M24 - Public Renaissance

Author(s)

Fabrizio Nevola (University of Exeter)

Keywords

Material Culture, Everyday, Experience

Abstract

Much of the monumental built fabric of European cities took shape in the early modern period, shaped by the agency of ruling authorities and élites, whose power was given physical expression in formal street designs and classicising architecture, and emphatically articulated through staged but ephemeral ceremonial events. And yet these same spaces were also defined by the everyday social actions of gender, work, family and religion enacted by individuals and groups, the insiders and outsiders that made up the urban polity. All these left their mark on the urban fabric – in the street networks, public spaces and local nodes – where they gathered and interacted. A range of evidence, from ephemeral sound marks, to cheap print, street signs and tabernacles all contribute to defining the material experience of urban public space.

Drawing on case examples from across Europe – with a particular focus on centres considered through our project – this paper considers the built and material traces of everyday life and sociability, from street corners to taverns and bakeries, market squares and fountains to preachers’ pulpits and print shops. By turning attention to these “practiced spaces” of the urban ecosystem it points to the agency of often-overlooked places and objects hidden in plain sight in museums and collections as well as in streets and buildings of many European cities. 

Author(s)

Massimo Rospocher (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italian-German Historical Institute)

Keywords

Public Sphere, Popular Politics, Political Space

Abstract

In the last two decades, in the fields of political history and the history of communication there has been a growing attention to the theaters of events and to the materiality of spaces where early modern publics came together, discussed politics, and exchanged opinions. Considering space as a social construct rather than a mere container, there has been more historical research on the agency of political space.

The spatial approach to political history has widened the analytical confines of political space and renewed the debate on the (post-Habermasian) public sphere. Early modern historians have focused not only on official or institutional political spaces (such us palaces, town halls and courtrooms), but also on informal political spaces (places of social interaction such as barbershops, public baths, churchyards, coffee houses, pharmacies, taverns, streets, squares, markets, bridges). This new political topography includes both ephemeral spaces such as benches or street corners and more constructed ones, such as churches or loggias. The spatial approach has not only illuminated a new urban geography of a public sphere in early modern Europe (and beyond); it has also highlighted the role of ordinary people as political actors, formally excluded from institutionalized power and previously left out of the traditional political narrative. New historical actors such as artisans, butchers, merchants, or notaries populated the early modern public arena of political debate.

After an historiographical overview of the impact of the spatial turn on the new political history and on the recent history of political communication, this paper will focus on the material evidence of the uses of political spaces in Early Modern Europe (1450-1650). Aiming to offer a street view of early modern politics, this talk seeks to illustrate how ordinary people could interact with power and in which public spaces their political actions could take place.

Author(s)

Sabrina Corbellini (University of Groningen) and Margriet Hoogvliet (University of Groningen)

Keywords

Spatial Networks, Public/private, Social Engagement

Abstract

This paper will address the transformation of the "inwardness" and the "privacy" of late medieval religiosity towards social engagement and public activity. The scrutiny of this process is particularly pertinent and relevant if we take into account social groups which have not been at center of scholarship on late medieval religious transformations, such as artisans. As a matter of fact, their pivotal role in the social tissue and in the transformation of the cityscape is essential for understanding processes of innovation and transformation. Moreover: while in scholarship, the focus has mainly been on textuality and transmission of knowledge, seldom the impact of this significant transformation on public spaces and cityscapes has been taken into account and a methodological reflection on the possibilities to retrieve the visibility of religious transformation has rarely been discussed. The challenge is to find within the framework of new spatial approaches in cultural and religious history new avenues for research and to take into consideration the importance of public space and its transformations as main research topic in our collaborative project on Public Spaces. The reconstruction of spatial networks of religious transformation, as proposed in the paper, will significantly contribute to broadening up research horizons on late medieval and early modern urban life.

Author(s)

Enrico Valseriati (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italian-German Historical Institute) and Umberto Cecchinato (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italian-German Historical Institute)

Keywords

Violence, Public Spaces, Dissent

Abstract

Renaissance urban everyday life was frequently disrupted by disputes played out in public settings. These dramas constituted a prominent part of political life for individuals and factions. They continuously redesigned the balance of power and interests among men and women of elites as well as among common people. Urban public spaces were stages for the communication of political dissent and enmity. This language relied on a manifold of material means – labels and cartelli, musical performances, burle and mocking rituals – and impacted the surrounding environment.

The paper will explore the rich criminal funds of Verona focussing on some case studies from the Renaissance. According to Marin Sanudo's records on the Italian Wars (1509-1517), the citizenship of Verona expressed political and private affiliations shaping the materiality of urban settings. During the Imperial occupation, people demonstrated against the foreign government by crowding churches and squares with noises, replacing statues of St. Mark and distributing pro-Venice ephemeral papers. Women shouted the name of the Evangelist from balconies, while soldiers marked the doors of their enemies preparing for vengeance. Following these events, social tension filled the squares, streets and corners of the city, turning them into places of ritualized clashes between clans. The second part of the paper will show how individual interests merged with larger political conflicts and how citizens used the same material means to act against their private enemies, shaping the urban environment for their personal goals.

Author(s)

Juan Gomis (Universidad Católica de Valencia)

Keywords

Gender, Chapbook, Popular Print

Abstract

The notion of “separate spheres”, a powerful spatial metaphor in early feminist historiography, has been challenged since the 90s revealing that, in spite of the heavy stress of conduct literature on their separation, women’s and men’s worlds overlapped and were often mixed in early modern society. Also, the very notions of “public” and “private” are neither self-evident, nor can they be exactly mapped onto the world of the streets, squares and markets, and that of the home, respectively, as the limits between those were porous both in practical and symbolic terms. In this sense, research of the last decades has explored how gender worked in the ways in which women and men occupied, moved about, and described space in early modern cities and towns, and on how moral prescriptions and lived experience interacted.

This essay looks at early modern popular literature as a source which, combined with others such as court records, can give precious glimpses into how the gendered organisation of space was predicated, lived, negotiated, and sometimes challenged. Drawing on our own research in Spain and on examples from Italy, France, and Britain, we will revise the gendered roles of women and men as sellers of chapbooks, as readers or more often listeners of broadside ballads recited or sung in the squares and street corners, as subjects of discourses that moralised in public the hierarchised roles and spaces in and beyond the home, and as protagonists of stories that romanticised unruly behaviours disrupting those very principles.

Author(s)

Blanca Llanes Parra (Universitat de València)

Keywords

Gender, Social Control, Urban Space

Abstract

Scholarship on women’s criminality, a topic long overlooked by crime historians, has experienced significant growth in recent decades, offering novel and deeper insights into this phenomenon. Studies of this nature have shown how female criminal activities during the early modern period were shaped by economic and social factors, as well as by women’s (restricted) possibilities to participate in public life. This paper adds to this body of research by examining the impact and patterns of crime in Madrid during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from a gender and spatial perspective. Drawing on primary sources including judicial documentation from Madrid’s highest tribunal -the Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte (the “Hall of Judges of the Royal House and Court”)-, pardon records, early modern Castilian law and legal literature as well as period chronicles, it looks at possible gender differences in the way male and female offenders used Madrid’s urban space. Special attention is given to sexual crimes and the Sala’s efforts to control these transgressive behaviors through the active intervention and surveillance of the urban space. In doing so this study also seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about the traditional and contested dichotomy between public and private spheres as well as to enhance our understanding of women’s interaction with urban public spaces in the past.

Author(s)

David Rosenthal (University of Exeter)

Keywords

Mobility, Digital, Media

Abstract

In the past two decades notions of space and increasingly mobility have become part of the armoury of academic discourse in early modern urban history. These tools help unlock interpretations of the way streetcorners, squares, taverns, city gates, tabernacles, or coats of arms acquire material roles in the sensory and kinetic experience of everyday life, roles that are mapped to class, gender and ethnicity. More recently, the geolocative and audiovisual affordances of mobile media have allowed historians to re-articulate such investigations of lived experience in public space in public space and as public history. This entails adapting research to the affordances, the potentials but also the limitations, of digital mobile formats. It also involves an additional translation of research into public history, raising issues such as the use of first- and second-person interpretation, as well as the use of mobile media to interrogate, complicate and expand public memory and heritage.

By following several case examples from research through to public output, this paper draws out this process of translation. Drawing primarily from the Hidden Cities app trails – presently the leading example of locative augmented reality (AR) for early modern history – it asks how we understand practiced places in terms of the material culture of the street, event, the senses, social activities and relations, and teases out the techniques used and issues raised in translating these insights into public experiences with mobile media.