Experientia contra experientiam. Religiöse ‘innere’ und ‘äußere’ Erfahrung im Spätmittelalter und im Übergang zur Neuzeit.

In the late Middle Ages there are two different conceptions of experience: a non-religious, exterior experience, derived from physical perceptions: the Aristotelian conception, and a religious, interior experience: the conception of monastic theology, represented by Bernhard of Clairvaux. In the transition from Middle Ages to modern times the distinction between exterior and interior experience is transferred into the religious experience.     

Rethinking the Politics–Religion Distinction

William T. Cavanaugh argues that the politics–religion distinction presupposes covert commitments that inappropriately support a “migration of the holy” from the church to the state. Despite his strong critical instincts, several of his genealogical propensities appear to stand in tension with his commitments to constitutional democracy and the universality of grace. By contrast with Cavanaugh, John Rawls’ post-metaphysical reformulation of the politics–religion aims to identify a public criterion compatible with a plurality of comprehensive doctrines. Although I commend Rawls for retaining some form of this distinction, I question the possibility of a post-metaphysical standpoint and its compatibility with his commitment to what he calls the “fact of pluralism.” Drawing on Bernard Lonergan’s transpositions of human nature and grace in this paper’s final section, I develop an alternative account of the relationship between politics and religion that aims to harmonize some of the strongest insights from the work of Cavanaugh and Rawls.     

‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya

Bells were an inescapable part of fourteenth-century urban life. They signalled the hours of the day and times for prayers; they warned of tempests and enemy armies; they heralded masses, funerals, and deaths. The pealing of bells brought men, women, and children together, choreographing communal behaviour in time and space. Bells echoed the vox Domini, calling out the deaths of holy men and women, celebrating the working of miracles. The ubiquitous presence of bells reflected the omnipresence of God in the medieval world. Their echoes transformed private moments into collective experiences, elevating the mundane into the miraculous. Scholars have rarely examined the religious aspects of bells, looking instead at their more practical side, especially their utilisation as markers of time and the allegedly concurrent rise of mercantile culture. This article approaches bells from the viewpoints of those men and women who heard them and wanted them rung. Focusing on sources from Christian clerics, we see that medieval men rang the bells with clear, but many possible, purposes in mind. By marking time and prayers, Christian church bells helped to create and facilitate communities within dioceses, spurring and choreographing their actions. During funerals, bells broadcast private moments, giving them communal significance. The transformative, creative function of bells is clearest in their role in miracles. In Manresa, the vision experienced by a few became a community affair when the church bells gathered the people; the bells transformed an ordinary day into one where the people, as a community, received divine favour. Finally, with the deaths of holy persons, the tolling of bells transformed private, even anonymous deaths, into moments of wonder as God’s hand touched the world.The pealing of bells defined Christian communities in the Mediterranean and, at the same time as rulers and elites throughout the region were seeking to control minority groups, those same groups were seeking to exercise control over the sounds within their own communities. Through the pealing of bells, churchmen across Catalunya sought to direct the thoughts and prayers of their listeners. When the Christian clerics of Catalunya rang their churches’ bells, they had specific aims in mind, yet, as the evidence demonstrates, the pealing of the bells never meant just one thing. This article demonstrates that there is much more to understanding medieval bells than knowing ‘for whom the bell tolls’; we have to look at the listeners as much as the ringers in order to understand their cultural significance in medieval Europe. This article is a first step in how such a study could be begun.     

Razi on Reason and Political Authority: A Study in Medieval Persian Political Thought

The Philosopher of Rey, Mohammad-e Zakariya-ye Razi and his Ismaili adversaries, Abu Hatam-e Razi and Naser-e Khosrow, share a political understanding of religion according to which religion is a theologico-political system of domination. However, they are at odds over the political philosophy appraisal of religion qua a system of authority. The paper explicates the latter disagreement in part based on Razi's and his opponents' conflicting ideas about the nature of the faculty of Reason and its distribution among men. Consequently, the paper underlines a democratic implication of Razi's thesis on the makeup of the human intellect.     

Adaptive strategies or ideological innovations? Interpreting sociopolitical developments in the Jequetepeque Valley of Peru during the Late Moche Period

Environmental perturbations and social unrest are thought to have led to the reconstitution of traditional belief systems and hierarchical political relations on Peru’s North Coast during the Late Moche Period (550–800 AD). Ideological transformations are thus commonly interpreted as adaptive or reactive responses to social, political, and ecological disruptions. Nevertheless, religious practices directly shaped the formation of alternative power structures and ecological systems on the North Coast during the Late Moche Period. This is especially evident in Late Moche Jequetepeque, which witnessed the proliferation of non-elite ceremonial sites and small-scale agricultural facilities throughout the rural hinterland of the valley. Moche-inspired ritual performances orchestrated in the countryside created distinctive new forms of political order which structured economic activities and ecological behavior. In this article, the Jequetepeque case study is mobilized to reassess normative interpretations of the role of religious ideology in cultural adaptation and sociopolitical realignment.     

Princely entries and gift exchange in the Burgundian Low Countries: a crucial link in late medieval political culture

This article treats the first entry of a new prince as the start of a series of exchanges between the prince and his subjects. On the occasion of an entry, gifts in all kind of forms, subsistence, luxury and symbolic goods, were exchanged with the intention of establishing a bond between the new ruler and the subjects. These gifts were not standardised in the Burgundian Low Countries. There was a wide range of gifts, from wine to silverware and from money to horses. Some gifts can be linked to the princely right of lodging in places he passed on his itinerary, whereas others refer to marks of honour offered by the host. However, not all gifts were given spontaneously, but were the result of a negotiating process between the town and the prince's officials on the one hand and between the different towns of a principality on the other. Those officials benefited as well from entry gifts that trickled down to lower levels in the official hierarchy. Therefore, the gifts can be considered as personalised items in a bigger process of exchange and as a confirmation of the outcome of political negotiations.     

Arendt in the refugee camp: The political agency of world-building

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.     

Of maps and eating bitterness: The politics of scaling in China's South-North Water Transfer Project

Based on extensive fieldwork as well as a discourse and content analysis of relevant government documents, we identify two important rescalings around China's South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP), the world's largest water project to date. These rescalings work in tandem with a discourse around the long-held Chinese ethic of “eating bitterness” (enduring hardship or chiku) and serve to include and exclude stakeholders and manufacture public acceptance of the project in the face of significant social, economic, and ecological trade-offs. We focus on two rescalings—one a more orthodox upscaling to the central government and one that relies on a fragmented, geographically disembodied, subnational scalar construction. Both rescalings operate in representational spaces, but also have important material dimensions. The case of the SNWTP demonstrates how rescaling is not only about power struggles between administrative political units, but can also be used as a political tool to exert power over particular groups of people.