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Review of periodical articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2020

Frederik Buylaert
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Department of History, Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, B-9000Ghent, Belgium
Gerrit Verhoeven
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Antwerp, 2000Antwerp, Belgium
Reinoud Vermoesen
Affiliation:
Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13 (D. 308), 2000Antwerp, Belgium
Tim Verlaan
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Extract

One of the great interpretive arcs of history as an academic discipline is the opposition between pre-modern and modern societies. Stimulated by post-modern theory, historians have done much in the past decades to expunge the ideological baggage of history as a ‘great march of civilization’, but they continue to imagine the industrial revolution as a great hinge between two distinct epochs. For all its merits, this perspective also creates problems. Burdened by hindsight, medievalists and modernists are often inclined to understand a case-study as either a prefiguration of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century development, or as its foil. Some of the most important publications on the history of medieval European towns published in 2019 were about destroying such assumptions.

Type
Review of Periodical Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Sjoberg, G., The Pre-Industrial City, Past and Present (New York, 1960)Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Lesger, C. and van Leeuwen, M.H.D., ‘Residential segregation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century: evidence from the Netherlands’, J. of Interdisciplinary History, 42 (2012), 333–69CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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5 F. Buylaert, J. Baguet and J. Everaert, ‘Returning urban political elites to the research agenda: the case of the Southern Low Countries (c. 1350 – c. 1550)’; J. Baguet, ‘The transformation of an urban political elite: oligarchy and aristocracy in sixteenth-century Ghent’; F. Buylaert, ‘From periphery to centre and back again: elite transformations in Mechlen (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries)’; and J. Everaert, ‘Power in the metropolis: the impact of economic growth on the Antwerp City Council (1400–1550)’ (published online in FirstView).

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7 Lesger and Van Leeuwen, ‘Residential segregation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century’.

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