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The early modern town—its history and historians: a review article*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Peter Burke
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Extract

Twenty-five years ago, when Jean Delumeau published his study of sixteenth-century Rome, contributions to the social (as opposed to the institutional) history of early modern towns were still rare events. Since about 1960, the trickle has become a flood. Historians from different countries have contributed to this development to varying degrees and in different ways; the French, with a shelf of massive doctoral theses; the Italians, with multi-volume histories of specific cities; the Germans, with symposia on small towns, and so on. The virtually simultaneous publication of three monographs on provincial English towns, one of them by an American scholar (J. T. Evans), prompts a question about the place of Anglo-American research in this picture. Are there distinctive English and American schools of preindustrial urban history? If so, is this because the towns studied are different, or the historical traditions of the students?

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 8 , May 1981 , pp. 55 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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Footnotes

*

C. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

J. T. Evans, 17th-Century Norwich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

D. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

References

1 For details, Clark, P., ‘Introduction’ to Clark, P. (ed.), The Early Modern Town (1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 L. Febvre, ‘Amiens: from the Renaissance to the counter-Reformation’, ch. 8 of A New Kind of History (ed. Burke, P., 1973, first published in 1941).Google Scholar

3 Blanshei, S. R., ‘Population, wealth and patronage in medieval and Renaissance Perugia’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9 (1979), 597—619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Davis, N. Z., Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975)Google Scholar; Agulhon, M., La sociability méridionale (Aix, 1966)Google Scholar; Vovelle, M., Les Métamorphoses de la Fête en Provence (Paris, 1976)Google Scholar; Grendi, E., Introduzione alia Storia Moderna della Repubblica di Genova (2nd edn, Genoa, 1976)Google Scholar, esp. the ‘ethnohistorical’ ch. 9; R. Trexler, Florence in Formal Array, forth-coming; Kent, F. W., Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977).Google Scholar Kent, D., The Rise of the Medici (1978).Google Scholar

5 Pillorget, R., ‘The Cascaveoux’, in State and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (ed. Kierstead, R. F., New York, 1975, first published in 1964).Google Scholar