Synopses & Reviews
A collection of twelve papers that attempts to identify an urban culture amongst the many overlapping cultures of Mediterranean towns and cities during the Renaissance and early modern periods. Divided into four sections, the first essays examine the elements that constituted an urban centre, ideally and in reality. The second part looks at the religious, ethnic or minority groups that lived within the city as outsiders, such as Jews and immigrant merchants, particularly in Cordoba and Venice. The economic and social conditions of smaller urban areas on the margins of larger centres are discussed in part three, including the 15th- and 16th-century cities of Puglia, Thessalonika and the region around Venice. The final section appraises cultural representations of urban centres, such as Venetian Renaissance painting and 16th-century travel writing about the Levant Ports.
Review
“this is a useful collection of discrete essays in which almost everyone has something new to say which will be of interest to readers of this journal.” -Urban History, Vol. 28:3, 2001 Urban History
Synopsis
Was there a distinctive Mediterranean urban culture in the early modern period? In this collection, a team of international scholars from a wide range of disciplines use a variety of approaches - literary, art-historical, cultural, social and economic - to demonstrate both the range of collective urban experience in the Mediterranean and the complexity of the nature of urban culture at that time.The book, after an Introduction by the editor, is divided into three sections: neighbours and neighbourhoods; religion, ethnicity and minority groups; culture, politics and society. The coherence of the collection sets up resonances and comparisons which confirm a considerable unity in the concept of Mediterranean urban culture in its broadest sense.
Synopsis
The book, after an Introduction, is divided into three sections: neighbours and neighbourhoods; religion, ethnicity and minority groups; culture, politics and society. The coherence of the collection sets up resonances and comparisons which confirm a considerable unity in the concept of Mediterranean urban culture in its broadest sense.
About the Author
Alexander Cowan is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northumbria, and a member of the University's research group for European Urban Culture. He has written extensively on Venetian social history and is the author of Urban Europe, 1500-1700 (Edward Arnold).
Table of Contents
Part 1
Neighbours and neighbourhoods: the myth of the Mediterranean city - perceptions of sociability
James Amelang
Neighbourhoods and local loyalties in Renaissance Venice
Joseph Wheeler
Part 2
Religion, ethnicity and minority groups: foreigners and the city - the case of the immigrant merchant
Alexander Cowan
The Jews and the city in the Mediterranean area
Donatella Calabi
The culture of the street - the Calle de la Feria in Cordoba, 1470-1520
John Edwards
Between heresy and free thought, between the Mediterranean and the North - heterodox women in 17th century Venice
Federica Ambrosini
Part 3
On the margins: the cities of Puglia in the 15th and 16th centuries - their economy and society
Eleni Sakellariou
Economic conditions in Thessaloniki between the two Ottoman occupations
Alan Harvey
Venetian Modon and its port (1358-1500)
Ruth Gertwagen
Part 4
Cultural representations: the port towns of the Levant in 16th-century travel literature
Benjamin Arbel
The cultural dynamics of representational space in Venetian Renaissance painting
Tom Nichols
"As much for its culture as for its aims" - the cultural relations of Venice and its dependant cities, 1400-1700
Nicholas Davidson