Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe by Miri Rubin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe by Miri Rubin Sybil Jack Rubin, Miri, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020; hardback; pp. 204; 5 b/w illustrations, 2 maps; R.R.P. $105.00; ISBN 9781108481236. Every so often, as historians do more research and further revise and extend their opinions about the meaning of the material available on a subject, it becomes necessary for a new survey to be composed in order to present the latest interpretations of the particular subject studied to a wider audience. The history of medieval cities has reached that point, and Miri Rubin's present work provides a short, readable introduction to current approaches to a thousand years of life in European cities, which she sees as a coherent entity that came to an end around the Reformation when new developments emerged. In the way of such overviews, the footnotes are as vital as the text, since they provide the detailed evidence for the informative summaries that emerge from them. In her magisterial survey of urban life across a continent before the Industrial Revolution, Rubin includes references to a wide range of cities which had been previously neglected but that have been the subject of intense recent study. Written with insight and charm, the exposition is attractive in itself and moves beyond the political management of the cities to open up a new understanding of the variety of life in different places and different periods. While cities remained primarily the centres of local, and in some places state-wide, administration, other more commercial functions also contributed to the existence of most cities. These generated demand for different goods and stimulated a wider and more complex [End Page 255] economic structure across the Continent as a whole. Rubin's focus, however, is not primarily on why the cities existed but on what sort of life they provided for their inhabitants. The population inside any European city was rarely, if ever, homogenous, and part of the new historical approach investigates how distinctively different groups who settled in various cities lived together and interacted, what roles they played, and the ideas they promoted at different times. While the heritage varied with the place and nature of the city, Rubin draws their diversity into a consistent explanation of the wider urban development in the period and the importance of the growing urban role in the European economy. As she expresses it, after a brief but illuminating account of past urban historians, 'Cities emerge as processes, unfinished, never fixed, always in flux' (p. 22), and it is around this that she shapes her account of the way in which migration was critical to the growth of an urban economy. As Rubin shows, a much clearer understanding has sprung from historians who persevered in examining the slight material that related to the widespread movement of interrelated groups of Jews into northern France and Germany in the period before the Black Death. They showed how the continuing links of one community to another formed what we might term an international connection of ideas and practices, even though the Jews's success and survival crucially depended on the protection of the local lords, and the relationships within different cities were often very unlike. She also shows how Jewish and Christian ideas and behaviour in many cities, despite Jewish persecution and extortion, were part of a symbiosis. The relationships were, however, never secure—the legislature varied from place to place in defining the imperfect position of Jews in their cities. The issues were even more complex where there were also Muslims. 'Fragile but enduring' (p. 58) is her key definition, a situation that was undermined in the fourteenth century when a focus on public blame for evident destruction and distress became essential. Religious debate on the common good shifted throughout Europe towards condemnation of Jewish ideas and practices, especially that of usury, with the determination that cities should be purified. Rubin also analyses the position of women in cities from the novel viewpoint of identifying them as strangers, in the same way as Jews or Muslims were, and marking out sub-groups of...