Imagine you are on a journey from Italy to France around 1500; maybe you are a pilgrim, a merchant or a painter; you’ve come over the Alps by a border pass, by yourself or with your family, and will soon arrive in Lyon. Approaching the city, you can see in the distance the Rhône Bridge and the famous Hôtel Dieu, at that time a hospice. Between you and the city, there are just fields, sodden meadows and scattered houses along the road to what was then the only crossing of the broad river. Some other large structures can be seen from afar, the towers of the churches and monasteries on the Presqu'île peninsula – St. Martin d'Ainay, Les Cordeliers, St. Nizier and others. The impressive cathedral is visible across the Saône, and the spires of smaller churches and chapels can also be made out, such as the small Fourvière chapel on a hill and off to the left in the distance, St. Just and St. Irénée.

 

Now imagine how this would look like today, approaching from Italy, probably not on foot but by car or by train. You would have to pause much further away from the city in order to get any sort of panoramic view. 500 years ago, there were only scattered houses, but now, there is practically a whole new town. The area west of the Rhône has been progressively developed since the eighteenth century, now comprising La Guillotière, Les Brotteaux, and Monplaisir districts. These border on Villeurbanne, named for a Roman Villa (villa urbana), which is adjoined physically to Lyon, but is administratively a separate town.

​

What can be seen along the cityscape? Firstly the famous gratte-ciel de Villeurbanne, the office towers of the business quarter Part-Dieu and apartment blocks which somewhat resemble the eastern European socialist Plattenbau. Some of the older church spires of the historical town can still be seen, and some newer additions. The four towers of the almost white Notre-Dame de Fourvière sit majestically on their hill. This Catholic pilgrim destination was built in the 1890s, as was Sacré-Coeur in Paris, during the Catholic revival, the renouveau catholique. Adjacent is the Tour métallique de Fourvière, known as the small Eifel tower, also built in the 1890s as a secular response to Notre Dame. The river bridges, whose number has grown to ten in the meantime, can only be properly seen from a higher vantage point. The fact that the city of Lyon, like so many other cities over time, has been subject to a major transformation is immediately obvious. How do we describe and investigate these myriad changes to the cityscape? Whereas church towers and spires once dominated Lyon’s sky, today's view is shared with secular structures.  

​

Urban life and religious life evolve together, and have done so since people have gathered in what we call cities. We call this co-evolution the reciprocity of their formation. Urban life and religious life relate to each other (because of this relation, prepositions hugely help us to explain what our research is all about, as you will see). So, how does living in a city change how you do your religion? Does your religion change how you organise your everyday life in the city you live in? These are the two questions at the heart of a collaborative research group at Erfurt University, in Germany.

​

Until now, these two questions have usually been approached from the angle of religion in cities – with cities acting as the colourful, even messy, background to religious history or from the angle of religion and the city where the focus often rests on sprawling mega-cities whose diversity expresses itself in various beliefs being practised side by side. Against this background, we propose to take two mental steps in order to re-consider how to approach urban and religious life.

​

The first step is to go beyond religion as traditionally understood – that is, moving away from religion as organisations and institutions, confessions and sects to, instead, consider religion as a way of communicating with transcendental actors like divine forces, the gods or your ancestors, while at the same time being in this world, so also communication with your neighbours. By communicating with superhuman actors like divinities or gods, religion opens up a reality that offers alternative, extraordinary and highly creative experiences to those engaging with it. As Jörg Rüpke has noted elsewhere, religion is profoundly ambivalent, anchoring believers in the here and now and allowing them to cross spatial and temporal borders, opening a recourse to the past and an orientation to the future, inviting a rejection of the every day and giving space to feelings of overextension.

​

The second step is to go beyond the city – that is, beyond the city as a material container of built-up infrastructure and architecture. For us, it is not amassed clay, stone and wood that makes a city a city. Rather, cities come into being whenever there is urban life – whenever people decide they’re living in a city and whenever they live a life that to them is distinct from the ‘rural’ life of their neighbours. We call this self-image “urbanity”, seeing it as the precondition of any city. Often, mental images, role models, and representations of urban ways of life play a role in this, as do the materiality and social practices of people – or rather, the interplay of all three. Emphasising the interplay of discourses, materiality and practices in urbanity, and not just the built-up, architectural form of a city, also frees the researcher’s eye to look for and find urban life outside the city, in Antiquity or example in the rural villas of wealthy Roman citizens or in Buddhist monastic life in Ghandhara (today Pakistan).

​

We are convinced an analysis that considers urban and religious life together is only useful if it goes beyond the traditional Western, in our case European, area of research and thought. De-centering Europe is long overdue in the historical sciences as in other areas of life. Therefore we work on South Asia, the Mediterranean basin and Europe. We have chosen these three regions for the closely woven cultural fabric of shared histories, geographical contingencies, and exchanges that might not be as commonly known to us as they should be. Working on these three regions in the context of one group affects not only shifting points of observation but also the space to engage with non-Western concepts throughout history.

​

Urban life and religious life shape, attract and repel each other – in different ways, depending on the time and the place you look at. In order to avoid fallacious generalisations and simplifications, we think it is important to begin always with a precise analysis of the actors we observe, their specificities and uniqueness, before turning to more comparative perspectives and longer-term processes.

​

The best way to do this is to go back to a precise historical city and pay close attention to what people actually did there. The essays collected here do just that: They zoom in to a city in history and consider what we can find out about how people practised and understood their particular way of doing urbanity and religion  – be it in Ahmedabad in Western India 500 years ago, in late antique Constantinople or in Cluj at the turn of the 17th century. Written from different academic backgrounds like history, archaeology, and religious studies and covering the last 2,000 years, our essays share a curiosity about how we perceive life in cities, especially those we know well or even live in.