Fifty years ago, the eminent German urban historian Heinz Stoob (1919–97) launched the term Minderstädte (‘lesser towns’) to denote a category of urban settlements with less than full urban status, near the borderline between town and village, but still real towns. Stoob used the term with special reference to Central Europe in the late medieval and early modern period. Since then, the term has gained some popularity among urban historians, and in 2005, a conference was held in Bolzano/Bozen under the auspices of the Österreichischer Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung to review the current status of the term and discuss its usefulness or otherwise in urban historical research. The conference papers have been reworked and in some cases significantly extended for this volume in the publication series of the Arbeitskreis.
As with all the volumes in this series, it contains broad and useful historiographical overviews of the topic, with extensive footnote references, from various regional and national viewpoints in Central Europe, with contributions covering eastern France, southern Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic, ranging from the Middle Ages until c. 1800, but with a special emphasis on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Wilfried Ehbrecht, Stoob's student, colleague and successor at Münster, gives a detailed and critical review of the use of the term, with the expressed purpose of purifying and clarifying the concept in the light of Stoob's own writings, as well as his known intentions. Most of the other authors provide a catalogue of contemporary terms (Markt, Flecken, Oppidum, etc.) with definitions and empirical surveys from their various regional perspectives. The articles are in German, with Italian summaries, with one exception, where the pattern is reversed.
For all its qualities, from a comparative point of view this volume is rather discouraging. The lack of a general introduction or concluding overview is typical of the series, but especially noticeable here. Ehbrecht concludes that the term Minderstadt should only be used in a strictly limited sense, to apply to a certain category of towns in the late medieval period, and mainly in the German lands. Some other authors, like Willibald Katzinger and Wilhelm Liebhart, warn against using the term altogether. Furthermore, most of the contributors limit themselves to one region and one period, leaving comparisons to the readers. The main exception is Tom Scott, whose comparative study of Württemberg (south-western Germany), Alsace and Romandie (western Switzerland) shows a great diversity of fortunes among small towns in the three regions, but still leaves the main question of the book open. It is also regrettable that the conference paper on French bastides, which would have broadened the perspective, could not be published.
As Heinz Stoob himself realized, in almost every part of late medieval and early modern Europe, there were real (often small) towns with limited urban rights, privileges and institutions. Most of the authors in this volume acknowledge the existence of a ‘grey zone’ of densely populated places somewhere between fully fledged towns and agricultural villages. But only one of them, Hannes Obermair, comes to grips with the need for a general term to allow for comparisons across political and linguistic borders, and over longer periods in time. However, even he discards the Minderstadt, for its allegedly negative connotations, advocating the use of the (hardly less negative) term Bastard Urbanism (as a parallel to Bastard Feudalism) instead. This seems an unnecessary and abortive exercise. We do need a term for this category of towns in this long period. As a (mainly) non-contemporary term, distinct from (but related to) small town, the concept of lesser town still has much to recommend it.
