SpatioTemporality / RaumZeitlichkeit

Today, it has largely been forgotten that fairs played a decisive role in trade and finance in pre-modern Europe. In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, many cities endeavoured to obtain a fair privilege and attract as many merchants as possible. Through the economic activities and infrastructures provided, a supra-regional spatial configuration gradually emerged, which was not only made up of places within a region, but across the whole of Europe and in some cases the wider world.

The contributions in this volume are based on a project jointly funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche and the German Research Foundation, which focussed mainly on fairs and cities in France, the Holy Roman Empire and Italy. In chronological terms, they cover the period from the end of the Champagne fairs (ca. 1320) to the success of the Besançon fairs (ca. 1580 to 1630), which epitomised a new type of fair. The geographical focus has been extended to include fairs and trade routes in Eastern Europe and China (temple fairs). This overall view makes it possible for the first time to analyse the functions of the various market forms in their regional context and in their development: from the exchange of goods to the credit market and financing government debt, but also the deep integration of the merchant culture into urban and religious culture.

Based on archival studies and the integration of artefacts, new graphs and maps, this volume provides a new look at the history of annual markets and fairs. In addition to functional aspects, spatiotemporal aspects such as disputes over fair dates, visiting rhythms, the transport of goods and routes (by land and water) are dealt with. Credit activities, transport of goods, and mobility of merchants, trading families and companies point to the highly developed transnational dimension of pre-modern trade. The volume concludes with a presentation of the project database, its functionalities and opportunities to participate.

This study benefits from the terminology of geocriticism – a literary criticism that suggests an interdisciplinary approach to the exploration of literature in relation to space and place, and refers to the spatial theories of Lefebvre, Foucault, Bakhtin, Augé, and Certeau as well as to Issacharoff’s study of ‘dramatic space’. Proposing a multidisciplinary perspective, the book analyzes the mimetic and diegetic spaces in four of Tom Stoppard’s plays; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), Arcadia (1993), and Indian Ink (1995). Stoppard’s plays from the 1960s to the 2000s portray different spaces including urban spaces, cities, landscapes, rooms, and fictional sites, thus serving as exceptional textual sources in spatial literary studies.

The exchange of populations between Poland and Ukraine, which took place in the context of the modification of territories and the establishment of the new Soviet border in 1944-45, has never been addressed as such. The reconstruction of this migratory crossroads of one and a half million people sheds light on the ways in which the two states were involved, and on the lived experience of displacement, according to the places, destinations and temporalities of this period of upheaval.

This book is based on research into the central archives of the Soviet State, the Soviet Republic of Ukraine and the Republic of Poland. It approaches the topic on different scales, from the most local to the international context. It allows us to disentangle the different geostrategic and political stakes of the period, to distinguish the role of logistical obstacles and inter-state disputes in the conduct of migrations, and to trace the very asymmetrical trajectories of the two minorities, Polish and Ukrainian, between constraints and expectations. In the light of this violent past that has durably separated the two peoples, the phenomenal presence of Ukrainian refugees in Poland since February 2022 marks a real inversion of history which manifests itself in contemporary issues.

Different from literary works (prose, drama etc.) with techniques like montage and contemporary media (film, documentaries, video games, internet) where time-lines are being questioned through flashbacks and flashwords, historiography seems to have resisted such challenges. Most historiographical works (biographies, scholarly studies) still adhere to chronological narratives, even though the boundaries between history and literary fiction have been blurred over the past decades.

Responding to 20th/21st c. attempts like Walter Benjamin’s prophetic historian, this volume asks: How to write history without following the chronologically oriented trajectory of time? The interdisciplinary contributions from a broad range of history (medieval, modern, music, sciences), sociology, life sciences, genocide research go back to a symposium that responded to a publication of Markus Vinzent (Writing the History of Early Christianity. From Reception to Retrospection of 2019, Cambridge University Press). The scholars engage with the idea of retrospection as a method of critical historiography.

Writing retrospectively is not simply a matter of presentism, reversing chronology, it disrupts continuities and teleologies and opens creative futures.

This volume focuses on the connection between modern design and architectural practices and the construction of "sacred spaces." Not only language and ritual but space, place, and architecture play a significant role in constructing "special" or "religious" spaces. However, this concept of a constructed "sacred space" remains undertheorized in religious studies and the history of art and architecture in general. This volume therefore revisits the question of a "modern sacred space" from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on religion, space, and architecture during the emergence of the modern period and up until contemporary times. Revisiting the ways in which modern architects and artists have endeavored to create sacred spaces and buildings for the modern world will address the underlying questions of how religious ideas—especially those related to esotericism and to alternative religiosities—have transformed the way sacred spaces are conceptualized today.

What are intermediary spaces from a spatio-temporal perspective? Can Foucault’s concepts of the heterotopia be combined with that of the chronotopoi to create a different space-time? What value do these spatial considerations have for cultural studies research? This band demonstrates how the application of spatial concepts can lead to new perspectives on history, especially when it comes to spaces in between.

Monastic lifestyles became a special focus of sixteenth-century European Reformation movements. This books describes the practices of the Poor Clares, an order of nuns, around 1500 by taking a topological perspective, thereby opening up new research perspectives for an integrated gender history and history of spaces.

The word "West" is omnipresent and often unquestioned. The goal of this volume is to elaborate a critical reflection on this concept and make these implicit processes explicit. The articles focus on spatio‐temporal practices regarding the production and representation of westernness. Taking critical perspectives, which view the West from the inside and the outside, they address issues of highest political and social relevance.

The main objective of the book is to allocate the grass roots initiatives of remembering the Holocaust victims in a particular region of Russia which has a very diverse ethnic structure and little presence of Jews at the same time. It aims to find out how such individual initiatives correspond to the official Russian hero-orientated concept of remembering the Second World war with almost no attention to the memory of war victims, including Holocaust victims. North Caucasus became the last address of thousands of Soviet Jews, both evacuees and locals. While there was almost no attention paid to the Holocaust victims in the official Soviet propaganda in the postwar period, local activists and historians together with the members of Jewish communities preserved Holocaust memory by installing small obelisks at the killing sites, writing novels and making documentaries, teaching about the Holocaust at schools and making small thematic exhibitions in the local and school museums. Individual types of grass roots activities in the region on remembering Holocaust victims are analyzed in each chapter of the book.

Martyrs create space and time through the actions they take, the fate they suffer, the stories they prompt, the cultural narratives against which they take place and the retelling of their tales in different places and contexts. The title "Desiring Martyrs" is meant in two senses. First, it refers to protagonists and antagonists of the martyrdom narratives who as literary characters seek martyrs and the way they inscribe certain kinds of cultural and social desire. Second, it describes the later celebration of martyrs via narrative, martyrdom acts, monuments, inscriptions, martyria, liturgical commemoration, pilgrimage, etc. Here there is a cultural desire to tell or remember a particular kind of story about the past that serves particular communal interests and goals. By applying the spatial turn to these ancient texts the volume seeks to advance a still nascent social geographical understanding of emergent Christian and Jewish martyrdom. It explores how martyr narratives engage pre-existing time-space configurations to result in new appropriations of earlier traditions.

This book discusses global dynamics behind the synchronous outburst of protests in China and Germany in 1989 and the local acts of dissent on the squares comparatively. It breaks with the national timelines protests in 1989 have so far been identified with and offers insights into the spatial manifestation of the global moment of 1989. Concluding on the importance of the "SpaceTime" on the seized squares in 1989, it also discusses more recent protests forming on city squares. Offering a global perspective on a phenomenon that itself became global in the last decades, the book provides a view on globalization processes operating from below that puts the occupied space on city squares at the heart of interest.

The production of urban space in scarcely studied by scholars in historical and urban studies, the city being still predominantly seen as a frame in which activities and social relationship develop, not a produce in itself. The scope of the book is the comprehension of this production. This implies an adequate conceptualisation of the way urban space can be measured and broken down in units which can be put in relation with social processes and agents. A first part examines the concepts and their implications. The second part deals with the anthropology and typology of architectural production considered in relation to demography. The third part develops on the rhythms of the space production at Lyon from the late 15th century to the 19th. The temporalities and spatialities of the production are determined and examined. The agents of the production are studied all along the period, in parallel to the market aimed at: investors in real estate, tenants, activities. Each phenomenon identified can be described and understood as in the meantime a temporal, spatial and social unit.

The book analyzes the (re)production of historical time in the commercial press – a medium largely shaped by the category of time. The analysis develops time as a central resource for managing affiliation in modern societies. Given its ambivalent patterns of self-location, Polish-speaking society at the end of the 19^th century offers a paradigmatic example of this issue.

This book traces artists’ theories of constructive space in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on these concepts and recent theories on space, it develops a methodology termed ‘Spatial Art History’ that conceives of artworks as physical spatio-temporal things, which produce the social, to overcome the reductive understanding of art as a mere mirror or facilitator of society.

A person’s horizon relates not only to one’s scope of vision, but also to one’s breadth of knowledge and complexity of understanding. The essays in this book reflect the varying content and uses of the term "horizon" and discuss its application in education and culture within and across specific disciplines.

The articles take a decidedly interdisciplinary look at the opus of the French philosopher, sociologist and pioneer of spatial analysis Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991). His works are reflected upon from theoretical and practical perspectives by authors from various fields (literature, history, philosophy, sociology, ethnology) closely examining text references from Lefebvre.

Lines are omnipresent in our everyday experience and language. They reflect and influence the spatial and temporal structures of our world view. Taking Tim Ingold’s cultural history of the line as a starting-point, this book understands lines as expressions that allow insights into cultural theoretical phenomena and thus go beyond their mere form. The essays will investigate this premise from various disciplines (architecture, art, cartography, film, literature and philosophy).

What is the potential power of "rhythm" as a conceptual key term for understanding the interplay between space and time? This volume explores this power in interdisciplinary essays on seasonality and rhythm, travel, transport and logistics, rhythm and time, and music and space. The theoretical foundation is provided by the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s concept of "rhythmanalysis."

This volume works through spatio-temporal concepts to be found in imperial practices and their representations in a wide range of media. The individual cases investigated in the volume cover a broad spectrum of historical periods from ancient times up to the present. Well-known international scholars treat special cases of the topic, using cutting-edge theory and approaches stemming from historical, cartographic, religious, literary, media studies, as well as ethnography.

The end of what the GDR called “real existierender Sozialismus” in Europe at the beginning of the 1990s dramatically changed the geopolitical situation in Central and Eastern Europe. Five states ceased to exist, whereas 22 new states have been recognized, accompanied by a host of internationally unrecognized states. Nearly half a century of relative stability in Europe was replaced by volatility and insecurity.

These geopolitical transformations were accompanied by a fundamental revalorization of political space and the rehabilitation of long-forgotten spatial symbolisms and geopolitical imaginations, from legacies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, concepts of Mitteleuropa, the Saisonsstaaten of 1918, to neo-imperial concepts of the “Russian world” and pan-Turkic neo-Ottomanism. The Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale assault on Ukraine in 2022 constitute a return of massive imperial violence, rhetorically justified by an intensely political rewriting of history, invoking the imperial past to justify aggression. Legacies of the historical past, which until recently were curiosities, little known beyond smaller groups of specialists, now formed a casus belli.

The volume, addressing scholars and others concerned with today’s Europe, contains four sections: its opening section on imperial spaces engages Russia’s attempts at “renegotiate” the international political order, an end of liminality in a Russia which “knows no boundaries” (thus Putin). It is followed by a section on the construction of spatial identities on the basis of the Russian Federation leadership’s “renegoting” its liminality. Section three engages the repositioning of Eastern Europe in the wake of Russia’s departure from the international, rule-based legal order. The final section inquiries into the ideological underpinnings of “re-negotiated” geopolitical imaginaries of both perpetrators and victims of this re-imagination of empires.

In contemporary Iran, commemorative rituals serve as spatio-temporal tools for fostering social bonds, yet they also represent contested spaces where the state and society negotiate power. The portrayal of the past by state institutions often clashes with how individuals remember, creating a conflictual dynamic. This dissertation investigates these dynamics, focusing on the interplay of competing worldviews.

It examines how the Shi’i Weltanschauung of the Iranian state resonates with the younger generation raised in deeply religious contexts, particularly those born and educated in the first decade following the 1979 Revolution. It analyses how the state re-invents the sacred, deploying ideological platforms to reinforce its vision. It also explores how youth from aligned religious milieus interpret, experience, and remember this vision. These processes reveal how the generation constructs new, sometimes contradictory meanings within the Shi’a utopia the state claims to embody.

Using grounded theory and qualitative interviews, this study highlights the divergences between the state’s official narrative and individual memories, showcasing how micro-narratives express agency and resistance. Ultimately, it demonstrates how these narratives contribute to a shared generational knowledge that can challenge, transform, or even merge with the hegemonic Shi’a discourse at pivotal moments.