Fertile Spaces, The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe

Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe
Author(s): Peter Arnade, Martha Howell, Walter Simons

Source: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 32, No. 4, The Productivity of Urban Space
in Northern Europe (Spring, 2002), pp. 515-548
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxn:4 (Spring, 2002), 515-548.
Arnade, Howell, and Simons

Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space
in Northern Europe The concept of space has long been
employed by social scientistseager to addresswider concerns:the
rise of capitalism,modernizationand modernizationtheory, self
and society, local and community studies, and, most recently,
globalizationand its discontents.For all its richnessand historical
resonance,the literaturedealing with issues of space-which has
grown in its interdisciplinarityto include literary and cultural
studies-has never been given sufficient attention by historians.
Yet, historians,especiallyurbanhistorians,have much to gain, and
much to offer, by interrogatingthe proliferationof "spaces"that
appearin scholarlyliterature-mental, political, imaginary,mate-
rial,andlegal space,to namejust a few. This specialvolume on ur-
ban spacein medievaland earlymodern northernEurope is a step
in the right direction.The signalachievementof the seven articles
herein is to offer empiricaland theoreticalrefinement to the de-
velopmental studies of northern European cities during the late
medievaland earlymodern eras.As such, they give concrete foot-
Peter Arnade is Associate Professor of History, California State University, San Marcos. He is
the author of Realms of Ritual: BurgundianCeremonyand Civic Lif' in Late Medieval Gllent
(Ithaca, 1996); "City, Court and Public Ritual in the Late-Medieval Burgundian Nether-
lands," ComparativeStudiesin Societyand History,XXIX (1997), 296-314.
Martha C. Howell is Professor of History, Columbia University. She is the author of
The MarriageExchange:Property,SocialPlaceand Genderin Cities f thleLouwCountries,1300-1550
(Chicago, I998); co-author, with Walter Prevenier, of Fromn ReliableSources:An Introductionto
HistoricalMetlhods(Ithaca, 2001).
Walter Sinions is Associate Professor of History, Dartmouth College. He is the author
of Cities f Ladies:BcguineCommnities in the MedievalLow Countries,1200-1565 (Philadelphia,
2001); Stad en apostolaat:de vestigingvan de bedelordenin het graafschapVlaanderen(ca. 1225-
ca. 1350) (Brussels, 1987).
Six of the seven articlespresented in this volume were originally presented at the con-
ference "Fertile Space: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the City in Northern Europe,
oo000-I65o," May I999, sponsored by Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center and Dickey Center
for International Understanding. The authors would like to thank these institutions for their
support and to acknowledge the help of colleagues who read draftsof this introduction and
offered excellent advice: Jeffery Charles, Elaine Combs-Schilling, Edward Muir, Ira
Katznelson, andJohn Marino. Finally, our thanks to the editors of theJournalof Interdisciplinary
History,especially Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, who expressed early interest in
the project, as well as superb editorial support.
? 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of
Interdisciplinary
History.
516 I ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
ing to a history of urban spatialism too often written as a meta-

narrative.
But these articles do more than offer theorists of space (most
of them students of modernity) case studies grounded in a particu-
lar space at a particular time. They also suggest ways that histori-
ans, mainly those of the premodern city, can answer old questions
and pose new ones by making space a central theoretical concern.
To what extent, they implicitly ask-and answer-does the no-
tion of space add to, or detract from, our understanding of causal-
ity as it relates to these urban societies? How does an under-
standing of space as a material site that both contains and generates
cultural references, economic and political meaning, and social
forms change how urban historians write about the built environ-
ment-and city life itself? If places previously accorded a bricks-
and-mortar inertness are viewed as alive with generative capacity,
what happens to the narrative and chronology of change in urban
history? Finally, what does the atemporal, synchronic notion of
"space" do to "time," that is, to historians' assumption that causal-
ity resides in chronology, or, in other words, that narrative is in
some sense explanation?
These articles not only address these issues; they also offer a
powerful commentary on long-standing traditions of historiogra-
phy that have alternately reified the spaces of these cities, reduced
them to inert places devoid of causal significance, or abstracted
them into networks of social interaction without clear material
referents. To claim such interpretive "space" for these articles is
not, however, to argue that they open new terrain. They clearly
depend upon, as they modify, older traditions of historiography on
space in these cities, and they join a growing collection of special-
ists of the period who are (re)turning to space. This impulse has
been most visible among historians of the Renaissance Italian cit-
ies, but scholars of northern cities during the long centuries that
bridged the medieval and the modern have also recently taken up
these issues. Inspired by both the explosion of writing on space
that has characterized recent cultural studies and the older-and
larger-body of literature emanating from the traditional social
sciences, these historians, too, have sought to give empirical spec-
ificity to the broader literature and, at the same time, add theoreti-
cal sophistication to more specialist traditions. For all its connec-
tion to existing scholarship, however, this volume, taken as whole,
URBAN SPACE IN NORTHERN EUROPE | 517
speaks to historiographical and theoretical issues not anticipated in

previous studies.'
SPATIAL THEORY AND ITS THEORISTS Most of the work on ur-

ban space that inspired this volume has focused on the capitalist
and late capitalist modern world-on the emergence and/or disin-
tegration of the modern metropolis, on the "global" space that has
replaced it, or, in the hands of cultural theorists, on the spaces of
erasure, alterity, resistance, or contradiction in the cities that late
capitalism spawned. Although many scholars, from disciplines as
disparate as economics and linguistics, have contributed to these
analyses, none has had a more singular influence than Lefebvre,
the Marxist social theorist, whose Productionof Spacecollected de-
cades of his work on the relationship of space to the capitalist pro-
cess. Although the articles that constitute this volume were not
written as direct responses to Lefebvre, it is his work, more than
any other single tradition of scholarship, that throws into relief the
issues they take up and illuminate.2
Lefebvre's thesis was that between the sixteenth and the
twentieth century, the fundamental acts of reproduction (of bio-
logical life, of labor power, and of the social relations of produc-
tion) necessary to capitalism occurred in a space that was at once
physical and ideological. In fact, these acts depended on the exist-
ence of this space for their realization. Lefebvre made space "both
the geographical site of action and the social possibility for engag-
ing in action." "More than just a physical location, a piece of real
estate," Lefebvre's space was "simultaneously an existential free-
dom and a mental expression" that motivated, legitimated, di-
rected, and constrained action. Lefebvre's long commentary on
the process that produced this space introduced an analytical grid
of three parts that he regarded as constantly in play during the pro-
duction of space: spatial practices, that is, the daily activities of
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
working, traveling, eating, sleeping, or playing; representations of

space, that is, the abstract concepts that organize space, such as ar-
chitectural plans, street maps, or the laws that regulate the use of
space; and representational space or what Lefebvre frequently
called lived space, the level at which people unconsciously re-
spond to space and represent it in symbols.3
Lefebvre's work was, at its heart, a critique of a long tradition
of social science writing on urban space that began with T6nnies'
celebrated Communityand Societyof 1887, which argued that mo-
dernity undid traditional ties of kin and propinquity by means of a
shift from face-to-face "Gemeinschaft" society grounded in place
to the more complicated and abstract "Gesellschaft" society. Rob-
ert Park and the Chicago school of urban sociology that flourished
during the 91 os and 192os developed this tradition by pioneering
an urban ethnography of social behavior that focused less on
classes and groups than on interactive behavior among individuals
and groups. Their interests lay in the affective dimensions of com-
munities undergoing what they considered the abrupt transition
from local place to urban grid.4
Even though this tradition, and the kind of urban ecology to
which it helped to give birth, recognized the importance of space,
it suffered from at least two problems. First, despite its romance
with "space" as an independent category of analysis, it tended to
treat space as a container, which existed, in Lefebvre's words,
"prior to whatever ends up filling it." Lefebvre argued that in this
scholarly literature, space was a nonspecific term that could alter-
nately (and simultaneously) refer to place, sphere, or even mental
abstraction; empty of analytical content, it was the passive recipi-
ent of meaning rather than its generator. Lefebvre aimed this criti-
cism not just at the liberal tradition of urban ecology practiced by
economists, political scientists, sociologists, and geographers. He
targeted his own Marxist tradition as well. Marxists also tended to
treat space as a container, the product of capitalist economic pro-
cesses rather than their agent.5
3 Mark Gottdiener, The Social Productionof UrbanSpace(Austin, 1985), 123.
4 Ferdinand T6nnies, Communityand Society(London, 1887); Robert Park, "The Urban
Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order," in Ernest W. Burgess (ed.), The Urban
Community(Chicago, 1926); idem, "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Behavior
in the Urban Environment," in Richard Sennett (ed.), ClassicEssays on the Cultureof Cities
(New York, 1969). On the ethnographic treatment of space, see Robert Rotenberg and Gary
McDonogh (eds.), The CulturalMeaningof UrbanSpace(Westport, 1993).
5 Lefebvre, Productionof Space, I5.
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
6 Ibid., 265, 27I.

520 I ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
made place, and thus space, unworthy of independent analysis.

Place was the detritus of the folk past. Lefebvre, in contrast, made
space's past, as well as its present and future, a problem requiring
study.7
Recent North American scholarship on the decline of public
space in the contemporary world owes much to Lefebvre's insis-
tence that scholars take past space seriously. Many of these studies
successfully leaven Lefebvre's often abstract theorizing with dis-
tinct cultural analyses to produce a narrative of the injuries caused
by the commercialization and decentered urban sprawl of twenti-
eth-century America. Edge cities, strip malls, fiber optic telecom-
munication, and market-suffused recreation, they argue, have
created a nation of exile citizens inhabiting a ruthless global free
market of placelessness. By contrasting a "placeless" present to a
"placed" past, they implicitly revalue the past, crediting it with a
power to enrich and enlarge human experience in a way no longer
attainable.8
The ambitious work of Sennett, who energetically surveys
urban life between classical Athens and contemporary New York,
similarly describes the modern urbanite as a citizen estranged from
himself. Sennett's expertise unpacks the interaction between the
individual, the community, and the built environment through
close readings of history, politics, art, and literature. How, Sennett
asks, did the modern metropolis as a neutral grid of disconnected
though physically contiguous communities emerge out of the
classical city that was so sensitive to place and community? As
Sennett puts it, "the stones of the modern city seem badly laid by
planners and architects, in that the shopping mall, the parking lot,
the apartment house elevator do not suggest in their form the
complexities of how people might live. What once were the ex-
periences of places appear now as floating mental operations." Al-
though riven by gender and social inequalities, the classical city
was, for all its warts, a meaningful bridge between self and urban
space. In contrast, modern individuals inhabit cities in their own
existential realm, moving quickly through space but stripped of
7 John Agnew, "The Devaluation of Place in Social Science," in idemandJames S. Duncan

(eds.), The Powerof Place: BringingTogetherGeographical
and SociologicalImaginations(Boston,
1989), 9-29.
8 For recent North American scholarship, see, in particular,Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations
on a ThemePark:The New AmericanCity and theDeclineof PublicSpace(New York, 1992); Wil-
liam Leach, Countryof Exiles: The Destructionof Place in AmericanLife (New York, I999).
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
Scholars of modernity's spaces may have newly discovered

the past, but they have not adequately examined the cities of late
medieval and early modern Europe. Although Sennett looked to
medieval Paris, as well as classical Athens, for Western prototypes
of urbanity against which to contrast contemporary New York,
his narrative stays mainly in the realm of theology, philosophy, art,
and literature, and circles around the development and alteration
of Christian notions of urban place. His is an important history to
be sure, necessary to make sense of the modern West, but, as
Lefebvre points out, a crucially formative moment in the modern
city's past lies in the commercial and industrial cities of the late
medieval and early period. Bruges, Florence, Venice, and Amster-
dam are the generators of New York, not Athens.
THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE Although Lefebvre's emphasis on

the medieval and early modern city in the history of modernity
provides a convenient entry into this volume, this aspect of his in-
terpretation is not the most relevant to it. Two more general issues
take precedence: first, his insistence on the historicity of space or,
as he put it, on the fact that space was produced; second, his rec-
ognition of space as a multivalent concept, a complex product of
apprehension, experience, and reification. Scholars have often
complained that Lefebvre's analytical categories are hard to grasp
and harder still to combine into a more general understanding of
historically produced space, but these categories had the distinct
virtue of providing essential groundwork, eliminating much of the
confusion that attends use of the term spaceor its conflation with
such related terms as place or sphere. Even more fruitfully,
Lefebvre's analysis helps to establish connections between "the
material" and "the discursive," the physical and the ideological, or
the experienced and the imagined. Lefebvre insisted that social
space is produced and exists at each of these registers.
The articles in this volume move seamlessly among these reg-
isters as they map the process of spatial production and assess its
historical significance. As a group, they also cross political divides,
traveling, for example, from Ghent to London and from English
(Berkeley, I996); Michael J. Dear, The Post-ModernUrbanCondition(Oxford, 2000). For an
excellent critique of Los Angeles' postmodern exceptionalism by a historian of the early mod-
ern city, see Robert A. Schneider, "The Postmodern City from an Early Modern Perspec-
tive," AmericanHistoricalReview, CV (2001), 1668-I675.
towns to the French countryside. They disturb chronology as

well, speaking of the twelfth century in the same breath as the sev-
enteenth. In our organization of this volume, and in this, our in-
troduction to it, however, we have ignored these disjunctions of
place and time, treating the contributions thematically instead, ac-
cording to the kind of space that each investigates-legal space, rit-
ual space, or mental space. These categories are not mutually
exclusive; nor are they the only kinds of spatial productions in
these cities. In fact, they are not categories at all, but useful lenses
through which to read the individual investigations.
The first two articles in the collection treat legal space. They
expose not just the ways in which legal claims were asserted and
realized (long a focus of historical research) but also the indetermi-
nacy of those processes and of legal space itself. More important,
they reveal the capacity of legal space to generate the possibility
and reality of ideological and political space.
Vanessa Harding's deeply researched study explores the prop-
erty market in English cities (principally London) over almost four
centuries. Focusing on how property rights were constituted as ei-
ther "private" or "public," Harding reveals the complexity of
these terms, even when restricted, as she restricts them, to imply
property rights alone. One of her arguments is that "private"
property rights never existed in any absolute sense throughout this
period and certainly not in the sense that they do now. Private
ownership, to the degree that it took place at all, represented
merely a limited claim to use, benefit, or control that was always
liable to legal challenge, never fully clear or fully secure. Subject to
constant testing from other property holders whose "rights"
conflicted with it, the privacy of property was murky in a material
sense as well. Property held under a single legal category might,
for example, be made more or less private by how it was orga-
nized, subdivided, and positioned. Hedges, windows, and walls all
helped to redefine space, rendering it private in fact if not neces-
sarily in law, or in law if not in fact.
As an inherently amorphous, unbounded category, private
property was inadequate to the task of defining its inverse, the
public. Although public authorities made claims to space on behalf
of a "public," or the collectivity for which they spoke, the extent
and force of their reach were unpredictable and subject to constant
revision. Although Harding argues that the early modern period
524 [ ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
brought a clarification to competing private property rights and a

less ambiguous public quality to certain spaces, Harding does not
credit any of the usual suspects with that change-not an emerg-
ing state, not an emerging civic humanism, and not a bourgeois
sense of order. In Harding's view, the economic downturn of the
fifteenth and early sixteenth century, with its accompanying de-
population, was responsible for delineating more clearly what was
to be public and what was to be private.12
Also rich empirically is Lorraine Attreed's article on rival ju-
risdictions in medieval English cities, which traces the production
of a discourse about the nature and sanctity of urban space in four
different royal towns in late medieval England. Attreed argues that
this discourse gradually developed through specific contests be-
tween cities' "private liberties," that is, between the institutions
and powers of these cities in their competition for authority over
residents and property. Against these private liberties, city corpo-
rations fought protracted legal battles for control of urban space,
and for its extension into the surrounding countryside. What
Attreed reveals most effectively is how the legal processes that en-
sued compelled city officials to build a case for their claims, and
how in the course of preparing and managing the decades-long
cases, urban officials had to create a story about themselves that
would defend them against others. They did not enter the fray
with a sense of their own rights, privileges, or particularvirtues al-
ready worked out, somehow acquired by the fact of being urban.
Their position was crafted, cobbled together, and fashioned in a
disjointed and fraught process of negotiation, dispute, compro-
mise, challenge, and counter-challenge. It was not, as historians
have sometimes imagined, discovered or bequeathed in a social
experience that was located outside that process.
While necessarily depending upon the notion that political
space was legal space, the next two essays, by Carl Estabrook and
Marc Boone, focus more directly on ritual space. Historians have
long appreciated the power of ritual to create social actors, thanks
to their colleagues in anthropology. What Estabrook and Boone
add to that understanding is twofold. First, they show how a space,
12 For another approach with a similarconclusion, see Michael Camille, "Signs of the City:
Place, Power, and Public Fantasyin Medieval Paris," in Hanawalt and Kobialka (eds.), Medi-
eval Practicesof Space, 1-37.
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)
terizes productions of space as performances, emphasizing that

battles for space were in fact battles for performance rights in
space. Performances were not simply representations of power;
they constituted power. In Estabrook's words, "it is important to
recognize, as contemporaries did, that the performance of public
ritual was in itself an exercise of power."
Boone's equally impressive study of the political geography of
late medieval Ghent, the Low Countries' largest city, makes a sim-
ilar case about performance. Boone argues that Pirenne and his
followers, who dominated the historiography of urban life in the
Low Countries until recently, erred in defining its cities as pure
"market enclaves" and the struggles that were waged over them as
manifestations of class relations based on economic roles. In this
regard, Boone unconsciously echoes Lefebvre's point that the
economic aspect did not-could not-have carried such causal
weight until a capitalist space had been produced. The medieval
or Renaissance city was the "historical mediation" for that pro-
duction; as economic space, it was, to use Lefebvre's phrase, only
in "status nascendi."14
Boone analyzes three distinct patterns of struggle, all of them
over ritual space. The first is the formation of the urban commune
through a struggle for control of iconic urban spaces-the build-
ing of belfries, markets, halls, and walls; the destruction of enemy
buildings; and the redefinition of spaces as public or communal.
When the "patrician" leaders of those first communal movements
were challenged from within, as they were everywhere in the
southern Low Countries at the end of the thirteenth century, the
stakes were the control of these spaces. This, Boone implies, was
not "class war" or "revolution" but a rivalry among different ele-
ments of the citizenry-all of them deeply imbricated in a market
that did not yet fully separate capital from labor.
The century that followed saw what most historians have
characterized as the age of "guild rule," the time when artisanal
corporations ascended to political power. Boone examines this de-
velopment in terms of political space, not class war. Artisans did
not destroy the institutions of rule; they appropriated them.
Significantly, they preserved, and even elaborated, the spaces of
14 See, for example, Henri Pirenne, "Stages in the Social History of Capitalism," American
HistoricalReview, XIX (1914), 494-514; Lefebvre, Productionof Space, 263-275.
political authority, enacting the rituals of rule appropriate to these

spaces and thereby claiming legitimacy for themselves.
Finally, Boone discusses the period of war between the dukes
of Burgundy and cities of the region. The dukes expressed-and
won-sovereign power in the cities not just by claiming urban
space in general but by occupying carefully chosen sites and mak-
ing civic symbols their own or, if necessary, destroying them.
The point of particularinterest is that space acquired meaning
through performances. Some of the performances were purely
symbolic in content: marching through the Friday market with a
guild's banners, kneeling before the duke at a gate, or staging a
royal inauguration on the town market square. Others were more
instrumental but no less powerful as symbols: a beheading on a
bridge, the burning of a belfry, or the destruction of a town char-
ter. These examples corroborate Lefebvre's idea of space as a mix
of conceptual, perceptual, and representational attributes. Draw-
ing on their heritage, those enacting the performances staged new
social practices and subtly altered the representational or symbolic
resonance of their space.
Legal space and ritual space were discursive products not re-
ducible to the purely material. Nor are they to be confused, as the
next three authors make clear, with mental space, which, as un-
derstood herein, is more imagined than enacted, more "represen-
tational" and "represented," to use Lefebvre's terms, than
"practiced." Yet, as these authors also demonstrate-and as
Lefebvre maintained-these spaces conferred social power. They
were just as responsible for creating actors and actions as a law of
property, a beheading on the town square, or an annual Easter ro-
gation was.
Frances Dolan's essay on English politics and polemics during
the turbulent years of the mid-seventeenth century explicates such
a process, while also offering a view of how gendered space was
imagined-and lived. Catholicism in early modern England was
easily characterized-if not demonized-as feminine, for at least
two reasons. Queen Henrietta Maria, herself a Catholic, was one
source for this attitude. As protector of the Catholic faith in Lon-
don, she not only provided Catholics with material sites for wor-
ship, such as chapels and churches; she also established an
imaginative link between Catholicism and women that would
long inform anti-Catholic discourse. She also posed a threat be-
528 ARNA1)E, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
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,
in contrast with the spiritualJerusalem, which monks laboriously

strived to emulate in their monastic enclosures. Mills' survey of
monastic and canonical texts suggests that monastic observers only
reluctantly included cities into their field of vision during the late
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the urban phenomenon
was simply too important to be ignored. When they did so, how-
ever, they tended to conceive of the new spaces in feudal, not ur-
ban, terms. Milis' essay demonstrates the power of representation,
its ability to overwrite practiced space and indicates the impor-
tance of noting who is doing the representing.
The concluding article in this volume, by Herman Pleij, re-
mains strictly within a textual world of imaginative construction.
Pleij studies how stock medieval romances and didactic literature
were reformulated for a lay urban audience in the highly commer-
cialized late medieval Low Countries to reflect the ideological dis-
tinction between the urban and the rural so essential, in Lefebvre's
eyes, to the production of the medieval and Renaissance city. As
literary topoi typical of medieval romance found their way into
the civic language of commerce and pragmatism, terms like "use-
ful," "profitable," and "enterprising" were put into the mouths of
such unlikely protagonists as Hercules. Cleverness and cunning
were repackaged as signifiers of the entrepreneurial spirit. A new
urban language of commercial behavior was emerging out the can-
onical stories of aristocratic provenance.15
Pleij's principal claim is that these stories, taken as they were
from aristocratic culture, were rewritten in an explicit effort to
make them speak to, and about, a newly self-conscious urban
bourgeoisie. The implication is surely not, however, that a single
author, or even group of authors, rewrote the texts with this in-
tention or that their readers or listeners explicitly articulated any
such demand, only that the stories' original tropes were refash-
ioned to support urban values-and address urban anxieties-
thereby making an implicit connection between the world of the
text and the world of the city.
Pleij's study is also significant for revealing how a particular
kind of urban space was born. Although the creation was imagina-
tive and the method rhetorical, the space created was real, and im-
15 For Lefebvre's discussion of the medieval and Renaissance city, see Lefebvre, Production
of Space, 268.
portant. The reconstituted stories sharply demarcated the urban

from the rural, drawing a mental boundary as firmly as did the
stone walls of the city itself: Burghers were not peasants; "com-
mon" they might well be-and surely were to the aristocracy
whose positions they were challenging and whose stories they
were rewriting-but they were not bumpkins. Nor were their
lifestyle and devotion to commerce unworthy. Burghers were
men of substance, and their cities were nodes of energy, intelli-
gence, and wit.
HISTORIOGRAPHY AND METHOD Notwithstanding its contribu-

tion to the study of urban space in cities of the premodern North,
this volume also speaks directly to three groups of scholars: spe-
cialists of the period, historians of other periods in the Western
past, and theorists of space itself.
The articles herein have particular significance for specialists
of the northern city; they help to explain, and revise, a long-stand-
ing tradition of historiography that has recently come under at-
tack. The original tradition goes back to at least the nineteenth
century, when scholars first staked out a powerful claim about the
nature of urban space in that age. Strongest in the late medieval
cities of the Rhineland, the Baltic, and the Low Countries, which
maintained political independence for several centuries and chal-
lenged emperors, kings, and popes alike, this tradition still domi-
nates contemporary Germanic historiography, as it has for more
than a century. Representative is Edith Ennen, Die europaische
Stadt des Mittelalters,its first edition now thirty years old; the latest
(1979) remains a standard source.
The book begins with a question, What is a city? Ennen had
an easy answer for the Middle Ages. The medieval city was a
densely built environment, a "compact silhouette," with encir-
cling walls and imposing towers that protected it from the sur-
rounding landscape. The walls served not only defensive purposes,
however; they also demarcated a special realm or sphere of urban
rights. Those "urban rights," Ennen goes on to explain, were
predicated on a widespread system of civic equality that was fun-
damentally in opposition to the feudal system that prevailed out-
side city walls, and on a constitution that allowed citizens to
participate in their own government, even granting them supreme
political autonomy. According to Ennen, these principles would
eventually spread beyond urban boundaries to dominate the Eu-

ropean landscape and to constitute the modern Western socio-
political order.'6
Ennen was quick to emphasize, however, that medieval cities
were more than political or legal innovations. Their populations
were unique with regard to the "liberties" that they possessed and
their socioeconomic traits. Compared to people in the country-
side, urbanites in that age were highly mobile, both geographically
and socially; the finely graded economic hierarchy and the social
divisions that derived from a medley of cultural practices served to
differentiate city people one from another in an unprecedented
manner. As the sites of the period's first commercial industry, the
medieval cities embodied a number of specialized occupations.
The great merchants of the day, whose networks stretched
throughout the known world and whose mercantilist policies
would become models for the governments of emerging territorial
sovereigns, were synonymous in the cultural imagination with ur-
banity itself The heart of this economy was the market, which not
only regulated exchange in the city but also facilitated the city's
penetration into, and influence over, the countryside. For Ennen,
and for the hegemonic historiographical tradition that she repre-
sents, this market was the generator of urbanity, the essential warp
of a sociopolitical and cultural fabric that would clothe all of Euro-
pean society.
As Ennen describes it, the late medieval city was a clearly
defined space of people and activity. It was also a material phe-
nomenon bounded by walls; graced by buildings of elegance and
utility; populated by shopkeepers, weavers, tailors, moneylenders,
merchants, printmakers, and silversmiths; and pocketed by specific
sites where the acts of economic production and exchange, of so-
ciability, and of the politics that defined urbanity were given life.17
The long tradition of scholarship from which Ennen drew
her image of the spatially distinct late medieval city, particularly
the city of late medieval Germany and the Low Countries, goes
back to the mid-nineteenth century, at least to Marx and von
I6 Enne, Die europiischeStadt des Mittelalters(Gottingen, 1972; 3rd. ed. 1979), I.

17 The distinction between "space" and "place" is discussed in Kobialka, "Staging Place/
Space in the Eleventh-Century Monastic Practices," in Hanawalt and idem (eds.), Medieval
Practicesof Space, 128-149. See also de Certeau, The Practiceof EverydayLife (Berkeley, 1988),
which Kobialka cites.
532 j ARNADE, HOWELL, AND SIMONS
Gierke. Although Ennen is no Marxist, her emphasis on the ur-

ban/rural divide, on the city's capacity to house and nurture capi-
tal accumulation, and on the power of the market, owes much to
Marxist historiography. Moreover, like von Gierke, Ennen ac-
knowledged the social significance of the urban market and made
sweeping claims about the city's historical significance. Von
Gierke argued that the urban corporation with its "laws of fellow-
ship" was a revolutionary organism, diametrically opposed to the
sociopolitical ethic of the countryside where lordship and hierar-
chy were the norm.'8
Pirenne and Weber, however, provided the dominant
historiographical vision informing Ennen's text. Pirenne's elegant
theories about the nature of urban society and the political culture
born of it depicted the city as market space, a bounded arena in
which people acquired distinct rights and privileges simply by vir-
tue of residence. Weber's portrait was broader and more complex.
His "ideal type" of Western city-significantly, most perfectly
realized in the late medieval North-was a similarly bounded, dis-
tinct space characterized not just by its market functions but also
by its corporative capacity to make, judge, and execute its own
law. 9
I8 On the urban and rural divide, see, especially, Karl Marx, "The GermnanIdeology" in
Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-EnqrelsReader (New York, I978; 2d ed.). For the
historiographical imlportance of this formulation, see the recent survey by Robert S.
I)uPlessis, Transitionlsto Capitalismlin Early Modern Europe (New York, 1997). Otto von
Gierke, Das deutschle Genosscnschaftsrecht (Graz, 1954; orig. pub. I868-1913), 4v.
19 Pirenne, MedievalCities. The French version of this work was reprinted in the anthology
of his essays published as Les villeset les institutionsurbaines(Paris, Brussels, 1939), 2v. See also
idem, Histoireeconolmique de l'Occidentmnedieval (Bruges, 195 ). For Pirenne's influence on ur-
ban historiography,see Raymond Van Uytven, "Les origines des villes dans les anciens Pays-
Bas (jusque vers 1300)," and Walter Prevenier, "Henri Pirenne et les villes des anciens Pays-
Bas aux bas imoyen age (XIVe-XVe siecles)," in Georges Despy and Adriaan Verhulst (eds.),
des tlhesesd'Henri Pirenne(Brussels, I986), 14-26, 27-50, respec-
La fortune historiograpliique
tively; Verhulst, "L'historiographieconcernant l'origine des villes dans les anciens Pays-Bas
depuis la mort de Henri Pirenne (1935)," in Franz Bierlaire and Jean-Louis Kupper (eds.),
Henri Pirenne.De la cite de Liegea la ville de Gand (Liege, I986), 107-116. For a new synthesis
that critically acknowledges its debts to Pirenne, see idem, The Rise of Cities in North-WestEu-
rope(Cambridge, I999). Max Weber (ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich), "The City," in
idim, Economyand Society:An Outline of InterpretiveSociology(New York, I968), III, 1212-
I372; Horst Callies, "Der Stadtbegriff bei Max Weber," in Herbert Jankuhn, Walter
Schlesinger, and Heiko Steuer (eds.), Vor-und FrulformendereuropiischenStadt im Mittelalter
(G6ttingen, 1973), I, 56-60; K. Schreiner, "Die mittelalterliche Stadt in Webers Analyse und
die Deutung des okzidentalen Rationalismus," in Jurgen Kocka (ed.), Max Weber, der
Historiker(G6ttingen, I986), II9-I5o; Wilfried Nippel, "Max Weber's 'The City' Re-
visited," in Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, andJulia Emlen (eds.), City Statesin ClassicalAn-
tiquityand MedievalItaly (Ann Arbor, I991), 19-30.
Products of the nineteenth century, the works of these schol-

arsbear all the marks of their epoch's intellectual culture, in partic-
ular, its taste for meta-theory and its idealization of the market's
capacity to generate progressive change. This way of thinking
about the late medieval city, however, had deep roots in the his-
tory of the cities themselves; in fact, it was as old as the cities. As
early as the thirteenth century, the citizenry of these towns regu-
larly expressed their claims for urban privileges-or "liberties," as
they typically called them-in spatial terms, describing their re-
publics as coherent, discrete, sociopolitical spaces, enclaves carved
out of an alien geographical, social, and political terrain, almost as
Pirenne, Marx, von Gierke, or Weber would later describe them.
Ennen and her fellow historians of the late twentieth century
would continue to do so.
However idealized, this spatial image was more than a fictive
representation. Powerful legal and political forces gave it life, pull-
ing spatial practices into their orbit. Urban corporations built
countless edifices; issued countless laws; produced countless docu-
ments; and spent countless livres, Marken, or gulden to realize the
privilege, separateness, boundedness, and distinction enshrined in
their rhetoric. City officials encircled their cities with walls to hold
off attackers and exclude unwanted visitors. Citizens wrote and
performed countless songs, plays, stories, and poems that cele-
brated the urban at the expense of a rural hinterland portrayed as
backward and ignorant, just as Pleij describes in this volume.
Law worked aggressively to draw the boundaries. Cities is-
sued meticulous and restrictive rules regulating access to citizen-
ship, to guilds and craft organizations, to membership in the
community of property owners, and even to residence, as well as
mapping the geographical limits within which their laws were to
have jurisdiction. Cities also fought for, and often won, the right
to select their own governors, set and collect their own taxes, es-
tablish their own market rules, and police their own streets.
Finally, cities turned their spatial metaphor into a law of personal
"freedom." The idea that "city air makes free," which was found
in many constitutional documents of the day, meant that simply
by inhabiting urban space, an individual was freed from feudal
ties.2"
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)
In Lefebvre's terms, space in these cities coalesced into "ab-

stract" space, transforming itself into "the social possibility for en-
gaging in action." To be sure, social practices did not converge
absolutely. As many empirical studies of the last decades have doc-
umented, the urban community was hardly the sui generis, radical
social experiment portrayed in contemporary words and pictures
and aggressively re-created in the originating scholarly literature.
The "commune" or the urban corporation described as
"uniquely" urban had, in fact, deep roots outside the city and was
seldom fully revolutionary, often created in cooperation with local
lords. Nor was the urban economy separated from, or independ-
ent of, the countryside. People, commercial goods, raw materials,
livestock, equipment, and money constantly flowed from coun-
tryside to city and back again. Urbanites were in regular contact
both with the busy suburbs clustered outside their walls and with
the villages and manors further away.2'
Moreover, religious attitudes and organizations were more
similar in town and country than the classic studies indicated.
Scholars have also insisted that cities did not win or retain urban
liberties as enemies of-not even as relentless competitors of-ter-
ritorial sovereigns. The two powers were always partners-if mu-
tually suspicious partners-in a complicated dance involving give
and take, as well as cooperation and conflict. According to these
scholars, cities were not at all what their citizens claimed them to
be, and not at all what their laws governing immigration and citi-
zenship, their walls and gates, and their jurisdictional boundaries
seemed to suggest.22
(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
Taking such revisionist studies at their word, some critics

have concluded that the images of urban space informing both
contemporaries' notions and the early scholarship on these cities
were nothing more than (mis)representations that disguised and
distorted the truth. From this perspective, cities were simply big-
ger, more powerful conglomerations of people drawn from-and
bound to a more diffuse "feudal" culture. Cities may have been
new in some sense, and certainly troublesome to their lords, but
"revolutionary" they surely were not. Urban space was little more
than the place where city people lived.
This interpretation is too extreme. The fact that social prac-
tices did not perfectly converge with representations of space does
not mean that cities were not distinct social spaces, or that the spa-
tial metaphors that informed early scholarly claims about these cit-
ies were complete fantasies. It means, instead, that space has to be
studied as a multifaceted, multivalenced creation, a social reality
that exists both at the discursive and material level. The task for
scholars is to discover the ways in which these levels converged,
under what pressures, and with what effects. This volume pro-
ceeds, not by attempting to resurrect or defend older notions
about urban space but by examining what pronouncements about
urban space were intended to do. More generally, it reveals how a
discourse about urban space that positioned the city as a site of
radical experimentation, distinct powers, and privileged actors
helped to fashion the medieval early/modern city.
This volume also casts new light on the tradition of thinking
about urban space that is associated with studies of the Italian Re-
naissance city, particularly by North American scholars keen on
rewriting the social and cultural landscape of Italian urbanism. Al-
though hardly entirely immune to the influence of Marx, Weber,
Pirenne, von Gierke, these historians of the Italian city have pur-
sued issues of urban space from separate and often incommen-
surate perspectives. The incompatibility of these two bodies
of historiography seems to be yet another variation on a long-
standing mutual incomprehension; the Alps have been an almost
impassable divide for scholars writing institutional and social histo-
ries of this period. There are, however, more specific causes for
H. Mundy and Peter Riesenberg, The MedievalTown (New York, 1958), discuss the gap be-
tween the appearance and reality of city life.
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
23 A good overview of Anglo-American historiography in the larger context of Renais-

sance scholarship on Italian city life is found in Edward Muir, "The Italian Renaissance in
America," Atmerican HistoricalReview,C (1995), 1095- 1118. For a collection that stressesmul-
tiple schools of urban history-and scholarly traditions sensitive to the classicaland medieval
world-see Molho, Raaflaub, and Emlen (eds.), City Statesin ClassicalAntiqtity and Medieval
Italy.
24 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilizationof theRenaissancein Italy (Harmondsworth, I990; orig.
pub. Basel, I860, as Die KulturderRenaissancein Italien).Muir and Ronald Weissman, "Social
and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence," in Agnew and Duncan (eds.), The
Powerof Place,81-I03, who cite Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Buildingof RenaissanceFlorence:
An Economicand SocialHistory(Baltimore, I980); Marvin B. Becker, MedievalItaly: Constraints
and Creativity(Bloomington, 1981), as recent examples of the traditional approach. See also
Goldthwaite, Wealthand the DemandforArt in Italy 1300-1600 (Baltimore, I993), which pow-
erfully combines studies of economic growth and the accumulation of capital with the tradi-
tional view. Hans Baron's classic work is The Crisisof the Early ItalianRenaissance(Princeton,
I955 [2v.]; 2d ed., I966 [IV.]). For an assessment of Baron's influence, see Molho and John
Tedeschi (eds.), RenaissanceStudies in Honor of Hans Baron (Dekalb, Ill., 1970); Riccardo
Fubini, "Renaissance Historian: The Career of Hans Baron,"Journalof ModernHistory,LXIV
(1992), 541-574.
This interpretation had no room for Weber or Pirenne and

no room to imagine urban spaces similar to Italy's north of the
Alps. From this point of view, the northern urban "space" of the
late Middle Ages-idealized both in contemporary northern prac-
tice and in later scholarship on the North-could not have existed
as unitary space, since northern cities at that time were mired in
the same hodgepodge of urban localism that had characterized the
medieval Italian city. No wonder that scholars of the South have
had so little to say about the North, and vice versa.
The scholars who began to steer Italian urban history away
from this heroic model of modernization drew their inspiration
from sociology and anthropology. Digging deep into the archives,
they mined serial sources to look closely at how people experi-
enced their cities, formed alliances, established social identities,
and claimed authority. What they found had more to do with spe-
cific, localized spaces than with the abstractspace of the "city" qua
civic arena.
As early as I969, Brucker summarized the critique of
Burckhardt's model of Renaissance exceptionalism: "Contra-
dicting the vision of Renaissance man joyfully breaking his tradi-
tional bonds and exulting in his liberty is the picture of the
Florentine who desperately sought new sources of security and
identity to replace those which had disappeared. The social free-
dom of the Renaissance man postulated by Burckhardt and elabo-
rated by his followers is, in fifteenth-century Florence at least, a
myth." In this new interpretation, individualism and capitalism
did not trump neighborhoods and family allegiances, rendering
them less useful and simultaneously eliminating their "spaces"
while transforming the urban space itself into the modern, secular,
republican city-state, as the Burckhardtian tradition would have
it.25
In an important essay published in I976, Klapisch-Zuber ex-
amined the social and emotional world of a fifteenth-century
Florentine merchant as a series of overlapping, geographically
grounded networks centered upon the parental home, the casa.
Trexler, Muir, and others have explored how local magistrates and
various social groups used Renaissance civic space to project their
ambitions and challenge each other, often through ritual action
25 Gene A. Brucker, RenaissanceFlorence(Berkeley, 1969; 2d ed.), Ioo-IoI.

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-
26 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "'Kins, Friends, and Neighbors': The Urban Territory of a

Merchant Family in I400," in idem, Women,Fanlily, and Ritual in RenaissanceItaly (Chicago,
1985), 68-93 (originally published as "Parenti, amici, vicini," in Quadernmi storici,XXXIII
[1976], 953-982). In a similar vein, but reminiscent of the association of local space with me-
dieval practice, is Diane 0. Hughes, "Kinsmen and Neighborhoods in Medieval Genoa," in
Harry Miskimin et al. (eds.), The MedievalCity (New Haven, I977), 95-I Ii. Richard Trexler,
Public Life in RenaissanceFlorence(Ithaca, I980); Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice
(Princeton, 1981). See also Weissmann, Ritual Brotherhood in RenaissanceFlorence(New York,
1982); idem, "The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations, Individualism, and
Identity in Renaissance Society," in idemand Susan Zimmerman (eds.), UrbanLife in the Re-
naissance(Newark, I989), 269-280. Work on gender, social behavior and public space in-
cludes Dennis Romano, "Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,"Journal
of SocialHistory,XXIII (I989), 339-353, and, more recently, Robert C. Davis, "The Geogra-
phy of Gender in the Renaissance," in Judith C. Brown and idem(eds.), Genderand Societyin
RenaissanceItaly (New York, I998). Enrico Guidoni, "Citta e ordini mendicanti. II ruolo dei
conventi nella crescita e nella progettazione urbana del XIII e XIV secolo," in Quaderni
Medievali,IV (1977), 69-o06. See also the special issue of Storiadella citta, IX (1978), 1-92;
"Les ordres mendiants et la ville en Italie centrale (v. I220-v. 1350). Actes de la Table Ronde,
Rome, 27-28 avril I977," in Melanges de l'Ecolefrancaise de Rome. Moyen Age et Temps
Modernes,LXXXIX (I977), 555-773. Elisabeth Crouzet-Paven, "Cultures et contre-cultures:
a propos des logiques spatiales de l'espace public Venitien," in Boone and Stabel (eds.),
Shaping UrbanIdentityin Late MedievalEurope:The Use of Spaceand Images(forthcoming).
eth century, when long-standing social, ritual, and cultural prac-

tices associated with certain places in the city were abandoned, or
the physical space itself dissolved. Davis, for one, in a work of cul-
tural history sensitive to the concerns of spatial analysis, demon-
strated that neighborhood allegiance and spatial division remained
strong forces in Venetian social history until the eighteenth cen-
tury. In fact, rather than confirming the notion that Renaissance
Italian cities were the spatial complements to Burckhardt's civic
individuals, such studies are more in tune with the understanding
of the Renaissance expressed in Burckhardt'sJudgementson History
and Historians.It describes the Renaissance as an indeterminate in-
terlude between the medieval world and the modern age rather
than the moment when rationality became fully realized.27
Thus, scholars of the Renaissance Italian city have begun to
argue that the political, social, and cultural achievements of that
urban civilization were embedded in a history of particular spaces,
not in their eradication. That scholarship does more, however,
than call into question Burckhardt's claim that the Renaissance-
and, according to urban historians who followed Burckhardt, the
Renaissance city-broke all ties with a medieval, localized past. It
also reminds us that the "late medieval" city of the North under-
went a similar process, acquiring its corporate character-becom-
ing Ennen's "Bereich eines besonderen Stadtrechtes"-through
spatial contention. Contributions as different as Harding's,
Attreed's, Dolan's, and Pleij's also bear witness to this process.
From a broader historiographical standpoint, this volume ad-
dresses the the revolutionary impact of these cities during this era.
It shows the power of urban space to confer as well as contain
meaning. For instance, in Boone's and Estabrook's contributions,
battles for control of cities, whether among citizens or between
cities and their overlords, were clearly struggles over the spaces
that contained, and could bequeath, privilege. To occupy these
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).
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
narratives that have long threatened to reduce cities to footnotes,

outcomes of functionalist processes generated outside the histori-
ans' view, in the shadowy world where such abstractions as "the
market," "political self-determination," or "the state" reside. Al-
though such abstractions should constitute part of the analytical
apparatusnecessary to understand the history of the cities featured
in this volume, they were less generators than products of spatial
histories. Second, this spatial approach is also a respite from narra-
tives that attribute structural changes to individuals or to
definitions of the self that lie outside history. When told about the
late medieval and Renaissance city, such stories typically feature
entrepreneurial geniuses, sometimes like the strange figures de-
scribed by Pirenne, who emerged from the marshes somewhere
between Liibeck and Bruges. Others describe peasants who fled
manors in search of embryonic forms of democracy or civic lead-
ers who had the wisdom to posit an equation between virtue and
political self-determination. Although a spatial history of cities
preserves entrepreneurism, democratic movements, and republi-
can theory as topics of importance, it shifts attention from the in-
dividuals embodying these desires to the historical processes that
produced them.
Although spatial history is a less purposeful, less teleological,
and more indeterminate history than other kinds of account, it is
hardly a mere recitation of anecdotes, events, names, and dates.
Like all vigorous historical narratives, spatial history deals with
power, intentionality, and agency. This volume displays the full
array of revolutionary artisans, clever ministers, weak husbands,
brutal overlords, ingenious women, predatory landlords, idealistic
visionaries, skilled storytellers, and misanthropic monks that usu-
ally populate studies of the period. Spatial history also tells time,
acknowledging the weight of experience and the rigidity of insti-
tutions. These essays relate many stories of meaningful change;
they carefully distinguish one generation from the next; and they
respect the power of law, money, and armies. In sum, a history of
space is a fully historical account of the past.
Finally, these essays offer methodological clarification: Space
was produced in a process that was both material and discursive;
the category exists at the physical, the ideological, and the sym-
bolic levels. Although each essay emphasizes a different register of
spatial formation, all pay particular attention to place, never con-
founding it with space but always insisting on space's materiality.

None of the essays concludes that urban space in this age was
nothing more than bricks and mortar, but they uphold Lefebvre's
general idea that space is unimaginable except as grounded place.
Space is a reification of social relations-"practiced place" in de
Certeau's apt phrase-different from, but nonexistent except in,
specific places. Such places are always man-made, composed of ar-
chitectural space, which is fashioned by walls and bridges, arches
and paving stones, moats and balconies, altars and thoroughfares,
bedrooms and theaters. The meanings that such space contains,
and those that it confers, derive, literally, from that materiality;
space acquires meaning precisely as a result of its ability to hide,
protect, shelter, divide, or display people.
These meanings are not, however, simply derivations of the
material; they are reifications of the activities that occur in places.
As reifications, they interpret, and thus inevitably distort, material-
ity, but they always have a material referent. Dolan's essay, though
apparently focused on discourse alone, aptly illustrates this point.
She portrays the Reformation in England as a struggle over space.
Buildings and their spaces were desecrated, turned to new uses,
sacralized, resacralized, and shut down. Catholics were displaced,
denied public worship (except in London, thanks to the Queen),
and compelled to practice their faith "in private." Unseen, un-
countable, and unknowable, they were imagined to be more
powerful than they actually were. In Dolan's telling phrase, Cath-
olics were "everywhere and nowhere." Even Milis' or Pleij's es-
says, which restrict themselves to textual representations, describe
a dialogue between the material and the discursive, not a process
of pure invention divorced from the experience of place.
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
monopolized their original activities or preserved their original

definitions forever, the new "unplaced" markets were not neces-
sarily their antitheses-that is, free and revolutionary, as scholars
have too often assumed. This hypothesis needs further testing.28
Such testing should include research that examines the ethic
of the "placed" market more closely to ascertain how restrictive it
was and what kind of restrictions it imposed. These market places
were undoubtedly exclusive. They established rules of exchange,
often installing price and production controls, and they prohibited
certain innovations. But these markets simultaneously created
freedoms that were utterly new in medieval society. Once a buyer
had entered the confines of the fish market, passed through the
doorway of the cloth hall, or approached the benches of the
money changers, he or she was bound by no rules but those of that
market-free to buy and free to refuse in the accepted manner and
free to pay in any of the coin acknowledged in that realm. Al-
though the trade itself was bound strictly by rules, and the rules
were bound by space, the individuals who occupied that space
were considered "free," and equal in that respect, because they
were not subject to rules that operated elsewhere. Such were the
ethics of the abstract market sphere-exactly the notions that
would be embodied in liberal socioeconomic theory of later cen-
turies.
The research questions that remain to be answered center on
how the practices of the market place and the ideas that informed
trade there were transferred to and changed by the "unplaced"
market sphere. In what way were the rules of exchange different
and the definitions of "freedom" altered? In what ways were they
the same? To what extent were the practices of the old, closed
market replicated in the new, open market? How, in short, did the
market place give birth to market society?
Another aspect of the market's history is embedded in the
gender history of these urban cultures. The traditional market
places in these cities were not exclusively male; women's presence
in these sites gave them automatic access to many of the public
28 See Fernand Braudel, Civilizationand Capitalism.II. The Wheelsof Conmmnerce

(Berkeley,
1992), for a general discussion of markets in this age and the functioning of market spaces.
When the city was "en foire," the entire city, or particularsections of it, were opened to all
commerce, all commercants, and all buyers. See Anna Maslakovic, "Common and Public: A
Genealogy of Urban Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Lyon," unpub. Ph.D. diss.
(Columbia Univ., 2000), for an analysisof this history in the creation of public space in Lyon.
spaces of the late medieval northern city. Women were visible on

the streets, at parades, and at the fairgrounds, as well as in the shops
and marketstalls. Although they did not enjoy the same access to
commerce that men did, the legitimacy of their presence in mar-
ket production is beyond question. Gender definitions did not en-
tail women's exclusion from market production.29
The later decades of this period, however, witnessed a change
in practices and attitudes that eventually banished bourgeois
women from market production and conferred these rights on
bourgeois men alone, thus reconfiguring the market as male space.
The history of this development which has hertofore been written
as a history of women's work and gender relations, awaits location
in a larger framework of spatial reorganization-not just market
space but domestic space and public space as well.
What, for example, was the process by which Europeans be-
gan their signifying work of creating the domestic sphere, which
was ideologically distinct from the public and imagined as femi-
nine? To some extent, it involved dividing the domestic from the
common or public by inserting walls, hedges, and gates between
the domicile and the street, and, as Harding's article helps to re-
veal, by instituting laws of ownership and possession. Another as-
pect of the process-often lost to history-took place solely
within domestic space, first among the rich and then among more
ordinary people. Beds became confined to sleeping chambers and
food to kitchens and to halls reserved for dining (preparation in
one, consumption in another; women and servants in one, men
and guests in another). Baths and toilets, too, acquired their own
spaces as did servants' quarters. Other rooms were specially de-
voted to receiving visitors, for family gatherings. In the process, as
Dolan reminds us, the domestic world acquired new valances, be-
coming highly charged with respect to gender and sex. Those as-
sociated with womanhood contained things made intimate by
their relegation to private, hidden, spaces.30
Just how this reconstitution of domestic and business life was
spatially achieved needs to be investigated. Business did not exit
the domicile for centuries after the medieval epoch, not until well
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.
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."
Weidenfeld's scope can be widened: Since municipal authorities

set weights and measures, fixed time and place of commerce, es-
tablished quality standardsand controls, determined currency ex-
change rates, guaranteed safety in travel, and registered and
enforced contracts, they were not just facilitating commerce.
They were also establishing their own authority and ineluctably
linking it to a bienpublicthat was intimately tied to the idea of the
market and its spaces and giving definition to the bienpublicwhose
protectors they claimed to be. For example, municipal regulations
about streetwalking, begging, or gambling, all of which multiplied
in the late medieval period, served both to define the legitimate
market and to constitute public space in specific ways. In these in-
stances, public space was closed for certain kinds of exchange and
opened for others. The "public" became associated with spaces
that were, by definition, risk-adverse, propertied, and sexually re-
stricted.33
By controlling the streets, public officials not only controlled
the market; they also created themselves. Hence, the street served
as the space of municipal government. This does not mean that
policy was debated, statutes drafted, treaties negotiated, taxes set,
or laws signed on the street (at least not usually) but that govern-
ment created itself in the act of claiming the city streets and
squares. Municipal governors and the corporative urban institu-
tions, such as guilds and confraternities that shared municipal au-
thority with them, regularly and ritualistically, took to the streets.
They staged parades, festivals, and ceremonies that asserted control
over the city's common spaces as they displayed and celebrated
their authority, just as Boone's and Estabrook's contributions to
this volume illustrate. It was no accident, no simple residue of tra-
dition, that parades wound so obsessively through city streets,
passing, marking, and implicitly claiming iconic spaces-a bridge
where a revolt had once been staged, a square where previous
governors had sworn their oaths, or a church where the best peo-
ple were buried or the city's patron saint worshipped.34
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:
Similarly, as the emergent territorial state entered the city,

claiming sovereignty and ultimately winning it from municipali-
ties in this region, the struggle for hegemony centered on urban
spaces. As Boone and Estabrook again demonstrate, this rivalry is
most evident in the ritualistic encounters between states and mu-
nicipal governors. The royal entries of the period, whether by
count, king, duke, or emperor, were grand occasions, but not sim-
ply because they presented the state. They made the state. By en-
tering the city, traversing its streets and occupying its squares, the
noble personage was literally "taking" the city. Government as
done in public transformed the public. No longer communal, the
public and, by extension, the city were now the property of the
emerging state. Having achieved that position, the state could
withdraw from the streets. Louis XIV staged no royal entries into
cities of his realm.
Throughout the late medieval period, the spaces of cities
were revolutionary agents of change. They were the specific
places-not realms or spheres-that made urban society and cul-
ture possible and gave cities and their citizens their power. Under-
standing how these spaces were produced, and how they
produced the people who inhabited them, is key to understanding
the nature of urbanity in the late nmedieval and early modern
North. Opening these spaces to full view exposes the threat that
cities posed to the established feudal order, the reasons for cities'
eventual victory in that struggle, and the logic of the centuries-
long encounters between city and country, city and sovereign.
Burgtundian Ceremonyand CivicLife in LateMedievalGhent (Ithaca, 1996). On politics and ritual

in general, see David Kertzer, Ritual, Politicsand Power(New Haven, 1988).

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Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe

Author(s): Peter Arnade, Martha Howell, Walter Simons

Arnade, Howell, and Simons

ing to a history of urban spatialism too often written as a meta-

speaks to historiographical and theoretical issues not anticipated in

SPATIAL THEORY AND ITS THEORISTS Most of the work on ur-

working, traveling, eating, sleeping, or playing; representations of

6 Ibid., 265, 27I.

made place, and thus space, unworthy of independent analysis.

7 John Agnew, "The Devaluation of Place in Social Science," in idemandJames S. Duncan

Scholars of modernity's spaces may have newly discovered

THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE Although Lefebvre's emphasis on

towns to the French countryside. They disturb chronology as

brought a clarification to competing private property rights and a

terizes productions of space as performances, emphasizing that

political authority, enacting the rituals of rule appropriate to these

in contrast with the spiritualJerusalem, which monks laboriously

portant. The reconstituted stories sharply demarcated the urban

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND METHOD Notwithstanding its contribu-

eventually spread beyond urban boundaries to dominate the Eu-

I6 Enne, Die europiischeStadt des Mittelalters(Gottingen, 1972; 3rd. ed. 1979), I.

Gierke. Although Ennen is no Marxist, her emphasis on the ur-

Products of the nineteenth century, the works of these schol-

In Lefebvre's terms, space in these cities coalesced into "ab-

Taking such revisionist studies at their word, some critics

23 A good overview of Anglo-American historiography in the larger context of Renais-

This interpretation had no room for Weber or Pirenne and

25 Gene A. Brucker, RenaissanceFlorence(Berkeley, 1969; 2d ed.), Ioo-IoI.

26 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "'Kins, Friends, and Neighbors': The Urban Territory of a

eth century, when long-standing social, ritual, and cultural prac-

narratives that have long threatened to reduce cities to footnotes,

founding it with space but always insisting on space's materiality.

monopolized their original activities or preserved their original

28 See Fernand Braudel, Civilizationand Capitalism.II. The Wheelsof Conmmnerce

spaces of the late medieval northern city. Women were visible on

Weidenfeld's scope can be widened: Since municipal authorities

Similarly, as the emergent territorial state entered the city,

Burgtundian Ceremonyand CivicLife in LateMedievalGhent (Ithaca, 1996). On politics and ritual

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