This article deals with the meaning and the historical change of the term urbanity with the aim of making urbanity as an analytical term fruitful. Since urbanity is both a historical concept and the object of analysis, a brief semantic history must be undertaken. It takes us (at least) back to the time of the Roman Republic, experiences a change of meaning in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and shows how urbanism and urbanity finally found their way into scientific discourse, starting with the social sciences about 100 years ago. Far from representing a uniform concept, it is also often normative or based on quantitative, measurable criteria, thus neglecting practices and ideas. All this (historical change, regional differences, tendency towards normativity in scientific discourse) makes it seem necessary to venture a new approach. My proposal is therefore to understand urbanity as a concept of form that allows for the analysis and better understanding of spatiotemporal configurations, practices and representations in relation to cities.*1 Exposition: Phenomenon or process addressed, agents, media In his novel Invisible Cities, the Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a scene between Marco Polo and the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. The Great Khan possessed an atlas charting the cities of his empire and the surrounding kingdoms, which even included maps of lands with promising cities that remained to be discovered. He thus asks the traveller: where will the favourable winds take us? which cities shall we visit next? Yet as the Khan leafs through his atlas of real and imagined cities, he is seized by a dystopian imagination. Earlier in the novel, Marco Polo had told the Khan of his extensive journey, which included visits to many cities that, over the course of the report, increasingly painted a panorama of a world threatened with ruin. Pulled by this current, the Khan asks Polo whether everything is not in vain if the last harbour (on a journey) can only be the city of hell. 'The inferno of the living,' Polo responds, 'is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together' (Calvino 1972: 165). One can escape this inferno by accepting it and becoming part of it, so that one ceases to see it. Or-the riskier path-one can 'seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.' This exchange between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in Calvino's novel could be applied to the project of this resource on 'Religion and urbanity'. Which cities will be visited and explored under such a perspective? Which will be looked at only in a historical atlas? Will this publication remain relevant despite its narrow, nearly whimsical selection of cities and case studies? How might its publication and its readers grasp what is important because it is shared? The ambivalence of these selected places also deserves to be examined-which can be heaven or hell or both at the same ti...

In den gegenwärtigen -deutschsprachigen und angloamerikanischen -Debatten über Flüsse in der Geschichte beziehungsweise "Rivers in History" 1 , die sich teils an die Landschafts-oder Umweltgeschichte, teils auch an diskursgeschichtliche Positionen anschließen, blieb bislang ein wichtiges Buch ohne Erwähnung, das sich seit 2007 auf dem Markt befindet, dessen Autor aber auch schon früher einschlägig publiziert hat: Es handelt sich um Jacques Rossiauds Werk zur Rhône im Mittelalter. Daß es bislang nur in Frankreich und in Italien zur Kenntnis genommen wurde 2 , mag partiell daran liegen, daß die Rhône nun einmal erst in der Südschweiz entspringt und dann auch noch nach Süden fließt; partiell könnte es auch damit

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Religion and Urbanity Online (R&U) will present important research contributions on the subject of the interplay between religious change, on the one hand, and, on the other, changes in urban spaces and urban forms of life, as well as on practices of and discourses on urbanness in Europe, the circum-Mediterranean region, and South Asia. It will provide historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of cities and of religion with research articles as well as overviews. Case studies focusing on particular cities or urban networks, or on specific phenomena and processes, will help to build a reservoir of knowledge relevant to two overarching questions: What role did religious actors, practices, and ideas play in the emergence and ongoing development of cities and 'urbanity'? What role did urban actors, spaces, and practices, and the discourse on urbanity, play in the emergence and ongoing development of religious groups and 'religion'? Why do we think that such an enterprise is timely? Problems of urbanity and urban religion are not just phenomena and problems of the present. On the contrary, these issues have recurred time and again throughout history. What do cities such as Jerusalem,