Pre-1500

This year's publications address seven broad themes: urban growth and migration; the social structure of late medieval towns; women and gender; political communication and the circulation of news; the church in the city; urban decline; and writing about the city.

In ‘Constructing a sense of community in rapidly growing European cities in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries’, Historical Research, 83 (2010), 575–87, Wim Blockmans surveys the causes and consequences of urban expansion in the period before the development of written rules and regulations and the emergence and consolidation of formal institutions. Urban development was the product of migration. How did people from different geographical, socio-economic, linguistic and ethnic origins adapt to and help to construct communal life? Blockmans turns to a concept used by the American sociologist, Charles Tilly, to explain the growth of cities. This is Tilly's idea of ‘trust networks’, forms of associational life based upon personal ties and upon the need for mutual support, which characteristically involved the swearing of oaths of allegiance and solidarity. Even when towns were well established, however, they continued to depend on migration to sustain themselves. In ‘Alien communities and alien fraternities in later medieval London’, London J., 35 (2010), 111–43, Justin Colson discusses four alien fraternities which served specifically the interests of those ‘born beyond the see’. These were in fact organizations for recent immigrants and they drew their membership from across the capital. Colson's article is interesting because it approaches the subject of relations between foreigners, aliens and the indigenous population of the city from a new perspective. Unlike the pioneering and highly statistical work of Sylvia Thrupp and Jim Bolton, it seeks to answer questions from the viewpoint of cultural history. How far, for example, did aliens actually want to assimilate within urban society? The evidence provided by Colson suggests that the immigrant groups saw their fraternities as self-consciously alien and exclusive. Three were German-speaking fraternities, but though such people were generically described in civic records and tax returns as ‘Doche’ and spoke Germanic languages, they came from different parts of the North Sea region: the Low Countries and Germany. Colson's argument that there was no single German community in late medieval London should encourage further research into the sense of identity among alien communities in provincial towns. However, it is Blockmans's article which deserves a final mention here because of the breadth of its vision. Although his principal interest lies in ‘the ways in which the incipient urban communities succeeded in creating, almost from scratch, entirely new forms of social attitudes and relations’ (577), the different forms of associational life which he considers – from communes to merchant guilds, confraternities to crafts – remained a permanent feature of the urban landscape throughout the late Middle Ages.

In ‘Von “antwerk” bis “zunft”. Methodische Überlegungen zu den Zünften im Mittelalter’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 37 (2010), 37–71, Sabine von Heusinger explores the fluid nature of the kinds of association which in late medieval Germany were called Zünfte. The word Zunft, or guild, as von Heusinger explains, covered various forms of organization, which also performed different functions: occupational/economic groupings (or crafts); religious/devotional associations (or fraternities); political units which held a seat in the town council; and military formations which shared in urban defence and peace-keeping. Von Heusinger's article is pointed resolutely at a German historiography of a teleological persuasion, which saw the craft guild gradually changing into the political guild in the fourteenth century in a series of ‘guild revolutions’ (Zunftrevolutionen) or ‘guild struggles’ (Zunftkämpfe). In Strasbourg and Zurich, occupational groups or crafts were individually or jointly represented in the town council, were frequently associated with a fraternity which venerated a particular patron saint and participated in defensive duties. In other cities, military obligations were organized independently of the guild structure, and there were crafts which were connected to a fraternity but which did not form a political unit of urban government. Even in Strasbourg and Zurich, however, crafts did not have a monopoly of production. Individuals could exercise a craft or a trade outside the appropriate guild. Moreover, fraternities were not always tied to a specific craft and, although ostensibly devotional organizations, they could also play a role in the political life of the city. There were clearly some aspects of guild life, such as the ‘drinking chamber’ (Trinkstube) – a meeting place and drinking establishment primarily, but not exclusively, for members of the craft – which were distinctive to German-speaking cities and which occupied an extremely important place in urban political life, where politics was discussed and information and news exchanged (48–9). Yet, in many respects, von Heusinger's study complements the work of Gervase Rosser, who has adopted a similar holistic approach to crafts and fraternities in an English urban context. Further research into the operation of the guild system in a comparative urban context is required.

In ‘Ein Kölner Barbier und sein Nachlass vom Ende des 14. Jahrhunderts’, Geschichte in Köln: Zeitschrift für Stadt- und Regionalgeschichte, 56 (2009), 155–70, Klaus Militzer provides a forensic examination of the social milieu of one craftsman in late fourteenth-century Cologne. Heinrich Loyff was a barber who, like others in his profession, combined the cutting of hair, surgery and medicine. Quite a lot is known about Loyff because of the legal and political wranglings which arose from the administration of his will and from the disputed claims of his nephew, another barber, to the inheritance of Loyff's impressively large house bordering the central market in the city of Cologne (the Heumarkt). The afterlife of Loyff was, in many ways, extraordinary: the nephew pursued his rights to the property with such tenacity that he solicited the aid of his native city of Aachen as well as the king and emperor, Wenzel IV. Indeed, the matter went all the way to the imperial supreme court. Militzer's article, however, is of wider interest because of what it says about the social world in which artisans such as Heinrich Loyff moved. Loyff was a wealthy member of his craft and a well-to-do citizen of Cologne, who disposed of a considerable amount of moveable property in his will. His prosperity marked him out from others in his trade and from many of his relatives, friends and acquaintances. Nonetheless, he purchased the house in which he died from another barber; his executors were an unremarkable group of artisans, including another barber, a clog maker and a bacon cutter (Speckschneider); and the witnesses to his will were a similar assortment of people, all inhabitants of Cologne. If Loyff belonged to the middle stratum of Cologne society, his friends, acquaintances and relatives were generally the ‘little people’ (kleine Leute) from the lower levels of urban life. Despite his wealth, he mainly socialized with people from an artisan background (Handwerkermilieu) or with those whose names are not to be found in the civic records. Militzer's study, therefore, raises interesting questions about the importance of ‘class’ in urban society, about the homogeneity of those defined and categorized as ‘artisans’ and about the social aspirations of working people within late medieval cities. Just as Militzer's article promotes further reflection on what it meant to be an ‘artisan’, so John F. Padgett, in ‘Open elite? Social mobility, marriage, and family in Florence, 1282–1494’, Renaissance Quarterly, 63 (2010), 357–411, asks about the meaning of the concept of ‘elite’ in an urban context. Who composed the Florentine ‘elite’ or ‘ruling class’? This is a question which could be asked of any town or city in the Middle Ages, but which is actually very difficult to answer because it requires exhaustive prosopographical research that is itself dependent upon the survival of particular kinds of sources. Florence is blessed with a series of tax censuses which have been exploited by other historians, but never so systematically. Underpinning Padgett's article is a formidable battery of statistics, derived from a relational database containing the names of well over 50,000 individuals, but it is his method which deserves particular attention. Elite status in Florence was based fundamentally on family and lineage, but, in examining the status of elite families in terms of a range of criteria – wealth, office-holding, and size (i.e. longevity) of lineage – Padgett reaches the conclusion that there was very little, if any, correlation between wealth and political power, or between political power and family size. In a world where ‘politics and family age contended with wealth as alternative markers of elite status’ (380), the Florentine ruling elite lacked a strong social cohesion. There were, in a sense, several elites, not one. Padgett's article should encourage future research into the structure and composition of urban elites in other cities, and alerts us to the challenges facing urban rulers in the construction and representation of their group solidarity.

Klaus Militzer's study of the barber of Cologne is heavily reliant on a single will and examines the bequests left by the barber to reconstruct the social network to which he belonged. In ‘Loving friends: surviving widowhood in late medieval Westminster’, Gender and History, 22: 1 (2010), 21–37, Katherine L. French draws on the testamentary evidence of widows and their husbands in the London suburb to explore the role of friendship in the lives of women who, bereft of a husband, were now left to their own devices in the inheritance, ownership and dispersal of real estate, the collection and payment of debts and the making of a last will and testament. She also discusses the legal experiences of widows in going to court to settle their affairs and those of their deceased husbands. The premise underlying French's article is eminently sensible, namely that widows were more vulnerable in an urban rather than rural context because of the absence or transient nature of kinship ties in towns, which were characterized by a relatively high mortality rate and by significant levels of rural–urban migration. Instead of relying on family, widows in an urban community such as Westminster had to turn to their husbands’ business associates, but also, most importantly, their own friends for assistance. French is determined to find evidence of friendships among women and proposes that when widows left their executors’ wives gifts, such bequests ‘speak to friendship’ between the testator and the administrator's wife. Expressed differently, ‘Many of these men thus appear to be helping out their wives’ friends’. Such friendships were forged, according to French, in the context of parish life, which ‘offered women many opportunities for collaboration’ (32). The argument about ‘friendship’ suffers from a lack of definition. What precisely did ‘friendship’ mean among the widows of Westminster artisans and merchants? Nonetheless, the close association between women and the parish is an interesting thesis, which is explored by Nicola A. Lowe in ‘Women's devotional bequests of textiles in the late medieval English parish church, c. 1350–1550’, Gender and History, 22 (2010), 407–29. Although Lowe does not suggest that there was a qualitative difference between the urban and rural parish, she makes considerable use of the published churchwardens’ accounts of parishes in Bristol and London in order to argue the case for ‘female agency’ in the late medieval parish church. In January 1464, for example, Elizabeth Sharpe gave her parish church – St Ewen's in the centre of the walled town of Bristol – a long embroidered towel, which she specified was only to be used once a year, when the laity of the parish received Easter communion. The cloth was houselling cloth, a piece of linen placed before the communicants to catch the crumbs which fell when parishioners shared in the consecrated bread. The bequest of cloth is revealing, according to Lowe, because textiles were closely associated with women, both at home and in the work place; because the gift established her identity ‘publicly as a generous and devout woman’ and as a respectable parishioner; and, most of all, because, in ‘directing the circumstances in which her gift was to be employed, she ensured proximity to the Host despite her gender, and maintained participation (even after death) in the most important devotional event of the year’ (421). In ignoring male bequests, and male bequests of cloth, in particular, however, Lowe's contention about the particular significance of textiles is less secure. A much more persuasive argument about the challenges confronting women in late medieval England is found in Judith M. Bennett's ‘Compulsory service in late medieval England’, Past and Present, 209 (2010), 7–51. Bennett draws attention to one aspect of the mid fourteenth-century labour legislation introduced in the wake of the Black Death, which was confirmed in subsequent labour laws and which has been ignored by historians: the order that every able-bodied man or woman under 60 years of age, who was not active in a trade or craft, should be compelled to enter the service of another. According to Bennett, this provision deliberately targeted women, specifically ‘singlewomen’ – a new word and, in some respects, a new phenomenon in fourteenth-century England – who stood outside the normal conventions of household governance and who lacked male supervision. Whilst Bennett's article is not about the urban experience of women per se, she aligns her work with that of P.J.P. Goldberg to argue for the gendered nature of rural–urban migration in the second half of the fourteenth century, when inheritance customs in the countryside combined with new opportunities in the labour market (created by the sharp demographic decline after the Black Death) to encourage female migration into the towns. Indeed, some of Bennett's evidence relates specifically to urban communities, such as the example of Christine Hinksey, alias Truelove, who appeared before the justices of the peace in Oxford in 1394, when one of the town's tailors demanded she serve him. The compulsory service clause in the labour laws became a weapon to address male anxieties about female autonomy, which were shared by ordinary householders like the Oxford artisan and by the urban authorities of cities such as Coventry, whose magisterial elite enforced the compulsory service clause against ‘singlewomen’ in 1492 and 1495.

Bennett's work is an important reminder that the urban corporate body was rather less inclusive than the notion of community implies and was deeply masculine in its identity. In ‘A targeted public: public services in fifteenth-century Ghent and Bruges’, Urban History, 37 (2010), 203–25, Jelle Haemers and Wouter Ryckbosch describe an urban community which, whilst not divided along gender lines, was equally limited in its social composition. In their consideration of whether the nineteenth-century concept of ‘public services’ has any relevance in a late medieval urban context, Haemers and Ryckbosch explore the plurality of corporate bodies – civic government, craft guilds and ecclesiastical institutions – which were responsible for providing legal services, health care and public works within the Flemish cities of Ghent and Bruges. In an urban milieu of multiple corporate groups, only members of these corporations actually benefited from public services. There was no ‘general’ public, but a series of partial publics. What emerges most clearly from this article is the extent to which it was citizenship which provided the key point of access to resources. It was citizens who had a stake in the system. Indeed, in ‘The rising of 1381’, English Historical Rev., 125 (2010), 112–31, Helmut Hinck shows incontrovertibly that the individuals who rebelled in the southern English city of Winchester at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt were citizens and craftsmen. This was not ‘a rising of the poor and modest’ (123), a conclusion which also tallies with the findings of historians of urban revolts in Germany and the Low Countries. Hinck gathers together some fascinating information, drawn from the judicial records of the English royal government, about the tumultuous events in Winchester over three days in June 1381. He claims that there were several distinctive features of this urban uprising, including the ringing of the city's ‘common bell’ (communis campana) and the occupation of the town hall. However, the same pattern of events was found in the city of York in November 1380, when the urban commons rose up and besieged the Guildhall and rang the bells on Ouse Bridge, where the city council routinely assembled. The same pattern of popular mobilization and proclamation, in fact, is to be found in urban revolts throughout late medieval Europe.

Hinck's study is one of three articles on the subject of political communication and the circulation of news in late medieval towns. Hinck's evidence reveals how the rebels sought to control the official media of communication within Winchester and responded to a network of information connecting the town to neighbouring urban communities in Hampshire and Surrey, as well as to London. In ‘New light on the life and manuscripts of a political pamphleteer: Thomas Fovent’, Historical Research, 83 (2010), 60–8, Clementine Oliver reconstructs the career of a political pamphleteer working in the capital in the late fourteenth century. Thomas Fovent was the author of a political pamphlet known erroneously as the Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti, which commented upon the events of the Merciless Parliament of 1388 (rather than the Wonderful Parliament of 1386), when the king's chief ministers and favourites were charged with treason. Oliver's discovery of Fovent's will in The National Archives allows her to place the author of the pamphlet firmly within a London context. Although Fovent was not a native Londoner, he was buried in the capital and he was certainly living there in the 1380s and 1390s, when he wrote his pamphlet. Oliver argues that ‘we should consider the Historia as a London text, thereby adding political pamphleteering to the already great variety of London literary practices in this period’ (65). However, if late fourteenth-century London was a highly precocious urban public sphere, Julien Briand demonstrates brilliantly in ‘Foi, politique et information en Champagne au XV^e siècle’, Rev. Historique, 653 (2010), 59–97, that the English capital was not the only urban centre in which national politics was discussed and political opinions exchanged. Briand focuses on the experiences of the three principal towns in the French region of Champagne – Reims, Troyes and Châlons-en-Champagne – during the period of civil war in the first third of the fifteenth century. This was an especially difficult time for these French towns because of the struggles between the political factions known as the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, which were part of a wider conflict with the English king. Civic leaders thus had to choose their side carefully. In this climate of insecurity, exacerbated by the existence of a substantial military presence in the region, urban rulers sought to be well informed of political and military developments involving the king and noble factions and also to keep their townspeople informed. English cities faced similar problems in the Wars of the Roses and responded in a similar way, but in the Champenois towns, clerics were absolutely central to the diffusion of news and information. All sections of the clerical community in each town – from the (arch)bishop and canons of the cathedral chapter, to parish priests and regular clergy, notably the members of the mendicant orders – were involved in the acquisition, transmission and proclamation of news on behalf of the urban authorities. Men of religion were singled out for several reasons, all of which related specifically to their ecclesiastical status. Friars, for example, were entrusted as town messengers because they were accustomed to travel and because, unlike those normally in the service of a town, they only wore the dress of their order and could not be identified with a particular urban community. They could carry messages and relay pieces of information without fear of interception, and it was not unusual to see mendicants or monks carry out espionage on behalf of a town. At the same time, the town councils of Troyes, Reims and Châlons-en-Champagne regularly relied upon parish priests to convey news to their parishioners through the Sunday sermon, whilst bishops were entrusted with the task of announcing news of the most delicate nature. In Troyes, for example, in the summer of 1431, the town council, fully aware of the town's history of divided loyalties to the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, asked the bishop to deliver a sensitive piece of news about the death in battle of one of the king's captains. The bishop was seen as someone who was especially skilled in ‘public speaking’ (parole publique) and who enjoyed a moral authority by virtue of his ecclesiastical position (80–1). The town crier, who wore the distinctive livery of civic office, would have been regarded by the townspeople as the mouthpiece of the urban government. In calling upon the cleric to proclaim the news, the civic rulers distanced themselves from any negative reaction which might follow the announcement. Briand's article has to be viewed in the immediate context of the particular dangers posed to towns by the fraught circumstances of civil war, but it also has a much broader significance and deserves a wider audience. On the one hand, in laying bare the ways in which town councils sought to regulate the movement and conduct of men of religion, both preachers and pilgrims (who were suspected of disseminating rumour and seditious news), and tried to exert control over the contents of public speech, notably words delivered from the pulpit, Briand adds another dimension to current understanding of the construction of oligarchy in late medieval towns. Here the clergy were employed to control the petit peuple urbain (95). On the other hand, these French provincial towns emerge as dynamic centres of vigorous political debate, in which dynastic politics and the affairs of the kingdom really mattered.

Briand's article is important in one other respect. In arguing for the role of the clergy as instruments of urban government, Briand places the church at the heart of the urban community and highlights the interaction between clerical and lay culture within the city. In ‘Living like the laity? The negotiation of religious status in the cities of late medieval Italy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 20 (2010), 27–55, Frances Andrews examines the prominent role of the clergy, especially monks, in the governance of several Italian cities including Siena and Florence from the mid-thirteenth century. Why is it, she asks, were the regular clergy increasingly employed in civic administration, notably as urban treasurers? She argues against the idea – articulated by Briand, for example – of a fundamental distinction between laity and clergy in an urban context. Civic leaders did not turn to the clergy because of an inherent belief that their commitment to a religious ideal made them less likely to commit fraud, that their single status made them less prone to the pressures of family and that they had specific expertise in literacy and numeracy which the laity lacked. Instead, clerical appointments to civic office were ‘contingent’ and ‘conditional’ (52), and reflected and expressed wider power relations within a city at particular moment of times. In ‘Mendicants as victims: scale, scope and the idiom of violence’, J. of Medieval History 36 (2010), 126–41, Guy Geltner investigates relations between clergy and laity within the Italian cities of Milan, Lucca, Bologna, Florence and Pisa between the late thirteenth and the end of the fourteenth centuries. He provides a statistical analysis of anti-mendicant violence, which he sees as an urban phenomenon. Whilst this conclusion is hardly surprising in the sense that mendicant houses were located in urban centres, Geltner is right to ask why friars, who were accustomed to travel, were not so vulnerable in the countryside. Geltner's hypothesis is that mendicants and their property were consciously targeted by individuals and groups who knew their victims and that these attacks were ‘consciously communicative acts’ (130). I am not sure that Geltner proves his case, but his desire to see this violence as a communicative action within a specifically urban environment will strike a chord with those historians interested in the concept of a medieval urban public sphere. Political and legal conflict is the subject of Ian Forrest's ‘The politics of burial in late medieval Hereford’, English Historical Rev., 125 (2010), 1110–38. Hereford was a cathedral town, and its cathedral in the late Middle Ages claimed an ancient monopoly over burials and funeral services within the five city parishes and also several of the surrounding villages. This monopoly was challenged between the late thirteenth and fifteenth centuries by a range of groups and individuals. The conflict over the place of, and payment for, burial became embroiled within wider power struggles within the city between the burgesses and the cathedral over financial and jurisdictional matters. However, Forrest argues that behind the repeated declaration of the collective interests of townspeople and parishioners lay the altogether more personal and dynastic concerns of the richer and more substantial families within the city, who sought burial and commemoration within their parish church. This is an extremely interesting argument, which has wider implications for the study of the upper echelons of urban society. Here, Forrest calls such families the ‘civic gentry’ (1133), and suggests that, in their burial practices, chantry foundations and obsession with commemoration, urban and rural elites operated in precisely the same way.

In ‘“Our land is only founded on trade and industry”. Economic discourses in fifteenth-century Bruges’, J. of Medieval History, 36 (2010), 374–89, Jan Dumolyn focuses on conflict of a different kind. The economy of late fifteenth-century Bruges was in crisis and, in the course of the Bruges revolt of 1488, the Great Council of the city – the body representing the craft guilds – delivered to the city magistrates a petition containing seventy-eight demands and complaints, most of them of an economic nature. Dumolyn uses the petition to explore not only the content of the ‘economic programme’ (375) advocated by the crafts to rescue the city from economic recession, but also the discourse within which the economic issues were framed. Dumolyn raises questions about the nature of the economic ideas which circulated among citizens and, most importantly, about the extent to which those ideas can be recovered from the available sources. Even the petition, which was delivered in the name of Bruges’ popular council, was in fact drawn up by a city clerk, who ‘translated’ the very practical and specific economic demands of the Bruges rebels into a universal language of justice, peace and the common good with which the city rulers were more familiar. The theme of urban economic contraction connects Dumolyn's article to Pamela Nightingale's study of ‘The rise and decline of medieval York: a reassessment’, Past and Present, 206 (2010), 3–42. Using the records of debt registered in the city as a measure of urban economic activity, Nightingale provides a completely new view of the chronology and causes of York's economic decline, which began considerably earlier than historians have hitherto believed and which was apparent from the middle of the fourteenth century. Nightingale dissects the close relationship between the availability of credit and the amount of coinage in circulation to argue that York's economic fortunes (both in trade and manufacture) were tied intimately and irrevocably to the money supply. York's economy contracted when the supply of money declined, whereas London, for all sorts of geographical and political reasons, had ‘unrivalled liquidity’, and Londoners could ‘go on offering credit when it was disappearing in the provinces’ (41). The north–south divide in England, Nightingale argues, was created in the course of the economic and monetary trends of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In ‘The functions and fortunes of English small towns at the close of the Middle Ages: evidence from John Leland's Itinerary’, Urban History, 37 (2010), 3–25, John S. Lee exploits a wonderfully anecdotal source produced by the famous Tudor antiquary during his travels in England and Wales in the 1530s and 1540s to consider the economic fate of smaller urban communities rather than the provincial capitals such as York. Lee concludes that Leland's descriptions of these small towns reveal that their fortunes were ‘every bit as complex and varied as those of their larger counterparts’ (23), but perhaps most interesting is his point (which he only mentions in passing) that Leland's observations reflect ‘a new literary awareness of towns, their functions and their growth and decline’ (23).

The novelty of this literary appreciation of towns might be questioned, both in an English and Continental context. The review ends with two articles which explore more fully the relationship between the writing of texts about the city and the historical context in which those texts was produced. Both focus on Florence. In ‘French literature, Florentine politics, and vernacular historical writing, 1270–1348’, Speculum, 85 (2010), 868–93, Laura K. Morreale argues that the beginning of the tradition of writing vernacular histories of Florence in the 1270s and 1280s owed much to the influence of stylistic and substantive elements drawn from a French literary genre of romans d'antiquité. Morreale associates this literary infusion specifically with the establishment of a French presence in the south of Italy during this period: the arrival of Charles of Anjou, younger brother of the French king, Louis IX, at Naples. The Angevins were important supporters of the Florentine regime, so the decision by Florentines to write in the vernacular and to employ literary devices found in French epics and romances was, according to Morreale, a conscious and calculated acknowledgment of the role of Angevin power in Florentine political life. Morreale argues, in short, for a direct relationship between literature and contemporary events. In ‘The uses of the past in Quattrocento Florence: a reading of Leonardo Bruni's Dialogues’, J. of the History of Ideas, 71 (2010), 363–85, Carol Quillen explores the literary construction of Leonardo Bruni's two dialogues, which were written in the first decade of the fifteenth century and which, in Quillen's words, discuss the ‘possibility for literary revival in the uniquely equipped city of Florence’ (364). In contrast to Hans Baron, who believed that the two conversations recounted by Bruni were written in two stages and at different times – the second, in particular, reflecting the political context of its production, namely Florence's victory over Milan – Quillen sees the Dialogues as a unity. The two dialogues express contrasting views of the literary quality of the work of the great fourteenth-century Florentine writer, Dante. According to Quillen, these conflicting opinions were an articulation of Bruni's sophisticated historical mentality, which explored different ways of presenting and interpreting the Florentine past and its civic culture. What better way to conclude this review than with an appreciation of Leonardo Bruni's postmodern historical sensibility!

1500–1800

Two aspects of Antwerp economic life are explored in E. Aerts, ‘The absence of public exchange banks in medieval and early modern Flanders and Brabant (1400–1800): a historical anomaly to be explained’, Financial History Rev. (published online 16 Nov. 2010), and B. de Munck, ‘One counter and your own account: redefining illicit labour in early-modern Antwerp’, Urban History, 37 (2010), 26–44. Aerts aims to present an explanation for the complete absence of public municipal banks in the southern Low Countries between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in Flanders and Brabant. He adduces various factors including substitutes such as money changers, cashiers and urban exchange offices and adverse economic conditions whilst governmental control of Antwerp debt discouraged municipal bank formation. Munck argues that urban guilds were neither dominated by the unregulated world of free trade and the ‘invisible hand’ nor the regulated world of corporatism but actually dynamic organizations responding to economic changes in the early modern world. He contends that early modern Antwerp guild rules were neither gradually eroded or relaxed but ‘materialised and developed further’ especially in response to the ‘clandestine activities of wholesalers and retailers’. This realization complements standard ideas concerning the deregulation of the labour market and the gradual increase in workshop size in the face of ‘emerging industrial capitalism’ and subcontracting. The main problem facing the guilds was not so much over-dominant masters who were not vigorously resisted by Antwerp guilds, but mercers intruding into the field of production and so ‘blurring established differences’ between retailing and production sectors. The experience of the Low Countries can be contrasted with the central European states where as S. Ogilvie demonstrates in ‘Consumption, social capital and the “Industrious Revolution” in early modern Germany’, J. of Economic History, 70 (2010), 287–32, whilst there was a desire to increase market work and consumption, elites employed the social capital of traditional institutions to oppose new work and consumption practices, particularly involving women, migrants and the poor. Whilst innovation was not wholly stifled, what she describes as ‘industrious revolutions’ were limited as a result when compared to the North Atlantic economies.

Relations between institutions, governmental forms, urban life and economic growth are examined in K. Karaman and Ş. Pamuk, ‘Ottoman state finances in European perspective, 1500–1914’, J. of Economic History, 70 (2010), 593–629, and R. Blaufarb, ‘The survival of the pays d'états: the example of Provence’, Past and Present, 209 (2010), 83–116. Karaman and Pamuk demonstrate how the early modern era witnessed the pan-European formation of centralized states that captured increasing shares of resources as taxes. These states not only enjoyed greater capacity to deal with domestic and external challenges but were also able to shield their economies better against wars. Government of the Ottoman Empire on the other hand, with its disparate and less urbanized territories spread across the Mediterranean, Balkans and Near East, did not become more efficient. Employing evidence from budgets, Karaman and Pamuk examine the Ottoman experience with fiscal centralization. They demonstrate that through the high shares taken by intermediaries, Ottoman government revenue fell behind that of other European states during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when it also began to experience naval and military setbacks such as the raising of the siege of Vienna, although after implementation of reforms there were increases in central revenues during the nineteenth century. One reason for the success of European governments at fighting wars and raising revenue is evident in Blaufarb's analysis of French government. Blaufarb explains how whilst much of central France progressively came under direct royal control, frontier provinces were more able to resist the advance of absolutism because of the powers exercised by provincial quasi-representative bodies known as pays d'états. The pays d'états came into existence because of the military and strategic significance of frontier provinces, and retained their status through a variety of spatial, temporal and geographical factors. Situated on the margins of France, it was not their distance from Paris that facilitated this relative autonomy but their importance in the system of frontier defences: the estates were fiscally, administratively and logistically crucial to war making. An important example of this was their importance in raising revenue, the city of Lille alone contributing 112,000 l. annually to maintain frontier fortifications and 250,000 l. in annual tax revenue towards the end of the ancien régime. Through their support for local government, administrative structures and expertise and tax revenue raising, the pays d'états were therefore, according to Blaufarb, crucial to the maintenance of the ancien régime.

The means by which central governments retained control over remote provinces are also examined in A. Groundwater, ‘From Whitehall to Jedburgh: patronage networks and the government of the Scottish borders, 1603 to 1625’, Historical J., 53 (2010), 871–93. Groundwater analyses how James I and VI used a group of Scottish courtiers that he brought with him to London to assist in the government of his realm along with his more English privy council. Groundwater shows how despite some hostility from English parliamentarians, these Scottish nobles had privileged access to James and were at the centre of a system of patronage networks stretching from Whitehall Palace to the Scottish and English borders. Whilst these courtiers benefited, of course, from these networks and were granted various lands, monopolies, patents and titles, they balanced the English aspects of government and supported their kinsmen allies and friends. The article illuminates some of the methods employed by James to bind his kingdoms together in closer union which parallel those of other contemporary European rulers. The borders were re-christened the ‘Middle Shires’ in 1603 and through patronage and a whole series of appointments of local government officials, grants of lands, magistracy and other offices ‘lines of communication were regularly and effectively used’ between the London court, the Scottish council and the Scottish borders landed elite to implement crown politics and maintain systems of patronage.

The interface between national government legislation and the operation of local government is evident, of course, when we consider the experiences of the English poor and operation of charities. In ‘The development of poor relief in Lancashire, c. 1598–1680’, Historical J., 53 (2010), 551–72, J. Healey employs a variety of sources such as petitions to JPs from paupers to examine changes in the way poor relief was administered in north-western Stuart England, providing a useful local case-study to counterbalance analysis of charitable provision as part of early modern state formation. He concludes that implementation by the mid-seventeenth century was ‘surprisingly’ rapid driven by the local magistracy, who received thousands of petitions, enforced statutes, set relief policy and policed the relatively small number of individuals on the parish. In ‘The poor law of Old England: institutional innovation and demographic regimes’, J. of Interdisciplinary History, 41 (2010), 339–66, M. Kelly and C. O Grada agree with Healey that when examined at a local level the old poor law system was more effective than has previously been accepted. They note that a more favourable view of the poor law has been encouraged by emphasis upon its efficiency in relieving the indigent and association with early modern economic growth based upon parish-level micro-studies. Kelly and O'Grada explore links between the old poor law and pre-industrial England's ‘low pressure demographic regime’ arguing that the poor law seems to have reduced vagrancy and destitution by the provision of funding through local administrative parish units. Collecting together data relating to multiple parishes from many studies which they present in tabular appendices, the authors argue that partly through the operation of the old poor law the earnings of ordinary people were little different between the Tudor period and the eve of the Industrial Revolution. They contend that the timing, design and effectiveness of the old poor law helped relieve ‘both life-cycle and crisis poverty with rising incomes’ helping to shield ‘an increasing proportion of the population against destitution’ social costs with much of the variation in poor relief being due to ‘differences in resource constraints and the cost of living’. In ‘Poor families, removals and “nurture” in late old poor law London’, Continuity and Change, 25 (2010), 233–62. A. Levene tries to look beyond the experiences of pauper males to explore the impact of enforced re-settlement upon women, children and families. Levene demonstrates that within the dispossessed pauper populations of two large London parishes, women and children were often disproportionately represented by the removals provisions of settlement law being forced back to their home parishes whether these wanted them or not. Levene's study also shows that despite acknowledgment of the detrimental impact of splitting families, this often continued to be done, particularly when older children were regarded as of a working age where they could support themselves. Finally, in ‘Charity and the government of the poor in the English charity-school movement, circa 1700–1730’, J. of British Studies, 49 (2010), 774–800, J. Schmidt examines the charity-school movement's extension of the idea of charity as justice to remedy the perception of a dangerous failure of parents to ‘discharge their natural duties of educating and disciplining their children’. He contends that the case of St James's Westminster demonstrates clearly the major effects of social power as manifest in the charity schools and their attitude towards parental authority as they moved away from working in conjunction with traditional structures of household authority towards more institutionalized boarding schools. Hence, whilst it was claimed that charities were able to stimulate the household most closely they were also institutions of power and authority reinforcing authority and discipline in the crowded metropolis.

Aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial life are explored in various articles. In ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” settlement of Ireland’, Historical J., 53 (2010), 919–37, J. Cunningham tried to look beyond the historical reputation of Cromwell and his generals in Ireland, especially in relation to the notorious massacre at Droheda. He turns his attention to the settlement programme during the 1650s which he demonstrates was a complex process in which Cromwell was, in many ways, an ally of Irish landowners against illegal land confiscations and transplantations approved by the London parliament rather than simply being a tyrannical figure. Whilst the brutality at Droheda and in Wexford is not effaced, Cunningham demonstrates that in many respects Cromwell was ‘humane and generous’ in his dealings with both Protestant and Catholic Irish landowners and ‘displayed a genuine compassion for cases of hardship’ and aversion to unfairness and injustices. In ‘News and the politics of information in the mid-seventeenth century: the western design and the conquest of Jamaica’, History Workshop J., 69 (2010), 1–26, N. Greenspan shows how the Protectorate also set its eyes upon Jamaica as a blow against the Spanish empire and an opportunity to enhance English trade and power internationally, and launched attacks in 1654 and 1655 which succeeded in conquering the Island. She explores the different ways in which ‘the news media shaped, and were shaped by, contemporary political, military and diplomatic interests and affairs’ and how the conquest generated much international interest in Europe, the British Isles and across the Atlantic. The analysis demonstrates how information was passed around through diplomats and in domestic and international press, whilst there was much speculation about the significance of the war, its international significance and possible outcomes, for example within the London and Madrid diplomatic communities. For example, we hear about the state of the Jamaican colony itself with its disease ridden settlement and how many existing soldiers and sailors died of disease before they were reinforced. This article examines the ways in which the news media shaped, and were shaped by, political, military and diplomatic affairs. As the English forces suffered setbacks and war against Spain dragged on, the Cromwellian government struggled to control the presentation and dissemination of information. Alternate news channels, however, undermined official control and challenged reports in the state-sponsored press. Greenspan concludes that ‘the image, scope and progress of the Western Design and ensuing Anglo-Spanish conflict’ was determined by the news media ‘as by the politicians, agents and military personnel responsible for policy development, diplomacy and the execution of war. For the most part, the news media responded to current events as they unfolded.’ So agents and news gatherers, spies, merchants and diplomats were all evaluating and re-interpreting information and shaping political actions as much as commanders, soldiers and government officials.

One means of encouraging trade and hastening colonial conquest and control from forts and ports was, of course, through the production and dissemination of maps and surveys. In ‘The merchant, the map, and empire: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake and inter-imperial trade, 1644–73’, William and Mary Quarterly, 67 (2010), 603–44, C.J. Koot provides a case-study of the production and changing uses and meanings of one example from the Atlantic world. Including various sections reproduced from Herrman's Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited (1670), Koot explores how the map travelled from its immediate Dutch context across the Atlantic from Maryland to England and thence passed into the hands of the Lords of Trade, becoming a crown possession, acquiring ‘new meanings and associations’ very different from those that had surrounded in its colonial place of birth. Prospering through his participation in merchant trade, Herrman became one of the leaders of Dutch New Amsterdam and facilitated co-operation between the Dutch and English whilst his map reflected that co-operation featuring more detailed surveys and topographical views of New Amsterdam. Produced in a colonial context by an individual who often ignored boundaries, the map ‘represented local understandings of the multi-imperial origins of the mid-Atlantic’. However, in British government hands it facilitated the re-evaluation and re-assessment of the colonies, starkly illustrating the geographical difficulties preventing effective government control of the territories and controlling trade and taxation. The map also demonstrated the possibilities for colonial exploitation and reinforced the importance of British control of the North American colonies symbolizing the value of the expanding empire which enable it to appeal to London merchant and naval audiences despite the dual-meanings suffused within.

Two articles examine the contrasting experiences of eighteenth-century slave and freed-slave communities in the Americas and Africa. In ‘Facilitating the slave trade: company slaves at Cape Coast Castle, 1750–1807’, Slavery and Abolition, 31 (2010), 363–77, T.M. Reese argues that many within Britain's Company of Merchants relied upon its company slaves to facilitate British African trade. These slaves had a relatively ambiguous status being regarded as property but also following West African custom receiving a wage, retaining various legal rights whilst being able to integrate themselves into local communities and offer some resistance to the company. This is evident in the settlement of Cape Coast Castle itself where the company slaves worked set hours and were able to live within the adjoining town rather than the castle, spend their wages and integrate themselves into local urban society. Indeed, the company was obliged to support them throughout life regardless of age or infirmity. Cape Coast served as an administrate centre and slave enclave and they were required to work in all manner of trades from general labourers, bricklayers, cooks, cotton gatherers to gardeners. Company slaves were also embroiled in local conflicts such as those between Upper and Lower Town when they were involved in fighting with townspeople during the local harvest festival in 1780 and had to be protected in the fort. In ‘Eighteenth-century “prize negroes”: from Britain to America’, Slavery and Abolition, 31 (2010), 379–93, on the other hand, C.R. Foy examines how the transatlantic prize system provided the opportunity for whites to exploit the system for greater gain and extend the reach of the slave market beyond the Americas, whilst restricting the opportunities for slave freedom and resulting in the sale of many black seamen into slavery. Whilst as Foy observes during the decades of almost continuous transatlantic warfare between the 1730s and 1780s the Anglo-American slave prize system extended the trade, frustrated enemies and enriched many seamen, owners and offices, it limited opportunities for black slave freedom. Privateering dominated the economies of Atlantic ports such as New York, Newport and Philadelphia with prize systems supporting the local urban economy. There was some difference in the treatment that slaves received from British and American vessels during the American Revolution, and the former were more likely to employ captured black mariners rather than sell them into slavery.

Returning to the British Isles and turning to religion various studies consider the geography and demographics of different denominations and the contingent process of identity formation. Taking the former first, in ‘Zion's people: who were the English nonconformists: part 2: occupations (Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists)’, Local Historian, 40 (2010), 208–23, C.D. Field continues his useful summary of the occupational evidence for nonconformity, although distinctions between rural and urban experiences are drawn piecemeal rather than systematically partly reflecting the varied evidence. Having examined the importance of baptism and marriage registers as occupational evidence for dissent, he investigates whether in terms of occupation ‘Nonconformity was the Established Church of the middle classes’. He tries to summarize the occupational data with regard to these denominations with the proviso that ‘there has been no uniform method for the classification of occupations over the centuries’. For the early modern period Field concludes that ‘despite inconsistent categorization of occupations and inevitable geographical variations, usually mirroring local and regional economies’, the ‘broad trends in Quaker social structure’ demonstrate that they were generally ‘drawn from the middling sort’ attracting ‘few gentry and professionals except for in the early years’. He concludes that Quakerism had ‘few attractions for labourers and unskilled workers’, the nineteenth century witnessing further ‘embourgeoisement’. Baptists also had relatively few gentlemen and professionals but strong groups of tradesmen and a ‘reducing proportion’ of farmers during the eighteenth century. However, they had far more poor, lower skilled, depressed and unskilled individuals than amongst the Quakers and Congregationalists. Finally, whilst Congregationalist can be especially hard to distinguish from other nonconformist groups they were broadly ‘much more affluent’ than either Baptists or Quakers, containing much greater proportions of gentry, merchants and tradesmen and ‘lower proportions of yeomen/husbandmen and artisans’.

The process of religious divergence and identity formation in changing political circumstances is the subject of A. Raffe, ‘Presbyterians and Episcopalians: the formation of confessional cultures in Scotland, 1660–1715’, English Historical Rev., 514 (2010), 570–98, and G. Tapsell, ‘Laurence Hyde and the politics of religion in later Stuart England’, English Historical Rev., 125 (2010), 1414–48. Both articles demonstrate how as Tapsell emphasizes, ‘one of the most significant dimensions of the re-invigoration of later Stuart studies over the last 20 years has been the drive to place religion at the heart of political affairs’. Whilst it has tended to be accepted that religion was not the same force in society as it had been in the early Stuart or civil war periods when religious radicalism had a major impact upon politics and society, this should not be exaggerated. Raffe examines how distinct Presbyterian and Episcopalian confessional cultures were forged in Scotland in the period between 1660 and 1715 and how ecclesiological parties were transformed into confessional groups partly through government attempts to restrict religious diversity. Encouraged by institutional upheavals, generational change and controversy, Scotland's Presbyterians and Episcopalians came to hold opposing views on church government and theology, and to worship in different ways. Departing from orthodox Calvinism, the Episcopalians moved closer to Anglicanism whilst the Presbyterians took the opposite journey, became increasingly fixed in their attitudes and placed greater emphasis upon ‘confessional orthodoxy’. As Tapsell demonstrates, a similar bifurcation is evident in the career of Laurence Hyde which had a major impact upon religious politics in the period. Hyde served as James II's lord treasurer and became a staunch defender of the Church of England against what he regarded as undue nonconformist influence in the reign of Queen Anne as a high church Tory. Much of his influence came from his relationship to the clerical establishment of Oxford which included a ‘lengthy association’ with Christ Church and the University as a whole, which allowed Hyde to champion the case against nonconformity, and his house was used as a meeting place for convocation clergy hostile to the Whigs and even supported Oxford high church Tory cleric Henry Sacheverell in his notorious incendiary sermons.

Nicole Greenspan is an assistant professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia. Her publications include articles on news, intelligence, and popular print as well as royalists and the exiled courts. She is completing a book on the news media in the mid seventeenth century. A special issue of Urban History (no. 3) edited by F. Nevola and G. Rebecchini examines various aspects of early modern Italian city culture. In ‘”Every sort of manual type, and mostly foreigners”: migrants, brothers and festive kings in early modern Florence’, Urban History, 37 (2010), 360–71, and ‘Domestic space and identity: artisans, shopkeepers and traders in sixteenth-century Siena’, 372–85, D. Rosenthal and P. Hohti respectively explore the material and ceremonial culture of the artisan classes. B. Furlotti, ‘Connecting people, connecting places: antiquarians as mediators in sixteenth-century Rome’, 386–99, S. Hanke, ‘The splendour of bankers and merchants: Genoese garden grottoes of the sixteenth century’, 399–419, and F. Bardati, ‘Between the king and the pope: French cardinals in Rome (1495–1560)’, 419–34, demonstrate how the aesthetic construction of controlled spaces for artistic display figured in social politics. The final set of three articles: V. Cafa, ‘The via Papalis in early cinquecento Rome: a contested space between Roman families and curials’, 434–52, P. Jackson, ‘Parading in public: patrician women and sumptuary law in Renaissance Siena’, 452–64, and P. Canguilhem, ‘Courtiers and musicians meet in the streets: the Florentine mascherata under Cosimo I’, 464–74, explore various cultural displays in public streets where social promiscuity posed special challenges. Taken together the essays demonstrate how important both republican and princely Italian states were in early modern European culture, fostering innovation through patronage and support from clergy, bankers, wealthy shopkeepers and princes. The church, for instance, was able to commission and promote works of art such as altarpieces and portraits as few wealthy individuals could be sanctioned by divine authority and partial community support. As Hanke shows, Genoese merchants were able to enhance their status and influence through patronage and regulation of distinctive palatial garden grottoes with their sumptuous mosaic floors, vibrant terracotta tesserae, exotic sea shells and waterworks and coralline profusion. As T.V. Cohen and E.S. Cohen argue in their conclusion to the collection ‘Postscript: charismatic things and social transaction in Renaissance Italy’, 474–82, the essays demonstrate how important other factors were in making material culture central to Italian Renaissance life despite – and partly because of – threats of instability from internal warfare and invasion. Whilst not unique to Italy, the Italian states were unusually urbanized with relatively dense town populations, rich traditions and concentration of economic activity compared with most of the rest of Europe apart from the Low Countries. Steeped in the remnants of their classical past with Rome still, although a tarnished, the centre of Constantine's church, as the awe induced in the minds of numerous foreign visitors continued to demonstrate, this gave their urban life special qualities and imbued some objects with rich and complex meanings. Not least of these were the rich profusion of artistic works from sculpture and garden grottoes to madrigals and masquerades and the numerous artistic, civic and ecclesiastical rituals associated with them.

Returning to the British Isles, two studies by B. Heller examine different aspects of life and pleasure in the eighteenth-century metropolis. In ‘Leisure and the use of domestic space in Georgian London’, Historical J., 53 (2010), 623–45, Heller argues that historians have underestimated the degree to which domestic spaces were the primary place of middling sort and elite polite pleasures such as reading, discussion and socializing. Using diaries, correspondence and other sources, he provides evidence of how different rooms were employed for different activities at various times of the day dependent upon a contingent mix of qualities, facts of life that highlight the limitations of conventional bi-polar public/private models. In ‘The “Mene Peuple” and the polite spectator: the individual in the crowd at eighteenth-century London fairs’, Past and Present, 208 (2010), 131–57, Heller examines another side of leisure in the capital using a vivid evocation of Bartholomew Fair composed by George Alexander Stevens, famous for his Lecture on Heads, and other descriptions. Here too he is partly interested in elite and middling sort pleasure but in this case how the ‘gentle’ sort confronted and experienced the realities of the disorderly fair with its numerous tempting attractions, noises, smells and milling crowds seemingly far removed from the order and regulation of Georgian domestic pleasures. As Heller points out, adhering to expectations of polite conduct in the fairground was difficult when sociable ease and refinement was challenged by Stevens’ ‘crowds against other crowds driving’ in a cacophony of noise from shows, rides and attractions, ‘amongst a barrage of smells from the food stalls and the fair-goers’. One response was to present oneself as apart from the crowd, an observer of the behaviour of others rather than a participant. Another was that towards the end of the eighteenth century the polite stopped attending fairs, as the lack of accounts by them demonstrates, and this change in attitude is also evident in the banning and circumscription of some fairs. Thus the mixing together of social groups in close and chaotic proximity represented by the fairs was curtailed by the end of the century as other forums such as tearooms and theatres also became more socially segregated.

Two stimulating articles interrogate relationships between international information networks and print culture. In ‘Eighteenth-century review journals and the internationalisation of the European book market’, T. Munck concentrates upon the ‘seemingly rather dry’ journals that specialized in reporting research and reviewing new publications which originated and were maintained by various scholarly communities. Often relying upon each other for information and support with hundreds of subscribers and networks of reviewers, these were frequently the conduit for international transmission of ideas with their translations and reviews. One French example was the Journal encyclopedique (1755–94) run by Pierre Rousseau, the Monthly Rev. and Critical Rev. in England and the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliotek (1765–1806) in the German-speaking world. Munck tracks the excigences of ideas facilitated by these interdisciplinary publications which fostered the geographical mobility of early modern European society. He concludes that where precisely situated in their social and political contexts, these journals are a relatively unused resource ‘capable of providing historians with invaluable evidence on the transmission, adaptation and reception of ideas across language borders in Enlightenment Europe’. A. Fox, ‘Printed questionnaires, research networks, and the discovery of the British Isles, 1650–1800’, Historical J., 53 (2010), 593–621, investigates the social and cultural geographies of printed questionnaires and the part they played in the formation of British identities. Questionnaires solicited information concerning geographical features, antiquities and natural history on behalf of scholars, learned societies and periodical publications which was used to inform a range of publications. Although the quality and quantity of responses varied, the technique facilitated contacts between philosophers and learned individuals and served as a model for nineteenth-century research practices. Taken together, Munck and Fox both demonstrate how intellectual networks were developed in the early modern world from the local to regional and international, and how scholarly communities were able to transcend – or even turn to their advantage – apparent limitations of localism and provinciality.

Turning to historiography, in ‘Making the human gesture: history, sexuality and social justice’, History Workshop J., 70 (20120), 5–20, J. Weeks examines the changing historiography of gender and sexual history as well as his distinguished personal contribution towards it as epitomized by the History Workshop J. which he contends ‘grew out of the same social, cultural and political context . . . as second-wave feminism and the lesbian and gay movement’. Crucially for Weeks, a former editor, these are always intertwined and he claims that for his generation ‘researching the history of sexuality the practice of history was more than simply a rediscovery or reconstruction of the past’ but also helped to ‘remake our understanding of the sexual present’. Sexual history was therefore part of the sexual liberation movement which ‘fuelled a recognition’ of the political nature of history, imbued past individuals with colour, life and desires and challenged scholarly convention, at the risk of subverting objectivity. This movement has been particularly fruitful in three areas ‘grassroots history’ with its inclusivity, ‘constructing histories’ or ‘creating the past afresh for the present’ and remaking ‘current possibilities’ whilst highlighting questions of structure, power and domination. As a result Weeks is sure that ‘a great deal has changed since the 1970s’ with a ‘vast and flourishing historiography about sexuality and intimate life’ and various enthusiastic younger scholars having replacing earlier ignorance and prejudice. He considers that much is now known about topics such as marriage and the family, prostitution and homosexuality, medical regulation, moral codes and religious traditions, sexual practices and related matters as part of what is now a ‘highly professionalised discipline’. A major concern of this research has been the importance of modern urban living in the formation of same-sex identities from the seventeenth century. Weeks acknowledges that it was in 1970s London that he was first inspired to join the gay liberation movement whilst the emergence of homosexual identities has been variously located in early modern towns of the Italian Renaissance, London and the Dutch cities of the seventeenth century, or London of the late nineteenth century which Weeks sees as ‘crucial for the emergence of recognizably modern identities and subjectivities’.

This attention to grand themes unconstrained by traditional periodizations seems to provide an example of just the kind of new model of historical transformation that P.J. Corfield calls for in ‘POST-Medievalism/Modernity/Postmodernity?’, Rethinking History, 14 (2010) 379–404. Here Corfield critiques historian's use of periodization as the ‘collective default system of the profession as currently institutionalised’ with its ‘out-dated assumptions’ concerning the ancient world, medievalism, modernity and ‘(perhaps) Postmodernity’. Despite the fact that history is a ‘multi-layered subject that continually renews itself’ to succeeding generations and the exploration of ‘an ever more ambitious range of themes’, this has not been sufficiently reflected in staid, and flat-footed periodizations which provide shared seemingly-inevitable assumptions that stifle criticism. Modernity and Pre-modernity have ‘hazy’ definitions and ‘even hazier’ chronologies, as do Medievalism, the Renaissance, or ‘the Industrial Revolution’ but are retained for intellectual and institutional reasons or for lack of consensus about alternative narratives. The deep continuities of the very gradual process of urbanization, for instance, which has led to half the global population being resident in towns and dependency upon urbanized economies, is hard to accommodate within medieval/feudal, modern or postmodern models. Corfield complains that the binary breaks between Modernity and Postmodernity during the late twentieth century (all of which she capitalizes) are chronologically and geographically challenged, ‘subjective and inconsistent’. However, this ‘uncertainty’ is ‘as nothing’ when compared with that surrounding the concepts of Modernity and Modernism caused by ‘historians and cultural critics’ who believe that the past can be studied (unlike Postmodernists according to her) but fail to ‘compare and contrast their operating models’. Corfield suggests that through much repetition and uncritical acceptance the concept of modernity has suffered from ‘conceptual confusion’ whereas non-Postmodern historians need to ‘allow for multiple dimensions-continuity, gradual change, and revolutionary upheaval’ within each period so transcending the ‘Post-post to study multi-layered experiences in the past as in the present’, moving beyond the ‘all-change “big switch” model of historical transformation’ towards a more effectively defined and conceptualized ‘longitudinally three-dimensional history’.

Post-1800

In urban history, it seems, size matters. This appears to be the message conveyed most clearly in the results of an extensive and ambitious survey undertaken by Mario Polèse and Jonathan Denis-Jacob, and published in Urban Studies, 47 (Aug. 2010), 1,843–1,860. The authors examine ‘Changes at the top: a cross-country examination over the twentieth century of the rise (and fall) in rank of the top cities in national urban hierarchies’. Defining top cities by population size, they track the shifts in hierarchy of the top 10 cities in 52 nations at three points in time: 1900, 1950 and 2000. Their analysis reveals that changes at the very top of national urban hierarchies are very rare, but that below this, a number of factors could cause an elevation or a decline in urban status. These factors included changes in technology, political events, shifts in trade and the expansion of settlement frontiers. They also found that hierarchical changes were more common in developing nations in contrast to older, industrialized nations, leading them to conclude that ‘urban hierarchies harden over time’. One interesting exception to this to emerge from the study was the case of Montreal, which lost its position as premier Canadian city to Toronto in the second half of the twentieth century. The authors argue that this was due to the rise of Québécois nationalism and the accompanying out-migration of Montreal's English-speaking business elite in the 1960s. Otherwise, they conclude that, ‘In mature urban systems, the probability that the top city will be dislodged by an upstart is slim.’

The Montreal case is a modern illustration of the capacity of migration to shape the character and status of a city, and this theme is also explored elsewhere in the periodical literature in relation to labour migration. John Belchem's study of ‘Hub and diaspora: Liverpool and transnational labour’, Labour History Rev., 75 (Apr. 2010), 20–9, offers an assessment of Liverpool's labour history through the experience of its largest immigrant labour workforce, the Irish. Belchem argues that the size and significance of the Irish community in Liverpool made it possible for it to sustain both an underclass, supported by a sophisticated infrastructure of charitable relief and community networks, and a second-generation of Liverpool-born Irish businessmen and retailers who became ethnic as well as political leaders for the migrant community. Although he makes some transnational comparisons, for example with the Polish migrant community in the United States, his research underlines the need for ‘context and cultural specificity’ in order to understand the migrant worker experience. Belchem's study is one of a number of articles featuring the urban experiences of migrants. The migrant worker experience in contemporary London, for example, is outlined in a research report entitled, ‘Global cities at work: migrant labour in low-paid employment in London’, London J., 35 (Mar. 2010), 85–99. Unlike Belchem whose focus was on one migrant group, the six members of the research team, funded by the ESRC, examined the experience of all foreign-born workers in a specified range of low-waged occupations, with a view to investigating their coping strategies and the role of ethnicity, gender and class in their occupational patterns. Taking 1993–2005 as their study period, they were able to use interviews and questionnaires to address their research questions. Their findings reveal a section of the London population impoverished not by exclusion from the workplace and dependence on benefits, but by their confinement to low-paid work offering little opportunity for social advancement.

Portuguese Studies devotes a special issue (no. 1) to the theme of the ‘Portuguese-speaking diaspora in Great Britain and Ireland’, 26 (2010), which also contains some material of interest to urban historians. In particular, Mark Eaton's contribution on ‘Portuguese migrant worker experiences in Northern Ireland's market town economy’, 10–26, examines the small concentrations of Portuguese workers employed in the harvesting, food processing and packaging sectors, typically located in Northern Ireland's market towns. Centres such as Portadown and Craigavon, along with Antrim, Armagh, Ballymena, Coleraine and Eniskillen among others, were the destinations of the Province's 700–1,000 Portuguese-speaking migrants in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In contrast, the main population centres of Belfast, Lisburn and Derry attracted relatively few because, Eaton contends, it was the smaller market towns which offered them a niche in low-waged labouring work. Their impact on these communities can be seen in the development of shops, pubs, cafes and churches geared towards catering for Portuguese clientele and in a strengthening of the migration trail between Portugal and Northern Ireland.

The economy of the market town is also the focus of Robert Gant's study of domestic servants in the South Wales town of Crickhowell. In ‘Domestic service in a small market town: Crickhowell, 1851–1901’, Local Population Studies, 84 (2010), 11–30, Gant concludes that the market town, with its craft and trading sectors and its close connection to a wider agricultural hinterland, provided a range of domestic service type roles for young workers in both outdoor and indoor situations which varied according to their employers’ primary economic function. The small town scope of Gant's study allows for a longitudinal analysis of patterns of change and continuity over time. In contrast, Manjirit Kamat's survey of work in the industrial city of Sholapur, India, is a micro-study of a two-year period. ‘Disciplining Sholapur: the industrial city and its workers in the period of the Congress ministry, 1937–1939’, Modern Asian Studies, 44 (2010), 99–119, explores how a period of provincial governance by the Congress ushered in an era of unrest in the western Indian industrial city of Sholapur as an upsurge of union activity in the local textile mills was met by an increasing emphasis on discipline by the Congress leaders. This ran counter to the alliances which the Congress had previously struck with the unions and was based on a fear of popular unrest. This piece demonstrates the profound impact that a change of government could have on the character and social relations of a city and its workers and is one of a selection of articles dealing with aspects of local government in an urban context.

Similar issues are confronted by James Owen, albeit in the entirely different geographical and chronological setting of mid-Victorian Nottingham, in Midland History, 35 (2010), 107–28. Owen's article offers a case-study of Liberal town politics in the years after the Second Reform Act and suggests that they were not characterized by tension between the moderate and radical factions of the party. Although this radical versus moderate framework has been used to explain the formative years of the Liberal ascendancy elsewhere, he contends that it was the political and religious traditions of the town, and in particular its nonconformity and its Chartist heritage, which set the tone for the electoral politics and campaign rhetoric of his study period. The politics of place outweighed those of party in this instance, highlighting the importance of viewing political rivalries in their context. Christopher Gurthrie's examination of ‘Socialism in microcosm: the municipal administration of Dr Ernest Ferroul in Narbonne, 1896–1921’, European History Quarterly, 40 (2010), 79–96, deals not so much with place as with personality in local politics in the southern French city of Narbonne. Ernest Ferroul's brand of socialism was concerned not with the ultimate aim of revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state, but with the creation of local government for the people. Using council minutes as his main source, Guthrie examines how Ferroul strove to achieve this through both symbolic and practical means such as street re-naming, the revitalization of celebrations such as May Day, anti-clericalism and the channelling of resources into organizations dedicated to the support of worker interests. Despite attempts by the French government to frustrate Ferroul's ambitions in Narbonne, his mayoralty demonstrated the capacity of a socialist local administration to focus on local problems at city level.

The cities of central Europe loom large in urban history articles this year, and a useful overview of recent publications on some of central Europe's key cities is provided in a historiographical review by Egbert Klautke in the Historical J., 53 (2010), 177–95. Klautke surveys recent monographs on Vienna and, to a lesser extent Prague, before moving on to new literature on Berlin. These two capitals and their experience of urbanization, for Klautke, reveal much about the history of modernity. ‘Historians of modernity’, he contends, ‘become urban historians almost by default’, such is the degree to which urbanization and modernization were overlapping processes. His review essay, as well as offering some forthright assessments of the merits of the various publications coming under his compass, also provides a useful reminder of the value of the city as a focus for the study of all manner of cultural, economic and social processes. Most of the literature discussed by Klautke takes as its chronological focus, the fin de siècle, when Vienna and Berlin were, albeit later than many western European cities, experiencing rapid urban growth and advancement. The same period is fruitfully explored as a key moment in Budapest's experience of modernity. Dorothy Barenscott's article, ‘Articulating identity through the technological rearticulation of space; the Hungarian Millennial Exhibition as World's Fair and the disordering of fin-de-siècle Budapest’, is part of a special section of Slavic Rev., 69, 2 (Fall, 2010). Guest edited by Mary Neuberger, the section comprises a trio of articles devoted to ‘Nations on display: world's fairs and international exhibitions in Eastern Europe and beyond’, which examine the phenomenon of the fin de siècle world's fairs. Barenscott's is the contribution which most directly examines the impact of such events on their host cities. The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition was a celebration of the thousand-year anniversary of the conquest of Hungary and the origins of Magyar settlement, but as well as this it became a stage on which Budapest could assert its claim to rival Vienna as an imperial centre of technology. As Barenscott points out, ‘the positioning of Budapest as a world-class metropolis ready for inclusion into the global economy clouded the status of the event as a Hungarian, a multinational or an international fair’, but ultimately the city provided the most appropriate venue for directing the eyes of the world to Hungary's millennial fair.

The occasion of an exhibition also provides the focus for a study of early twentieth-century Glasgow by Sarah Britton. ‘“Come and see the empire by the all red route!”: anti-imperialism and exhibitions in interwar Britain’, History Workshop J., 69 (2010), 68–89, focuses on the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 and the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938. In this case, the urban exhibition appears as a contested and divisive phenomenon as the Glasgow Empire Exhibition prompted the city's Independent Labour Party to stage a counter event, a ‘Workers' Exhibition’, in which an anti-imperial narrative was promoted. The vitality of cultural life in the Scottish metropolis in the inter-war period, evident in Britton's work, is a far cry from the view of Glasgow which emerges in Angela Bartie's article, ‘Moral panics and Glasgow gangs: exploring “the new wave of Glasgow hooliganism”, 1965–1970’, Contemporary British History, 24 (2010), 385–408. Bartie examines the resurgence in gang violence in Glasgow in the second half of the 1960s and the reactions to it by local residents, the police and the wider public. Interestingly, the emergence of this wave of youth gang culture is explained in relation to the development of the Easterhouse district, an estate formally opened by Clement Attlee in 1956 which housed over 50,000 people by the mid-1960s, but which lacked social and leisure amenities. The construction of the estate around four distinct housing schemes indirectly gave rise to rival youth gangs which identified themselves with the different schemes. Likewise, efforts to address the problem, galvanized by the intervention of popular singer and comedian Frankie Vaughan who communicated directly with gang members, concentrated on providing key facilities designed for use by the young people of Easterhouse. Bartie's article is an interesting case-study of the emergence of a place-related understanding of youth delinquency.

The practical results that can be achieved by engaging with the urban environment and communicating directly with different interest groups in the city is a theme which also dominates a short but inspiring account of the public history work of an academic research centre located at one American university. Amy L. Howard's ‘Engaging the city: civic participation and teaching urban history’ is part of a special issue (no. 1) of the J. of Urban History, 46 (2010), 42–55, on teaching. Howard provides a summary of the work of the University of Richmond's Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, which uses its city location as ‘an extension of the classroom’. From an introductory ‘UniverCity’ day for new first-year students, to a placement programme where participants volunteer for work with a number of partner institutions, the centre provides history courses on urban America which engage directly with the environment of Richmond and which encourages its students to share their knowledge and expertise beyond the classroom.

Howard's essay is just one of a large number of articles this year forming part of special issues or special sections, as journal editors increasingly utilize these forms to explore particular themes in depth. In addition to its Fall 2010 issue, discussed earlier, the Slavic Rev., 69, 2 (Summer, 2010), also contains a special section, this time exploring the theme of urban crisis and resilience in a cluster of essays dealing with ‘The siege of Leningrad revisited: narrative, image, self’. Polina Barskova, guest editor of this section, explains the new sources and discursive forms which provide the context of this re-examination, primary among them the new approaches in genocide studies. Her own contribution to the volume is an essay on ‘The spectacle of the besieged city: repurposing cultural memory in Leningrad 1941–1944’, 327–55. Using contemporary descriptions of the horrific and yet also sometimes beautiful manifestation of the city under siege, Barskova explores the way in which Leningrad's citizens responded to the urban environment during the traumatic years of the siege and suggests that the tendency to juxtapose the beauty of their surroundings with the horror of their situation was a way of attempting to communicate the often unrepresentable scenes which confronted them in their everyday lives. The story of Leningrad after the siege is the focus of an article in the J. of Contemporary History, 45 (2010). Robert Dale's ‘Rats and resentment: the demobilization of the Red Army in post-war Leningrad, 1945–50’, 113–33, deals with the reception and reintegration of returning veterans. Contrary to the official Soviet representation of successful demobilization, Dale argues that Red Army veterans returning to Leningrad were resentful of the ‘rats’ who had avoided front-line service by taking on administrative jobs. Many did not receive the high-profile heroes’ welcome of the first waves of returning soldiers and, ultimately, the experience of demobilization in Leningrad was a tense and problematic as it was elsewhere in Europe as urban communities struggled to adapt to post-war conditions.

Elsewhere in the post-war period, towns and cities across Europe attempted to put behind them the divisions and conflicts of the war years through the promotion of municipal internationalism and, in particular, through twinning arrangements with places in formerly hostile countries. As Nick Clarke points out in his study of ‘Town twinning in Cold-War Britain’, Contemporary British History, 24 (2010), 173–91, more research has hitherto focused on the European rather than the British experience of twinning. His article aims to redress this balance by providing an overview of the mechanisms behind twinning arrangements in British towns and cities, and traces the development of the process from the Cold War through to the late 1970s, by which time a tradition of civic and cultural exchange between British and western European towns was firmly established.

Another influential factor in the transformation of post-war societies was sport. The staging of sporting events and the construction of sporting stadia could be used by cities to signal modernity and the emergence of a new identity and culture. The second issue of Urban History, 37 (2010), features a special section on ‘Sports stadia and modern urbanism’, consisting of three articles and an introduction by Nikolaus Katzer which explore the physical influence of sport on the urban landscape in post-war cities in the 1950s and 1960s and the influence of the Olympic Games on the formation of new urban identities. Alexandra Köhring's ‘Sporting Moscow: stadia buildings and the challenging of public space in the post-war Soviet Union’, 253–71, identifies the building of the Luzhniki stadia complex in Moscow in the mid-1950s as an exemplar of the shift in Soviet urban planning from an idealist-driven, monumental view of buildings in the landscape to one which was more sensitive to people's uses of urban space. During the planning phase, rival views of the Luzhniki area emerged. Some planners envisioned the district as the location for a landmark super-stadium, while others, pointing to advantages of the location as a prime, riverside recreational area, argued that the complex should cater for mass sport rather than elite display. But political change and new town planning principles also impacted on the planning process. Ultimately, the ambition to provide a place of mass leisure and recreation rather than a monument to elite sport was evident in the provision of facilities and services for visitors and spectators, in and around the main stadia, and the absence of an impressive main entrance.

In the second of this group of articles, Kay Schiller and Christopher Young examine the graphic and garden designs incorporated into the planning for the Munich Olympics in 1972, 272–88. Landscape architect Günter Grzimek and graphic designer Otl Aicher's work ranged from sports posters to the Olympic lake and should be viewed, the authors argue, as representing ‘progressive ideas regarding freedom and participation in West German society and democracy’. Christian Tagsold's contribution to this collection of articles also takes as its focus the occasion of an Olympic Games, this time the Tokyo Games of 1964, 289–300. His article presents the Tokyo Olympics as Japan's rite of passage to modernity. The technological innovations and buildings constructed in the years prior to the Games, in particular, the bullet train, the monorail and a new broadcasting centre, demonstrated the capacity for the Olympics to generate major urban improvements. During the Games, the route of the marathon was used to show-case the renewal and modernization of the city and its infrastructures taking athletes, for example, along the newly constructed Kôshû kaidô highway surfaced with asphalt. It was not just through the staging of mega events that sport could shape the identity of a city. As Geoffrey Levett shows in his ‘Sport and the imperial city: colonial tours in Edwardian London’, London J., 35 (2010), 39–57, the visit of touring parties could also raise questions about urban identity in a very public and sometimes uncomfortable way. In this case, the role of London as imperial capital was subject to scrutiny during the Edwardian tours of the New Zealand All Blacks (1905–06) the South African Springboks (1906–07) and the South African Cricket team in 1907. London hosted each of these touring sides in their matches against England, and therefore witnessed the overwhelming sporting superiority of the visiting colonial teams. Levett notes that, paradoxically, ‘The success of colonial teams reassured Londoners of the loyalty of the far-flung Britons overseas, but, at the same time, their superiority on the sports field could provide evidence for those who saw a degenerating society at the heart of the empire.’

In contrast to the image of the healthy ‘sporting city’, presented in these articles, a number of other writers have focused their attention on the physical and reputational damage that could be wreaked on towns and their inhabitants by pollution. Barry Doyle takes as his case-study, the town of Middlesbrough in the English north-east, in ‘Managing and contesting industrial pollution in Middlesbrough, 1880–1940’, Northern History, 47 (2010), 135–54. The town enjoyed the distinction of being the fastest-growing industrial centre in the country for much of the nineteenth century, but was also blighted by atmospheric pollution from the various iron, steel and chemical works which employed thousands of workers. The relatively long time-frame of this article allows Doyle to trace changing attitudes towards the smoke problem from the pre-World War I period when pollution was relatively easily identifiable, but difficult to address, to the inter-war period when the range of perspectives on the problem and the number of potential causal factors multiplied, making the search for solutions even more problematic. The pollution problem in the town was never just about industry, but also about the environmental location and the pressure of the mushrooming population and the difficulties of disposing of its waste. Doyle shows how different interest groups from within the community tended to emphasize different causal factors in their attempts to explain the pollution, but notes that in the inter-war period the word of expert officials and trained scientists became an increasingly ‘powerful weapon’ resorted to by environmental campaigners.

Joseph Hillier and Sarah Bell offer a rather different assessment of pollution in the nineteenth-century city in their contribution to the London J., 35 (2010), 22–38. The Great Stink of 1858, caused by the stench from rotting sewage in the Thames during the hot and dry summer of that year, prompted MPs to flee the House of Commons in fear of exposing themselves to disease by breathing in the foul air. Hillier and Bell examine the exposure of the politicians to the Great Stink by examining not just the conditions of that summer, but also the unsuccessful attempts in earlier years to provide the Houses of Parliament with an effective ventilation system. From this perspective, the authors argue, ‘The Great Stink event can therefore be seen as having a socio-political, technical and environmental configuration.’ Over a century later, a very different kind of environmental crisis in St Louis forms the subject of Robet Gioielli's article, ‘Get the lead out: environmental politics in 1970s St Louis’, J. of Urban History, 36 (2010), 429–46. In the 1970s, environmental activism in the city crystallized around the issue of childhood lead poisoning, caused by the common use of lead based paint in the city's old housing stock. Gioielli sees this as ‘an important example of postwar urban environmentalism’ as many poor black residents joined action groups such as the People's Coalition Against Lead Poisoning, with the aim of forcing city leaders to address the inadequate housing in which many local people were compelled to live.

Elsewhere, the design and planning of urban housing features prominently in the periodical literature. Cheryl Buckley's examination of ‘Modernity, tradition and the design of the industrial village of Dormanstown, 1917–1923’, appears in a special issue (no. 1) of the J. of Design History, 23 (2010) on ‘Model, method and mediation in the history of housing design’, 21–41. Buckley's study reveals how the industrial setting of the north-east of England gave rise to an unusually modern model village. Although the houses were based on traditional neo-Georgian architectural forms, the village design by the renowned partnership of Adshead, Ramsey and Abercrombie, incorporated materials, planning and construction methods which were unusually modern. In Planning Perspectives, 25 (2010), meanwhile, Robert Home examines ‘Peri-urban informal housing development in Victorian England: the contribution of freehold land societies’, 365–72. Home's focus is on the housing initiatives outside municipal boundaries by the Ipswich and Suffolk Freehold Land Society which, he argues, made an important contribution to the provision of housing for the urban working class. These articles show the range of initiatives and approaches which made their mark on Britain's urban housing stock in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and demonstrate the value of the case-study approach to illuminate local variations.

Although construction and character of houses and other elements of the built environment rightly figure prominently in the research interests of urban historians, it is the open urban spaces and, more particularly, the human activity therein which provides some of the most intriguing subject matter. The staging of processions through the streets and squares of towns and cities have long provided urban historians with rich research material, inviting exploration of all manner of spatial, social and cultural dimensions in urban life. It is perhaps fitting then, that one of the most substantial and scholarly contributions to the periodical literature on post-1800 urban history this year is Oliver Zimmer's study of Corpus Christi processions in late nineteenth-century Germany in the J. of Modern History, 82 (2010). ‘Beneath the “culture war”: Corpus Christi processions and mutual accommodation in the second German Empire’, 288–334, is part of a special issue on ‘The persistence of religion in modern Europe’ and offers much of interest to the urban historian, including a useful historiographical section on processions in their urban context. The research focus of Zimmer's article is the Corpus Christi processions in the denominationally mixed German towns of Augsburg, Ulm and Ludwigshafen am Rhein. In each of these places Zimmer readily finds examples of occasions when Corpus Christi processions raised tensions. In Augsburg in 1897, for example, it was the decision of three Catholic council members to attend the procession dressed in their robes of office which caused consternation. In Ulm in 1895 the seemingly trivial invitation by organizers to all householders along the procession route, rather than just the Catholic residents as in previous years, to decorate their dwellings, prompted indignation among some Protestant families, and in Ludwigshafen, a plan to hold a Corpus Christi procession for the first time in 1881 was met with protests over, among other things, potential traffic disruption. But rather than view these instances as evidence of an unbridgeable gulf between Catholic and Liberal interests in these German towns, and as part of the ‘Culture war’ of his title, Zimmer notes the efforts of the different interest groups to accommodate one another's needs. There was much, he argues, that united German Catholics and German liberals, not least their common language of Christianity. Zimmer's article, as well as providing a new example of the potential of the procession to provide a window on urban society, is perhaps more importantly a reminder of the need to look beyond the sometimes obvious examples of conflict and dispute in towns and cities in order to uncover a more complex, but perhaps more complete, picture of urban life.