Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)

Les notions d’urbanité de politesse et de savoir-vivre connaissent depuis une dizaine d’années un intérêt renouvelé à la fois dans leurs dimensions politique sociale et culturelle.

Cet ouvrage souhaite envisager le milieu urbain en tant qu’espace de civilité en croisant les regards des historiens et des spécialistes de la littérature de l’âge classique. Il s’agit aussi d’examiner les cérémonies et rituels du XVIIe siècle comme un ensemble de réseaux de pratiques codifiées dans lequel interagissent notamment des usages collectifs et des préséances individuelles. Ces usages organisent l’espace urbain comme l’espace curial en se déployant en leur sein. La confrontation des archives et des documents littéraires mais aussi des outils et des méthodologies utilisés par ces différents champs disciplinaires permet d’étudier à nouveaux frais les relations entre des concepts trop rapidement perçus comme antonymiques : l’incivilité n’est jamais le contraire de la civilité et il n’existe pas de civilisation ni de société civilisée qui puisse se revendiquer comme statique ou achevée. En revenant dans le sillage des travaux de Norbert Elias aux origines de la civilité moderne envisagée à l’échelle européenne cet ouvrage entreprend d’examiner ce processus non pas de manière linéaire et téléologique mais dans la complexité de ses évolutions et mutations afin de mieux contextualiser les débats contemporains autour de l’incivilité.

Textile industries were one of the driving forces of the urbanisation process in medieval Northwest Europe and nowhere was their impact so profound as in Flanders where almost all larger and smaller cities were involved in manufacturing woollens from the 12th to the 16th century. Ypres the third city in the county was perhaps the most important concentration of industrial labour and capital in this period. In their heyday in the 13th and 14th centuries Ypres woollens were exported all over Europe and Ypres entrepreneurs and textile workers were able to adapt in very flexible ways to changes in demand. This book investigates not only what the impact of cloth manufacture was on urban society it also tries to unravel the social mechanisms of industrial development in late medieval cities. It focuses on social inequalities and on the often difficult relationship between the various stakeholders in the urban cloth industry: merchants entrepreneurs guild masters and skilled and unskilled workers. Through the analysis work practices wage levels investment strategies gender issues and political aspirations it unravels how urban industries in the pre-industrial era shaped social relations in the city how they moulded the urban fabric.

Ceccholo making a claim against Nello for the payment of unpaid land rent. Jacopo Giovanni and Turi appealing for an exemption from tax. The long queue of claimants that formed in front of the communal palace was an everyday scene in fourteenth century Lucca. What is remarkable is the enormous ubiquity of such claims. In this Tuscan city of only twenty thousand people an average of ten thousand claims were filed at the civil court each year. Why did local residents submit claims to the commune in such numbers? And what effect did this daily accumulation have on the development of the commune?

In the fourteenth century Italian communes the established public authorities that governed the populace underwent a shift toward becoming oligarchic regimes. The communes’ character as a form of government in which power was held ‘in common’ by ‘the public’ seemed be on the verge of disappearing. At this time political leaders and judicial magistrates began to rely on their own discretion when rendering their decisions a practice that was recognized as legitimate even when such decisions deviated from positive law. By the beginning of the fifteenth century this shift in the underlying logic of the legitimacy of rulings became entrenched in the jural and political character of the commune portending the advent of the modern era. Based on the archival records from law courts and councils this book elucidates the process of the emergence and shaping of a new form of justice and the transformation of the commune by focusing on everyday practices that unfolded in the spheres of civil and criminal justice by inhabitants who raised claims and the governors who heard them.

Transforming Space deals with visible and invisible changes in premodern cities their causes and the way in which they were perceived and received. The chapters in this book analyse the development and management of urban space combining case studies and insights from a range of cities from all over Europe. Several contributions deal with the impact of major events on the urban tissue: geopolitics; disasters such as fires or wars; expropriation or redevelopment projects directed by urban governments; religious change such as the Dissolution in England and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation on the continent. On closer scrutiny however some of these major events were only an accelerator of already ongoing processes of change. By shifting the perspective from the city as a whole to neighbourhoods urban blocks or even plots of land other chapters reveal how functional change or real estate dynamics changed the urban landscape almost imperceptibly. This book is written from a comparative perspective that takes into account path-dependency. Pre-existing power relations ideology and mentality the resilience of property structures the impact of building regulations subsidies or the effects of real estate markets are shown to have had different outcomes for different social groups and the evolution of neighbourhoods.

The oeuvre of Marc Boone (Ghent 1955) has become standard reading for specialists of medieval European towns and cities as well as for those interested in the history of state building - most notably that of the Burgundian polity. Honoring Ghent University’s venerable tradition of medieval studies begun by Henri Pirenne and building upon the work of his Doktorvater Walter Prevenier Marc Boone also investigated taxation and the history of government spending popular protest and the persecution of “deviant” sexuality. Over the course of his rich career he served as president of the European Association of Urban History and as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University. For more than twenty years he taught the introductory course on historical criticism to every first-year student of the faculty and thus had a major impact on the pensée critique of generations of young minds. Upon the occasion of his retirement in 2021 his former students have compiled this collection of some of his best historical essays half of which have been translated from French and Dutch into English.

Erasmus Schetz Gaspar Ducci and Gilbert van Schoonbeke. Contemporaries made it indisputably clear that these three moneymakers were exceptional from different perspectives and for different reasons but all commentators implicitly or explicitly referred to their unique economic achievements and they were right to do so. The exceptional careers of the three protagonists shed light on the potential of the most dynamic economic centre of Europe - and the world - during early globalization. Precisely because their economic initiatives were far more ambitious than what other businessmen in Antwerp could or would consider or achieve their careers are ideal vantage points for observing and analysing ‘capital at work’. They also provide an opportunity to examine how commercial capitalism changed and/or was transformed and in what measure the three protagonists extended the frontiers of capitalism.

This book engages with Antwerp in the Renaissance. Bringing together several specialists of sixteenth-century Antwerp it offers new research results and fresh perspectives on the economic cultural and social history of the metropolis in the sixteenth century. Recurrent themes are the creative ways in which the Italian renaissance was translated in the Antwerp context. Imperfect imitation often resulted from the specific social context in which the renaissance was translated: Antwerp was a metropolis marked by a strong commercial ideology a high level affluence and social inequality but also by the presence of large and strong middling layers which contributed to the city’s ‘bourgeois’ character. The growth of the Antwerp market was remarkable: in no time the city gained metropolitan status. This book does a good job in showing how quite a few of the Antwerp ‘achievements’ did result from the absence of ‘existing structures’ and ‘examples’. Moreover the city and its culture were given shape by the many frictions and uncertainties that came along with rapid urban growth and religious turmoil.

Social inequality is one of the most pressing global challenges at the start of the 21st century. Meanwhile across the globe at least half of the world’s population lives in urban agglomerations and urbanisation is still expanding. This book engages with the complex interplay between urbanisation and inequality. In doing so it concentrates on the Low Countries one of the oldest and most urbanised societies of Europe. It questions whether the historic poly-nuclear and decentralised urban system of the Low Countries contributed to specific outcomes in social inequality. In doing so the authors look beyond the most commonly used perspective of economic inequality. They instead expand our knowledge by exploring social inequality from a multidimensional perspective. This book includes essays and case-studies on cultural inequalities the relationship between social and consumption inequality the politics of (in)equality the impact of shocks and crises as well as the complex social relationships across the urban network and between town and countryside.

The purpose of this volume is to question traditional notions of city space in pre-modern Europe (with its stress on space being incorporated regulated and integrated dominated by its merchants and crafts) and to investigate how far it was in fact economically and politically pluralistic with a great variety of functions and juridictions. The volume examines comparatively the range of different urban spaces in and outside the medieval and early modern city from gardens farmland and wasteland to industrial sites poor and rich suburbs shooting grounds green space grey space and military zones. Case studies cover cities in France Germany Italy the Low Countries England Portugal and the Middle East. We ask: how far was the pre-modern city a compact city? Or was it in fact a ‘subaltern city’ as geographers have recently proposed where many urban spaces were contested and the municipality has to be seen as only one key spatial actor?

Painted cityscapes have always captivated the viewers of medieval works of art. To this day scholars are mesmerised by their capacity to mirror the urban context from which they sprang combined with their ability to symbolize a more abstract world view religious idea or social ideal. Especially oil painting which thrived in the fifteenth-century Low Countries among a heterogeneous elite and the well-off urban middling groups succeeded as no other medium in capturing the urban landscape in its finest details. In order to gain an insight into how late medieval citizens clerics and noblemen conceived of urban society and space this book combines a serial analysis of a large corpus of painted city views with a critical discussion of some well-documented and revealing works of art. Throughout the book a variety of questions are addressed ranging from the religious conception of the city the theatrical dimension of urban space the extent to which Early Netherlandish painting depicted the city as an economic space how images of city and countryside functioned as identity markers of the donor and how technical advances in the field of cartography impacted the portrayal of towns in the sixteenth century. In doing so this study explores the duality of some of the major interpretive schemes that have determined the last few decades of historiography on late medieval Netherlandish culture oscillating between bourgeois and courtly realistic and symbolic profane and religious and innovative versus traditional.