The City in the History of Religion

This collection of articles is written in the face of far-reaching processes of urbanization, drawing more and more people into the administrative web of cities and their density, diversity, and inequalities, balancing feelings of individual freedom and aspirations with those of loss and exposure. Thus, it joins works related to the spatial turn that since the 1990s has affected several disciplines, including Religious Studies. Particularly relevant are the study of religion in the field of Geography on the one hand and Kim Knott’s analysis of the spatial dimension of contemporary religion in the United Kingdom, on the other one. Yet, our focus is more particular as it aims to explore the urban as a cultural trait rather than an indication of city-space, and much broader the longitudinal interest in the urban as a factor for religious change since the start of urbanization in the valleys of Mesopotamia, the Nile, Chinese flood plains, and the Harappa culture.