From the cultic worship to the worship without cult: Felix and Regula in Zürich (8.-18. CE)

The project concentrates on the long term forming of the identity of the urban community in the city of Zurich and its patrons, the (alleged) late antique martyrs Felix and Regula, from the 8th to 18th century. The two key points are marked by a Latin Vita of the 8th century and by a speech by Johann Caspar Lavater dating from 1797. Although Zwingli destructed the grave of the saints at the beginning of the 16th century, and prohibited their cult, the devotion continued in other, now non liturgical forms – such as the telling of the origin of the Christian Zurich (used in polemics against the Jesuits in the 17th century) or as naming. Based on a wide range of different types of texts, images and names this astonishing continuity shall be researched to understand, how the sacral identity of an urban community was designed and worked under given historical, cultural and even religious boundaries, and to reason what this means regarding the phenomenon of sacredness in the Middle ages and the early modern period.