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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxn:4 (Spring, 2002), 515-548.
? 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of
Interdisciplinary
History.
516 I ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
I For medievalists who are (re)turning to issues of space, see, for example, Barbara A.
Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (eds.), MedievalPracticesof Space (Minneapolis, 2000); Marc
Boone and Peter Stabel (eds.), ShapingUrbanIdentityin Late-MedievalEurope:The Uses of Space
and Images (Louvain-la-Neuve, 2001); Spazio urbanoe organizzazioneeconomicanell'Europa
medievale,Annali della Facolta di Scienze Politiche, XXIX (I993/94); Jean-Claude Maire
Vigueur, D'une ville a l'autre: structuresmaterielleset organisationde l'espace dans les villes
europeennes(XIIIe-XVI siecles)(1989).
2 Henri Lefebvre (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith), The Productionof Space (Cambridge,
Mass., I991; orig. pub. Paris, 1971, as La productionde l'espace).
5I8 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
Lefebvre did more than simply challenge the way that pre-
vious scholarship deployed the concept of space. He also attacked
what many others have seen as a fundamental weakness in this lit-
erature-its functionalism and economism. He leveled his charge
again at both traditional social science and Marxist analysis, insist-
ing that space was as much a productive force as labor, capital, and
technology were. Capitalist social relations of production were
created and maintained through control of physical space by
means of property rights. These, he sought to demonstrate, were
not just effects of the "market."
Lefebvre's strategy in the face of these interpretive problems
was to focus on how space was produced in order to expose both
its potency and its historicity, thus rendering space active and de-
toxifying reductive arguments about the market's determinative
power. Most of his work on this issue centered on the develop-
ment, and later disintegration, of the Western city, the embodi-
ment of modern capitalism. Lefebvre paid more than passing
attention, however, to premodern western cities-those of medi-
eval and Renaissance Europe that constitute the subject of this
volume-because he believed that the abstract space that defined
capitalism took form there. For Lefebvre, the medieval city pro-
vided the space of "accumulation" in the Marxist sense, a process
that has long cried out for a more precise accounting. The com-
mercial revolution brought, in his words, "commerce inside the
town and lodged it at the center of a transformed urban space."
This process was not material only but also discursive, accom-
plished at the level of what he often called "representations of
space," as well as at the level of social practice; the town "per-
ceived itself as a harmonious whole, as an organic mediation be-
tween earth and heaven."6
For students of modernity, Lefebvre's turn to the past was
key. The social science tradition to which Lefebvre's work was re-
sponding had the odd effect of devaluing space by assigning it gen-
erative power only in the "traditional" past. Agnew complained
about this weakness more than a decade ago, pointing out that an
unflinching attention to the processes of modernization, along
with an acceptance of T6nnies' lingering but powerful notion that
modern society was constituted by the transition from place-
based localism to "placeless" transregional nations, effectively
the ability to connect inner self to the outer. The modern city, for
all its stimuli, is incapable of facilitating "exposure."9
Sennett's culturalist approach to the study of space associates
him with the other major vein of contemporary scholarship on
space, that undertaken by postmodern theorists during the last two
decades. This work has had a much more complicated relationship
with history, since one of the central tenets of postmodernism is
that the temporal and the spatial are incommensurable. Foucault
was explicit on this point, asserting that to the historically minded
"the use of spatial terms seems to have the air of anti-history. If
one started to talk in terms of space that meant that one was hostile
to time." The complaint was not simply that historians tended to
neglect the spatialbut that history's investment in time was insepa-
rable from its attachment to meta-narrative and linearity, its easy
positivism, and its methodological romance with objectivity.
These are the very habits of mind that postmodern theorists are
bent on exposing and dislodging. In this interpretation, to write
history is to erase space.")
Many postmodern social theorists, however, are beginning to
seek reconciliation. As part of an effort to invigorate the field of
geography with critical theory, Soja and other cultural geogra-
phers have attempted a new heuristics of spatiality. Although Soja
set this work against "the hoary traditions of a space-blinkered
historicism," and often inveighed against too heavy an interest in
the historical or temporal, the effect of his project has been to
show the significance of space in history, not to exclude history
from the social sciences. As part of an emerging "Los Angeles"
school of urban studies, Soja along with scholars such as Dear,
have advocated a new urban-studies paradigm for the late-capital-
ist postmodern metropolis. It clearly departs from the Chicago
school's seamless functionalism. Concerned with the new decen-
tralized mega-city, these scholars marry a postmodern sensibility
with Lefebvre's interest in the historicity of space and the urban
history of capitalism.1
9 Quotations from Sennett, The Conscienceof the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities
(New York, I990), xi; idem, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in WesternCivilization
(New York, I994).
io Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge(Brighton, I980), I49.
I Quotations from Edward W. Soja, PostmodernGeographies: theReassertionof Spacein Criti-
cal SocialTheory(New York, 1989), 43-75, which credits Anglo-American and French histor-
ical geographers of urban capitalismwith bringing a spatialdimension to the fore in the I970S
and I98os. Idem, The City: Los Angelesand Urban Theoryat the End of the TwentiethCentury
522 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
laden with the meanings of the ritual activities that took place
there, bequeaths its resonances on other occupants of that space.
Second, they demonstrate that rituals, far from being independent
of space, acquire their power precisely through occupying partic-
ular spaces.13
Estabrook's examination of contests over the ritual spaces of
mid-seventeenth-century English cathedral cities illustrates how
political space was fashioned in the wake of struggles among civic
officials, cathedral clergy, and the Crown during England's civil
war. Although Estabrook mainly discusses the contests themselves,
his analysis yields a textured account of cities redefining civic
spaces and spaces redefining citizenship. The story that he tells is,
on the surface, a strange one; the contests were staged in spaces
fundamentally religious, waged in terms of control over religious
ritual and worship.
During the centuries leading up to this period, civic authori-
ties in the cathedral towns that Estabrook studied had appropriated
religious symbols and occupied church space in order to do the
secular business of government and perform official duties. In the
tumultuous seventeenth century, however, this tradition came un-
der attack. As the Crown's authority over these competing institu-
tions of power vacillated, cathedral authorities sought to claim
religious symbolism as theirs alone, thus denying civic officials the
spaces and symbols that they had long shared and, indirectly, chal-
lenging the Crown's control of them. When the dust finally had
settled on this long national struggle, civic corporations emerged
victorious, at least with respect to cathedral chapters, but their vic-
tory did not consist of a return to the status quo ante or to a re-
assertion of traditional rights. Secular authorities no longer
claimed shared rights to these traditionally hybrid spaces; they
now claimed exclusive rights over what had been newly marked as
sacred spaces. The political space of the urban community was
now larger both geographically and authoritatively.
Estabrook's essay introduces another theme in this volume-
the study of the mechanisms that created space. Estabrook charac-
13 The work of Natalie Davis on ritual power, particularlythe articles collected in Society
and Culturein EarlyModernFrance(Stanford, 1975), are exemplary. For a discussion of the in-
portance of this kind of historiography, see, for example, Lynn Hunt, The New CulturalHis-
tory (Berkeley, I989)
526 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
14 See, for example, Henri Pirenne, "Stages in the Social History of Capitalism," American
HistoricalReview, XIX (1914), 494-514; Lefebvre, Productionof Space, 263-275.
URBAN SPACE IN NORTHERN EUROPE | 527
cause, as wife of the king, she had the capacity to legitimate and
perpetuate Catholicism in England through the birth of an heir.
Thus did the queen create a feminine space of idolatry, based on,
but not reducible to, any particular place.
The other vehicle for linking women with Catholicism was
the household. When disestablished and rendered illegitimate,
Catholicism retreated to an unofficial space of the household.
There, it was-in fact and in imagination-hidden and fed by
women, whose association with this space made the religion, in
some sense, private. Paradoxically, however, the very fact of
women's influence at home placed this space-and women-in
public.
In recreating this mental space, Dolan helps to explain Ca-
tholicism's reception in early modern England. Labeled "female,"
it was imaginatively linked to "secret" and illegitimate places of fe-
male sexuality; hence, it became the inverse of order, legitimacy,
rationality, self-control, and visibility-all the virtues of the emer-
gent Protestant state. More than a political danger or religious
threat, Catholicism became a moral sickness to be hunted, ex-
posed, and destroyed. Space, in Dolan's story, was both danined
and desired, created more by rhetoric than by the weapons of law
and politics.
Ludo Milis' article also describes a mental production, his
performed by the monastic, Latin text. His subject is the tension
inherent in the dual nature of medieval Christianity. Christianity
originated and grew in a distinctively urban setting-the polis and
civitas of the late antique age. Its values and outlook on life, how-
ever, were often hostile to urbanity, exacerbated by the accom-
modations made to the aristocraticworld of the early Middle Ages
and the triumph of monasticism. Milis' essay examines the conse-
quences of this duality. Although monks recognized that the gov-
ernmental institutions of the Church were located in cities and
that its administrative structure was overlaid on Rome's ancient
provinces, they imagined themselves as citizens of an otherworldly
community above and beyond the contours of an urban life that
they perceived as changeable, untrustworthy, and disorderly.
This monastic disenchantment with urban life did not derive
so much from a lack of familiarity with it as from an ideology in-
herited from the late antique world of Augustine's days-the con-
demnation of pagan Rome as the epitome of earthly sin and error,
URBAN SPACE IN NORTHERN EUROPE | 529
15 For Lefebvre's discussion of the medieval and Renaissance city, see Lefebvre, Production
of Space, 268.
530 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
20 For a general overview of the way that cities claimed physical, economic, jurisdictional,
and political space, see Socite Jean Bodin, La ville (Recueilsde la SocieteJeanBodin VI and VII)
534 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
(Brussels, 1954/5); Ennen, Die europaischeStadt und die Kultur des Burgertumsim Mittelalter
(G6ttingen, 1955); and M. M. Postan (ed.) CambridgeEconomicHistoryof Europe(Cambridge,
1965), III.
21 Susan Reynolds, Kingdomsand Communitiesin WesternEurope, 900oo-1300(New York,
I984). For the relationship between the urban and rural economy, see, for example, Richard
H. Britnell, The Commercialisationof EnglishSociety(Manchester, I996; 2d ed.); Peter Stabel,
DwarfsamongGiants: The FlemishUrbanNetworkin the Late MiddleAges (Louvain, 1997); Da-
vid Nicholas, Town and Countryside:Social, Economic,and Political Tensions in Fourteenth-
CenturyFlanders(Bruges, 1971).
22 For the relationship between urban and ruralreligion, see Miri Rubin, "Religious Cul-
ture in Town and Country: Reflections on a Great Divide," in David Abulafia, Michael
Franklin, and idem (eds.), Churchand City looo-15oo: Essays in Honour of ChristopherBrooke
(Cambridge, 1992), 3-22. For relations between cities and territorialsovereigns, see, for ex-
ample, Bernard Chevalier, Les bonnesvilles de Francedu XIVe au XVI siecle(Paris, 1982). John
URBAN SPACE IN NORTHERN EUROPE | 535
H. Mundy and Peter Riesenberg, The MedievalTown (New York, 1958), discuss the gap be-
tween the appearance and reality of city life.
536 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
the disconnect between the North and South on the topic of ur-
ban space, for historians of the Italian Renaissance have often con-
ceived of city spaces in a way that excluded the North.23
For students of Renaissance urban life interested in social life
and space, Burckhardt's magisterial interpretation of the Renais-
sance and of urban civilization in Italy, The Civilization of the Re-
naissancein Italy, has done double duty as Ur-text and foil for any
new histories of urban self and society. Burckhardt's sweeping
view of the Renaissance Italian city inspired a tenacious model of
Renaissance urbanism centered around modernization. In this
view, the Renaissance city was a fundamentally novel creation
that replaced a medieval urban hodgepodge of spatially conceived
loyalties governed by neighborhoods, clans, families, and local re-
ligious practice. Due to residual Weberian and Marxist influence,
scholars continued to recognize the homogenizing power of capi-
talism, but following Baron's important studies of Florentine hu-
manism of the 1950s, historians placed even more emphasis on
republicanism and civic activism, which were thought to have
been made possible by the demise of parochial medieval alle-
giances. The study of Italian urban history therefore often merged
with an account of political and cultural modernization, which
emphasized the breakup of medieval collectivities and positioned
Italian cities as the radical and original founders of urbanity, even
of modernity.24
that is not unlike the pageants, parades, coronations, and riots de-
scribed by Boone or Estabrook in this volume. Even the Church,
once conceived as a homogenous power hostile to urban action,
appearsin more recent work as composed of various branches that
carved up and aggressively attempted to control urban space dur-
ing the formative centuries of the Italian city. Guidoni, for exam-
ple, suggested that in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries,
the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinian Her-
mits (the main mendicant orders) show a remarkable awareness of
space in their foundation patterns, dividing the city into sections
to avoid undue competition and to maximize efficiency. Others
have drawn attention to the architecture and layout of mendicant
churches and convents as they affected the urban landscape and,
particularly, the use of public piazze. According to Crouzet-
Pavan, the symbolic and political authority vested in Venice's cen-
tral public spaces not only represented the commune but helped to
create it. Boone and Attreed make a similar point herein.26
Recent works have even questioned the modernity of the
Renaissance Italian city. If not indifferent to it altogether, they sit-
uate the process of modernization not in the Renaissance but at
the end of the ancien regime or in the nineteenth or even twenti-
27 One work that questions the modernity of the Italian Renaissance city is Marina Vitale
and Domenico Scafoglio (eds.), La piazza nella storia:eventi, liturgie,rappresentazioni
(Naples,
1995). Robert C. Davis, The Warof the Fists: PopularCultureand PublicViolencein LateRenais-
sanceVenice(Oxford, 1994), took issue with some of the more traditional approaches to space
in Crouzet-Pavan, "Soprale acquesalse." Espaces,pouvoir,et societea Venisea lafin du MoyenAge
(Rome, 1992). The Renaissance as not fully modern is discussed in Hayden White,
Metahistory:The HistoricalImaginationin Nineteenth-CenturyEurope (Baltimore, I973), 246-
247. See also Burckhardt,Judgementson History and Historians(Boston, I958).
540 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
spaces and to deploy their symbols was to possess the city. This
does not mean, however, that city space had self-evident meaning.
The significance attached to urbanity and the privileges claimed in
its name came about only through prolonged conflict; the claims
acquired content and shape even as they were being negotiated.
Once imbued with significance, a particular space was poten-
tially available to new occupants who could assume its power and
assign their own character to it. In Ghent, artisanstook control of
the spaces of political power, and thereby acquired rights of rule,
not because these spaces contained the material technology of
power, but because they embodied its ideologies. In seventeenth-
century England, women and their Catholic collaborators were
relegated to private space but, paradoxically, rendered the private
dangerous, potent as it had not been. Civic officials in English
municipalities usurped spaces and sacred symbols, thereby re-
establishing their corporative legitimacy and, simultaneously, re-
ordering power relations between clergy and civic rulers.
The significance assigned to any particular place was always
unstable, but it was not randomly variable. It emerged through
encounters between the specific material and historical character
of the place that grounded the space and the political capacities of
those who vied for control over its various dimensions, be they
material or discursive. Harding is particularly instructive on this
point. She traces such changes in a thoroughly grounded, deeply
researched, and methodologically satisfying way that demystifies
the process, rendering it plainly historical, the result of specific
contests, specific institutional changes, and specific responses to
chance occurrences.
In an important sense, these essays continue Lefebvre's proj-
ect; they complete a picture about the premodern European city
that he could only sketch. They track the development of spatial
discourses; they reveal key moments of spatial contest when uses
and meanings of space shifted in portentous ways; and they por-
tray the dramas when new social actors claimed existing space,
thereby both redefining the space and creating themselves anew.
But for historians the essays have other import as well; they re-
acquaint us with the way we think about historical change, causal-
ity, and agency.
Adding space to the mix of historical variables, as these essays
do, accomplishes two feats. First, it offers a respite from the meta-
URBAN SPACE IN NORTHERN EUROPE 541
NEW AGENDAS For all that these essays have to say about the
processes of spatial production and the potency of urban space,
they do not exhaust the theme. Hopefully, future studies will at-
tack the problem of space even more directly, not abandoning the
traditions of empirical scholarship that give these experimental
forays into space such authority, but reaping their benefits to con-
struct research agendas explicitly designed to explore the spatial
histories of these cities. Given its centrality to traditional scholar-
ship on urban history, the market, and market relations, should
URBAN SPACE IN NORTHERN EUROPE 543
comprise the first topic on that list. But others press easily and nec-
essarily against it, two of the most urgent being the relationship of
gender to space and the more general question of how premodern
urban Europeans produced public space. Notwithstanding all the
premium that historians and social theorists have generally ac-
corded the public sphere, few catalog what urban people of this
age said about it, what vocabularies they used to describe it, and
what instruments-law, literature, property records, and the like
-registered their notions of it.
The urban history of this era has long been written as the his-
tory of the market; even theorists of urban space during this era
have shown great interest in the history and social impact of the
market. Even if, in some ways, as Boone emphasizes, the story of
the market has obscured other stories that need to be told, the
market should not, and cannot, be displaced. Bringing space to
bear on it, however, makes its history clearer, and the role of these
cities in European history more visible.
After all, markets arose in medieval Europe as especially de-
marcated places, defined by architecture, fixed by law, and regu-
lated by political authority. City officials usually delineated these
sites by the type of goods being traded (fish or wool, for example),
but sometimes by type of transaction (retail or wholesale) or by
identity of the traders (locals in one place and foreigners in an-
other). This system of separation facilitated the face-to-face con-
tact between buyers and sellers that played so central a role in
legitimating a transaction during the period. The procedures also
helped to guarantee the availability, the affordability, and the qual-
ity of basic provisions; trade so confined could be more easily su-
pervised. It was no wonder that the kind of trade most often
associated with specific places was that in the foodstuffs necessary
for everyday life or the materials required for the principal urban
industries.
Marketplaces did not, however, contain all the commerce of
the late medieval city. Trade exuberantly spilled beyond these des-
ignated sites, entering the street, the tavern, the home, and the
church. Although often suspect when it threatened to unseat trade
still confined to demarcated space, "placeless" exchange just as of-
ten became an accepted, and even privileged, part of the eco-
nomic whole. Although the original market places by no means
544 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
29 Stabel, "Women at the Market: Gender and Retail in the Towns of Late Medieval Flan-
ders," in Wim Blockmans, Boone, and Therese de Hemptinne (eds.), SecretumScriptorum:
LiberAluninorumWalterPrevenier(Louvain, 1999), 259-276.
30 For an early, but provocative, effort to write this history for the Florentine bourgeoisie,
see Goldthwaite, Buildingof RenaissanceFlorence.
546 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
into the Industrial Revolution. But since private space was in-
creasingly subdivided in these early centuries, the separation of the
manufacture and sale of goods from domestic matters would easily
have been possible, perhaps by the construction of workshops as
distinct rooms or outbuildings or by somehow distinguishing retail
space from living space. Surely, too, the laws regulating market
production and treating the male head of household as the sole
participant in the trade would have helped to create conceptual
boundaries between household and commerce. Similarly, the in-
creasing corporate organization of trade or the emergence of per-
manently capitalized firms would have isolated household activity
and the women who managed it. Although several studies traced
changes in business practice and their effects on the sexual division
of labor, this history is also, and more fundamentally, an ideologi-
cal history; it has everything to do with the production of space, in
exactly the sense that Lefebvre described.3'
If market space was deeply implicated in the production of
gendered space during this age, it was even more intimately con-
nected to the creation of public space. As Harding's contribution
makes abundantly clear, the "public" in this age was a murky con-
cept, not yet a site, a legal right, or a legitimation of sovereign
power. But it was becoming all of those things, and the market
place, we propose, was a principal motor. Maslakovic, for exam-
ple, recently argued that medieval urban ideas of the "common"
or "common good" were born, in part, out of ideas of a shared
market and that this concept of"common" was precisely what in-
formed medieval urban ideas of the corporate whole. The Middle
Ages-at least the medieval Lyon that she studied-had no notion
of a public as later centuries would understand it.32
Offering another fruitful approach to the history of the "pub-
lic," Weidenfeld examined how the evolution of police powers
asserted by political officials depended upon a conception of pub-
lic good that was closely tied to urban market spaces. Princes and
municipal authorities claimed the right to control city streets be-
cause of their duty to ensure that adequate supplies were made
available in the markets that they authorized and protected.
3 For the increasing isolation of household activity, see, for an overview, Merry Wiesner,
Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993); Hanawalt, Women and Work in
in LateMe-
Europe(Bloomington, 1986); Howell, Women,Productionand Patriarchy
Preindustrial
dieval Cities (Chicago, I986).
32 Maslakovic, "Common and Public."
URBAN SPACE IN NORTHERN EUROPE | 547
33 For the police powers of municipalities, the German literature is especially extensive.
See, for a summary, Ennen, Die europdische Stadt. For a study of the relationship of police
powers to the emergence of a bien public, see Weidenfeld, La policede la petitevoiriea lafin du
moyenage (Paris, 1996).
34 For the medieval royal entry, see, most recently, Gordon Kipling, EntertheKing: Theatre,
Liturgyand Ritual in the MedievalCivic Triumph(New York, 1998). For an analysisof civic and
state ritual encounters for the Burgundian Netherlands, see Arnade, Realms of Ritual:
548 | ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS