IMC 2018: Sessions

This two-part session series aims at calling together scholars, historians, and art historians from several parts of Central Europe investigating Central, East-Central, and Southern European urban communities in order to offer a comparative and interdisciplinary picture for this region (which is less in the focus of such investigations in Western European scholarship) with regard to the characteristics and specificities of civic endowments as tools of preserving memory in urban context. The intention is to have a closer look at the various forms and functions of endowments and their material representation in religious or secular space. Within the framework of the session-string, the following issues will be addressed: how did built space and structures affect the practice of donating? How can endowments be an important institutional nexus for a certain community in an urban setting? Which forms did endowments take and what did it mean in practical terms: for example, an individual donation/bequest for a specific secular purpose, or rather an institutionalized endowment for a general purpose in a religious context? How the practices of the several social groups (nobles, average burghers, members of the ruling (administrative) elite, widows or widower, and couples) correspond or differ in their character. Finally, how the different urban communities invested in their memory and parallel to that how their investments served the common good of the town (be it a small market town or a significant maritime merchant city) as a whole.