Civic Foundations under Socialism: The Peter-Warschow-Stiftung in Greifswald

Endowment Studies ◽

10.1163/24685968-05010001 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-52

Author(s):

Oskar Böhm

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Local Level ◽

Cultural Practice ◽

Empirical Basis ◽

The Middle Ages

Abstract This paper traces the fate of Greifswald’s most significant civic foundation: the Peter Warschow Foundation, a foundation that has existed since the Middle Ages to the present day. It examines the reasons why foundations were dissolved or merged at the local level in the GDR and how a civic foundation was able to survive the period of socialism. The empirical basis for this are previously unpublished archival records. The result of the study is that foundation dissolutions and mergers were primarily pragmatically motivated and that the Peter Warschow Foundation was able to survive mainly because of its cultural practice and financial basis.

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Piety and Politics in Nineteenth Century Poitiers: The Cult of St Radegund

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History ◽

10.1017/s0022046900018649 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 47 (1) ◽

pp. 65-81

Author(s):

Brian Brennan

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Local Level ◽

Third Republic ◽

Sixth Century ◽

Second Empire ◽

French Society ◽

The Third ◽

Pius Ix ◽

The Middle Ages

St Radegund, a sixth-century royal ascetic who relinquished her position as the wife of a Frankish king and established a convent in Poitiers, is today a rather obscure French local saint. Yet in the nineteenth century, as a result of the tireless promotion of her cult by Édouard Pie, bishop of Poitiers from 1849 to 1880, St Radegund was widely invoked in France as ‘la sainte reine de la France’ and ‘la mère de la patrie’. Her wonder-working tomb, a popular devotional site in the Middle Ages, offered cures and Pie saw to it that the pilgrim trains to Lourdes made an obligatory prayer-stop at Poitiers. This article analyses devotion to St Radegund during the Second Empire and the Third Republic and explores some of the religious and political connotations of the cult of this royal saint. The development of the cult is particularly significant for it allows us to see, reflected on the local level, something of the larger struggle for national self-definition that was taking place in nineteenth-century French society as royalists contended with Bonapartists and republicans, clericals waged war against secularists and the ultramontanes sought to rouse their fellow countrymen in support of Pius IX.

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Introduction: Medieval and medievalist practice

Affective medievalism ◽

10.7228/manchester/9781526126863.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 1-21

Author(s):

Thomas A. Prendergast ◽

Stephanie Trigg

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Cultural Practice ◽

Affective Responses ◽

The Past ◽

Historical Truth ◽

The Middle Ages

Scholars of the medieval past are often drawn to a kernel of historical truth that might guarantee the truth of their inquiries, but medievalist scholarly and cultural practice reveals the impossibility of this secure knowledge. Affective responses to the past continue to structure our understanding of historicity and temporality; just as the strange familiarity of the Middle Ages in the present is a form of “uncanny” knowledge and feeling. Medievalism is a social and cultural practice, not a secure epistemological category. Indeed, as a practice, medievalism constantly troubles the apparently simple alterity of the Middle Ages, leading to intellectual and affective discontent from both medieval scholars and medievalist practitioners.

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