Urban Europe 1500-1700. (Reviews).

Alexander Cowan, Urban Europe 1500-1700

London and New York: Arnold, 1998. ix + 229 pp. $70 (cl), $19.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-340-66324-3 (cl), 0-340-71981-8 (pbk).

Alexander Cowan, ed., Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400-1700

Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. x + 277 pp. $42.50. ISBN: 0-85989-578-5.

Alexander Cowan is the author of the well-received comparative history, The Urban Patriciate: Lubeck and Venice, 1580-1700 (Cologne/Vienna: Bohlau, 1986). For the University of Northumbria at Newcastle's Research Group of European Culture, he organized a conference in 1995 around two questions: "What is urban culture? To what extent may we speak about a common Mediterranean urban culture in the early modern period?" Mediterranean Urban Culture collects ten of those conference papers along with two others in an interdisciplinary application of the "cultural turn" to the Braudelian, materialist tradition on early modern Mediterranean cities. The second book under review, Urban Europe, is a textbook that grew out of Cowan's teaching and is a welcome addition to the classroom.

Mediterranean Urban Culture draws together contributors from five countries, who focus, by and large, on Venice and its Mediterranean imperial reaches through a variety of literary, art-historical, cultural, economic, social, archeological, and socio-architectural sources and approaches. The twelve essays range from the recovering Mediterranean world of the post-fourteenth-century crisis to the collapse of the Venetian empire into its Adriatic base by the end of the seventeenth century. A four-part division reflects the major themes in the collection: urban space (sociability and neighbors/neighborhoods), the role of outsiders (foreigners, Jews, merchants, and women), the place of smaller centers away from the mainline of international trade (three cases -- Thessaloniki, Modon in the Peloponnese, and the cities of Puglia), and the representation of urban centers in travel literature, painting, and culture in general.

The two essays in Part I, "Neighbours and Neighbourhoods," are programmatic overviews of problems and topics for further study and serve as starting points to explore reigning myths about civic solidarity and neighborhood sociability. James Amelang explodes two myths -- the myth of "civic" or "urban ideology" which emphasizes the social order, ethical commitment, and cultural achievements of the city versus the rusticated world of the countryside; and the myth of the Mediterranean, with its assumption of a unified culture area of distinctive social relations bound around family, friends, and neighbors. The ambiguities of sociability and public space alert us to the contradictions and complementarities inherent in urban society and space -- male and female, sacred and secular, public and private, high and low. Joseph Wheeler's essay focuses on "street-level" life in the Venetian sestiere of San Polo in the late fifteenth century in order to evoke the complexity of neighborhoods and local loyalties. Gender, age , and work divide neighborhoods in diverse ways to create fluid webs of allegiance that overlap, are negotiable, and circumstantially determined. In Venice, identity or belonging did not derive from the administrative units of the sestiere; but rather, solidarity and loyalty attached to the parish, to unofficial areas with and across parishes, and was blurred at their boundaries and overlapping edges.

Part II, "Religion, Ethnicity and Minority Groups," collects four essays that contrast the pull of outsiders to urban centers versus the relationship between outsiders and their host societies. Alexander Cowan presents the ambivalence toward foreign immigrants through a case study of the Dutch merchant Jacob Strycker, resident in Venice as Giacomo Stricker from 1647 until his death some forty years later. Because this Amsterdam merchant's daughter sought to marry a member of the Venetian patriciate, abundant documentation allows Cowan to test the meaning of boundaries between foreigner, resident, and citizen. Foreigners, even well connected merchants, occupied a difficult position within, but almost never part of their host city. Donatella Calabi summarizes the range of variation in the relationship between Jews and cities in the Mediterranean area to ask questions about the selection of the site, the ownership of buildings, and the organization of space in Jewish ghettos. Overall, ghettos were centrally loca ted (with the exception of Venice and Palermo), received a larger number of public services than other areas within the city, developed a central square, and had bad-quality buildings (especially with regard to structural repairs and neglected exteriors). John Edwards describes Cordoba's Calle de la Feria, a street of fairs, markets, public executions, and trades (especially tanners, skinners, and leather workers) that served as the north-south axis dividing its western Medina and eastern Ajerqu'a districts. He uses his source, Francisco Delicado's picaresque novel Portrait of the Fair Andalusian, to let the heroine Aldonza/Lozana recall from the perspective of a woman-of-the-streets in High Renaissance Rome the teeming life of urban trade and traffic in her Cordoban birthplace. Federica Ambrosini's essay on heterodox women in seventeenth-century Venice concludes that Lutherans, Calvinists, Greeks, Jews, Muslims, and even nonbelievers could create "deep spiritual and moral bewilderment" for Venetian women. Ei ght cases of such women brought before the Venetian Inquisition give tantalizing pictures of the ideas and uncertainties plaguing high-born ladies, low-class prostitutes, young girls, and married women, as they refused to confirm to the Church's teachings, sought solutions to their needs outside the Church's practices, or resisted society's ideas about women.

Where the first two parts of the collection emphasized the diversity of urban culture in the heterogeneous society of the city, the final two parts focus on the political and economic forces establishing the hierarchical relationship between cities as center and periphery (Part III) and the role of high culture in enforcing such structures of dependency (Part IV). In Part III, "On the Margins," Eleni Sakellariou's study of the Puglian network of cities such as Bari, Otranto, and Lecce, which profited from the trade of grain, olives, almonds, and other agricultural products, points to the need to examine large urban centers in relationship to their hinterlands and to understand the links between feudal aristocracy and urban elites. Allan Harvey, on 1403-30 Thessaloniki between the two Turkish occupations, examines a provincial town between the two cultures of the Ottoman Turks and the Byzantine Greeks; while Ruth Gertwagen, on the Venetian town of Modon in the two hundred years before Ottoman conquest in 1500, reconstructs through archeological evidence the importance of such maritime outposts in the transmission of culture and the exploitation of colonial rule. In Part IV, "Cultural Representations," Benjamin Arbel analyzes the descriptions of five Levant port towns (Alexandria, Rosetta, Damietta, Beirut, and Tripoli) in Renaissance travel literature as accurate historical sources. Tom Nichols demonstrates how linear perspective and the use of representational space in Venetian Renaissance painting and architecture created a symbolic and idealistic vision that reconstructed the world as a dramatic, theatrical set. In the last essay, Nicholas Davidson asks how all this concentration of diverse peoples and cultures in Venice affected its Terraferma cities. Rather than a simple diffusionist model flowing out of the hegemonic capital, he tells a cautionary tale in his finding of a constant interplay between the dominant power and its dependent cities -- with local elites, powerful landed families, and professionals a t the only university town of Padua often defying the logic of political and economic control through expression of cultural independence.

Cowan's textbook Urban Europe 1500-1700 joins Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City 1450-1750 (London/New York: Longman, 1995) as the best course overviews for early modern urban history. Cowan's eight chapters are divided into two parts: the first five chapters establish the urban framework in economy, government, elites, social structure, and religion; the concluding three chapters explore challenges of change from the interplay of social, economic, and political forces with the urban infrastructure, through rural migration, poverty, and poor relief, and from social control and disorder. Cowan's two major themes are a shared urban dimension across early modern Europe's cities and the centrality of urban dynamism in influencing patterns of consumption, modes of thought, and broad-based change. A fourteen-page topical bibliography, and separate indices for people, places, and subjects make it student-friendly.

The heterogeneity of Cowan's early modern Mediterranean and European cities link economic activity and cultural forms that spread from city to city. Contrariwise, conflicting cultures and values could heighten internal tensions within cities and between centers and peripheries. At the same time, elite culture created enduring myths and images to reinforce social hierarchies inside the city and between the city and the countryside. The comparative frame emphasizes the similarities and differences in urban life on both sides of the Alps, whatever the city's size, function, or religion.