Ehemaliger Fellow am Max-Weber-Kolleg von April bis Juli 2019
Urban Spacetime
Urban studies have assumed the power of salvific history to be an important element influencing the medieval notion of towns. Discourses and artifacts reflecting on the celestial Jerusalem have been examined; scholars have investigated how much this idea has influenced town planning; and performative ways of defining the urban space as a religious area and the urban community as a sacral community have been described. My research explores another approach. It aims for a deeper analysis of texts, images, and maps and their ways of mediating temporal and spatial dimensions of towns between the 13th and 16th centuries, so at a time when the urban landscape was being shaped in Europe. Analysing manifold combinations of maps and historiographical texts, this reseach will explore the modes and models which helped to create images of the town as a spatial and historical phenomenon embedded in salvific history. The project focuses on a process consisting of several strands: a gradual change in the actors responsible for inventing tradition from monastic to urban elites; a changing notion of the town’s embeddedness in the history of salvation; the formation of urban historiography as a memory of towns; and the development of individual representations of towns. Based on an approach that emphasises the capacity of cartographical and historiographical tradition to create meaning, it will be argued that the time up to the 16th century can be taken as a period of constant medial experiments in amalgamating representations of space with its historical significance, a situation that was not abruptly changed by technological innovation, new possibilities of dissemination, or the Reformation.
Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien
Universität Erfurt
Postfach 90 02 21
99105 Erfurt
Universität Erfurt (Campus)
Nordhäuser Str. 63
99089 Erfurt