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Cities in late medieval Europe: the promise and the curse of modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2012

MARC BOONE
MARC BOONE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Ghent, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, BE-9000 Ghent, Belgium
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Abstract:

This article examines how modern historiography has developed quite differentiated views on the way medieval cities have given expression to renewal and to creativity. ‘National’ traditions have played a highly influential role in modifying the general views articulated in the major syntheses produced by scholars such as Max Weber and Henri Pirenne at the beginning of the twentieth century. An almost jubilant way of looking at the city as the hotbed of modernity gave room, in the decades after the Great War, to pessimism and a negative view on urbanity, before a more nuanced and positive view has been re-established after World War II and in the course of recent paradigmatic changes.

Information

Type
Surveys and speculations
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , May 2012 , pp. 329 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Echoing the many pessimistic predictions about the future arising from the frantic pace of urbanization throughout today's globe, the United Nations recently estimated that in 2008 the proportion of the global population living in urban areas had reached 50 per cent and further predicted that in 2030 six out of ten people on this earth will be city dwellers. Existing cities, the report continued, cannot absorb this influx of residents, and the ensuing crises will be particularly extreme in much of Africa and Asia, where governments are simply not equipped to address what will be overwhelming demands for housing, healthcare and employment.Footnote 1 The gloomy predictions may very well be justified, but it is perhaps also useful to recall that this is not the first period of rapid urbanization in history and not the first to provoke fears of socio-political disorder, moral collapse and demographic disaster. Urban history may reflect these fears, but it still reflects as well the hopes that urbanization has inspired. And, for this reason, it may be useful to gain insight into how historiography presents these shifts in how generations of historians have looked upon the urban phenomenon and have considered it, at given moments and in a given context, to be also a token of progress and of modernization. In what follows, I shall focus on this ambivalent vision and how it is contingent upon the changing paradigms in history itself. Since most of the examples and models have been designed on the basis of urban experiments in medieval western Europe, I will refer to cities from that part of the world in the first place, though many visions that their experiences have underpinned were designed to be applied on a broader and more general scale.

While historians have long acknowledged these cities’ importance in western European history, for they were the nodes of the commercial revolution that gave birth to the modern market economy, they have not consistently been interested in urbanity itself – what it meant to live in cities, why people so ardently sought to live as urban citizens and what rights and privileges attended their status.Footnote 2 The uneven history of their explorations reveals a great deal about the ideological underpinnings of much of our historiography, and the principal purpose of this article is to investigate the ways that the lives of historians themselves and the history of our profession have had a lot to do with the way scholars have told – or not told – the story of urbanity in this age.

This historiography is in many respects a reflection of bourgeois values and bourgeois ascendancy, and to enshrine it as the full story of Europe's urbanization is to write out the many horrors that attended the rush to cities in this or any other period of history, western or global, including our own age. At the same time, however, we would be unwise to dismiss either the history of medieval cities or the historiography that has given us the stories we have about them. For all our nostalgia about country values and rural pleasures, after all, westerners today choose to live in cities, and they have been making that choice for centuries, ever since that epoch over a half a millennium ago when people first made commercial cities powerful actors in European politics. By 1500, just after the first wave of European urbanization that allows for quantification, one can posit that about 15 per cent of the population in western Europe lived in cities. This number hides important ‘regional’ differences, for at the same moment the two most urbanized parts of Europe, northern and central Italy and the southern Netherlands, were up to 30 per cent urbanized, a proportion that as always needs to be put in context and to be critically examined regarding the standards used.Footnote 3 By 1800, the global figure for European urbanization had risen to about 21 per cent, but with industrialization the pace of urbanization increased dramatically so that already by 1910 just over 50 per cent of Europeans were urbanites.Footnote 4

My claim is certainly not that the late medieval city was simply an early version of western cities today, nor is it that they should serve as direct models for urban policy-making today. Some of the fears that medieval cities inspired amongst the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the day, and many of the attractions that drew people to cities in the later Middle Ages, are at work today.Footnote 5 That conflicted history of repulsion and attraction ineluctably returns us to historiography itself, where the city has alternately been portrayed as the hotbed of the evils associated with modernity, on the one hand, and on the other as the crucible where modernity gave birth to extraordinary innovation and creativity.

Historians’ ambivalence

Like history itself, historians’ accounts of European urbanization have been an unstable mix of light and dark – celebration on the one hand, condemnation or suspicion on the other. This alteration reveals a great deal not just about our historiographical traditions but also about the history that gave rise to these traditions. Historians of the late nineteenth century saw medieval urbanization in a largely positive light, as the seedbed of modernity, and they understood modernity to mean a specific form of ‘democracy’, embodied by the driving and creative bourgeois forces of society. This understanding of urbanity was closely tied to the professionalization of history writing, the emergence of what is still called ‘scientific’ history writing in Europe.Footnote 6 What is particularly interesting here is that it was in the advanced industrialized and urbanized parts of Europe, limited at that period to western Europe, that what Peter Clark has characterized as a ‘town history’ with a ‘boosterism’ quality took root. In these texts, industrial and commercial advancement, communal cultural life and public resources, civic pride and civic identity were celebrated. In short, cities were beacons of modernity. And modernity was almost without blemish.Footnote 7

It is no wonder that one of the leading historians of that generation, indeed one of the greatest historians of medieval urbanity, was the Belgian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935). The son of a successful entrepreneur in textiles in the booming industrial town of Verviers and a firm believer in progress and liberal politics in the context of the nineteenth-century nation-state, he became the incarnation of renewed urban history and the voice of a generation of historians.Footnote 8 The history of the recently constructed Belgian nation-state (Belgium came into existence only in 1830 after having split from the united Netherlands), eager to justify its existence alongside ‘big’ European powers such as France and Germany, was to become Pirenne's best-known work: his Histoire de Belgique. Pirenne's personal ‘openness to innovation, the key sign of modernism’ made him, to cite further the qualification of Pyenson and Verbruggen, ‘an apostle of modernism’, just as the nation, whose history he so successfully described in a publication that made his reputation as a first-ranking scientist in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, incarnated modernity.Footnote 9 At the end of the nineteenth century, the same nation was, indeed, one of the strongest industrialized nations and hence a successful illustration of the collective energy unleashed by the bourgeois and capitalist spirit.Footnote 10 It was evident to Pirenne that such a story belonged to cities and that the history of urbanity in Europe had ineluctably led to this moment. Pirenne's fascination with cities began early in his professional life, with his Ph.D. thesis of 1883. Describing the constitution of the medieval town of Dinant, a city along the Meuse, he set the tone: ‘J'ai cherché à faire, pour une ville belge, ce qui a été fait, pendant les dernières années, pour tant de villes allemandes et françaises.’Footnote 11

Although known primarily as a social and economic historian, Pirenne was also an institutional historian, as Jan Dhondt perspicuously pointed out in a 1966 article entitled ‘Henri Pirenne: historien des institutions urbaines’.Footnote 12 In fact, a careful reading of Pirenne locates him as a predecessor to many of the scholars associated with the new Institutional Economics, and it is those studies rather than Pirenne's more famous Mohammed and Charlemagne that have best stood the test of time. Pirenne was also a beneficiary of the then dominant tradition of positivist and historicist scholarship, which emphasized careful analysis of sources, respect for ‘facts’ retrievable from them alone and the technical skill needed to extract that information. History was thus professionalized as a ‘science’, just as was announced by the banner behind which Gabriel Monod, the director of the influential Revue historique, marched in 1883 during the funeral of the French radical republican Gambetta: ‘l'histoire est la science maîtresse’.Footnote 13 That approach was evident even in Pirenne's early articles on urban constitutions, which appeared in 1893–98 in the same journal. These studies in urban history culminated in his 1910 Les anciennes démocraties des Pays-Bas.Footnote 14 If we now return to these studies, we are struck by how successfully the extent to which Pirenne was able to combine and bridge the best elements of the dominant schools of history writing of the day, the French and German. Pirenne had received part of his training in both Paris and Berlin (and Leipzig) and was very much aware that he was writing the history of what he called ‘le point sensible de l'Europe’ where the Germanic and Latin parts of the continent met and merged.Footnote 15 In the second phase of his career during the Great War, which broke out just when he had acquired international recognition, he would discover, however, just how ‘sensitive’ a place this was.Footnote 16 Despite that unhappy future, Pirenne's scholarship combined, as did none other, the best elements of both traditions and helped bridge stubborn divides between socio-economic, institutional and cultural history. This combination gave Pirenne an almost holistic view of the positive effects of an urbanity that combined peculiarly urban institutions with the creative powers of generations of merchants and highly skilled artisans in the two most urbanized parts of Europe: northern and central Italy on the one hand, the Low Countries on the other.Footnote 17 At the centre of these histories were studies of communal organizations, guilds, confraternities, all of which were thought to express a set of values and a sense of collectivity that had almost religious inspiration. Pirenne's interpretations, although perhaps most clearly summarized in his Anciennes démocraties, reached their widest audience in the little book he published after his grand tour in the United States in 1923, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. Acclaimed as a classic from the start, it is still read in university classrooms throughout the English-speaking world.Footnote 18

Collapse of a paradigm

Yet after the Great War, it was impossible to sustain the optimism about cities and the modernity they represented. For Pirenne, as for almost all of his contemporaries, there were no more intellectual certainties. Just like the medieval monuments that were destroyed in the course of the war – the great drapery hall of Ypres, the old university library of Louvain, the cathedral of Reims – celebratory histories of cities were in ruin. Historical scholarship itself seemed illusory; it was ‘the end of a great illusion’ as the Italian medievalist Cinzio Violante has put it in describing the state of mind of Pirenne and his fellow historians after 11 November 1918.Footnote 19 Scepticism about society's foundations and especially about ‘progress’ and modernity was now the rule, doubt also about history's capacity to trace clearly any such development and thus to serve as a guide in making choices about the future. Urban history itself seemed beside the point, for it could no longer serve as the laboratory for studying progressive modernity. Speaking particularly of British historiography, Peter Clark has emphasized that it was not only that the German tradition, which had once so profoundly influenced the study of urbanity, was unpopular and unfashionable after 1918, but also that the aversion to urban history was intensified by what he characterized as a ‘growing trend against cities in British culture’.Footnote 20 The decades after 1918 thus saw an outpouring of publications and research on rural history; in this wave of nostalgia of the 1930s, scholars emphasized the culture of the countryside, a place of supposed simplicity and purity that had been almost destroyed in the trenches of World War I. Although we do not yet have similarly detailed studies of this trend in Belgian and German historiography, there is no doubt that there too rural history displaced to a large extent urban history. It was only in certain places like the Scandinavian countries that had kept out of World War I that urban history prospered.Footnote 21 In Germany, the much acclaimed book by Oswald Spengler on the fall of western civilization voicing the intellectual despair during the Weimar Republic situated twentieth-century Germany in the winter phase of human history, characterized by ‘tendencies of an irreligious and unmetaphysical urban cosmopolitanism’.Footnote 22

Rescue came indirectly, in the form of the French Annales school.Footnote 23 The Annales did not in the first place attach the same importance to urban history as had been the case in the preceding period of historicism, when books such as the classic handbook, even bible, of historicism, the Introduction aux sciences historiques of Charles Seignobos and Charles-Victor Langlois (1863), dominated.Footnote 24 Both Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the founders of the Annales, had been at the front during the Great War, and both invested much scholarly energy, Bloch in particular, in rural history.Footnote 25 Gradually, however, the emphasis that Annalists put on economic and structural elements provoked a renewed interest also in urban phenomena – the urban economy, the effects of commercialization on social relations and the meaning of city space – all recalling the kind of history Pirenne had written (who, not incidentally, had originally been asked to head up the Annales). It was, however, the so-called second generation of the Annales, under the direction of Fernand Braudel, that made a clear ‘urban turn’. It began with regional studies such as Pierre Goubert's seminal book on the city and countryside of Beauvais in the early modern period (1960), which became a model for this approach. By then, the combination of rapidly accelerating urbanization in France and the intellectual exhaustion of rural studies put towns again on the (historical) research agenda. That Braudel himself was also significantly influenced by Pirenne and knew his work very well also helps explain the Annalists’ (tardy) ‘urban turn’.Footnote 26 In his Civilisation matérielle of 1967 (the first of the three-part series), Braudel thus described the essential function of cities: ‘Pas de ville sans marché et pas de marchés régionaux ou nationaux sans villes . . . Enfin, pas de villes sans pouvoir à la fois protecteur et coercitif.’Footnote 27 In other words: no city without market and no city without the power both to protect and to coerce. Pirenne could easily have written this sentence.

There were other moves in a similar direction, most notably among the Chicago school of urban sociology. In the years after the Great War and led by Robert Park (1864–1944) and colleagues, these scholars offered a analytical model for the study of cities from a socio-spatial perspective, thus pioneering an urban ethnography of social behaviour that focused less on classes and groups than on interactive behaviour among individuals and groups. Their interests lay in the affective dimensions of communities undergoing the abrupt transition from local place to urban grid: ‘The city is a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in this tradition.’ Footnote 28 Their approach was first registered among British historians in the work of men like Asa Briggs and H.J. Dyos, but in the decades since has left its mark on all research on urban history, including medieval urban history.Footnote 29

The Germans: absent, then present

The Germans, once at the centre of western historiography and chief architects of nineteenth-century urban historiography, were, however, largely absent from these developments, isolated in traditions constipated by attacks on Rankean method and later contaminated by Nazism and its uses of historiography. European historical scholarship in the Pirenne tradition, once a brilliant merger of the French and German traditions, was now coming apart, and urban historiography suffered as a result.

The important German tradition reached back well into the middle of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the legal, political and economic institutions and on the constitutional authority that took root in the urban world, with works by historians Otto von Gierke (1841–1921), Gustav von Schmoller (1836–1917) and Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915) and by sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), the Germanic tradition reached its apogee in the years before and shortly after World War I.Footnote 30 Lamprecht in particular had personally and profoundly influenced Pirenne, but their relationship would come to a dramatic halt during World War I when Lamprecht endorsed the ‘Aufruf an die Kulturwelt’, an apology for the German aggression against Belgium in 1914.Footnote 31 Lamprecht even came to Brussels in 1915 in order to convince his Belgian friends that it was Belgium's destiny to be part of a new German Empire.Footnote 32 But he came in vain: he did not even succeed in meeting Pirenne in person and got no closer than the office of Guillaume Des Marez, a direct student of Pirenne and by that period professor at the Free University of Brussels and city archivist.Footnote 33 The breach with the German tradition was a matter of intellectual divergence but also, and given the personal histories involved, a deeply felt event for people like Pirenne, Bloch and others who had suffered as a result of World War I.Footnote 34

On the German side, however, there were several different historiographic voices. The cultural science (Kulturwissenschaft) of Max Weber (1864–1920), and Georg Simmel (1858–1918), was fundamentally different from the cultural history (Kulturgeschichte) of Karl Lamprecht, which was positivist, developmental and finally nationalist, its nationalist bias becoming quite clear when Lamprecht acted as one of the 93 subscribers who signed the ‘Aufruf an die Kulturwelt’ on 4 October 1914.Footnote 35

Max Weber was probably the most influential representative of the German tradition, and it was his version of medieval urban history that would dominate after the crises of both world wars. Like Pirenne, he argued that the western city, born in the central and late Middle Ages, was identified not only by its market functions, but also by its corporative capacity to produce and execute its own laws. In effect the medieval coniuratio, which Weber understood to be an expression of what he called a herrschaftsfremde Charisma, was essentially a form of emotional community based on a mutual contract. In this, Weber owed much to Otto von Gierke's notion of free unity (Freie Einung), but he drew his prime examples from the Italian commune in its most classical form, which dated from the thirteenth century, the period of the so-called popular regimes.Footnote 36 His posthumously published and unfinished book Die Stadt (the city), drawn from the writings he had left in the journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik under the title Die Stadt. Eine soziologische Untersuchung, made the argument crystal clear: the western city was simultaneously a defensive organization, a market, the independent generator of law and justice, and the possessor of rights to self-government.Footnote 37 Weber's ideas about the city were not always well understood, however, and his arguments are sometimes misrepresented in contemporary scholarly literature.Footnote 38

Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War and during the Weimar period – not to mention the period of fascism – historical research was manipulated and subjected to ideological agendas that violated the terms both of older historicism and Ranke's positivism as well as ‘scientific’ history writing more generally and Weber's form of historical sociology.Footnote 39 In their place came an approach propagated by Stefan George and his followers, who provided a reductive reading of a great philosophical tradition reaching back to Nietzsche, which had argued that history was best considered a guide for the Volksgemeinschaft, the people's community – and that the job of historians was to provide lessons from the past, useful for both the present and future.Footnote 40 While Stefan George may have worked hard to make a revival of a ‘secret and eternal Germany’ reminiscent of the imperial grandeur of the past, and may even have contributed to undermine the Weimar Republic, his spiritual endorsement of the new nationalist movement of Hitler did not mean he engaged himself at the latter's side. For one thing: he never allowed himself to become a member of a nazified cultural organization. Since he died in 1933, he did not have to witness the reality of the new regime that had come to power in the same year.Footnote 41 In the cultural climate imposed on Germany in the years following the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, history, and so too urban history, did not have to make claims to truth in either a Rankean or in Weberian sense; it had to be a servant of ‘life’. Hence, although Weber had distanced himself from Rankean positivism and historicism, his effort to replace that paradigm with a more holistic and cultural approach fell before this powerful criticism that, born of political ambition and a dominant ideological frame, easily trumped both Rankean historicism and the ‘objectivity’ it promised as well as Weberian abstractions.Footnote 42

In both Weimar and Nazi Germany, the anti-urbanism of historical scholarship was, in effect, a version of anti-modernity which in itself implied hostility to all things urban.Footnote 43 The result was a clear shift towards Landesgeschichte and agrarian and territorial history, an approach that would prove useful in laying claims to European territory.Footnote 44 Historians would thus easily be lost in what has been labelled the ‘Night and Mist’ (Nacht und Nebel) of the Nazi party. Already by the late 1920s, the Rhine had become a Schicksalsstrom (river of fortune); on its left bank, in France, was the Nouvelle Histoire of the Annales scholars with its interest in individuals, groups and their mental and social constructs, while on the German right bank the dominant tone in historical research was linked with notions such as Volk and Gemeinschaft – with their pernicious subtext of race and blood.Footnote 45 In reaction, after World War II and the Nazi period, there seemed to be a return to an ideal of Rankean objectivity and the explicit rejection of the idea that historical scholarship had direct relevance for contemporary society and politics. As in Ranke's day, historians returned to the study of the state and political history understood as the recitation (or recovery) of facts. The kind of history associated with Marc Bloch and the Annalists found few adherents.Footnote 46 That Bloch had been murdered by the Nazis surely had something to do with this, but, as we have seen, urban history was late to be put on the agenda by the Annalists as well. Clearly, however, the Germans would have done well to ask what they could learn from their French colleagues.Footnote 47

Urban history thus seemed to have no direct future in Germany and only in France under Braudel's generation of Annalists did there seem to be stirrings of new interest in urbanity. But it was in Western Germany, not France, that urban history, particularly medieval urban history, found new life, a life going back, directly or indirectly, to Weber and to another great German tradition, that of the history of law. In this particular respect, the work of Hans Planitz (1882–1954) Die deutsche Stadt im Mittelalter (dating from 1954) needs to be mentioned.Footnote 48 Planitz belonged to a tradition of legal historians who, in Germany and abroad, have dominated more specifically the research agendas concerning both the character and the origins of urban constitutions.Footnote 49 The general move in Germany is, however, best represented by Edith Ennen (1907–99), professor in Bonn. Although trained in the tradition of Landesgeschichte and a student of Franz Steinbach (1895–1964), she made her name internationally with Die Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt (1953). Gradually – very gradually – Weber's ideas found new life in what was beginning to be called Städtegeschichte (urban history), although at the still active Institut fur vergleichende Städtegeschichte (Institute for Comparative Urban History) at the University of Münster, founded in 1969 by Heinz Stoob (1919–97), a student of Hermann Aubin (1885–1969), the initial approach was neo-Rankean.Footnote 50 In keeping with that tradition's emphasis on fact gathering, objectivity and neutrality, the Institute produced urban atlases and the like. Although hardly useless exercises in a nation where most cities had been reduced to rubble and traces of the medieval past buried, the work nevertheless lacked interpretative power.Footnote 51 Ennen's book of 1953 was a follow-up to her Die europäische Stadt des Mittelalters als Forschungsaufgabe unserer Zeit (The European medieval city as research programme for our time) which had first appeared in 1941 but was subsequently re-issued in several editions. There, Ennen had first distanced herself from the Landesgeschichte that until 1945 had been conceived as a tool for the present and brutally put into service by the Nazis, under Franz Petri's (1903–93) Westforschung programme. Like both Aubin and Steinbach (both Ennen and Stoob were their students), Petri belonged to the war generation and had been at the front in World War I; their revisionist views made them hostile to Pirenne and his school.Footnote 52 During the occupation of Belgium the Nazis imposed this programme on Belgian universities.Footnote 53 Pirenne, long the bête noire of the Westforschung, would have turned in his grave.Footnote 54 The Westforschung project was devoted to the study of the border regions west of the Rhine, a project intending to offer historical and geographical insight that would legitimate a revision of the peace (Diktat) of Versailles that had been ‘imposed’ on Germany at the end of World War I.Footnote 55

Of course, German historians did not all embrace the crude categories of Nazi ideology that easily; many of them and certainly the representatives of the older generation continued to consider history as an apolitical subject, meaning essentially it was not tied to party politics. The professional organization of the historian's guild, however, was subject to a deliberate attempt to nazification.Footnote 56

But Ennen's book, whatever its murky origins in a tradition of highly politicized scholarship were, left a wake, inspiring a new body of work on the medieval city as a political body that uniquely combined individual rights with collective values. Cities in this mode were considered to have generated cultural interaction by facilitating the sharing of social space and thereby to have produced and protected artistic and socio-political experimentation. City dwellers were, in effect, ‘forced to be free’, and came to understand that their freedom was bequeathed by the community and won in community struggle. This insight was most prominently brought forward in yet another great tradition which after World War II revived in the former German Democratic Republic. It is probably not a complete surprise that the man who was responsible for the continuation of a certain view on urban history in the former DDR or Eastern Germany, though he himself never became a member of the communist party, was directly linked to Henri Pirenne. Heinrich Sproemberg (1889–1966) had indeed been formed in the great German tradition of among others Gustav Schmoller, and belonged personally to the liberal tradition of the Berliner bourgeoisie.Footnote 57 When he came to intellectual maturity, however, he saw his chances of an academic career thwarted, first because of his critical stance towards the military and political logic of Wilhelmine Germany, afterwards in the course of the Weimar Republic and during the Nazi period, for reasons of intellectual jealousy and racial prejudices, since he was partially of Jewish descent. He recalled this hesitant start in the profession in one of his last works, an autobiographical sketch in which he put his intellectual relationship to Henri Pirenne at the centre. Sproemberg had indeed written abundantly on subjects related to Belgian and Flemish history and in doing so had first established intellectual contacts with Pirenne in the months before World War I had started. Both men would continue a mainly epistolary relationship till very shortly before Pirenne's death in 1935.Footnote 58 Sproemberg, condemned to an existence in the margins of historical research till the end of the Nazi regime and the establishment of the German Democratic Republic, kept the bonds with Pirenne and with Marc Bloch and the French Annales historians alive, however.Footnote 59 His own scientific activities promoted first the study of religiously inspired social movements, and second in importance the study of the commercial organization of the German Hanse. Both were important items with direct links to urban history, though of course the latter was so in a much more explicit way. The Eastern German link to urban history evident in both Pirenne and Weber and in the study of societal modernism was advanced in several works, all of them inspired by Sproemberg or by his students’ scientific activity. This influence is clearly discernible in works by Erika Engelmann on the communal movement and by Evamaria Engel on the ‘German city in the Middle Ages’.Footnote 60 In a very bland mode, even after the German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Engel acknowledged Marxist inspiration, referring to Marx's interpretation of medieval communal movements, an interpretation which he in turn had based on the analysis already made by the French historian Augustin Thierry (1795–1856).Footnote 61 Therefore both in Western and in Eastern German historiography, bridges were constructed to overcome the many gaps ahead: the conceptual one between Marxist and liberal historiography, the temporary one separating actual research from the great tradition of Max Weber and his predecessors, von Gierke, Schmoller and the like.Footnote 62

In a recent survey of German medieval research, Otto Gerard Oexle concludes that historians now agree that medieval society was as much a ‘communal’ society as a ‘feudal’ society. His prime examples – and there could be many more – were taken from the work of Gerhard Dilcher (who has also written extensively on Max Weber) and Eberhard Isenmann.Footnote 63 Both scholars emphasize the importance of brotherhood-like organizations in urban society: in the organization of burghers, of artisans, of religious and economic organizations, in the maintenance and inculcation of peace and control of behaviour.Footnote 64 Peter Blickle, inspired both by Weber and the Lamprecht tradition of the late nineteenth century, has pleaded for years, not least in a European ESF programme concerning the coming about of the modern state, that the notion of Kommunalismus, one of the key notions (he uses the word Elefantenbegriffe), captures the ethic of medieval society just as much as do other concepts like feudality, parliamentarianism and so on.Footnote 65

Of course, Blickle not only refers to urban movements when he speaks of communal movements, but the city played a fundamental role in the development of this concept. It is also important to understand that this principle cannot be extended to all European medieval cities, for they did not all meet this standard. Both Pirenne and Weber took cities of the southern Low Countries and northern/central Italy as their examples and tended to extend the model far beyond these boundaries. These were the two poles of what urban historians and geographers used to call the ‘blue banana’ – the urban belt stretching in the form of a banana over Europe, linking south-eastern England, the Low Countries, the Rhineland, western Switzerland to northern Italy. While hardly representative of all medieval cities, it is nevertheless true that they were centres of artistic accomplishment and economic energy of such a scale as to produce a cultural pattern that others sought to emulate.Footnote 66

Knut Schulz's synthesis of scholarship regarding the twelfth- and thirteenth-century communal movement in this so-called blue banana makes exactly this point and brings us close to the present. His too-often ignored book ‘Denn sie lieben die Freiheit so sehr’ (‘They loved liberty so much’ perhaps not a title apt to attract the right audience) was published in 1992.Footnote 67 A year earlier, the University of Leipzig had founded a ‘Karl-Lamprecht Gesellschaft’ – a significant move in a nation that had recently been unified and perhaps a signal of the return of an historiographic tradition that had been abandoned for almost a century.Footnote 68

The new historiography in historical context

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, we perhaps have sufficient distance to assess these developments, now 20 to 30 years, even more, in the making. Seen from this perspective, the historiography just reviewed has led scholars to take up, anew, questions concerning the relationship between individual rights and political organization at the level of the city, region and state alike. Contemporary political developments surely helped fuel the interest – the collapse of the east–west divide and the end of the ‘cold war’, which had dominated European history since World War II, along with the discussions around the enlargement and institutional deepening of the European Union. These changes may be considered a European variant of larger processes involving globalization, the emergence of a modern communication society and the consequently ever more rapid mobility of people, things, ideas and diseases – the very issues that so concerned policy-makers at the United Nations when they warned of the dangers attending global urbanization today. For historians, an associated question is the following: are we prepared to keep the nineteenth-century nation-state as our frame of reference, or should we take much more seriously the different levels at which community, individual rights and duties and political order are constituted?

The recent work on medieval urban history discussed in this article can help with this question. As Knut Schulz commented in the introduction to his overview of the different twelfth-century communal movements, the old discussion of whether medieval society was really ‘democratic’ is irrelevant. Rather, four issues should govern our study of these societies: the spatial organization of political activity and of public debate; how rule was legitimated; what duties and rights attended self-government; and individual rights and liberties. The first issue, that of the ‘public’ and ‘space’, recalls Jürgen Habermas’ Öffentlichkeit, a concept that has inspired work across fields and chronology.Footnote 69 Habermas of course spoke of another age and did not intend ‘space’ in quite the same material way as it is intended in studies of medieval cities.Footnote 70 Research ever since has made the medieval city one of the loci where such a political space was prominent.Footnote 71 Yet, another recent survey of medieval social history, this one focused on England, makes a similar argument. In discussing the question of whether the Middle Ages knew an ‘individual’ in the sense traditionally thought to have been produced during the Renaissance by a cultural process of ‘self-fashioning’, Miri Rubin argues that in late medieval society (and I would emphasize ‘urban’ society) growing individualism interlocked with participation in collective communal endeavours.Footnote 72 Similarly, Richard Britnell, in his discussion of economic life in Britain's comparatively modest urban settings (London is of course the exception), stresses that a commercial mentality necessarily produced or at least combined with a sense of collectivity because decisions about commerce had to be taken by the group as a whole even if individuals were to reap their separate rewards.Footnote 73 Herman Pleij's studies of Dutch vernacular literature in the late Middle Ages exposed the same issues: individual rights and freedoms were achieved – and understood to have been achieved – in collective action.Footnote 74

Thus, historians of the medieval city and of medieval culture more generally may be on to something. In a multitude of ways, the medieval commune was indeed an experiment in communal living, an effort to reconcile individual and collective needs. Schulz is also right: the question of whether these cities were ‘democratic’ is what the French call a ‘faux problème’, or yet another manifestation of a too simple Whig view of history, since in most parts of Europe centralized states made the dream of urban independence just a dream or, as was the case in Italy, most of the communes evolved into city-states dominated by a small group of elite families, eventually giving way to a ‘signoria’ under the princely authority of one family. The Italian example, in fact, gives the lie to the overly optimistic views of Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work regarding the resilience of the medieval ideal.Footnote 75 Nevertheless, the medieval communes succeeded in launching a set of social and legal constructs which in the long run did have a fundamental influence in the search for an equilibrium between private interest and the commonwealth, the bonum commune. Footnote 76 As Aaron Gourevitch observed in his classic book on medieval culture, the fundamental input of medieval urbanity was a crucial one: the type of the ‘burgher’, member of a free and independent urban community. However highly developed on the cultural level the cities of both the Byzantine and Islamic world may have been, they failed to develop this social type, the basis for further social and economic developments that help to explain the European Sonderweg.Footnote 77 But more than the set of rules and texts, however important they may have been for further developments, the coming about of the first real Republic on Europe's soil (‘the fear of some, the envy of others and the wonder of all their neighbours’ as the famous quote from Sir William Temple in 1673 goes), the Dutch Republic, cannot be explained without referring to the centuries-old accumulation of urban ideology and political practices in the medieval communes of the southern Low Countries where so much began.Footnote 78

Although, as I hope to have demonstrated, the history of the medieval city has been consistently informed by the ideological predilections of its historians, it may nevertheless be worthwhile to return to the debates put on the agenda by preceding generations, by Pirenne, Weber and so many others. Urban history and urban studies are indeed booming in many respects: the number of new reviews and research programmes that focus on the city and the success of individual conferences bear witness to that energy. Reorienting history towards what distinguished it as urban offers a possible way out of the stalemate and suffocating specialization that historical research seemed to be heading towards in recent times. Historians and students of urban society have begun to understand that the medieval city was, if not the birthplace of ‘democratic modernity’ in the celebratory mode of nineteenth-century historiography, an experiment in social organization that produced a unique partnership between the individual and the collective. It will do well to consider what made that happen, made it work and made it fail, when thinking about the present.

In his famous Apologie pour l'histoire ou le métier d'historien (1941–42) Marc Bloch recalls a 1928 visit with Henri Pirenne to Stockholm following an international congress held in Oslo. Both men had just arrived, and Pirenne asked ‘Qu'allons-nous voir d'abord? Il paraît qu'il y a un hôtel de ville tout neuf. Commençons par lui’ (What will we see first ? It seems that they have a brand new city hall here. Let's start by visiting that). And Bloch adds that Pirenne seemed to want to prevent him from asking a question by adding ‘Si j’étais antiquaire, je n'aurai d'yeux que pour les vieilles choses. Mais je suis un historien. C'est pourquoi j'aime la vie’ (If I were an antique dealer I would be interested in old things, but I'm an historian, that's why I love life in all its diversity).Footnote 79 A lesson, perhaps, for historians today as they contemplate our urban past.

References

1 The report World Urbanization Prospects. The 2007 Revision. Highlights was published by the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, available through: www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2007/2007WUP_Highlights_web.pdf. The cited first key finding of the 2007 revision is on p. 16.

2 The bibliography on European urban history has become very large. Two recent surveys include Pinol, J.-L. (ed.), Histoire de l'Europe Urbaine, 2 vols. (Paris, 2003)Google Scholar, and Clark, P., European Cities and Towns, 400–2000 (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar, with a short historiographic survey and bibliography. See also a series of (often nationally organized) specialized journals, in addition to this journal: Histoire urbaine (France), Stadsgeschiedenis (Belgium and the Netherlands), Città e Storia (Italy) with specific bibliographies.

3 See the remarks by Chittolini, G., ‘Urban population, urban territories, small towns: some problems of the history of urbanization in northern and central Italy (thirteenth–sixteenth centuries)’, in Hoppenbrouwers, P.C.M., Janse, A. and Stein, R. (eds.), Power and Persuasion. Essays on the Art of State Building in Honour of W.P. Blockmans (Turnhout, 2010), 233–7Google Scholar.

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5 This is the important central statement in a collection of essays concerning the urban history of the Low Countries (an English version is forthcoming with Taylor and Francis, London): Lucassen, L. and Willems, W. (eds.), Waarom mensen in de stad willen wonen, 1200–2010 (Amsterdam, 2009)Google Scholar (contributions on the Middle Ages by M. Boone and W. Blockmans).

6 See the remarks referring to several ‘national’ traditions in works such as Bentley, M., Modern Historiography. An Introduction (London and New York, 2003)Google Scholar; Lingelbach, G., Klio macht Karriere. Die Institutionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und der USA in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2003)Google Scholar; Melman, B., The Culture of History. English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar; Delacroix, C., Dosse, F. and Garcia, P., Les courants historiques en France, XIXe–Xxe siècle, 2nd edn (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar.

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8 The classic biography of Pirenne remains of course Lyon, B., Henri Pirenne. A Biographical and Intellectual Study (Ghent, 1974)Google Scholar. An important biographical note was written by Pirenne's most influential student Ganshof, F.L., Pirenne, Henri, in Biographie Nationale, 30 (1958)Google Scholar, electronically available at http://digitheque.ulb.ac.be/fr/digitheque-henri-pirenne/biographie/la-vie/index.html. A recent version by Prevenier, W., Marie, Pirenne Jean Henri Otto Lucien, in Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek, 19 (2009), cols. 753–70Google Scholar. A not so traditional and rather atypical appraisal of Pirenne as an urban and economic historian, reading as a kind of anti-Lyon, is the short but brilliant text of Mundy, J., ‘Henry Pirenne: a European historian’, Journal of European Economic History, 6 (1977), 473–80Google Scholar. See also Keymeulen, S. and Tollebeek, J., Henri Pirenne, Historian: A Life in Pictures (Leuven, 2011)Google Scholar.

9 Pyenson, L. and Verbruggen, C., ‘Elements of the modernist creed in Henri Pirenne and George Sarton’, History of Science, 49 (2011), 377–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 A recent reappraisal of the fundamental period of Belgian history in Witte, E., Hentenryk, G. Kurgan-Van and Lamberts, E. et al. , Nation et démocratie 1890–1921. Actes du colloque international Bruxelles, 8–9 juin 2006 (Brussels, 2007)Google Scholar, passim, and Deneckere, G., Les turbulences de la Belle Epoque 1878–1905 (Brussels, 2005)Google Scholar.

11 ’I tried to do for a Belgian city what has already been undertaken during the recent years for so many German and French cities’, published in 1889 as Histoire de la constitution de la ville de Dinant au Moyen Âge in the series of monographs of the faculty of Letters of Ghent University where Pirenne had been appointed three years earlier in 1886 as professor of medieval history.

12 Dhondt, J., ‘Henri Pirenne: historien des institutions urbaines’, Annali della fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa, 3 (1966)), 81–129Google Scholar (reprinted in the collection of Dhondt's essays: Hommes et pouvoirs. Les principales études de Jan Dhondt sur l'histoire du 19e et 20e siècles (Ghent, 1976), 63–119, with a critical introduction by Wim Blockmans). The article's first chapter opens with a remarkable sentence which deliberately seems to recall the style of Pirenne, or tries to make a pastiche: ‘Henri Pirenne possédait une capacité incomparable à projeter son message dans les esprits individuels de ceux qui l'approchaient comme dans celui des ensembles intellectuels qui l'entendaient. Ce fut bien certainement son atout principal. Que l'on y joigne une intelligence véritablement somptueuse et le non-conformisme scientifique, caractéristique “sine qua non” du grand savant’ (‘Pirenne disposed of an almost incomparable capacity to inculcate his message in the hearts and minds of those who dealt with him, or of the intellectual groups he addressed. Without questioning this was one of his most important gifts. One should add to that a remarkable intelligence and a scientific non-conformism, the ultimate characteristic of any great scholar’): Hommes et pouvoirs, 65.

13 On the journal (first issue published in 1876) and Monod: Delacroix, Dosse and Garcia, Les courants historiques en France, 117–25.

14 The first translation in English, bearing the wrong, but given the specific circumstances of World War I understandable, title: Belgian democracy (Manchester, 1915), was afterwards repeatedly re-edited under the more correct title Early Democracies in the Low Countries. Urban Society and Political Conflict in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New York, 1963).

15 Tollebeek, J., ‘“Au point sensible de l'Europe”: Huizinga et Pirenne’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 74 (1996), 429CrossRefGoogle Scholar (re-edited in his De ekster en de kooi. Nieuwe opstellen over geschiedschrijving (Amsterdam, 1996), 243).

16 A testimony to the success and renown of Pirenne before the Great War is the booklet edited on the occasion of the birth of the Foundation Pirenne when he was honoured for 25 years of teaching in Ghent: Manifestation en l'honneur du m. le professeur Henri Pirenne. Bruxelles, 12 mai 1912 (Mons, 1912).

17 The comparison introduced by Pirenne continues to provoke historical questionnaires and research. For a recent evaluation of the question: Crouzet-Pavan, E. and Lecuppre-Desjardin, E. (eds.), Villes de Flandre et d'Italie (XIIIe–XVIe siècle). Les enseignements d'une comparaison (Turnhout, 2008)Google Scholar

18 The first English edition appeared in Princeton in 1925 – it is still a widely read book at American colleges. The French edition was published in 1927, immediately hailed by Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the Annales (see infra), in the following words ‘Un de ses livres comme seuls sont capables d'en produire les hommes qui, ayant excellé toute leur vie dans une profession, ont par surcroît le don d'animer ce qu'ils touchent. Il est signé Henri Pirenne’ (‘One of the books written by an author who has dominated all his life his profession and who has been given the quality to breath life into all they touch upon’): Febvre, L., Vivre l'histoire (ed. Mazon, Brigitte) (Paris, 2009), 306Google Scholar.

19 This feeling is clearly brought to our attention in Violante, C., La fine della ‘grande illusione’. Uno storico europeo tra guerra e dopoguerra, Henri Pirenne (1914–1923). Per una rilettura della ‘Histoire de l'Europe’ (Bologna, 1997)Google Scholar; a review of this book by Toubert, P., ‘Henri Pirenne et l'Allemagne (1914–1923)’, Le Moyen Âge, 107 (2001), 317–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recently, a German version was published containing an important introduction on Violante by Giorgio Cracco: Violante, C., Das Ende der ‘grossen Illusion’. Ein europäischer Historiker im Spannungsfeld von Krieg und Nachkriegszeit, Henri Pirenne (1914–1923) – Zu einer Neulesung der ‘Geschichte Europas’ (Berlin, 2004)Google Scholar

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21 For Belgium, see Billen, C. and Boone, M., ‘L'histoire urbaine en Belgique’, Città e Storia, 5 (2010), 3–22Google Scholar. In Germany, the paradigm change occurring after World War I led to a reappraisal of the ideas already formulated in the second unzeitgemässe Betrachtung (untimely meditations) by Friedrich Nietzsche, published in 1874 ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’ (On the use and abuse of history for life): see Oexle, O.G., ‘Staat – Kultur – Volk. Deutsche Mittelalterhistoriker auf der Suche nach der historischen Wirklichkeit, 1918–1945’, in Moraw, P. and Schieffer, R. (eds.), Die deutschsprachige Mediävistik im 20. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern, 2005), 72–4Google Scholar. For the remarks concerning Scandinavia, see the discussion following the presentation of parts of this text at Helsinki in April 2009 (see n. *).

22 Cited and put into the intellectual context of Weimar Germany in Evans, R.J., The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2004), 121Google Scholar. The citation from Spengler: Spengler, O., Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. I: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Vienna, 1918), 73–5Google Scholar.

23 Named after the French review founded in 1929 for which not surprisingly its two famous founders, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, had in vain tried to have Pirenne accept to act as its first president, see Delacroix, Dosse and Garcia, Les courants historiques en France, 200–95; on the link between Pirenne and Bloch and Febvre: Lyon, B., The Birth of Annales History: The Letters of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Henri Pirenne (1921–1935) (Brussels, 1991)Google Scholar. An Anglo-Saxon view on the Annales school is offered by Stoianovitch, T., French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, 1976)Google Scholar.

24 On this bible of historicism: Delacroix, Dosse and Garcia, Les courants historiques en France, 145–53.

25 See, in the abundant literature on Bloch, how this interest was developed during the close contacts with British colleagues whose interest in agrarian history as we have seen following Clark's analysis (see n. 2) had taken over in the post-war period: Touati, Fr.-O., Marc Bloch et l'Angleterre (Paris, 2007)Google Scholar. On Bloch: Dumoulin, O., Marc Bloch (Paris, 2000)Google Scholar.

26 See the abundant proof in one of the few reliable studies on Braudel so far: Daix, P., Braudel (Paris, 1995), 91–5, 273Google Scholar. After having heard a lecture in Algiers on 29 Jan. 1931 by Pirenne on his Mahomet and Charlemagne thesis, Braudel went so far as to adapt the subject of his own thesis, putting forward the Mediterranean instead of Philip II of Spain.

27 Braudel, F., Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, Xve–XVIIIe siècle. Tome 1: les structures du quotidien: le possible et l'impossible, 2nd edn (Paris, 1979), 423Google Scholar.

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29 Clark, ‘The city’, 42–3.

30 See the entries and reference to further literature on Gierke and Schmoller by Rüdiger vom Bruch in Bruch, R. vom and Müller, R. A. (eds.), Historikerlexikon von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd edn (Munich, 2002), 108–9, 279–80Google Scholar. On Tönnies, see references on the website of the Tönnies Gesellschaft: www.ftg-kiel.de/; his complete works are edited by Walter De Gruyter (Berlin and New York), first vol. 1998.

31 On Lamprecht, see the entry by Louise Schorn-Schütte in Historikerlexikon, 189. With regard to the ‘Methodenstreit’, the 12 volumes of his Deutsche Geschichte triggered from 1891 on: Oestreich, G., ‘Die Fachhistorie und die Anfänge der sozialgeschichtliche Forschung in Deutschland’, Historische Zeitschrift, 208 (1969), 320–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bruch, R. Vom, Wissenschaft, Politik und öffentliche Meinung. Gelehrtenpolitik im wilhelmischen Deutschland (1890–1914) (Husum, 1980)Google Scholar. Raphael, Lutz, ‘Historikerkontroversen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Berufshabitus, Fächerkonkurrenz und sozialen Bedeutungsmustern. Lamprecht-Streit und französicher Methodenstreit der Jahrhundertwende in vergleichender Perspektive’, Historische Zeitschrift, 251 (1990), 325–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Concerning his relation to Pirenne, see, apart from Lyon's biography of Pirenne, the following source editions: Lyon, B., ‘The letters of Henri Pirenne to Karl Lamprecht’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d'Histoire, 132 (1966), 161–231CrossRefGoogle Scholar, to be completed by Van Werveke, H., ‘Karl Lamprecht et Henri Pirenne’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d'Histoire, 138 (1972), 39–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Boone, M., ‘“L'automne du Moyen Âge”: Johan Huizinga et Henri Pirenne ou “plusieurs vérités pour la même chose”’, in Moreno, P. and Palumbo, G. (eds.), Autour du XVe siècle. Journées d’étude en l'honneur d'Alberto Varvaro. Communications présentées au Symposium de clôture de la chaire Francqui au titre étranger (Liège, 10–11 mai 2004) (Geneva, 2008), 36–7Google Scholar.

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33 Lyon, B., ‘Guillaume Des Marez and Henri Pirenne: a remarkable rapport’, Revue Belge de philologie et d'histoire, 77 (1999), 1068–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on Des Marez: Billen, C. and Boone, M., ‘Pirenne in Brussels before 1930. Guillaume Des Marez and the relationship between a master and his student’, Belgisch tijdschrift voor nieuwste geschiedenis. Revue belge d'histoire contemporaine, 41 (2011), 459–85Google Scholar.

34 Bloch served the full years of the war as a soldier in the French army, on different fronts; Pirenne lost one of his sons in the war, was imprisoned because of his resistance to the German cultural and educational policies imposed on the occupied part of Belgium; see the already cited biographies of both men.

35 On this manifesto: Jürgen, and von Ungern-Sternberg, Wolfgang, Der Aufruf ‘An die Kulturwelt!’ Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der deutschen Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1996)Google Scholar, passim.

36 A recent reappraisal of German historiography and of Weber's position concerning urban history is to be found in Hirschmann, F.G., Die Stadt im Mittelalter (Munich, 2009), 62–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Italian communes of the so-called ‘popular type’: Vigueur, J.-Cl. Maire, Cavaliers et citoyens. Guerre, conflits et société dans l'Italie communale XIIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris, 2003)Google Scholar, and Vigueur, J.-Cl. Maire and Faini, E., Il sistema politica dei comuni italiani (secoli XII–XIV) (Milan and Turin, 2010)Google Scholar, passim.

37 Schreiner, Kl., ‘Die mittelalterliche Stadt in Webers Analyse und die Deutung des okzidentalen Rationalismus. Typus, Legitimität, Kulturbedeutung’, in Kocka, J. (ed.), Max Weber, der Historiker (Göttingen, 1986), 119–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dilcher, G., ‘Max Webers Stadt und die historische Stadtforschung der Mediëvistik’, Historische Zeitschrift, 267 (1998), 91–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar; more recent with abundant references to an equally abundant literature on Weber and his theories: Scheller, B., ‘Das herrschaftsfremde Charisma der Coniuratio und seine Veralltäglichungen. Idealtypische Entwicklungspfade der mittelalterlichen Stadtverfassung in Max Webers “Stadt”’, Historische Zeitschrift, 281 (2005), 307–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Weber's text, see the relevant sections of his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, most conveniently in Weber, M., The City (Glencoe, IL, 1958)Google Scholar (part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft; critical edn: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Cologne, 1956)).

38 Lexikon des Mittelalters adds to a sense of confusion and even contradiction as is convincingly argued in Dilcher, G., ‘Einheit und Vielheit in Geschichte und Begriff der Europäischen Stadt’, in Johanek, P. and Post, F.-J. (eds.), Vielerlei Städte. Der Stadtbegriff (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2004) 20–1Google Scholar.

39 See several contributions to Moraw and Schieffer (eds.), Die deutschsprachiche Mediävistiek im 20. Jahrhundert; Oexle, O.G., L'historisme en débat. De Nietzsche à Kantorowicz (Paris, 2001)Google Scholar (translation of his Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen des Historismus (Göttingen, 1996)), passim; and Oexle, O.G., ‘Das Mittelalter und das Unbehagen an der Moderne. Mittelalterbeschwörungen in der Weimarer Republik und danach’, in Burghartz, S., Gilomen, H.-J., Marchal, G., Schwinges, R.C. and Simon-Muscheid, K. (eds.), Spannungen und Widersprüche. Gedenkschrift für Frantisek Graus (Sigmaringen, 1992), 125–53Google Scholar.

40 See the fundamental discussion in Oexle, ‘Staat – Kultur – Volk’, 73 and 75, where he takes the very influential book by Kantorowicz (1895–1973) on Frederik II as the example for this evolution. The same Kantorowicz in his address at the Historikertag in Halle (Grenze, Möglichkeiten und Aufgaben der Darstellung mittelalterlicher Geschichte) had formulated the programme of the group around Stefan George. Note that for this ‘creative’ use of his philosophy Nietzsche himself cannot be held responsible. See in general: Galindo, M. Zapata, Triumph des Willens zur Macht. Zur Nietzsche-Rezeption im NS-Staat (Hamburg, 1995)Google Scholar.

41 Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 411–12.

42 See the analysis by Oexle, O.G., ‘Vom “Staat” zur “Kultur” des Mittelalters. Problemgeschichten und Paradigmenwechsel in der deutschen Mittelalterforschung’, in Fryde, N., Monnet, P., Oexle, O.G. and Zygner, L. (eds.), Die Deutung des mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft in der Moderne (Göttingen, 2004), 40–7Google Scholar.

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44 Oexle, ‘Staat – Kultur – Volk’, 92–4, and M. Werner, ‘Zwischen politischer Begrenzung und methodischer Offenheit. Wege und Stationen deutscher Landesgeschichtsforschung im 20. Jahrhundert’, in Moraw and Schieffer (eds.), Die deutschsprachige Mediävistiek im 20. Jahrhundert, 251–364.

45 The image of the Rhine's two banks is taken from Oexle, ‘Staat – Kultur – Volk’, 96–7, who borrows it from Ulrich Raulff, the reputed biographer of Marc Bloch.

46 Ibid., 100–1.

47 The question was posed in a provocative way, recalling the fierce attack on German historiography and science in general by Henri Pirenne in one of his public addresses as rector of Ghent University in 1922 ‘Ce que nous devons désapprendre de l'Allemagne’ by Oexle, O.G., ‘Was deutsche Mediävisten an der französischen Mittelalterforschung interessieren muss’, in Borgolte, M. (ed.), Mittelalterforschung nach der Wende 1989 (Munich, 1995), 89–127Google Scholar.

48 Planitz, H., Die deutsche Stadt im Mittelalter. Von der Römerzeit bis zu den Zunftkämpfen (Graz and Cologne, 1954)Google Scholar.

49 See the fundamental overview by Johanek, P., ‘Stadtgeschichtsforschung – ein halbes Jahrhundert nach Ennen und Planitz’, in Opll, F. and Sonnlechner, Ch. (eds.), Europäische Städte im Mittelalter (Innsbruck and Vienna, 2010), 49–50Google Scholar.

50 Werner, ‘Zwischen politischer Begrenzung und methodischer Offenheit’, 336. On the founding of this institute, in the context of German historiography: Hirschmann, Die Stadt im Mittelalter, 70.

51 See the essay by one of the former directors of the Munsterian institute Peter Johanek, ‘Zu neuen Ufer? Beobachtungen eines Zeitgenossen zur deutschen Mediävistik von 1975 bis heute’, in Moraw and Schieffer (eds.), Die deutschsprachige Mediävistiek im 20. Jahrhundert, 168–9, with references to the atlases published so far.

52 A short but penetrating assessment of their role in World War II: Rusinek, B.-A., ‘“Westforschungs”-Traditionen nach 1945. Ein Versuch über Kontinuität’, in Dietz, B., Gabel, H. and Tiedau, U. (eds.), Griff nach dem Westen. Die ‘Westforschung’ der völkisch-nationalen Wissenschaften zum nordwesteuropäischen Raum (1919–1960), 2 vols. (Münster and New York, 2003), vol. II, 1150–1Google Scholar.

53 This was particularly the case in the University of Ghent, looked upon as an outpost of Germanic culture in the West since it was ‘germanized’ in the sense that the Dutch language was imposed as the language in which teaching was done in 1930, a development which pushed Pirenne to leave Ghent for Brussels. Franz Steinbach appointed during the first winter semester of the occupation in 1940–41 to teach in Ghent noted however in an official report to the military command in Belgium that Pirenne still was revered in Ghent and that a vast majority of both professors and students were supporters of Belgium and rather hostile to ‘völkische’ points of view. One student he quoted told him that ‘scientific truth has no Vaterland (home country)’: see M. Nikolay-Panter, ‘Geschichte, Methode, Politik. Das Institut und die geschichtliche Landeskunde der Rheinlande, 1920–1945’, in Dietz, Gabel and Tiedau (eds.), Griff nach dem Westen, vol. II, 713.

54 Petri published his thesis on the linguistic border in Belgium and the Germanic elements in Wallonia and northern France in 1937. This thesis, so many sources confirm, had an important personal influence on Hitler who adapted his policy towards Belgium and the Netherlands after reading it (after the war, as many German university professors, Petri was easily at work again after a short period of denazification, became professor at Münster between 1951 and 1961, and returned afterwards to Bonn). In his Nazi period, he had criticized Pirenne abundantly (his review of the last part of Pirenne's Histoire de Belgique numbered 110 pages!) and was co-responsible for the remarkable ‘translation’ of Pirenne's great posthumous book, his Mahomet et Charlemagne of 1937, a translation falsified in a way to glorify the Germanic influence in early medieval Europe; see Schöttler, P., ‘Henri Pirenne, historien européen, entre la France et l'Allemagne’, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 76 (1998), 877–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Petri: Ditt, K., ‘Die Kulturraumforschung zwisschen Wissenschaft und Politik. Das Beispiel Franz Petri (1903–1993)’, Westfälische Forschungen, 46 (1996), 73–176Google Scholar, and the more critical assessment of Westforschung by the Dutch sociologist Derks, H., Deutsche Westforschung. Ideologie und Praxis im 20. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 2001)Google Scholar, passim, who develops a more critical stance towards the work and activities of Petri. The same author added new elements not very favourable to Petri's role to the dossier in 2005: Derks, H., ‘German Westforschung, 1918 to the present. The case of Franz Petri, 1903–1993’, in Haar, I. and Fahlbusch, M. (eds.), German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing 1919–1945 (New York, 2005), 175–99Google Scholar.

55 Fundamental research concerning these activities is presented by Schöttler, P., ‘Die historische Westforschung zwischen “Abwerhkampf” und territorialer Offensive’, in idem (ed.), Geschichtschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945 (Frankfurt, 1997), 204–61Google Scholar. See also the (impressive) collection of essays: Dietz, Gabel and Tiedau (eds.), Griff nach dem Westen; two essays concern Franz Petri: the one by Martina Pitz and one by Karl Ditt.

56 Though ‘this made little difference in reality: the profession was already extremely hierarchical’: Evans, R.J., The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (London, 2006), 312–13Google Scholar.

57 See Borgolte, M., Sozialgeschichte des Mittelalters. Eine Forschungsbilanz nach der deutschen Einheit (Munich, 1996), 9–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 See the unfinished and postumously published chapter ‘Pirenne und die Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft’ in Sproemberg, H., Mittelalter und demokratische Geschichtsschreibung. Ausgewählte Abhandlungen (ed. Unger, M.) (Berlin, 1971), 377–446Google Scholar.

59 Borgolte, Sozialgeschichte des Mittelalters, 12.

60 Ibid., 278–89, the references to both seminal books: Engelmann, E., Zur städtischen Volksbewegung in Südfrankreich: Kommunefreiheit und Gesselschaft, Arles 1200–1250 (Berlin, 1959)Google Scholar, and Engel, E., Die deutsche Stadt des Mittelalters (Munich, 1993)Google Scholar.

61 Borgolte, Sozialgeschichte des Mittelalters, 280–1.

62 On the intellectual evolution and gradual unification (though of course important intellectual and ideological divides remained in place): Borgolte, Sozialgeschichte des Mittelalters, 287–312, and a direct testimony by Engel, E., ‘Bürgertum – Bürgerkampf – Bürgerstadt. Probleme beim Versuch einer Synthese deutscher Stadtgeschichte des Mittelalters’, in Borgholte, M. (ed.), Mittelalterforschung nach der Wende 1989 (Munich, 1995), 407–25Google Scholar.

63 Oexle, ‘Vom “Staat” zur “Kultur” des Mittelalters’, 57–8. Oexle refers to Dilcher, Gerhard, ‘Die Rechtsgeschichte der Stadt’, in Bader, K.S. and Dilcher, G., Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte. Land und Stadt – Bürger und Bauer im Alten Europa (Berlin, Heidelberg and New York, 1999), 249–827Google Scholar.

64 Isenmann, E., ‘Gesetzgebung und Gesetzgebungsrecht in spätmittelalterlichen Deutscher Städte’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 28 (2001), 1–94Google Scholar and 161–261. In his synthesis Die deutsche Stadt im Spätmittelalter (1250–1500) (Stuttgart, 1988), Isenmann makes his the characteristics Max Weber used to qualify the medieval city.

65 Blickle, P., Kommunalismus: Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform, 2 vols. (Oldenbourg, 2000)Google Scholar; see the collection of essays in the context of the ESF (European Science Foundation) programme: Blickle, P., Resistance, Representation and Community (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar.

66 The effects of comparisons and of differences between these two highly urbanized regions of medieval Europe were different for each of them: see the contributions (on the demographic aspects and on comparisons) by G. Pinto, P. Stabel and W. Blockmans in Crouzet-Pavan and Lecuppre-Desjardin (eds.), Villes de Flandre et d'Italie (XIIIe–XVIe siècle). I developed some of these aspects further in Boone, M., A la recherche d'une modernité civique. La société urbaine des anciens Pays-Bas au bas Moyen Âge (Brussels, 2010), 109–21Google Scholar.

67 Schulz, Knut, ‘Denn sie lieben die Freiheit so sehr. . .’ Kommunale Aufstände und Entstehung des europäischen Bürgertums im Hochmittelalter (Darmstadt, 1992)Google Scholar. On the importance of this work see the remarks concerning its place in a re-evaluation of the communal movement by Dilcher, ‘Einheit und Vielheit in Geschichte und Begriff’, 21.

68 See the websites: www.lamprecht-gesellschaft.de/ and http://www.eniugh.org/ the latter of the European Network in Universal and Global History of which the Lamprecht Gesellschaft is part. In 1993, a collection of essays in which Leipzig-based historians sought to renew their link to Lamprecht was published: Diesener, G. (ed.), Karl Lamprecht weiterdenken. Universal- und Kulturgeschichte heute (Leipzig, 1993)Google Scholar.

69 See the references referring to Weigel, Sigrid, ‘On the “topographical” turn: concepts of space in cultural studies and Kulturwissenschaften. A cartographic feud’, European Review, 17 (2009), 187–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Habermas, J., Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied and Berlin, 1962), 16–21Google Scholar, rejects the possibility of defining the existence of a public political space for the late Middle Ages and early modern period, reflecting in doing so the historical knowledge of the period in which he conceived his ideas (the early 1960s).

71 See among others the collections of essays concerning different parts of Europe, which all were published in a remarkably short span of time thus testifying to a historiographic impulse: Kundert, U., Schmid, B. and Schmid, R. (eds.), Ausmessen – Darstellen – Inszenieren. Raumkonzepte und die Wiedergabe von Räumen in Mittelalter und frühen Neuzeit (Zürich, 2007)Google Scholar; Boucheron, P. and Mattéoni, O. (eds.), Les espaces sociaux de l'Italie urbaine (XIIe–XVe siècles). Receuil d'articles (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar; Deligne, C. and Billen, C. (eds.), Voisinages, coexistences, appropriations. Groupes sociaux et territoires urbains (Moyen Âge–16e siècle) (Turnhout, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monnet, P., Villes d'Allemagne au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2004)Google Scholar.

72 Rubin, M., ‘Identities’, in Horrox, R. and Ormrod, W. M. (eds.), A Social History of England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), 402ffGoogle Scholar.

73 R. Britnell, ‘Town life’, in Horrox and Ormrod (eds.), Social History of England, 163–8.

74 See the life-long research by Herman Pleij, synthesized in his recent magisterial contribution to a new general history of Dutch literature: Pleij, H., Het gevleugelde word. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1400–1560 (Amsterdam, 2007)Google Scholar.

75 Putnam, R.D., Leonardi, R. and Nannetti, R., Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar; an important critique (among many others): Terpstra, N., ‘Republics by contract. Civil society, social capital and the Putnam thesis in the papal state’, Storicamente, 2 (2006) (see: www.storicamente.org)Google Scholar.

76 See the collection of essays on the ‘bonum commune’ as an ideological tool developed and discussed in late medieval cities in Lecuppre-Desjardin, E. and Van Bruaene, A.-L. (eds.), De Bono communi. The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European city (13th–16th c.) (Turnhout, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Gourevitch, A., Les catégories de la culture médiévale (Paris, 1983), 210–11Google Scholar. Albeit originally dating from 1972, his text has become widely known since its translation into French and the preface by Georges Duby from 1983.

78 See Boone, M. and Prak, M., ‘Rulers, patricians and burghers: the great and the little traditions of urban revolt in the Low Countries’, in Davids, K. and Lucassen, J. (eds.), A Miracle Mirrored. The Dutch Republic in European Perspective (Cambridge, 1995), 99–134Google Scholar, and Boone, M., ‘The Dutch Revolt and the medieval tradition of urban dissent’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007), 351–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Bloch, Marc, L'histoire, la guerre, la résistance, ed. Becker, Annette and Bloch, Etienne (Paris, 2006), 879Google Scholar.