Organised by Margit Dahm and Timo Felber, who are members of the the subcluster Urban ROOTS, the conference “Mentale Konzepte der Stadt in Bild- und Textmedien der Vormoderne” took place on 10-12 June 2021. The conference addressed the basic fact that the city was not only a component of the historical reality of pre-modernity but also part of the fixed inventory of cultural knowledge and memory. The contributions were dedicated to mental concepts, i.e. notions, ideas or imaginings, of the city, which appear across epochs in different discursive and visual representations. In an interdisciplinary exchange between specialists of German studies, theology, archaeology, history and art history, mental concepts of the city were examined in different media formats, including city chronicles, secular paintings, biblical texts, medieval city plans or courtly novels. Based on the diversity of the examined formats and hermeneutical confrontations, it became clear that the cultural ideas associated with the city and urbanity are shaped by historical specifics, but also by supra-temporal constants. The media representations of the city only partly emerge from the historical conditions of urbanisation of their time of origin. They also refer to supra-temporal patterns, topoi and concepts of meaning. In the course of the conference, it was also possible to unveil the mental roots of the social, historical and cultural ideas of the city in recent societies, as modern media conceptualisations of the city often fall back on the same ideas, which are frequently rooted in antiquity and Christian traditions. We look forward to the publication of the proceedings of this conference in the ROOTS Studies series.

Link to the event´s webpage.