Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400–1500

Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space

Caroline Goodson, Anne E. Lester, Carol Symes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754667230
• eBook ISBN: 9781317165934
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Cities, Texts and Social Networks examines the experiences of urban life from late antiquity through the close of the fifteenth century, in regions ranging from late Imperial Rome to Muslim Syria, Iraq and al-Andalus, England, the territories of medieval Francia, Flanders, the Low Countries, Italy and Germany. Together, the volume's contributors move beyond attempts to define 'the city' in purely legal, economic or religious terms. Instead, they focus on modes of organisation, representation and identity formation that shaped the ways urban spaces were called into being, used and perceived. Their interdisciplinary analyses place narrative and archival sources in communication with topography, the built environment and evidence of sensory stimuli in order to capture sights, sounds, physical proximities and power structures. Paying close attention to the delineation of public and private spaces, and secular and sacred precincts, each chapter explores the workings of power and urban discourse and their effects on the making of meaning. The volume as a whole engages theoretical discussions of urban space - its production, consumption, memory and meaning - which too frequently misrepresent the evidence of the Middle Ages. It argues that the construction and use of medieval urban spaces could foster the emergence of medieval 'public spheres' that were fundamental components and by-products of pre-modern urban life. The resulting collection contributes to longstanding debates among historians while tackling fundamental questions regarding medieval society and the ways it is understood today. Many of these questions will resonate with scholars of postcolonial or 'non-Western' cultures whose sources and cities have been similarly marginalized in discussions of urban space and experience. And because these essays reflect a considerable geographical, temporal and methodological scope, they model approaches to the study of urban history that will interest a wide range of readers.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Caroline Goodson, Anne E. Lester and Carol Symes

Among the splendid cities of the world that have achieved celebrity, the city of London – seat of the English monarchy – is one whose renown is more widespread, whose money and merchandise go further afield, and which stands head and shoulders above the others. It is fortunate in the wholesomeness of its climate, the devotion of its Christians, the strength of its fortifications, its well-situated location, the respectability of its citizens, and the propriety of their wives. Furthermore, it takes great pleasure in its sports and is prolific in producing men of superior quality.

In 1174, a cleric called William FitzStephen completed a life of his former employer, Thomas Becket (1118–70), and included a fulsome description of the new saint’s birthplace, London. Although Canterbury was the site of the archbishop’s martyrdom and his miracle-working tomb, William wanted to be sure that prospective pilgrims appreciated the urban milieu that had fostered so great a man. For it was in London that this son of immigrants had been spurred to achieve a superior education, equipped to soar through the ranks of the era’s greatest corporation, and endowed with the courage to challenge the century’s most powerful monarch. Only by grasping what made this city great could one understand the mettle of the man who had been bred there – and the conditions in which other ‘superior men’ would be fostered.

Those conditions persisted, or were perceived to persist. In the 1320s, William’s description was incorporated into the city chamberlain’s official account of London’s customs and institutions.¹ More than two centuries after that, it was crucial to the Survey of London undertaken by John Stow (circa 1525–1605), first published in 1598 and reprinted and expanded in 1603.² Indeed, Stow’s motive in quoting William’s text in full was to show how much the city Stow himself had known in boyhood, in the halcyon days of Henry VIII, had resembled its ancient counterpart – and how grievously altered he perceived it to be, since the Protestant regime of Elizabeth had disrupted traditional neighbourhoods, social networks and modes of interaction.³

William’s description participates in a triumphal genre of urban panegyric reaching back into antiquity and extending into the present day. In itself, and in the circumstances in which it was preserved and received, it exemplifies the ways that any city’s lived reality is continuously inflected by nostalgia and desire, shaped by cultural borrowings and assumptions, and reconfigured by knowledge or ignorance of how the urban landscape has changed over time. At the time of its inscription, it served to paint a compelling picture of an ideal society in which social mobility, economic opportunity and political access created a culture capable of producing the local boy who had made good. It is, therefore, untrustworthy. At the same time, however, many elements of it can be corroborated by other sources, while the fact that the city it evokes was still recognizable four hundred years later suggests that latter-day inhabitants either lived in this London or had deeply internalized ideas that indelibly coloured their experience of it.

Perhaps most strikingly, we note Stow’s insistence that something had changed in his own lifetime, that the events of the sixteenth century had disrupted the essential character of urban life and made the once-familiar landscape alien. In this he was prescient, both in observing changes and in prophesying that they would make it difficult for future generations to recognize or value the urbanity of the middle ages. When urban historians look to the past, they tend to look far beyond this millennium to antiquity, to the era before ‘the fall’ of Rome’s differently urbane civilisation. Even Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), who sought the causes of medieval cities’ emergence in the age of Charlemagne, and minimized the effects of earlier invasions on Rome’s empire in order to locate its demise in the rise of Islam, was as much influenced by modern events – especially his experience of the Great War – as he was by historical evidence. He was determined to let the record show that German barbarism could not destroy his own civilisation.⁴

But if medieval cities are seen as the result of rupture and discontinuity visà-vis antiquity, they are also viewed – with less justification – as having little to do with the modern cities that have allegedly displaced them, even when they are manifestly the ancestors of these metropoles (for example London, Paris). Historical accident (fire) or human intervention (Haussmannisation, warfare) can help to reinforce the impression that the medieval past and its fabric are irrelevant to the study of individual cities or to urban history at large. The contours of the medieval city are continually juxtaposed with a modernity that valorizes its own experience of urban life and insists on its own radicality.⁵ At the same time, the contributions of the urban middle ages to the world economy or to modern habits and ideas are regularly ignored or belittled in the canonical scholarship modern historians frequently cite. The prevailing paradigm, exemplified by the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, holds that patterns of development discernible after 1500 generated revolutionary changes. Recent research has shown, however, that these changes represent the acceleration or expansion of trading networks, trends in production, social structures and political institutions that were already evident in the twelfth century, if not earlier.⁶

Making the study of the middle ages central to urban historiography not only corrects this narrative, it challenges and extends the models of social development, spatial praxis and political agency articulated by Walter Benjamin, Fernand Braudel, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Jürgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson. Moreover, recent research on medieval urban society shows that some key commonalities exist throughout time, making the application of theory that grew out of Marxist and Weberian critiques of cities, capital and production ever more worthy of investigation in the pre-modern context. Indeed, because both Marx and Weber (as well as the host of social and critical theorists who followed their approaches) based these critiques on a paradigm of the medieval world that has now been decisively overturned, core ideas are ripe for revision. Accordingly, the essays in this volume begin to take up the challenge of rewriting and rethinking the medieval urban past outside of older constraints, but through the critical lenses produced by that older scholarship.

Since political and economic questions have long dominated scholarship on ‘the medieval city’, pre-modern urban history has usually been framed with reference to political expansion, state formation and economic growth. The medieval city is thus associated chiefly with the communal movement of the early twelfth century and the emergence of economic franchise on the one hand and class conflict and contested power on the other. Yet medieval cities and the varieties of urban experience they fostered were far more complex. This volume accordingly moves beyond attempts to define medieval cities in purely legal, demographic or economic terms. Its contributors emphasise the role of cultural forces, representation, perceptions and public discourses in shaping urban communities. And because the resulting chapters reflect a considerable geographical, temporal and methodological scope, they model approaches to the study of urban history that are intended to engage a wide range of readers. Collectively, they provide an introduction to pre-modern urban history and culture, and they aim to promote awareness of the medieval underpinnings of modern urban phenomena. Indeed, many of the questions they raise will resonate with scholars of postcolonial or ‘non-Western’ societies whose sources and cities have been similarly marginalized in theoretical discussions of urban space, discussions that too frequently misrepresent evidence that does not adhere to modern western conceptions of what cities are and how they function, or of what defines the urban experience.

The Medieval City as Heuristic and Historical Challenge

Attention to definition and categorization has often had the effect of marginalizing the pre-modern city because it does not always adhere to the standards of either modernity or antiquity, a trend discernible in other areas of medieval studies.⁷ Approaches to medieval urban history framed by ‘the end of the ancient city’ or ‘the rise of the early modern city’ can have the effect of homogenizing stark regional differences, minimizing specific historical contexts, and losing sight of the distinctive forces that have shaped the textual record. We have therefore attempted to detach the study of medieval urbanism from both the teleological and the retrospective approaches.

Histories of the Early Medieval City

Early medieval cities, like their later medieval counterparts and outgrowths, were constituted not only through the physical forms and administrative apparatus of government, but also by the experiences and perceptions of people living in them. As noted above, scholarship on these cities has long focused on definitions and nomenclature: What constituted a city in the early middle ages? Was it a market, city walls, relative density of population or hierarchical administration? Were these early cities truly ‘urban’? What was the difference between a city and a town? In 1979, in response to this scholarly tradition, Martin Biddle famously proposed characteristics of an ideal type, which when present in sufficient quantity would define a ‘town’ in Anglo-Saxon England. For Biddle and a group of archaeologists working on Northern Europe in the early middle ages, a ‘place was accepted as a town if it possessed or fulfilled more than one of the following criteria: it exhibited defences; a planned street-system; a market(s); a mint; legal autonomy; a role as a central place; a relatively large and dense population; a diversified economic base; plots and houses of “urban” type; social differentiation; complex religious organization; or a judicial centre’.⁸ These criteria deliberately challenged earlier definitions of English towns, which were dependant on the preservation of texts, such as a borough charter, or on its designation as a burgus in the Assize Rolls, or its political representation in Parliament.⁹ Biddle’s criteria, in reflecting both physical structures and social patterns, helped to recast the discussion of urbanism as something that is fruitfully analyzed across disciplinary divides. Janet L. Nelson used this model when rereading the textual sources from and about Charlemagne’s capital at Aachen.¹⁰ Chris Wickham recently employed it to shape his comparative analysis of early medieval ‘urban centres’, so-called so as to avoid disagreements about definitions.¹¹ Biddle’s criteria have thus opened up a discussion of the medieval urban experience in productive ways.

To be sure, questions about definitions reflect some of the concerns voiced by contemporary inhabitants of these early medieval towns, such as Gregory of Tours (d. 594), who wondered why Dijon was not called a city (civitas) when it had solid stone fortifications, thirty-three towers, mills, gates, and was purportedly founded by a Roman emperor.¹² Probably reflecting the diversity of their authors’ experiences and expectations, early medieval sources use a wide range of terms to describe urban entities, including civitas, urbs, villa, castrum, madīna, burgh and wic, and attempts to reconcile these with textual and archaeological evidence has been an ongoing concern for scholars of the period.¹³ of course, the expectation that medieval sources should be consistent about defining something as varied and subjective as urbanism is unrealistic, although many of the following chapters demonstrate the significance and complexity of the textual contexts in which such terms were used. In turn, they invite the reader to grapple with the urban milieu as defined by perceptions and experiences.

While many historians seek definitions, some would do away with the analytical category of ‘city’ altogether. In a book which has called for a reassessment of the state of questions pertaining to the Mediterranean world, Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden suggest that urbanism is no longer a useful category through which to examine history, as ‘towns can be seen as “epiphenomenal of larger ecological processes”’.¹⁴ They argue that a focus on towns negates the complex and real relationships between town and countryside or between one town and other towns which would be, they posit, a more accurate index of historical activity. Such dismissal of urbanism as a point of inquiry is, we feel, too radical. Indeed, there is something particular about medieval cities, the texts they generated and their social networks, that merits further scrutiny. Not least, medieval cities had relatively greater densities of population than suburbs, hamlets, or the countryside, and this increased the scale and diversity of social interaction. While this greater density is always relative (to rural areas, to other urban centres, to the past, to the future) it nonetheless can be seen to foster distinctive forms of association. Charles Maisels, an historian of the ancient Near East, describes this by employing the classical Greek term ‘synoecism’, defined as ‘interdependence arising from a dense proximity’, and attributes to it the rise of government, writing-based administration and monumental building.¹⁵ The causes and results of synoecism are, in turn, related to Biddle’s criteria for the ideal type of the medieval ‘town’, which include certain administrative and juridical functions, and return us to one of the main aims of the present volume, the fundamental importance of social networks for medieval cities.

If the examination of social diversity and interaction is one particularly vital area of study, another is the relationship of a medieval city to its past.¹⁶ Contemporary writers, like Gregory of Tours, and modern scholars, like Martin Biddle, place great importance on an early medieval city’s ancient origins; Roman foundations apparently increased the status of the urban site.¹⁷ Because the city has been widely perceived as an essential element of the Roman world, not to mention the Hellenistic and classical worlds, the vitality of urban centres has been seen as defining the trajectories of post-Roman populations, either b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: CONSTRUCTING AND RESTRUCTURING
• PART 2: TOPOGRAPHIES AS TEXTS
• PART 3: CITIZENS AND SAINTS
• PART 4: AGENCY AND AUTHORITY
• Bibliography
• Index