idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
With its broad spatial and temporal scope, the workshop will bring together historians specializing in diverse fields, enable comparative reflections, and interweave multiple historiographical threads that touch on the intersection between work and the sacred.
At least four such threads can be identified:
• First, historians have recently reinterrogated the famous Weberian theme of the work ethic, e.g., by illuminating a plurality of premodern work ethics or by emphasizing the longue durée of pre-industrial valorizations of work. This ongoing critique of Weber inevitably contends with theories of religious change and “disenchantment.”
• Second, the issue of worktime—hours per day but also days per year—has preoccupied social and economic historians in the wake of Jan de Vries’s claim that an “industrious revolution” took place in northwestern Europe after 1650. Religion matters to this debate as well, most notably because early modern attempts to reform the calendar of holy days affected the balance between work and leisure.
• Third, scholars have broken new ground in both European and global history by scrutinizing the heavily racialized and gendered divergences—and hidden entanglements—between free and unfree as well as between legally privileged and marginalized labor. Religious attitudes toward the early modern mass enslavement of Black people have already been studied closely. This topic deserves further investigation and similar questions need to be asked afresh about other coercive labor regimes.
• Finally, intersections between labor and environmental history have taken on increasing salience. Much of the relevant literature draws inspiration from the classic works of Carolyn Merchant who discussed alienation from labor and alienation from nature in tandem, crucially connecting both to religious transformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Workshop program and time schedule
April 10: Diversity and Hierarchy in Work Regimes
Welcome and introductions (1:30 p.m.)
Panel 1: Theological Debates about the Work of Merchants and Wage Laborers (2 p.m.)
• Giovanni Patriarca (Dicastery for Culture and Education, Vatican City), Holy Numbers,
Blessed Measures and Sacred Money? An Unexpected Correlation between Moral Issues and
Commercial Mathematics
• Monica Martinat (Lumière University Lyon 2), Work and Wages in Seventeenth-Century
Scholastic Thought
Coffee break (3:30 p.m.)
Panel 2: Slave Labor and Religious Thought – Global Perspectives (4 p.m.)
• Anne-Charlotte Martineau (French National Center for Scientific Research/CNRS, Paris),
Juridico-theological Justifications of Slavery and Forced Labor in the Spanish and
Portuguese Empires, c. 1550–1600
• Madhu (Miranda House, University of Delhi), Colonialism, Caste, and “Customary” Labor in
India
• Aaron Pride (Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania), God’s Work: Militant Millennial
Movements in Medieval Europe and in Nineteenth-Century America
Conference dinner (7 p.m.)
April 11: Industriousness and Idleness
Panel 3: Revisiting the “Work Ethic” Part I – The Role of Religious Reformism (8:30 a.m.)
• Corine Maitte (Gustave Eiffel University, Marne-la-Vallée), Religious Holidays and Working
Hours: What Impact?
• Stanisław Witecki (Jagiellonian University, Kraków), Catholicism, Enlightenment and
Questions of Labor: Ideas and Reforms
Coffee break (10 a.m.)
Panel 4: Revisiting the “Work Ethic” Part II – Case Studies of German-Speaking Lands (10:30 a.m.)
• Teresa Petrik (Institute of Rural History, St. Pölten), Work as Penance, Idleness as Sin:
Exploring the Religious Character of Punitive Labor in Early Modern Austria
• Kilian Harrer (Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz), The Bee’s Greatest Pleasure:
Physico-theology and Ideals of Work in Eighteenth-Century Lutheran Germany
Florian Kühnel (Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz), Concluding Reflections (12:15 p.m.)
Final Discussion (12:30 p.m.)
Hinweise zur Teilnahme:
The workshop will be held in person and conducted in English.
Contact: Kilian Harrer (harrer@ieg-mainz.de).
Termin:
10.04.2025 ab 13:30 - 11.04.2025 13:00
Veranstaltungsort:
Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG)
Alte Universitätsstr. 19
55116 Mainz
Rheinland-Pfalz
Deutschland
Zielgruppe:
Wissenschaftler
E-Mail-Adresse:
Relevanz:
überregional
Sachgebiete:
Geschichte / Archäologie, Religion
Arten:
Seminar / Workshop / Diskussion
Eintrag:
10.03.2025
Absender:
Stefanie Mainz
Abteilung:
Medien- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit
Veranstaltung ist kostenlos:
nein
Textsprache:
Deutsch
URL dieser Veranstaltung: http://idw-online.de/de/event78843
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