The question whether the governance and autonomy of medieval cities and the participation of their citizens in managing communal affairs may be regarded a laboratory of democracy or yet another form of the rule of the privileged has re-emerged with new answers in recent scholarship. Besides urban and legal historians and scholars of political thought, research in art history, literacy, spatial studies, and global history have provided a set of new answers. Governing bodies and institutions, with varying degree of participation by inhabitants of different social and legal standing have been examined, as well as the shaping of the physical environment, including its open spaces, buildings and ornaments.

The talks of renowned invited experts in this online lecture series will seek the origins of civic participation in political thought and explore its forms of expression in written and visual media from Late Antiquity to the seventeenth century. The lectures will also prepare the ground for a Summer University Course entitled Urban Governance and Civic Participation in Words and Stone to be organized by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) in July 2022.

While the OSUN course aims to examine the notion of civic participation through a critical lens in medieval and Early Modern Central Europe, the lecture series, co-organized by the Democracy in History Workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute, the Department of Medieval Studies at CEU, the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Erfurt, will cover the same topic in a longer historical perspective and a broader geographical spectrum. The series is convened by Zoe Opacic (Birkbeck), Susanne Rau (Erfurt), and Katalin Szende (CEU DI).

Every lecture in the series is open to the public. Participation is possible for individual dates as well as for the entire lecture series.