Entangling Urban and Religious History: A New Methodology

The general forms of urban life and the very process of urbanization – typically accepted as a given and seemingly irreversible – have only rarely been addressed beyond Western modernity. In this article, we propose “religion and urbanity” as a method to overcome such limitations. Focusing on what we claim to be a reciprocal formation, the study of the entangled history of religious change and the development of religions on the one hand and of urbanization on the other reconnects “urban religion” to history of religion and critical comparisons more generally. At the same time, it invites cooperation with (researchers from) urban studies, which, from urban planning to urban history, have only reluctantly considered religion beyond a European scope. Setting out from the current state of the art at the intersection between urban history, the history of religion and religious studies, the introduction turns to our methodological considerations and the conceptual framework of the research group Religion and Urbanity. The main body of the article follows a two-fold structure. The first part considers how urbanity was transformed by religion in different religious, historical and geographical contexts. The second part of the article reverses the direction of analysis and asks how religion was influenced by urbanity.