Suchergebnisse

In Germany, migration research is still a relatively young line of research. Several obstacles complicated a critical recovery of research concepts on the history of population and migration that had been shaped as early as in the 1920s. This was the result of the multilayered disavowal of academic demography - because of its role in Nazi Germany, because of the long-lasting primate of history of politics in post-WW ll Germany, and finally because of the late emergence of the history of society. This situation has profoundly changed during the last decades of the twentieth century. Reasons were the increasing historical distance to the 'fall of man' of demography in Nazi Germany, the reorientation of historiography in the context of critical social and cultural sciences; the inclusion of labor-market research into migration research, and the shaping of interdisciplinary and integral research concepts.

This contribution sketches the essential aspects of terrestrial navigation in the late middle ages and early modern times. The emergence of terrestrial navigation is seen in the context of changes taking place in both trade policies and vessel types directly prior to this epoch. Whereas ships had previously remained in the vicinity of the coast for purposes of protection, now every effort was made to keep a safe distance from the coast. This principle was reflected in new navigational methods completely lacking any theoretical basis, particularly in a specific type of icourse-pointö navigation (Wegpunktnavigation). The new methods depended entirely upon the aid of the sounding Iead, the compass and sailing directions passed along in both oral and written form. For territory-related reasons, the log and sea chart did not play a role in navigation until a much later date.

"On the basis of saints' vitae and miraculous stories primarily from Early Medieval Saxony, the
author calls attention to special forms of mobility in the Middle Ages - 'sacral mobility' - pilgrimages during which the pilgrims encountered the mortal remains of saints on their way to
their future places of rest (so-called translationes). These experiences took people beyond the limits of their often quite stationary everyday lives, leading in the process to common religious experiences as a form of social solder between the classes. Concrete examples also demonstrate how, in the mentality of the times, these journeys by land and water bonded the saints to the people, at the same time bringing about cures of sick persons as well as the mitigation of punitive measures in some cases and their imposition in others. Thus even within the framework of mobility, the religious cosmos of the Middle Ages remained unaffected and committed to the belief in this world and life after death." (author's abstract)