Hearing the City is a major new contribution to the field of urban musicology in the early modern period with twenty-one essays by leading figures in the field from Europe, the USA and Australia. The urban soundscape is studied from a range of different interdisciplinary perspectives, and its scope is broad, from the major role of city minstrels in fifteenth-century Viennese urban identity to the civic problems presented by the location of opera houses in Enlightenment Naples. The individual contributions explore themes related to the complex relationships between sound and space within the urban context and between social identity and civic authorities and draw on a wide range of source material from city pay documents and legislation to contemporaneous accounts, correspondence, travel writing, religious and moral tracts, fictional writing and architectural legacy. Aspects of urban soundscapes both specific and common to Naples, Rome, Palermo, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Lisbon, London, Vienna, Hamburg and Zurich are analyzed in their broader socio-cultural contexts, as well as the dynamic networks between cities in Europe and beyond. These case studies are framed by Tim Carter's stimulating introduction to the development of historical urban sound studies and a coda in the form of a discussion as to how the results of urban musicology might be applied through a digital platform to reach beyond academic discourse to involve modern citizens in hearing the soundworlds of the past.

A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.

The early modern period is often characterised as a time that witnessed the rise of a new and powerful merchant class across Europe. From Italy and Spain in the south, to the Low Countries and England in the north, men of business and trade came to play an increasingly pivotal role in the culture, politics and economies of western Europe. This book takes a comparative approach to the effect such merchants and traders had on the urban history of market places - streets, squares and civic buildings - in some of the great commercial European cities between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It looks at how this in period, the transformations of designated commercial areas were important enough to modify relationships throughout the entire urban context. Market places tend to be very ancient, continuing to function for centuries on the same location; but between the middle of the fourteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth, their structures began to change as new regulations and patterns of manufacture, distribution and consumption began to install a new uniformity and geometry on the market place. During the period covered by this study, most major European cities undertook the rebuilding of entire zones, constructing new buildings, demolishing existing structures and embellishing others. This book analyses the intentions of innovation, in parallel with sanitary and hygienic reasons, the juridical regulations of the architecture of certain building types and the urban strategies as efficient tools to better control the economic activities within the city.

Cities and Solidarities charts the ways in which the study of individuals and places can revitalise our understanding of urban communities as dynamic interconnections of solidarities in medieval and early modern Europe. This volume sheds new light on the socio-economic conditions, the formal and informal institutions, and the strategies of individual town dwellers that explain the similarities and differences in the organisation and functioning of urban communities in pre-modern Europe. It considers how communities within cities and towns are constructed and reconstructed, how interactions amongst members of differing groups created social and economic institutions, and how urban communities reflected a sense of social cohesion. In answering these questions, the contributions combine theoretical frameworks with new digital methodologies in order to provoke further discussion into the fundamental nature of urban society in this key period of change. The essays in this collection demonstrate the complexities of urban societies in pre-modern Europe, and will make fascinating reading for students and scholars of medieval and early modern urban history.

Martha Pollak offers a pan-European, richly illustrated study of early modern military urbanism, an international style of urban design.

Comparative urban history examines early modern economic and cultural achievements in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London.

Despite the great wave of publications on European cities and towns in the pre-industrial period, little has been written about the thousands of small towns which played a key role in the economic, social and cultural life of early modern Europe. This collection, written by leading experts, redresses that imbalance. It provides the first comparative overview of European small towns from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, examining their position in the urban hierarchy, demographic structures, economic trends, relations with the countryside, and political and cultural developments. Case studies discuss networks in all the major European countries, as well as looking at the distinctive world of small towns in the more 'peripheral' countries of Scandinavia and central Europe. A wide-ranging editorial introduction puts individual chapters in historical perspective.