Religious Guides to Urbanity

The workshop focuses on the regulation of urban life through orders, ordinances, instructions and other forms of written authoritative communication that are spurred by religious motivations, betray religious concerns, or target religious behaviors and misbehaviors. It takes a broad chronological and cross-cultural view in order to compare urban productions as diverse as anti-idolatrous regulations authored by late antique Christian and Jewish religious specialists, institutions like the Muslim hisba, council orders of early modern European towns (Polizeyordnungen), and several other textualized strategies to promote and/or impose a ‘safe urban life’. As suggested by the notion of urban religion, which considers the spatially informed dialectic of co-production of urban life and religious communication, the focus of the workshop is twofold: on the one hand, it addresses the regulation of religious life and the ways in which religious texts aim to shape the urban conditions of living, and on the other hand it looks at how urban spaces, actors, and ideals of urbanity generate more or less binding projects of religious normativity. The workshop takes a source-based approach and seeks to take a close look at individual sources and their interpretation to enable meaningful comparisons across cultures past and present as well as a range of regions.