Review of periodical articles. (May 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Buylaert, Frederik; Verhoeven, Gerrit; Vermoesen, Reinoud; Verlaan, Tim
• Editors: Arnold, Jörg; Becker, Tobias; Saumarez-Smith, Otto
• Is Part Of: Urban history. Volume 47:Part 2(2020)
• Page Start: 327
• Page End: 347
• Publication Date: 2020-05
• Subjects: Cities and towns -- History -- Periodicals; Cities and towns -- History -- Bibliography -- Periodicals; 909.09732
• DOI: 10.1017/S0963926820000012
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0963-9268

Abstract

Abstract : 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.