City Limits?: The European City
1400-1900
September
30 – October 2, 2004
Conference Abstracts
Arab,
Ronda. “Commercial Exchange and London City
Comedy: The Shopkeeper’s Compromised Masculinity”
On the London
stage, early seventeenth-century city comedies satirized the urban culture of
commerce and leisure activities that flourished around them. While courtiers and other gentlemen were
mocked as effeminate for excessive consumption and over-refinement, tradesmen
and shopkeepers faced other threats to their manliness as a consequence of
their engagement in the increasingly material world, most specifically from the
dictates of the market that required submissive and humble manners to even the
most irritating and inferior of customers.
In Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Honest Whore the character of Candido, a master linen draper,
is so mild-tempered, patient and submissive to the laws of the market that he
infuriates his wife, exasperates his servants, and is gulled by the city’s
courier pranksters.
Back
to schedule
Bailey,
Melanie. “French Nationalism and post-1848 Parisian
Values”
Parisians both suffered and enjoyed the changes that the
revolution of 1848 wrought in their city.
Opera and science commentators for the city’s newspapers used their
columns to interpret their experiences as citizens of ‘their’ city and France. Through their articles, they reflected and
articulated perspectives about the traditions that defined them and the hopes
that ought to inspire them. My paper
will analyze the relationship between the individual, the city in which he
lived, and the nation of which he was a citizen in the context of the mid-19th
century upheavals in France.
Berg,
Keri. “Off the Map: Mobility and the Reading of Paris,
1830-1848”
From 1830-1848, Paris
witnessed an increase in population, spurred on by a wave of urban
migration. Editors capitalized on the
changing cityscape, launching les
physiologies: short, illustrated texts designed as social guides to the new city and its
inhabitants. Les physiologies’ mapping
of Paris
consisted of localizing various social figures within the city, linking subject
and habitat. Yet for Honoré de Balzac,
this correlation ignored the prospect of mobility. Indeed, with the advent of urban development
and the democratization of society, Parisians could now move from one part of
the city and, in theory, from one class to another. The notion of mobility thus problematizes the
mapping of Paris,
as citizens, from the grocer to the mid-wife, can easily change geographical as
well as social coordinates. Physical
mobility then becomes a metaphor for social advancement, testing the limits of
both les physiologies’ spatial and
social map.
Back
to schedule
Blackstone,
Mary. “Pageantry and Community in Early
Modern Norwich”
The Tudor regimes of sixteenth century England
restructured the country’s power base by incorporating an unprecedented number
of urban centres. Newly incorporated and
long established communities like the city of Norwich invested in pageantry,
ceremony, architectural projects, historical and geographical documentation and
systems of education, correction and punishment – all of which were intended to
underscore and enhance their increasing power and status. Some of the most ‘performative’ of these
manifestations of power, however – the pageants and the players – provided a
contested site for negotiating less than predictable and sometimes volatile
interpretations of key concepts of “community,” “common wealth” and the
emerging English nation-state.
Candelaria,
Matthew. “The Victorian Cockroach”
This paper first analyzes the changing attitudes toward the
city as an unnatural space free from the contamination of animals during the
Victorian period, then shows how these intersected with new attitudes toward
domesticity typified by the rise of housekeeping manuals. Then the paper looks briefly at the origins
of entomology as a hobby dedicated to collecting exotic specimens, which
prejudiced its results away from common insects, before showing the shift away
from these origins during the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, the paper shows how this shift in
focus leads to a greater emphasis on the cockroach as the characteristic insect
and also the singular enemy of humanity.
Back
to schedule
Coenen,
Saskia. “Synagogues and Tourism in Early
Modern Amsterdam”
This paper examines the dynamic interaction between
newly-built and highly visible Jewish synagogues and their local/foreign observers
in seventeenth and eighteenth century Amsterdam. Whereas synagogues had traditionally been
small and hidden from public view, during Holland’s
Golden Age Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews created conspicuous religious structures
that became attractive sites on the tourist map of Europe. An analysis of contemporary travelogues,
letters, and diaries offers a window into the responses of foreign and local
travelers, not merely to the increasing public presence of Jewish architecture
in the city, but also to the place and participation of Jews in the Dutch Republic
at large.
Cooperman,
Bernard. “Marginalized Inclusion:
Ghettos in Early Modern Europe”
Ghettoization of the Jews in the Early Modern period has
usually been treated as a sign of increasing ethnic hostility and religious
persecution directed from the dominant majority to the minority group. Seen in the context of urban development,
however, the ghetto represents a negotiated response to complex economic change
and shifts in the balance of trade and power.
Careful study reveals the ghetto not as a retreat from medieval
hospitality but – paradoxically – a new form of toleration. It also provides the setting for the development
of new, stronger institutions of self-governance among the urbanized Jews
themselves.
Back
to schedule
D’Amico,
Stefano. “Post-Plague Milan and New Traders, 1630-1650”
After the devastating plague of 1630-31, the population of Milan grew from 75,000 in
1633 to more than 100,000 around 1650.
This demographic recovery was certainly the result of sizable migratory
flows. Large numbers of people from the
countryside, faced with the decline of agriculture and the collapse of rural
industries, had little choice but to migrate towards the urban centers and Milan was the only city
offering favorable opportunities. This
paper reflects upon the composition of these migratory flows, the new
settlements established in the urban fabric, and the effects of this massive
immigration on the urban productive and commercial systems.
Fisher,
Alexander. “Alls wie mann inn krieg
pflegt zue thuen: Music and Catholic Processions in Early Modern Augsburg”
In early modern Augsburg, the
largest biconfessional city in the Holy Roman Empire, spectacular processions
on the feasts of Good Friday and Corpus
Christi contributed to the process of
confessionalization by dramatizing Catholic dogma for observers of both
faiths. Music, ranging from Marian
litanies to military music, played no small role in the effect of these
processions, underlining their confessional specificity and guaranteeing that
their effects would be felt throughout the city. Extant statements by organizers, observers,
and listeners suggest that the sounds of Catholic processions could reconfigure
the sacred geography of this divided city, at least temporarily.
Back
to schedule
Friedrichs,
Christopher. “The European City
in Global Perspective, 1500-1800”
A long-standing intellectual tradition emphasizes the
differences between European and Asian cities in the pre-modern world. The political autonomy of some European cities
and the role played by some citizens in European municipal government led
theorists like Max Weber to posit a fundamental difference between “occidental”
and “Asiatic” cities. Yet while this
distinction can help us understand certain features of European urban history,
it obscures some other vital aspects of European urban life in the pre-modern
era. For when we move beyond the formal
structures of urban governance to explore how urban groups and sub-communities
actually organized themselves to pursue their collective interests, we find
remarkable parallels between cities located all across the Eurasian continent
from the Atlantic seaboard to Japan. And
in doing so we come to realize that what we know about Asian cities can help us
to better understand the real character of European cities in the early modern
era.
Germani,
Ian. “‘Gateways of the Republic:’
Besieged Cities in the Imagination of Revolutionary France”
This paper provides analysis of republican decrees,
speeches, prints, plays and press reports to reveal the besieged city as an
important metaphor in the Jacobin discourse on terror. It argues that the republican discourse on
the besieged city provides the clearest evidence of a link between war and
terror in the revolutionary imagination.
That discourse justified terror in terms of military necessity. Nevertheless, it also betrayed a more
fundamental preoccupation with republican unanimity which implied that the
terror had a moral purpose transcending the achievement of victory.
Back
to schedule
Hoople,
Robin. “Urban Iconography and
Architectural Text: Henry James, Florence (1877)
and New York
(1905)”
Abstract unavailable at this time.
Jenstad,
Janelle Day. “Mapping Early Modern London: A Hypertext Atlas
Project”
A hypertext atlas of early modern London,
based on a 1560s woodcut map, allows one to navigate horizontally through space
or vertically through the early history of London, thus replicating the experience of
the reader of John Stow’s Survey of
London. Jenstad discusses the
topographical knowledge required to live and work in London,
demonstrates the atlas, and compares the navigational system of the website to
the cultural work of the map itself, of Stow’s Survey, and of other guides to London life.
Back
to schedule
Johnson,
Julie. “Rethinking the Fin de Siècle City: the Parisian New
Woman”
Julie Johnson explores the complexities and contradictions
of the independent “new woman” by examining how a group of notable women in the
arts traversed the often unsettling and dangerous path of public and urban life
in Paris of the Third Republic.
While historians have thoroughly explored the obstacles and misrepresentations
that the new woman faced as she emerged into the urban, public spaces of
fin-de-siècle Europe, they have largely
ignored how her life was not just a hard-won achievement of independence and
equality. Public life in the fin-de-siècle city was also difficult and
even unsatisfying, filled with anxiety, danger, and an imperiled sense of
self. This paper will show that these
artists experienced "newness" in unstable and contradictory ways,
both liberating and troubling, as they made their way in a cultural public of
art viewers in the tumult of a fully modern Paris at the end of the nineteenth
century. It examines both how a sense of crisis in Paris not only allowed
these women to enter new public spaces, but also the ways in which the
challenges of urban life often led them to rearticulate and re-evaluate their
private lives in art.
Top
Back
to schedule
Land, Isaac.
“Where Was Sailortown? Urban
Geography Meets Subculture Theory”
The new field of Atlantic history has emphasized the role of
port cities as sites of encounter for sailors, slaves, and other oppressed
groups. This approach challenges
traditional images of “sailortown” as a self-contained maritime ghetto,
distinguished from adjacent neighborhoods by occupational differences and the
impenetrable jargon of the tight-knit brotherhood of seamen. My paper applies subculture theory to this
apparent contradiction, asking to what extent the difference or apartness of
sailors was occupation and to what extent it was performative and
self-conscious. The answer may help us
better understand sailors’ capacity to form political alliances with other
groups in Europe and elsewhere.
Back
to schedule
Lewis
Hammond, Mitchell. “Leprosy, the Pox,
and Urban Life in Early Modern Germany”
I investigate perceptions and social responses to leprosy
and the “French Pox” in German-speaking cities of the late-16th and
early-17th century. The paper
discusses the difficulty of diagnosing these diseases, distinguishing them from
one another, and the consequences for charitable institutions. I suggest that medical practitioners
increasingly emerged as guarantors of individual and social health in the early
modern city.
Lewis
Hammond, Susan. “Music and the Urban
Agenda in Christian IV’s Copenhagen”
Christian IV (r. 1588-1648) redefined Denmark’s relationship with Europe by adopting
international models to revitalize his court and capital of Copenhagen.
The king enhanced the city’s cultural prestige by printing two
monumental collections of Italian music: Giardino
novo I-II (Copenhagen,
1605-06). The internationalist ambition
in repertory, artistic quality, and dedicatees of these anthologies served the
representational needs of the Danish king and capital, and helped the kingdom
rid its image as a cultural backwater.
My paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes the
creativity embedded in reception, the complexity of perceptions of backwardness
and isolation, and the integration implicit in urbanization.
Back
to schedule
Martin,
Kim. “Man or Woman, Widow or Lover? Elizabethan and Jacobean Representations of
the City of London”
My paper will use literary texts to come to an understanding
of how London’s citizens conceptualized this
city under the reign of both Elizabeth
I and James I. The city becomes embodied
by a single gendered figure in the pageantry of both Thomas Dekker and Ben
Johnson. Because the city is the locale
and the focus of many pageants, as well as contemporary poetry and plays, it is
important to try to grasp how it was understood by its citizens. By looking historically at literary texts,
the paper attempts to understand the decision of these authors to gender their
capital.
McKean,
Matthew. “Rethinking the Fin de Siècle City: London’s Crowds”
Matthew McKean examines the depiction of urban crowds in
British working-class fiction at the fin de siècle in order to determine the links
between degeneration and crowd theory.
Themes such as crime, poverty and drunkenness, criminality, violence and
urban decay all straddle ontological categories. They were also commonplace in the fictional
representation of London’s
city crowds – particularly in the working-class novels of George Gissing,
William Morrison, Arthur Besant, and Margaret Harkness. In this way, novelists’ depiction of
degenerate, urban crowds are a means of reconciling theories of collectivity
and regression. This paper argues that
crowds should play a much larger role in degeneration theory and that
degeneration should factor more prominently into crowd theory. Both of these theoretical models, moreover,
depend entirely on the various and variegated trappings of the fin-de-siècle
city. Slum novelists depicted the crowd
as starving and desperate, as criminal and aggressive, as animalistic and
savage, and as drunkards and female; London’s fictional East-End streets were
always crowded and its inhabitants impoverished and dangerous. This paper proposes that theories describing
the fin-de-siècle city be reconsidered within the cultural context of the
period.
Back
to schedule
Olson,
Kory. “A Tale of Two Maps: The
Transformation of Paris from an Imperial to a Republican City 1870-1878”
Paris
in the 19th century was a city constantly in transition. Maps printed throughout the century indicate
a city that went from a crowded 18th century capital to that of
Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s world showplace in the Second
Empire. With large, elegant
boulevards, the map of the imperial Paris
found in Adolphe Joanne’s Paris Illustré
was one of industry and modernity, a city open for business. Three years after Napoleon III’s unveiling of
Paris to the world at the 1867 Exposition
Universelle, Paris
in 1870 was a city for those in power.
Paris
in 1878 was again host to the Exposition Universelle. However, the city presented eight years later
had changed. The fall of Napoleon III
late in 1870 ended the Empire and brought forth the Third Republic,
the form of government that would last until World War II. The capital of France was no longer an imperial
city; by 1878 it was solidly a republican city, based on equality and
citizenship. By comparing the image of Paris from Paris Illustré with that found in the
1878 Plan Bijou de Paris, a map of the city and the Exposition grounds in 1878,
I will show not how the French capital had been transformed physically in those
eight years, but how the use of the city by its citizenry and tourists had
changed. With more leisure time afforded
to the working classes and facilitated transportation, the Exposition Universelle
of 1878 was not a chance to show Paris to the world, as in 1867, but to France
herself.
Panagia,
Davide. “The Edicola, the Piazza and the
Noise of the Utterance”
In the paper, I examine the role of the Italian newsstand
(edicola) in shaping the public life of the piazza in the late 19th
& early 20th century Italian city. I take examples from one case study – the
town of Casalmaggiore
– and the power dynamics of space and place that developed around the
architectural layout of the city landscape.
Back
to schedule
Saklofske,
Jon. “Between History and Hope: The
Urban Centre of William Blake and William Wordsworth”
The city can be a metaphor for either history or futurity, a formal
structure of established tradition or a fluid space of evolutionary possibility
and hopeful excess. William Blake and William Wordsworth engage with each of
these perspectives in relation to late eighteenth-century London. Wordsworth, London's
tourist, idealises the historical reality of the city by rejecting its people
while Blake, London's
resident, realises a future ideal of the city by imaginatively redeeming its
people. The contrasts and intersections between these views challenge
stereotypical Romantic attitudes towards the city while demonstrating the
effects of a "mutual imposition" between city and author.
Sankey,
Margaret. “Edinburgh
After 1707: Second City or Center
of Sedition in the 18th
Century”
The Union of 1707 transformed Edinburgh
from a working national capital into a cultural symbol for Scots, whose
opinions of the Union varied considerably, from delighted participation in the
machinery of British government, to continual plotting on behalf of the exiled
Stuarts, who regularly promised the restoration of Scotland’s
independence and the restoration of Edinburgh
as a center of government. My paper
draws on 18th century papers, diaries and printed works from
residents of all political and religious stripes to trace Edinburgh’s shift
from a city of political to cultural and intellectual importance by the end of
the 18th century, including its subversive use as a center of
Jacobite plotting, the dispensing of patronage from London, the growing social
life of urban elites, the intellectual glow of the Scottish Enlightenment, and
the importance of Edinburgh as an educational center for American colonists.
Back
to schedule
Sinclair,
Struan. “The Men of the Crowd: Transparency
and Opacity in the Victorian
City”
E.A. Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” stands as a meditation on
the corrosive power of guilt and a fable of inaccessible psychologies. The man
of the crowd is a closed secret, epistemically available intermittently and only
to those possessing the requisite expertise.
Poe’s story, I shall argue, reflects a widespread nineteenth-century
fear of criminality as a latent, progressive infection incapacitating the
social body via the figure of the criminal.
Framing the criminal classes as a social problem was inflected by
multiple discourses fundamentally concerned to recast opacity as transparency.
Swales,
Robin. “A Purified New Jerusalem? London
1654”
The 1650s have been little studied. Early in 1654 optimism was reflected in the
expansion of retail shopping, conspicuous consumption, trading in works of art
and a high quality book trade. A ‘court’
returned with negotiations for peace with both Dutch and French. There were improved relations with government
and hopes of a longer settlement. There
was emphasis on ‘environmental issues’; projections for street cleaning;
improvements in water supply; building regulations on lines later followed in
the 1660s, and a comprehensive attack on traffic movement. Much had been achieved before the Restoration
and the Great Fire to gain a sense of renewal.
Back
to schedule
Swift,
Megan. “Apocalypse and Apotheosis in the
Myth of St. Petersburg”
Alexander Pushkin created the foundation myth for Petersburg with his 1833 epic poem “The Bronze Horseman”,
a myth that inspired Dostoevsky’s city of cruel premeditation and Gogol’s
stories of fog-obscured, fantastical Petersburg. At the center of Pushkin’s poema stands the
intriguing figure of the Horseman himself, the indomitable metallic image
shaped by Falconet in his Bronze Horseman, the 1782 monument to the legendary
founder of the city. This paper will deal
with images of apocalypse and apotheosis in a textual and cultural analysis of
Pushkin’s poema, Falconet’s statue, the mythologized figure of Peter himself
and the mythopoesis of the founding of “the most abstract and intentional city
in the world”.
Tráser-Vas,
Laura. “Berlin from a Bird’s Eye View: Literary
Texts and Architectural Paintings between 1830-1860”
German city novels appeared on [the] literary scene somewhat
later due to the lack of a prominent capital in the nineteenth century. Spanning the period from the Napoleonic
occupation to the 1848 revolution, the novels by Georg Hermann, Wilhelm Raabe
and the paintings of Eduard Gärtner explore the modernizing Berlin.
The aim of this paper is to discover the various meanings of the
elevated perspectives that all three artists apply in their works. While comparing the spatial organizations of
the city in these texts and painting, I will elaborate on the representational
limits of the city and the subjectivity of the artists’ visions.
[j.r.a]
Walkowitz,
Judith R. “Feminism and the Moving Body”
In 1894, Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant, a feminist social purity
activist successfully challenged the dancing license of the Empire Theatre of
Varieties in Leicester Square,
London. My talk focuses on Mrs. Chant’s theory of
female bodily display, its spatial implications, and its relation to
geopolitical alignments and metropolitan journeys. I argue that one striking opposition
overlooked by historians of the event was the competitive patriotism at stake
in the assertion of freedom of movement.
Mrs. Chant’s body politics bore a family resemblance to some of the
cultural forms and imaginative tropes of music hall entertainments. Like the performance practices of the music
hall, Mrs. Chant was herself engaged with fantasies of urban and transnational
movement and with kinesthetic forms of expression that linked her to
Anglo-American female reform traditions and networks. The “Battle
of the Empire” brings into relief the cosmopolitan city of global consumption.
Back
to schedule
Watt,
David. “Hoccleve and the City”
Abstract unavailable at this time.
Top