This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
Much of the lives of urban dwellers in early modern Europe was played out in city streets and squares. This is where people came together to work, shop, and eat, but also to fight, celebrate, show their devotion, and express their grievances. Through looking at European street life between 1600 and 1800 this special subject tackles key questions on how early modern urban society was shaped and how this changed over time. As such, this source-based module will address important historiographical controversies on order, power, and control, on the relationship between popular and elite culture, and on the appropriation of urban space. It will encourage students to reflect critically upon the impact of fundamental changes in early
modern European society such as the growing role of the state, urbanisation, the disciplining process, and the rise of the public sphere.
By using a combination of visual and textual sources, participants will examine urban street life through topics such as the economy of the street, protests and riots, street crime, poverty, and entertainment. Students will be challenged to assess the importance of concepts such as honour and dishonour, order and disorder, formality and informality, and public and private,
and how these concepts shaped urban experiences in different European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By studying street life in its broadest sense, the participants will be required to engage with various (sub-)disciplines such as cultural history, social history, art history, economic history, and gender history.
Weekly three-hour seminars.
This module will be assessed by 40% coursework, 60% examinations.
There will be two 2-hour exams in the Summer term, each worth 30% of the final module mark.
R. Laittinen and T.V. Cohen (eds.), A cultural history of early modern European streets (Brill, 2009).
Donatella Calabi, The market and the city: square, street and architecture in early modern Europe (Ashgate, 2004).
Eleanor Hubbard, City women. Money, sex and the social order in early modern London (Oxford 2012).
Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly women and female power in the street literature of early modern England and Germany (Virginia, 1992).
D.T. Garrioch, 'Sounds of the city: the soundscape of early modern European towns', Urban History, vol 30, issue 1, (2003), pp. 5-25.
M. Calaresu, 'From the street to stereotype: Urban space, travel and the picturesque in late eighteenth-century Naples', Italian Studies 62(2), 2007, 189-203.
K. van Strien, Touring the Low Countries: Accounts of British travellers 1660-1720 (Amsterdam, 1998).
J.L. Salman, (2006). Between reality and representation. The image of the pedlar in the 18th century Dutch Republic. In M. van Delft & F. de Glas (Eds.), New perspectives in book history. Contributions from the Low Countries (pp. 189-202). Zutphen: Walburg Pers.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
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