You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
This volume aims at taking the first steps towards a revaluation of urban historiography in Northwest Europe, including rather than excluding texts that do not fit common definitions. It confronts examples from the Low Countries to well-studied cases abroad, in order to develop new approaches to urban historiography in general. In the authors' view, there are no fixed textual formats, social or political categories, or material forms that exclusively define 'the urban chronicle'. Urban historiography in pre-modern Western Europe came in many guises, from the dry and modest historical notes in a guild register, to the elaborate heraldic images in a luxury manuscript made on commission for a p...
This volume explores the specificity of the urban culture in western Europe during the period c.1150-1550. Since the mid-twentieth century, many studies have complicated the association, traditionally made, between the medieval growth of towns and the birth of a modern, secular world; but few have given any attention to what actually made urban culture 'urban'. This volume begins by placing medieval 'urban culture' within its spatial context, to consider how urban conditions determined the perception and representation of the city-dweller. Contributors examine a variety of urban cultures, from the political to the artistic, from London and Bruges to Florence and Venice, and beyond Europe. They show how urban culture involved a process of interaction with other discourses (royal, noble, ecclesiastical) and that it was not monolithic: the relationship between urban environments and the cultures they generated were hybrid, fluid and dynamic.
The study of urban history on the European continent has intensified over the past 15 or 20 years. This book provides a comprehensive review of work carried out on national and regional European urban history.
The authors of this volume examine various fields of cultural discourse in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century: the political, commercial, religious, artistic, and sensory domains, and less obviously metaphysical properties like time and space. What defined the Low Countries were not its borders and its territories but its cities, and their economies dominated political relations. A dense network of large cities and small towns developed hand in hand with a broad range of textile and luxury industries. In Antwerp, culture was commerce: its art and printing industries catered to much of the Western world and, at the same time, carved a confident self-image celebrating the liberal arts as...
Urban history is a well-established and flourishing field of historical research. Written by a leading scholar, this short introduction demonstrates how urban history draws upon a wide variety of methodologies and sources, and has been integral to the rise of interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to history since the second half of the twentieth century. Shane Ewen offers an accessible and clearly written guide to the study of urban history for the student, teacher, researcher or general reader who is new to the field and interested in learning about past approaches as well as key themes, concepts and trajectories for future research. He takes a global and comparative viewpoint, combi...
This regional study focuses on the socio-economic development of the so-called West-Quarter of the county of Flanders during the period 1300-1600. Through the expansion of potent textile industries in the countryside from the fourteenth century onwards, this region gradually attained distinctly 'urban' characteristics in terms of production scale, specialisation, product quality, and the aim for external markets. By the middle of the sixteenth century the West-Quarter had even become one of Flanders's main production regions of woolen cloth. This book assesses how and why this economic expansion took place, why it happened at that particular moment, and why in this region. The broader aims o...
During the last decades, representations of medieval and early modern urban space have witnessed an increasing popularity as objects of study within the historical disciplines. Scholars with different backgrounds investigate urban landscapes in various forms and using a wide range of media. In general, such 'portraits of the city' cover different types of visual and written documents. The twelve essays gathered in this book all cover specific types of such portraits, ranging from historiographical texts and archival record, over drawings, prints and paintings to maps and real urban architectural settings. Moreover, the interdisciplinary scope results in an ample compilation of various innovative methodologies, currently applied in the fields of study and disciplines addressed in the book. 'Portraits of the City' provides a representative overview of the current state of knowledge and is in this way a relevant contribution to the international debate on representations of the city.