Abstract
This stimulating collection underlines the appeal that “space” continues to hold for a wide variety of scholars. Intersecting with a more general “cultural turn” across the humanities and social sciences, it has firmly established itself as an academic field. Ever more aspects are explored in special journal issues, conference proceedings, and essay collections, with urban society, religion, politics, and topography among those examined most recently.1 There are monographic surveys illustrating how spatial perspectives can shed fresh light on classic historical themes like state building or confessional change and introductions aimed at a general audience.2 Signs of institutionalization include theoretical schools, research clusters, and dedicated university positions.3 The distinctive niche of this volume is a close focus on “uses,” both in terms of how space informs scholarly approaches in the present and how spatial perceptions served practical and ideological purposes in the past.4 While the former represents one of the key questions of the field as a whole, the latter sets the challenging task of not only reconstructing historical ideas about space, but also tracing their application in specific periods, here particularly the centuries between c. 1500 and 1850.
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Peter J. Arnade, Martha C. Howell, and Walter Simons, eds., “The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe,” [special issue of] Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (2002); Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Beat Kümin, ed., Political Space in Pre-Industrial Europe (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009);
Marko Lamberg, Marko Hakanen, and Janne Haikari, eds., Physical and Cultural Space in Pre-industrial Europe: Methodological Approaches to Spatiality (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011).
Achim Landwehr, Die Erschaffung Venedigs: Raum, Bevölkerung, Mythos 1570–1750 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2007);
Susan Guinn-Chapman, Religious Space in Reformation England: Contesting the Past (London: Pickering & Chatto Publishers, 2013). For interdisciplinary introductions see
Denis Cosgrove, “Landscape and Landschaft: Lecture delivered at the ‘Spatial Turn in History’ Symposium (German Historical Institute, 19/2/2004),” German Historical Institute Washington: Bulletin 35 (2004): 57–71;
Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann, eds., Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, 2nd edn. (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag für Kommunikation, Kultur und soziale Praxis, 2009); and
Susanne Rau, Räume: Konzepte, Wahrnehmungen, Nutzungen (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013).
Key theorists are discussed in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (London: Routledge, 2000); space-focused research groups exist, for example, at University College London (http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/graduate/research/space) and the Technical University at Darmstadt (http://raumsoz.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/; both accessed May 17, 2014). The University of Erfurt established a Heisenberg Chair for the “History and Cultures of Spaces in Modern Times” in 2009.
For a comparative conceptualization of obstacles facing large-scale authoritarian campaigns in different settings see J. C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
For recent attempts at a better integration of science and humanities perspectives, especially through “deep mapping,” see David J. Bodenhamer, “Beyond GIS: Geospatial Technologies and the Future of History,” in History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections, ed. Alexander von Lünen and Charles Travis (Dordrecht: Springer e-book, 2013), Chapter 1, 1.3 (DOI: 10.1007/978–94-007–5009-8_2; accessed May 3, 2014).
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991);
Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001);
K. Friedrich, ed., Die Erschließung des Raumes: Konstruktion, Imagination und Darstellung von Räumen und Grenzen im Barockzeitalter (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014); cf. Paul Stock, chapter 1, “History and the Uses of Space,” of this book.
Three of the latest examples, each with conceptual introductions, are Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007);
Gerd Schwerhoff, ed., Stadt und Öffentlichkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011):
Massimo Rospocher, ed., Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2012).
For a discussion of recent anthropological, geographical, sociological, and historical perspectives on gendered space see also B. Kümin and C. Usborne, “At Home and in the Workplace: A Historical Introduction to the Spatial Turn,” in “At Home and in the Workplace: Domestic and Occupational Space in Western Europe from the Middle Ages,”, ed. B. Kümin and C. Usborne, History & Theory 52 (2013): 305–318.
On late medieval precedents for such female agency, see Katherine French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. Chapter 3. For further conceptual reflections on public spaces see
Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds., Zwischen Gotteshaus und Taverne. Öffentliche Räume in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004).
Ralph Kingston, “Mind Over Matter? History and the Spatial Turn,” Cultural and Social History 7, no.1 (2010): 111–121. For case studies and conceptual guidance on material approaches, see
Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, eds., Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2010). A forceful case for the primary importance of the physical environment can be found in Christine Carpenter, “Political and Geographical Space: The Geopolitics of Medieval England,” in Political Space, ed. Kümin, 117–134; ways in which the spatial and cultural turns could be distinguished more clearly in Stock’s “History and the Uses of Space” above.
T. Unwin, “A Waste of Space? towards a Critique of the Social Production of Space,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 25 (2000): 11–29. A useful survey of seminal taxonomies in Rau, Räume, 61–70.
The challenge to religious images and truths was part of a wider anxiety about human sight and perception: S. Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
On the question of the wider global applicability of European periodization: Shamuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds., “Early Modernities,” special issue of Daedalus 127 (1998);
R. Dürr, ed., Expansionen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005).
J. May and N. Thrift, eds., Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London: Routledge, 2001).
P. Nora, “From lieux de mémoire to realms of memory,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. P. Nora and L. D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), Vol. 1, p. xvii. On another level, to end with a more specific example, a spatial distinction between “front-” and “back-stage” areas helps to explain why (architecturally and physically) identical rooms can prompt diametrically opposed forms of behavior:
E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1969), Chapter 3, “Regions and Region Behaviour.”
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Kümin, B. (2015). The Uses of Space in Early Modern History—An Afterword. In: Stock, P. (eds) The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_10
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