Simone Wagner has won the Johann Daniel Schöpflin Prize for her dissertation “Gender and Urbanity. The authority of abbesses and provosts in south-western collegiate churches”. In her dissertation she has analysed how the authority of abbesses and provosts in collegiate churches was constructed and to what extent gender and urbanity influenced their authority…
KFG Fellow Edmund Kizik (Universität Gdansk) und Kerngruppenmitglied Martin Christ führen am 03. Juli 2024 einen Workshop zu frühneuzeitlichen Quellen über die Bedeutung und den Umgang mit den Toten durch.
The KFG « Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations » is announcing its next annual conference, which will take place in Erfurt from the 4th to 6th June 2025. The topic is Making Boundaries – Performing Religion and Urbanity.
Since 2018 we have been publishing articles, reviews, reports and personal reflections on a variety of topics. In most cases they are tied in one way or an other to one of our research areas: South Asia, especially India and Pakistan, the Mediterranean from Antiquity until today, and Europe, especially in the Medieval and Early Modern period. We have picked some of our favourite entried by fellows and core group members of the Religion and Urbanity group in Erfurt.
On the 17th of April, we went on our twelfth city walk, which revolved around animals in the city and the animal turn. At three stops in the city of Erfurt we discussed different aspects of how animals are recognisable in the mutual formation of religion and urbanity. Frédéric Vandenberghe, Jörg Rüpke, Aileen Becker, and Heinrich Lang gave short presentations at the Natural History Museum on the Animal Turn in general and animals adapting to urban lifestyles; the St. Crucis Church on animals in biblical stories and displaying them in religious architecture, and finally at the Krämerbrücke (merchants bridge) on animals as resources in urban life.
On 6 & 7 June 2024, the “Religion and Urbanity” research group is convening an international workshop in the visibility of new religious movements in urban space across time and space. The workshop is organised by Martina Stercken, Susanne Rau and Klara-Maeve O’Reilly.
The peer-reviewed, open access database of the “Religion and Urbanity” research group, which is published by De Gruyter and edited by Susanne Rau and Jörg Rüpke, has been updated with eight new articles. All articles are published open access.
Workshop report by Fathima Thesni (Farook College, Kozhikode) on the nternational book project workshop titled ‘Towards a New History of Calicut’ on 5 & 6 January, 2024, organised by Susanne Rau and T Muhammadali.
A post by our students on the Mikvah in Erfurt. Written sources on the mikvah ion Erfurt date back to the middle of the 13th century. They show that the Jewish community had to pay taxes for the bath and the land, first to the bishop, later to the city of Erfurt. From the medieval tax lists we learn that the area around the Mikvah was densely populated.
This case study focuses on the question of how Paris acquired metropolitan significance as early as the 6th and 7th centuries through the presence of rulers and important saints, although the city did not historically occupy a prominent position among the cities of Gaul and was hardly larger than an unfortified suburb of Rome or Constantinople in the Merovingian period. In these two centuries, a close topographical and symbolic connection of residence, royal burial and veneration of saints emerged, which is constitutive for the dynamic development of Paris throughout the Middle Ages…
During the late Middle Ages, Erfurt was a prosperous city with a dynamic trade center, and home to one of the first universities in Europe. While its success was a result of many factors, including its geographical location, few people are aware that the colour blue had a significant impact on the development of the city.
In April 2023, Meera Dass visited a series of places linked to the Ashokan period in Madhya Pradesh, together with Susanne Rau. The initial stop was at the District Museum at Vidisha, where amongst other exhibits, Dr. Dass discussed a Yaksa and Yaski statue from the 2nd century BCE.
Susanne Rau, Martin Christ and Sara Keller are convening a panel at this year’s Historikertag which will take place from 19 – 22 September 2023 in Leipzig. The speakers include current and former fellows of the “Religion and Urbanity” research group as well as established reseachers in the field of urban history.
Harry O. Maier discusses Mateusz Fafinski and Jakob Riemenscheider’s book, Monasticism and the City in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The book provides readers with a comprehensive exploration of ancient monastic and urban sites and their inhabitants, akin to a Lonely Planet travel guide. The authors examine monasticism from five aspects: as a genre, within and as cities, with respect to monks and nuns in urban settings, in terms of monastic learning, and as a phenomenon in Afroeurasia.
Buildings embody people and ideas: what if this common metaphor were more than a rhetorical device? The author discusses the thesis that architecture can be intentionally designed to create a resonance between a built space and a living being…
We are interested in the connections between urbanity and religion.
This blog is connected to the DFG-funded Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (FOR 2779). We are based at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University.
