Lecture: Miri Rubin: Living Difference in Late Medieval Cities, 04.04.2017, Wien

poster_mr__lecture_webVeranstalter sind der SFB-VISCOM (42) und der FSP Gemeinschaft, Konflikt und Integration (Universität Wien) (Web)
Zeit: 4. April 2017, 16:00-18:00 Uhr
Ort: Institut für Mittelalterforschung der Ö. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Hollandstr. 11-13, 1020 Wien, Einladund als PDF
Medieval urban centres were always engaged in assessing strangers, and interacting with them. The nature of this relationship – or more appropriately relationships – was produced at the interaction between lordly legislation, and the statutes and regulations which communities created with the powers they possessed to design their communities. In doing so they were variously influenced by local understandings of the risks involved in accepting strangers, and the advantages such willingness offered. Be they skilled artisans, students, single women, merchants – Christians or non-Christians – the willingness to allow these strangers to become neighbours, and the acknowledgement of the contribution they could make to local well-being, was sensitive to the state of the economic cycle, and the activities of cultural agents, the shapers of local opinion.
This lecture aims to draw conclusions from a comparative reading of provisions related to foreigners in the period from the eleventh to the early sixteenth centuries. It anticipates a lively discussion with the expert team of researchers on the Visions of Community project with the hope not of building a general model, but discerning strands and correlations between lordship and urban communities as both affected the lives of strangers.
Miri Rubin: Queen Mary University of London