Research group “Religion”

My project examines the intellectual and ideological genealogy of the Iranian intellectuals in Europe from the 1870s to the 1930s.

Synagogues are the central religious space of a Jewish community. The design of the space, as well as the associated possibilities for experiencing religious practice, are situational, at times also hierarchically differentiated, and are always significantly shaped by the orientation and the religious self-understanding of the respective community that defines the cultic functionality of the space. In research on synagogue architecture, attention has so far been directed mainly to visual and above all stylistic aspects of the buildings. The project pursues the aim of placing in focus that component of synagogue architecture that is fundamental for the perception of the Jewish rite, but has so far been insufficiently researched – the acoustic space.

The research project examines the media coverage of natural disasters as cross-border moments of reflection and mobilisation in (Western) Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead of focussing on single extreme events (with the climax of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755), as is common in historical disaster research, the project aims to show the longer-term formation and transformation of disaster discourses across territorial and linguistic borders. Printed works in German, English, French, Italian and Latin will be analysed that deal in textual and visual form with extreme natural events (earthquakes and floods) in the respective other countries or language areas. The hypothesis is that an early modern European media culture of disaster emerged through societal teleconnections produced by the media.

Honeybees and silkworms held great, notably physico-theological cachet as ‘virtuous’ animals whose tireless labour, when aptly conjoined with that of humans, would create abundance. In exploring this discourse, my aim is to consider the political-economic dimension of the European Enlightenment writ large. I will combine this approach with a case study of Brandenburg-Prussia to show how insect-farming projects played out on the ground. To elucidate the connections between those two levels – the European and the regional – I will draw on the social history of the clergy and of religious minorities. The project will also explore how efforts to increase beekeeping and build a large silk-farming sector from scratch created ecological dilemmas, especially in colder climates such as Prussia’s. For example, as agricultural expansion chipped away at heathlands and forests, writers and local communities began to lament the loss of natural spaces especially suited for beekeeping. In sum, the story of eighteenth-century beekeeping and silk farming will shed new light on the Enlightenment’s relentless drive to reshape nature.

Throughout the turbulent decades around 1800, Catholic pilgrims mingled piety and politics in the borderlands between German- and French-speaking Europe.

In the eighteenth century, Catholic populations in Europe as well as in other parts of the world were confronted with a wave of radical holiday reforms. At the request of secular rulers, popes exempted the people from the obligation to refrain from all field and manual labour for a series of saints' days and Marian days. Religious reform ideals and political economy interacted in these attempts to initiate an "industrious revolution" from above. These historical processes are the subject of a project whose current aim is to contribute to the international research platform "Entangled History of Poland" (funded by the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the Centre for Polish-Lithuanian Studies at the University of Aberdeen), which has been running since 2022. In the context of his affiliation with this research group, Kilian Harrer deals with both implemented and failed plans of holiday reform in Poland-Lithuania, where the problem of unfree labour (corvée for landlords) played a particularly important role. Furthermore, he is interested in the option of expanding the area of investigation and looking at analogous reforms in Protestant as well as Catholic Silesia.

Although the Renaissance as the supposed birthplace of the "modern individual" has largely been debunked as a myth, historians usually locate signs of early modern individuality among those who deviated from the norm, i.e. mostly among "heroes" and "heretics". With this micro-historical project "The Counter-Reformation Self", Nicole Reinhardt takes a deliberately different approach and follows the career of a conformist in the age of the Counter-Reformation (ca. 1540-1610).

The 18th century represents a historical epoch that largely wanted to be understood as an 'age of reason' and is gladly understood as such even today. However, the contemporary developments of the traditional academic discipline of logic, which stylized itself as a practice oriented towards the cultivation of reason par excellence and at the same time was characterized by manifold attempts at renewal, are not a preferred subject of Enlightenment research. My project inquires into the place and significance of logic within religious and social reform projects, usually perceived as core concerns of the Enlightenment age. More concretely, it focuses on the usages of this discipline in the enactment of religious controversies and debates surrounding the social role of scholars in selected late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century milieus.

​In this monograph project, Nicole Reinhardt examines a Bolognese academy in which primarily students of medicine and philosophy gathered between 1563 and 1567. The brief existence of the Oziosi Academy raises a number of questions, not least that of the social, intellectual and religious classification of the students of natural philosophy at the university and in the immediate final phase of the Council of Trent.

The research consortium founded in 2021 investigates the question of what value the past holds for earlier and contemporary societies. A focal point in the second funding phase concerns current debates on climate change, on the postcolonial responsibility of the Western world, on the use of the past in the growing right-wing populism, and on the historical legitimization of war.

The pilot project aims to record the bibliographic information in the inventories of two priestly libraries of the Dutch Republic of the 18th century. The scholarly significance of such libraries is well known: They show what Catholic priests who served in the Dutch mission read or at least found useful. In addition, such libraries can tell us more about Dutch Catholic spirituality in the early modern period, as well as about interest in books that did not fall within the realm of theology and pastoral care.

As an internationally intertwined part of the British Empire, the Arab world, the Islamic reform movement and the (post-)Ottoman region, Egypt was a meeting point for both mobile actors and globally circulating concepts at the beginning of the 20th century. Against this background, the IEG project, which is part of the Leibniz cooperation project HISDEMAB, investigated how global concepts of health and nationalization policy were implemented in local contexts, whereby differently mobile actors renegotiated their affiliation to modernity, but also to their local context.

Egypt became the main center of Arabic literary production and Islamic reform at the end of the nineteenth century. Various actors freely discussed the meanings of democracy, secularism, and independence as well as the significance of diverse cultural and religious identities. In the national independence movement and the political system, a secular consensus prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the 1929 Egyptian Nationality Law stipulated that only a person whose family had lived in Egypt since 1848 without interruption was an Egyptian. Thus, it discriminated against mobile Jewish, Greek, Italian, Armenian, and Syrian minorities, residing in Egypt since Ottoman times. By discussing the scope and limits of such concepts as democracy, secularism and citizenship in public debates, the research project aimed to take a fresh look at the emergence of modern Egypt.

The project examines the genesis, argumentative development and social implementation of the self-marginalisation of the Anabaptist groups and later of the Mennonites between 1527 and the assimilation and migration processes of the 18th century. Shortly after the emergence of the movement, Anabaptist groups reacted to the onset of violent persecution of the movement with a consistent separation from their environment in the "Schleitheim Articles". The research project focuses on both the communicative strategies and the everyday practical consequences of the Anabaptists in their reaction to the changing pressure of social marginalisation.

One of the great challenges of Europe in the 21st century is to ensure the peaceful coexistence of religions. The constructive approach to religious and confessional plurality is a task that does not, however, only exist in the present. On the contrary, it has been part of Europe's history since its beginnings. The formation of religious peace agreements since the 16th century has set the agenda for all modern developments. They constitute an essential component for the constitution of the modern European state. At the same time, they allow deep insights into the handling of religious coexistence in early modern times as well as the development of the idea of tolerance and enable us to understand today's religious plurality and to deal with it appropriately.

Ziel des WissenschaftsCampus Mainz / Frankfurt ist es, eine breite Plattform für interdisziplinäre Byzanz­forschung institutionell zu etablieren. Beteiligt sind alle Fächer, die zur Erforschung des Byzantinischen Reichs und seiner Kultur beitragen bzw. beitragen können.

This project focuses on processes of fragmentation and pluralisation within the Dutch Catholic community by examining the schism in the Catholic Church in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic from the perspective of the Catholic laity.

There were many urgent discussions across Europe in the wake of the Second World War about the need to build new, “modern” societies. Christians – whether they were clergy or lay intellectuals – played active roles in such debates and sought ways of bringing the aims and practices of post-war social reconstruction in line with their faith. Tendencies towards secularisation in this period were often accompanied by principles that stood in competition with Christian worldviews, such as a faith in science and technology, a commitment to individualism and personal fulfilment, and the ideologies of the Cold War.

Overcoming those conflicts that had arisen from the denominational pluralisation of Europe since the Reformation represented a peculiar challenge for peacekeeping and peace building between 1500 and 1800. Important for this resolution of conflicts were the various decrees, edicts, capitulations and treaties by which secular, i.e. non-religious powers legally regulated the coexistence of different Christian belief systems since the 16th century.

Wars – both internal and external – exert a large impact on the development of societies. The Byzantine Empire has always been in constant exchange and conflict with its neighbours and rivals due to its geographic position. Out of this arose a wide range of violent interactions with the Latin, Slavic and Islamic worlds, in addition to, as a consequence, manifold interrelationships between the respective martial cultures, which we define as the norms, interpretations, attributions of meaning and reflections related to war as well as its forms and practises. The aim of this Research Training Group is to analyse Euro-Mediterranean martial cultures and the importance of Byzantium for them in a transcultural perspective for the first time.