Fair Relations: Business, Church and Power

In this interview, Katalin Szende, Professor of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, and founding member and current President of MECERN, talks about her on-going research into Fair Relations: Business, Church and Power in the 11th – 13th Century.  Her focus is on the cathedral cities of the three major polities of the period and region, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, their differences and similarities. Katalin notes that there are few traditional, archival sources of information for her research, and so uses the method of spatial analysis to understand the changing relationship between ecclesiastical , secular , and mercantile power.  These relationships become clear from the locations of, and physical and visual links between the cathedral, the stronghold and the marketplaces of a city. The research presented in this podcast was funded and hosted by the Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations research group of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt (DFG – FOR 2779).This podcast is part of a series of interviews covering central Europe in the medieval period for MECERN and CEU Department of Historical Studies.