The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries

Edited by Marc Boone Edited by Martha Howell

Book cover: The Power of Space in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Extent: 221 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Early Modern & Renaissance Studies, Medieval Studies

Series: Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)

Series volume number: 30

Language: English

Paperback (Published)

(May 2013)

ISBN: 9782503547848

Price: $113.00

Out of stock

A range of contributions discussing the languages of power in medieval and early modern Italy in terms of politics, art, and religion.


This volume examines the politics of space in the most densely urbanized areas of Europe during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. It ranges from Italy to the Parisian region and then to the greater Low Countries, home of Europe’s most powerful commercial cities of the period. Hardly inert sites on which political action took place, the spaces these authors investigate conferred power on those who possessed them. At the same time they were themselves transformed by the struggles, thus acquiring new powers that invited future contest. Thus implicitly responding to Georges Lefebvre’s claim that space is produced, the authors ask how space was perceived and used in everyday life, giving specific spaces cultural, social, and political coherence (le percu); how it was represented or theorized, thus encoded in symbols, maps and laws (le concu); and how it was lived, in effect the result of the dialectical relation between the perceived and the represented (le vecu).

  • Edited by Marc Boone
  • Edited by Martha Howell