Das Bild der Stadt in der Neuzeit 1400–1800

Abstract

The early modern city remains a slippery historical phenomenon. Jan de Vries's landmark study of populations, European Urbanization (1984) first established 1400–1800 as unique for cities on demographic grounds. For de Vries, as for Fernand Braudel, the period bracketed by the Black Death and Napoleon's ascendance was distinct and coherent for towns, but at the same time charged with a certain heterogeneity. Commonly defined in rclation to what it was not — either ‘late medieval’ or ‘protoindustrial’ — the city before 1800 was in reality anything but singular; individual locales remained economically as well as culturally unique. De Vries showed how somt' would-be metropolises (London, Paris, Amsterdam) gTew steadily after the fifteenth century, while others (Naples, Madrid) watched their populations explode briefly and then stagnatc until the nineteenth. Recent books like Christopher Friedrichs's (1995) affirm tllese conclusions in some respects, discount them in others, but in general wrestle with tlleir inlplications for source material — do the 0et's face it) dlY data of court records and agricultural returns really have completE authOlity in determining some city as 'early modern?' Friedrichs's look at daily life, for example, found little to suggest that the quotidian changed at all for most urban dwellers between 1100 and 1800. COILstructing such periodizations with statistical material alone has become increasingly sllspect, particularly when interdisciplinary urban studies (such as Christine Boyer's 199.J, book) provide evidence of multiple, intermingled modernisms. The portrait of urban culture btfore industrialization as 'static and undifferentiated may change in light of different sources. Contextualizing thc premodern city's role as site and subject of self-representation in images is now a task for more than just the historian of art.