Brill's Companions to European History series has for many years now created a platform for historians to present their research to a wider audience. The tone of these publications is light enough for any interested reader but at the same time each contribution also represents fundamental academic research and goes beyond the importance of textbooks. The collection has been especially fruitful for urban historians as the list of cities covered by the series keeps growing, the latest one added being medieval Vienna. The contributions in this volume were collected with the intention to introduce the city from as many aspects as the primary sources allow from c. 1100 to c. 1500. The volume is comprised of 19 chapters, starting with the introduction written by the editors, after which the chapters are grouped into four thematic parts. The book concludes with an appendix including the genealogical charts of the Babenberg and Habsburg families, a select bibliography and two indices: one listing geographical, the other collecting the personal names referenced.
The first thematic section focuses on describing the urban environment of medieval Vienna and introducing the main political events that took place in the observed period. Chapter 2 presents the primary sources that are available, providing the foundation for the entire volume, while the following chapter lays out the political configuration of the medieval city along with the social groups that formed part of it. Chapter 4 includes a detailed account of the architectural design: the importance of symbols and certain sacral buildings, while chapter 5 is an analysis of the property market: describing how it acted as an institutional framework, which then was very much interlinked with the social framework of the city. This first section closes with a collection of maps: detailing how the city was portrayed and viewed at the time.
The second section focuses on the privileges, rights and freedoms that Vienna as a city and its citizens fought for and established. Chapter 7 describes the emergence of a legal framework that evolved from the different rights of the city of Vienna as a whole, but additionally also the privileges of certain social groups within the city walls. The following chapter introduces the economic, social and political elite of the town and their constant struggle over influence and rights with the Austrian territorial lords over the 400 years covered by the book. This part also includes an introduction of the institutional and political conditions within which the community of the urban elite was organized and carried out their everyday life. The last chapter in this section is an analysis of the waterways of medieval Vienna: their economic importance is presented based on both archaeological and documentary sources. The chapter also offers plenty of illustrations and a deep geographical insight.
The third thematic section is dedicated to examining further social groups, minorities and intellectuals. Chapter 10 reflects on the division that exists in urban space as well as the ties that can connect or heal these divisions, such as kinship, property or spiritual belonging. Chapter 11 shines a spotlight on the Jewish community and describes their existence as a key political factor, while chapters 12 and 13 shift the focus of this section towards the intellectual and scholarly groups of the town. The section closes with chapter 14 casting the social net wide and attempting to portray the everyday life of the ordinary people in medieval Vienna.
The final theme of this volume embraces medieval urban culture. Five chapters are dedicated to subjects that still form an integral part of and very much define urban life in Vienna today. Chapter 15 introduces the works of the university with the example of Greek studies. Chapter 16 describes the importance of a symbolic group of tradesmen: goldsmiths. The relevance of their activities in art as well as in trade again draws a parallel between medieval and twenty-first-century Vienna. Chapter 17 explores the urban spaces and forms of art, especially rituals that took place there, while chapter 18 narrows the focus onto performative art. Chapter 19 is dedicated to music and introduces the foundations from which Vienna evolved into the world capital of music during the following centuries.
This volume is constructed as a well-oiled machine, where the reader first gets to see the big moving parts of a political system, legislative framework and their participants. This macro view is then narrowed, where micro cultures – tradesmen, scholars and artists – are all introduced in order to see how an ordinary day in medieval Vienna might have looked. The additional aid of a top-down analysis of the social structure really paves the way for the reader towards a complete understanding of the medieval urban environment. The most significant value of this publication, however, is the collection of primary and secondary sources it references. Similarly to the recent publication of Peter Csendes and Ferdinand Opll, Wien im Mittelalter. Zeitzeugnisse und Analysen (Vienna and Cologne, 2021), this book is a showcase of the abundance of material that is available for historians in the various Viennese archives. Whilst the Csendes and Opll work takes a new approach on the chronological events, A Companion to Medieval Vienna focuses upon multiple thematic aspects of medieval urban life.
