The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries

222 Pages·2013·35.292 MB·English

by  Marc Boone, Martha Howell

The Power of Space
in late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
SEUH
30
Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800)
Series Editors
Marc Boone
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene
Ghent University
The Power of Space
in late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
The Cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries
Edited by
Marc Boone & Martha Howell
H
F
Illustration de couverture: Erhard Reuwich, Detail of Venice, in: Bernhard von Breydenbach,
Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, Mainz, 1486 (© Royal Library of
Belgium, Brussels, INC B 225 f° 13)
© 2013, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2013/0095/59
ISBN 978-2-503-54784-8 (printed)
ISBN 978-2-503-54822-7 (online)
Printed on acid-free paper
Table of contents
Marc Boone & Martha Howell
Introduction 1
Marco Vencato
Space Politics and Images of Power. The Urban
Renewal of Naples During the Renaissance 11
Chloé Deligne
Powers over Space, Spaces of Powers. The Constitution of
Town Squares in the Cities of the Low Countries (12th - 14th Century) 21
Ellen Wurtzel
City Limits and State Formation: Territorial Jurisdiction in
Late Medieval and Early Modern Lille 29
Diane Chamboduc de Saint Pulgent
L’espace économique comme lieu de reconstruction politique
à Lucques à la fin du xive siècle 43
Pierre-Henri Guittonneau
Petites villes et espace fluvial : pratiques sociales et
conflits d’usage autour de Paris au xve siècle 57
Marc Boone
From Cuckoo’s Egg to “Sedem Tyranni”. The Princely
Citadels in the Cities of the Low Countries, or the City’s Spatial
Integrity Hijacked (15th - Early 16th Centuries) 77
Jean-Baptiste Delzant
Instaurator et fundator : édification de la seigneurie urbaine et
présence monumentale de la commune (Italie centrale, fin du Moyen Âge) 97
Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan
La proximité en négatif : pratiques de stigmatisation et
espaces du quotidien dans l’Italie de la Renaissance 123
v
Table of contents
Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin
The Space of Punishments: Reflections on the Expression and
Perception of Judgment and Punishment in the Cities of the
Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages 139
Henk van Nierop
Sacred Space Contested: Amsterdam in the Age of the Reformation 153
Denis Crouzet
Espace d’ici-bas et espace de l’Au-delà : la violence catholique à la
recherche de la cité de Dieu (France, 1560-1598) 163
Claire Billen
La construction d’une centralité : Bruxelles dans le duché de
Brabant au bas Moyen Âge 183
Peter Arnade
The City in a World of Cities: Antwerp and the Civitates Orbis Terrarum 197
vi
Introduction
Marc Boone
Universiy of Ghent
Martha Howell
Columbia University
This volume originated in two workshops focusing on the “power of space” in
European cities during the pivotal years that closed the Middle Ages and gave birth to
the modern centuries. The first, held in Lyon in 2008 as part of the ninth international
congress of the European Association of Urban Historians (EAUH), was entitled Urban
Society as a Producer and a Product of Space. Historians of the City and Henri Lefebvre after
35 years.1 Two years later, in spring 2010, scholars who had contributed to the Lyon work-
shop joined other American and French specialists at a conference at Columbia University
in New York, The Power of Space, to examine the particular histories of space in in late
medieval and Renaissance cities of Italy, northern France, and the greater Low Countries.
The revised papers from that conference constitute the bulk of this volume.
The volume is a natural fit for the series Studies in European Urban History from
Brepols (Turnhout, Belgium); the series includes several volumes that, like this one, resulted
from a program of comparative urban history funded by the Belgian government, labeled
“City and society in the Low Countries, 1200-1800”.2 In 2008, for example, Brepols pub-
lished another collection of conference papers in the series, again originating in EAUH meet-
ings, that similarly focused on cities of both Italy and the Low Countries, comparing them
through a group of fixed categories – demography, economy, political structures, religious life
and artistic production.3 Another volume in the same Brepols series, published in 2007, took
up the issue of space through the lens of social contest in European cities during this period.4
Here the influence of Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace of 1974 (published in English
in 1991) was obvious, and his work had similarly informed two previous workshops (in 1998
and 1999) involving some of the same scholars who contributed to the present volume.5
1 For details such as the papers presented at the session, see the association’s website: http://www.eauh.eu/sessions/
urban-society-as-a-producer-and-a-product-of-space-historians-of-the-city-and-henri-lefebvre-after-35-years.
2 For more information, see: http://www.cityandsociety.be/
3 Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (ed.), Villes de Flandre et d’Italie (xiiie-xvie siècle). Les
enseignements d’une comparaison (Studies in European Urban History, 12),Turnhout, Brepols, 2008.
4 Chloë Deligne, Claire Billen (eds.), Voisinages, coexistances, appropriations. Groupes sociaux et territoires urbains
(Moyen Âge – 16e siècle), (Studies in European Urban History, 10),Turnhout, Brepols, 2007.
5 See Marc Boone, Peter Stabel (eds.), Shaping urban identity in late medieval Europe/L’apparition d’un identité urbaine
dans l’Europe du bas Moyen Âge, Louvain – Apeldoorn, 2000 (the result of a session at the EAUH congress of Venice in
1998) and the thematic issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32, 2002 edited by Peter Arnade, Martha Howell,
Walter Simons as the follow-up of another conference “Fertile space: an interdisciplinary conference on the city in Northern
Europe, 1000-1650”, organised at Dartmouth college (New Hampshire) in 1999.
The Power of Space in late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: the Cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries,
ed. by Marc Boone & Martha Howell, Turnhout, 2013 (Studies in European Urban History, 30 ), pp. 1-10.
F H G DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH.1.101402
Marc Boone & Martha Howell
This volume thus has a long pedigree in previous workshops and conference volumes
inspired in part by the new interest in social space partly engendered by Lefebvre’s work, but
it has antecedents that go back further, at least to the work of Henri Pirenne, who set agen-
das for research on urban history during this period and the politics that gave birth to cities,
their social actors, and the modern western economy that prevail today.6 This volume moves
beyond its predecessors, however, by taking a more direct and a particular approach to the
issue of space in cities of this period.7 Treating the most densely urbanized areas of Europe
during the age, the home of some of the subcontinent’s most powerful cities, it focuses exclu-
sively on the politics of space, seeking to reveal how space produced, constrained, and defined
power in such settings. This turned out to be a very productive approach, for in all these cities
space was vigorously contested, underwent significant material change during the period, and
emerged as the site – both physical and ideological – on which power was defined.
Spatial politics were a leitmotif of the history of the kinds of cities studied in this
volume. Not only the hubs of Europe’s commercial revolution, the cities of Italy, the Low
Countries and parts of northern France were also the authors of new political principles,
practices, and institutions that encroached upon and challenged traditional political actors.
They had inserted themselves into a landscape organized by feudal or quasi-feudal rule,
their walls and moats seeming to carve out enclaves where different laws, economies, sys-
tems of government, cultures, and social systems took root, thus laying claims to autonomy
that were both expressed and constituted as claims to territory and control over territory. In
doing so, they challenged rulers whose lordship was increasingly being defined territorially
and conceived as sovereign. Within city walls, space was as highly contested. Spaces there
became highly differentiated, laden with specific, if multiple, meanings that could both
signal and confer identity, status, and authority. In sum, political contest, social change, and
cultural constructions not only took place “in space” but also, in fact, produced space and
emerged from prior spatial productions or constructions.8
6 For a recent reappraisal of some of the themes put on the agenda by Pirenne and by his immediate followers and
students: see the special issue of the Revue Belge d’histoire contemporaine, 41, 2011 : Marc Boone, Claire Billen & Sarah
Keymeulen (eds.), Henri Pirenne (1862-1935): a Belgian historian and the development of social and historical sciences.
A recent biographical sketch of the man : Sarah Keymeulen, Jo Tollebeek (eds.), Henri Pirenne, historian. A life in
pictures, Leuven, 2011.
7 As one can observe when looking at the themes and the way they are treated in a recent collection of essays, see: Alain
Dierkens, Christophe Loir, Denis Morsa & Guy Vanthemsche (eds.), Villes et villages, organisation et représentation
de l’espace. Mélanges offerts à Jean-Marie Duvosquel à l’occasion de son 65e anniversaire, Bruxelles, 2011, 2 volumes.
8 It is surprising that historians have tended to neglect these issues, for scholars, at least from Marx, Weber, and von
Gierke on, up to and including Lefebvre, recognized that the late medieval and early modern city was a spatial phenomenon,
its emergence and development a central theme in European history. For Lebfebvre, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of
Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Cambridge, 1991(orig. Paris, 1974). For examples of some recent efforts to examine
the spatial history of the late medieval and early modern European city, see Peter Arnade, Martha Howell & Walter
Simons (eds.), “The Productivity of Urban Space in the Late Medieval Urban North” in Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
32 – 4,Spring 2002 , pp. 515-548. On space in medieval society more generally, see Barbara Hanawalt et al. (eds.),
Medieval Practices of Space, Minneapolis, 2000, the topic continues to be on the research agenda: see for the important
German tradition: Ursula Kundert, Barbara Schmid & Regula Schmid (eds.), Ausmessen – Darstellen – Inszenieren.
Raumkonzepte und die Wedergabe von Räumen in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, Zürich, 2007; Ferdinand Opll, Christoph
Sonnlechner (eds.), Europäische Städte im Mittelalter, Innsbruck, Wien, 2010. And the series continues, a recent
contribution: Frances Andrews (ed.), Ritual and space in the Middle Ages. Proceedings of the Harlaxton Symposium 2009,
Donington, 2011, several historiographic overviews are useful in this respect: Claire Billen, Marc Boone, “L’histoire
urbaine en Belgique: construire l’après-Pirenne entre tradition et rénovation”, in Città & Storia, 5/1, 2010, pp. 3-22 and Marc
Boone, “Cities in late medieval Europe: the promise and curse of modernity”, in Urban History, 39, 2012, pp. 329-349. For
Lefebvre’s contemporary application in urban theory, see Setha M. Low, “Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and
Social Construction of Public Space”, in American Ethnologist, 23/4, 1996, pp. 861-879.
2
Introduction
Thus taking up Lefebvre’s challenge to examine how space was “produced,” the
papers implicitly make use of his three-part analytical grid (if not his vocabulary), asking
how space was perceived and used in everyday life, giving specific spaces cultural, social,
and political coherence (“le perçu”); how it was represented or theorized, thus encoded
in symbols, maps, and laws (“le conçu”); and how it was imagined, in effect the result of
the dialectical relation between the perceived and the represented but separate from them
(“le vécu”). The studies are also unified by an understanding that space changes in ways
unintended by its creators but it can also harden into particular shapes and meanings that
resist further manipulation. Despite the similarities of their analytical approaches, the
papers nevertheless pursue their individual inquiries from different vantage points. Some
of the essays in the volume focus on religious space, others on legal, political or economic
space; some on the urban landscape as a whole, some on individual sites within it. They
also, as explained, examine different parts of Europe – Italy on the one hand, and the
North, specifically the Parisian region and the greater Low Countries. Historians have
tended to treat these regions separately, producing distinct bodies of historiography that
have rarely been in conversation. The conference that produced these papers was an effort
to begin that conversation, not, however, by forcing systematic comparison but by juxta-
posing empirical studies of spatial topographies from each region. As readers will discover,
there were striking similarities between Italy and the North with regard to the meanings
space acquired, in the way it was contested, and in the power it bequeathed. In North and
South alike, the history of cities was very much a history of contests over, appropriation
of, and interpretation of space. This does not imply that Venice was like Valenciennes or
Liège; it does imply, however, that there is much to be learned not just about urban space
but also about urban history in this period more generally by thinking about these parts of
Europe simultaneously.
In the pages that follow, we have grouped the papers neither according to more
usual categories of historical investigation – law, religion, or politics, for example – nor
according to the region of Europe or the city they examine. Rather we have arranged the
studies according to five analytical lens that emerged from the papers themselves, each of
which distinctly illuminated what it means to say that space is “powerful”:
• first, how spatial constructions are manipulated by the people who appropriate the
spaces in the future, sometimes by utterly changing their meaning;
• second, how social and economic practices give space meaning and confer rights on
the users of the space;
• third, how political contests are ineluctably contests over the meaning of space,
not just over its material properties, but also how existing spatial configurations
determine the course of the contests;
• fourth, how ritual acquires force only in conjunction with space – and vice versa; and
• fifth, how narratives about spatial meanings, whether textual or visual, provide scripts
for historical actors.
In the paragraphs below we have treated each paper as an example of one of these
analytical categories. In truth, however, every paper in the volume demonstrates that space
acts and is acted upon in myriad ways, not just in the single manner we have described in
3
Marc Boone & Martha Howell
introducing each paper. We thus urge readers to allow the empirical richness of these essays,
taken individually and as a whole, to multiply the lens through which space can be viewed.
Three of the papers demonstrate that the manner in which a given space first
acquires meaning does not fully determine how it is interpreted and deployed by future
generations, even as they depend on the powers it bequeaths to them. The papers make no
general claim about the ingredients that might have gone into a particular spatial produc-
tion, but they clearly show that spatial forms and meanings, once realized, not only express
its initial arrangement but also easily morph into others. Marco Vencato’s paper, for exam-
ple, argues that the “porosity” of Neapolitan space that so unsettled nineteenth-century
visitors like Burckhardt, making the city seem uninterpretable and unpossessable, was a
product of Renaissance politics, not the random development later observers assumed. The
city’s cacophonous layout, the hodgepodge of dissimilar edifices, winding streets, dead-end
alleys and the like, all either came into being as princes sought to contain and thus to control
the urban population or followed from the spatial restrictions imposed during that period.9
The princes’ main target was the local elite whose urban palaces were both symbolic and
material challenges to his rule. In the end, the princes prevailed, and the most significant
architectural signs of the resident elite’s former status have thus all but disappeared. Left in
the wake of this struggle, however, was the urban topography that so confused later visitors,
a “porosity” that seemed inexplicable and mysterious, somehow “natural” to the enigmatic
city. Other features of the urban landscape were similarly naturalized in the centuries after
the Renaissance; for example, the north-south orientation of the city, which today might
seem the product of organic growth during the Middle Ages, was in fact imposed as part of
the same seigniorial attempt to rule the city by organizing its space.
Chloé Deligne’s essay explores how spatial organizations born of one process are
later interpreted – and misinterpreted – through the lens of later histories. Her subject is
the central market square of the late medieval Low Countries, the iconic space that seemed
to late medieval observers and has seemed to many historians the perfect expression of the
medieval urban commune. Her research suggests, however, that its history is otherwise.
Markets in cities like Brussels or Bruges, now respectively renowned for their “grande
place” and “grote markt,” were once scattered throughout the urban terrain, and many were
privately owned rather than municipally controlled. The centralization and elaboration of
market places, in effect the creation of places like Brussels’s grande place, took place not so
much as a seamless outgrowth of communal power but as a result of the commercial and
political elite’s success in controlling urban space. As they gathered and concentrated com-
mercial sites, they also surrounded the central market square with civic buildings, adorned
it with symbols of both sacred and secular power, and made it the host of rituals of com-
munity, lordship and faith. Thus constructed, the squares did come to symbolize the urban
whole but that whole, Deligne suggests, cannot be assumed to be the product of some kind
of “medieval” communal will.
Ellen Wurtzel’s study of jurisdictional space in late medieval and early Lille presents
a revisionist history of urban space and its relationship to monarchical power. Historians
have long held that cities in this region approached the status of city-states during the later
9 John Marino’s Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples, Baltimore, 2010, provides additional detail
on this history.
4