Abstract
Studies in medieval and early modern urban history have long been dominated by questions of political and constitutional history. In the 1980s, this approach was challenged by more anthropological perspectives on urban spaces, for example, the ritual studies of Edward Muir and Richard C. Trexler in Venice and Florence and various other studies on performative aspects of towns. 1 Symbolic representations, actions, and discourses or their interpretations turned out to be important material for a deeper understanding of historical cities. Besides studies of religion (of great importance in premodern times) and the history of minorities and marginalized, excluded, and deviant people, we can observe a growing interest in the spatial dimensions of medieval and early modern urban history in the past ten to fifteen years. This is not to say that spatial aspects had been totally absent before, but prior to the arrival of the so-called spatial turn and the new reflections on the relationship between “spatiality” and “sociality” in social, literary, and historical studies, space had been mostly understood as being three-dimensional and often as given. This (traditional) kind of spatial analysis is present in hundreds of town histories that simply “localized” events without asking for the meaning of a place or the effects of a special site but also in studies on towns and their urban hinterland. History of town planning had scarcely investigated power struggles, town dwellers’ or visitors’ perceptions of structures, or their appropriations (which could include deviant ones). Of course, there are some early exceptions, such as Arlette Farge’s Fragile Lives, in which she analyzed typical sites of conflict and solidarity in early modern Paris: the home, the workplace, and the street. 2 Other scholars asked whether actions were site specific, and again others examined how sites had become lieux de mémoire. What is now considered to be the new paradigm of “spatial stories,” however, is due to a theoretical reflection on the concept of space/spatiality, from the integration of sociological, philosophical, and geographical concepts in historical studies, on one hand, to interdisciplinary approaches, on the other. Current studies on the perception of sites and spatial arrangements by historical subjects could be classified as a third path toward “spatial stories” because they help us to understand that not only space itself but also people’s perceptions of space may change over time.
What the titles under review collectively represent is a focus on spatial dimensions of early modern city life, especially in Europe and especially with regard to streetscapes and street life. By themselves, the books and their authors seem to have nothing in common: the authors are historians, art historians, and literary historians from both sides of the Atlantic. They have been brought together for this review only because of their common interest in different levels of spatiality: environmental, medial, conceptual. I first present the books one after another and then attempt to answer the question whether they really do reflect a new trend in urban history and what we can learn from them for further spatial approaches to urban and cultural history or, more generally, what their contribution might be to urban history. Before we can answer these questions, we should specify the innovative features of the cities themselves at the beginning of the modern era, commonly referred to as the Renaissance. Although we should always be careful with drawing clear lines, there is evidence to suggest that it was Renaissance cities that commenced representing themselves (on either maps or veduti), initiated self-reflexivity about their place and history, and started to plan, regulate, and control their spaces; due to a growing literacy, town dwellers began to leave written records about their family lives and the events that happened in their town. Thus, the growing production of what have been baptized “ego-documents” provides a chance for historians to discover documents which offer a glimpse of spatial perceptions or individual appropriations of spaces.
Naomi Miller’s study of the Renaissance culture of cartography clearly illustrates the interest in the study of cartography at that time. The Italian Renaissance marks not only an age of prospering cities but also a radical shift in the representation of cities. While in the Middle Ages cartography was essentially based on sacred, mythological, and historical events, it was now determined by topography, accompanied by a new mode of visualization and new modes of design. Decisive in this graphic transformation was the study of ancient texts and especially the discovery of Ptolemy’s Geography, which led to the introduction of mathematical thinking in geography and cartography. From then on maps were to represent a multidimensional body “in just proportions” on a two-dimensional plane. The basic source materials for this richly illustrated book were the city maps of the Urbino codex, for a long time preserved at the Duke of Montefeltre’s court and now present in the Vatican archives. According to the author, city maps had a threefold function: they were works of art, they were emblems of “civic humanism,” and they served practical needs. In her book, Miller goes back to the second century
Stuart Blumin’s work on streetscapes in early modern art shows a comparable interest in the pictorial representation of cities, although his sources are not so much maps as veduti (a developing genre within the larger history of urban representation) or their forerunners. The American historian analyzes the emergence of this genre, linking it to the history of its subject matter: the city and urban spaces in early modern Europe. Whereas his background information on demographic or social aspects of early modern cities is sometimes very sparse, at any rate too cursorily treated, his identification and explanation of the new sensibility of urban improvement is of great interest. Blumin not only uncovers the special interest in city painting or engraving in early modern times and the new sensibility of urban improvement but also gives reasons for the varying receptions and developments in different parts of Europe—for example, why vedutismo, an almost entirely urban activity, is fairly widespread in Italy and the Low Countries but less so in France and why it seems to be rather marginal in Germany, where Braun and Hogenberg (among others) were apparently more interested in distant view making, and only infinitesimally in quaint cities such as Bruges, Siena, and Toledo. According to the author, one of the reasons for the predilection for veduti could be the important changes in early modern cities due to demographic upturns (if any) and to new trends in urbanity that promoted the construction of promenades, squares, halls, avenues, and the like. Another reason may be the possible group of buyers. Even though it is always difficult to tell whether town dwellers themselves bought streetscapes, there were the early modern tourists, first the gentry, then the bourgeoisie, who wanted to buy souvenirs of the places they had visited on their “Grand Tour” and who thus contributed to the production of city views. According to Blumin, the Grand Tour itself was therefore a considerable factor in European integration. The success of veduti in Amsterdam, itself not a major tourist destination, is explained by its role as a commercial and financial hub and as a place of contact for many European merchants. As the author reminds us, the printing press was a major technological requirement for the expansion of the genre, its mass production (and therefore its availability), as well as its integration into books.
The seven essays in yet another book on early modern European streets complete the range of subject-specific approaches to urban sites by focusing on their material constructions and social usages. The reader is guided through the streets of Lisbon, Kolozsvár or Klausenburg, Stockholm, Åbo, Rome, Venice, and London and learns a lot about urban street planning processes, street regulations, street theater, gossip, and the street as a stage for everyday life where people see and are seen. Streets share a number of similarities with taverns and churches—their closed counterparts—in that they have always been public spaces, never completely separate from other public spaces nor even from private spaces, as Riitta Laitinen and Thomas V. Cohen, the editors, recount in their introduction to the anthology. In contrast to pure studies in urban planning, several of the book’s contributions scrutinize the interplay between regulations, on one hand, and behavior and use, on the other. In her study of sixteenth-century Klausenburg, Emese Bálint shows how social control processes allow house and street to merge and how the soundscape of outcries and other noises drowns out the visual streetscape. As an irony of history, the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon turned out to be of special interest for historians of urban space because it enables them to compare pre- and post-1755 Lisbon, two cities that differ not only in design but also in regulation and use. Elizabeth S. Cohen’s essay on Rome around 1600 is another excellent contribution because in her attempt to gender urban geography, she challenges the common divide between the male public realm and female domesticity and shows how in many different ways women ventured into the streets of a Mediterranean city (assumed to be governed by gendered seclusion). Despite their unusual ways of inquiry, all essays contribute to an undermining of formal spatial distinctions. Nevertheless, this kind of approach to streets would benefit from a deeper analysis of iconographic sources in the manner of Miller and Blumin.
The literary historian Daniel Vaillancourt suggests yet another rephrasing of the research question. In his Les urbanités parisiennes he analyzes urban discourses, mostly literary, to trace the establishment of a new urban thinking and feeling in the seventeenth century. For the author, the new sensitivity toward the urban environment has a referent in the real—that is, the material world. By 1600 urban planning projects, under the reign of Henri IV, gave Paris new pavements, façades, bridges, places, statues, as well as street lighting and other useful or decorative elements. The changes also concerned traffic regulations, the broadening and straightening of streets, police ordinances, and a growing enforcement of those regulations. The city was to become a rationalized, organized, controlled, and watched space, visited and experienced by foreigners and town dwellers alike. Vaillancourt states that the experience of this novel spatial arrangement, accompanied by its discourses and control practices, contributed to the formation of a new subjectivity in one of the biggest early modern cities. The five more deeply analyzed discursive layers comprise dictionaries, the prototourist discourse (travelogues etc.), the technocratic and juridical discourse, treatises of civility, and the literary and philosophical discourse (Sorel, Furetière, Descartes, La Bruyère). These discourses, each in its own manner and scope, not only participated in the formation of a new imaginary of the city but transformed the city’s “habitus” as well as that of its inhabitants. Although primarily a literary study, the book is organized along the changes of urban space and adds, at the end, a histoire des pieds (as a means of moving a body across urban space) and a histoire des roues (likewise for coaches); but, unlike a history of city planning, Vaillancourt analyzes the spatial arrangement not as such but as reflected in the above-mentioned discourses.
In Karen Newman’s Cultural Capitals several of the above-mentioned approaches converge. From a comparative point of view, her goal is nothing less than to explain the qualitative side of early modern urbanization, a process that refers primarily to a demographic development. After reviewing the debate on urbanity since Louis Wirth, she argues that the production of a metropolitan subjectivity associated with modern times had in fact started earlier, in the early modern European cultural capitals that have, so far, largely been ignored in the debate. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence that the figure of the flaneur as described by Baudelaire and Benjamin, the sensitivity toward filth and noise, crowded streets, the availability of new commodities, information on and knowledge of distant or newly discovered lands, and so on—criteria that are usually attributed to modern urbanity—already existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Henceforth, it will be difficult to ignore the rising awareness of a specific metropolitan way of life evolving in several European capitals that were often also competitors. Newman’s clever combination of different concepts, her resolute decision for a spatial analysis of the cities (deliberately chosen to avoid a teleological narrative), and her attempt to combine quantitative with qualitative aspects of early modern urbanization led to an explanatory model that could be sketched in the following way: rapid urban growth and the development of large scale activities resulted in an accumulation of financial and cultural capital in the cities. In the latter domain urbanization produced new technologies of movement (modes of transport and walking) through the city but also new literary and iconographic genres, and it promoted the development of a consumer society and its attendant cultural practices. Another effect was the promotion of distinctive urban behavior and the development of new forms of sociability. In her book she also retraces the new modes of describing the city since the sixteenth century, such as urban descriptions, theater plays, street literature, ballads, satires, as well as the spatialization of the written word in maps, prospects, engravings, or veduti. Newman analyzes spatial practices such as prospects or views from a high, often fictitious, point of view, as well as promenades. Moreover, she always keeps in mind that urban space is dominated by capital and that it is a site of contests, a site of encounters and even riots, and, last but not least, a site of sexual encounter, as commercial sex first appeared in cities. The fact that there are always human observers who attempt to measure and master the chaotic experience of early modern urban life proves the adequacy of her approach to early modern cities because they reveal the self-reflexivity of such developments. Hence, these new developments—but also the frictions and contradictions between the reality of urban life and culture-specific codes of correct behavior and appearance—promoted the emergence of distinctive urban behavior and new forms of urban-specific sociability. From my own perspective, having analyzed this process for the city of Lyon, 4 I fully agree with Newman. I would only add a translocal perspective on those cities that had different kinds of relationships to their regions or to other European metropolises or even to the wider world. Studies in urban history would benefit from more of this kind of historical and literary work on other early modern cities, first, to specify the role of London and Paris (were they exceptions or the rule?), and second, to get a clearer idea of what early modern urbanity comprises. The deliberately chosen spatial approach could also be expanded; we could, for example, analyze spaces of the early modern consumer society—not only markets but also shops and their role in the social and cultural life of the respective cities. 5
Overall, the studies represent a valuable subfield in urban history. The books each have a unique approach, but what they have in common is a reflective inquiry into urban space, especially the street, but also the city as a whole and its different forms of representation. Several studies emphasize the representational side; others focus on planning and governmental aspects; still others treat spatiality as spatial arrangements, perceptions, and uses. The way ahead should be to try to combine all these aspects in a more effective way. Then we may get a better idea of the history of urbanity—dominated until now by studies concentrating on the twentieth century—and the participation of different groups (councilors, artists, and ordinary people) in the development of urban cultures. Other questions to be investigated could be what “happened spatially” to cities and their inhabitants in urbanization processes and what the cultural conditions were that generated urban forms? Social historians should no longer refrain from integrating iconographic documents that depict urban form and space (veduti and others). Streets should no longer be viewed as representing mere backdrops for social life or mere fruits of urban planning or mere objects of visual representation but all of them at the same time, as three related components of processes in the constitution of space. In doing so, we will get closer to what French sociologist Henri Lefebvre proposed as criteria for a spatial analysis of cities. His threefold model of “representation of space,” “representational space,” and “spatial practice” was rediscovered in the 1990s, especially by social geographer Edward Soja and only recently by some sociologists, philosophers, and historians. 6 There are undoubtedly other methodological approaches, but only these concepts allow us to examine different layers of space and the different agents involved in the production of space, and they can promote a more nuanced understanding of the production of urban forms and the different perceptions and usages of urban space. Collectively, the reviewed books already make an important contribution to the upcoming urban “spatial stories.”