Urban Cultures in The Early Modern Habsburg Territories
Conference organized by the Research Institute of Politics and Government, National University of Public Service and the Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities
VENUE:
National University of Public Service
Budapest, Ludovika square 2.
main building, 1st floor, room Hunyadi
Program:
4 November 2019
10-11.15 Keynote lecture
Jaroslav Miller: A Dream World of Ideas and Crudeness of Reality: Early Modern City as an Utopia
11.30- 13.00 Session I.: Town Descriptions
11.30-12.15 Ferenc Hörcher: Town descriptions and urban politics in Márton Szepsi Csombor's
European Travel Journal
12.15-13.00 Katalin Simon: Urban Environment in Buda in the 18th Century
13-14.00 Lunch break
14.00-16.15: Session II.: Governing Urban Communities
14.00-14.45 István Németh: Cities, Self-government, State in the Early Modern Age. The Political
Framework of Urban Life
14.45-15.30 Peter Benka: Early modern towns as language communities : The case of Upper
Hungarian free royal boroughs
15.30-16.15 Adam Smrcz: Jansenism and Urban Politics in 18th-Century Hungary
16.15-16.45 Coffee break
Session III.: An Outlook on non-Habsburg territories
16.45-17.30 Krisztina Péter: Image, Print and Manuscript in Early Modern Cologne
17.30-18.15 Eszter Kovács: Montaigne as the Mayor of Bordeaux: Mapping a Political Network
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CALL FOR PAPERS
The National University of Public Service and the Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities invite proposals for their upcoming workshop, Urban Cultures in The Early Modern Habsburg Territories - A Workshop on Recent Research Methodologies. The symposium is being organized as a part of our series called The Intellectual History of the City, and this time, our focus point is going to be the research methodology of the intellectual history of early modern urban life.
By now, empirical historians have provided massive amounts data concerning everyday urban life in early modernity (supporting claims about urbanisation, highlighting birth and death rates as well as the average level of education etc.), while intellectual historians have made considerable analyses of "urban mentalities" (of the underlying attitudes behind confessional conflicts and coexistence, of political decision making etc.). Microhistorians have revealed much of the forgotten past of urban life, while methods of statistical analysis could highlight aspects which were mostly hidden from contemporary scientists as well. Also, even more recent approaches (like that of knowledge flow or big data analysis) equally promise benefits for their practitioners.
However, apparently there is no platform to confront these results with each other, a kind of neutral ground for historical urban studies. The current workshop, hence, aims at bringing together scholars from diverse fields (e.g. empirical and intellectual historians, sociologists, historians of philosophy etc.) in order to share their experience concerning the methodological backgrounds of their particular approaches. Speakers are invited to present particular case studies of their interest with a special emphasis on the methodology employed by them.
A further priority is to take examples of early modern urban developments in Central and Eastern Europe. This is only an encouragement, not an explicit criteria, but apparently research on this field is still handicapped.
The keynote speaker of the conference is going to be Professor Jaroslav Miller, from Palacky University Olomouc. He is the author of the monograph: Urban Societies in East-Central Europe, 1500-1700 (2008).
The venue of the conference is going to be at The National University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary (Main building, 1st floor, room 145).
Proposals should be sent to smrcz.adam@btk.mta.hu
Until 15 September, 2019.
Organizers:
Ferenc Hörcher
Ádám Smrcz