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.
Author(s): Andrew Brown, Jan Dumolyn
Series: Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800), 43
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 220
City: Turnhout
Andrew Brown & Jan Dumolyn / Medieval Urban Culture: Conceptual and Historiographical Problems 1
Claire Judde de Larivière / The Urban Culture of the Ordinary People. Space and Identity in Renaissance Venice (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries) 27
Mark Amsler / Memory, Text and Space in Late Medieval London 41
Peter Howard / Making a City and Citizens: The 'Fruits' of Preaching in Renaissance Florence 59
Barbara Rouse / Nuisance Neighbours and Persistent Polluters: The Urban Code of Behaviour in Late Medieval London 75
E. Amanda McVitty / Prosecuting Treason in Lancastrian London: The Language and Landscape of Political Dissent 93
Lindsay Diggelmann / Chronicles and Crowds: Accounts of Urban Unrest in Norman Cities, 1090–1160 111
Roger Nicholson / 'Cursed ymagynacion': Late Medieval London, Urban Chronicles and the Topologies of Treason 125
Chris Jones / Connecting the Urban Environment with Political Ideas in Late Capetian France 139
Constant J. Mews / Christian–Jewish Exchanges within the Urban Culture of Twelfth-Century France and England 157
Johan Oosterman / Discovering New Media. Anthonis de Roovere and the Early Printing Press 171
Katrien Lichtert / Port Cities and River Harbours: A Peculiar Motif in Antwerp Landscape Painting c. 1490–1530 183
Kim M. Phillips / Europe Looks East: Chinese Cities in Medieval Travel Writing, c. 1298 – c. 1440 201
