Cityscapes

These are images of early modern cities, starting with two small German cities in around 1700. Note the walls around each, and how sharply they divided city from countryside; cities did not have the rings of suburbs that we're accustomed to today. As we discussed in class, city walls mattered. Europe usually had wars going throughout our period, and almost all cities (set as they were along key lines of transportation) had military as well as economic significance. After European armies started using artillery, a little before 1500, city walls had to be carefully engineered—they had be thick enough to resist bombardment, and they had to include angles allowing defenders to fire on attackers. The corollary to military effectiveness was population density: rebuilding city walls was very expensive, so cities grew inward rather than outward, filling in as many open spaces as possible. The walls had another function, as a mechanism of urban policing. The authorities could control movement in and out of their cities (usually the gates were closed at night), adding to contemporaries' belief that cities were safety zones in a frequently violent world.




Even much bigger cities were carefully fortified. The map shows Paris in 1615, when it was biggest city in Europe. Again, fields started right outside the city gates, but in this case population pressure did produce in suburbanization; notice the development shown in the upper right of the map. Notice also the prominence of the city's public buildings, true in any early modern city, but especially in great capitals like Paris. These included churches (note the cathedral complex on the island in the middle of the city); law courts (taking up the other end of the island); and the immense royal palace complex near the river, at the bottom of the map (the Louvre and Tuilleries palaces).


A great deal of money went into these public buildings; they were meant to display the grandeur of the city itself and of its governing institutions. Here's a nineteenth-century drawing of the main courthouse in Rouen, a French provincial city (the building was constructed early in the sixteenth century, in the "flamboyant gothic" style of the late Middle Ages).



Finally, three street scenes from the same city, conveying a sense of what most seventeenth-century city houses would have been like: three or four stories high, built of wood and plaster, with shops on the ground floor. Because space was at a premium and wheeled traffic infrequent, streets tended to be narrow; that would begin to change after 1600.

Villagers

In 1600 the vast majority of Europeans lived in the countryside, in small villages; two centuries later, the population was still mainly rural, though by a smaller majority. The standard term for early modern country-dwellers is "peasants;" it's the word de Vries uses, and I'll use it often in class. But it's a complicated concept, with multiple implications that not all historians accept. Literally, peasant just means someone who lives in the countryside (from the French word pays. In addition, though, the term implies a series of attitudes and social relationships: a commitment to traditional ways of doing things, strong attachments to family and community, some financial obligations to landlords and other outsiders.

All this implies a distinction between peasants and modern farmers, whose economic decisions are based on calculation of profit and loss, rather than tradition. Many historians say that English farmers ceased to be peasants in the seventeenth century, because they became more market oriented and individualistic. Other historians go farther, and say that no early modern farmers count as peasants in the usual sense of the word. Even centuries ago, these historians argue, all farmers had to think carefully about their economic choices-- their survival depended on doing so.

European artists found peasants fascinating, so we have some powerful images of them. Here's a harvest scene, by the Dutch-Belgian artist Pieter Brueghel, from the late sixteenth century:
Note how many workers it took to cut and bind the grain; note also that women worked alongside men-- the men are shown cutting the grain, the women binding it into sheaves.

Another well-known Brueghel work shows a village wedding:
It's a scene of abundance and comfort (note the jugs of wine on the left), which also suggests the intensity of village life; people lived and worked close together, and socializing was expected to reflect that.

The social imagery is more complicated in the next two pictures, both by the French painter Louis Le Nain, from 1642:



Again, there are signs of abundance: there's wine, rather elegant glassware, music (note the boy holding a violin), and a pet dog in the lower left; most of those depicted are wearing solid shoes and quality clothing. But the mood is somber, and there's a poor man on the right, without shoes and not drinking. Poverty is presented here as a village reality.

This is another picture by the same artist, with some similar themes: there are signs of comfort, but also a somber mood-- there's wine, but the only food on the table is bread:



One reason for the intense collective life of early modern villages was the organization of rural space: most villagers lived close together, rather than in the isolated farms we're familiar with in North America. The map (of a village in France) below shows the result: fields were spread out around the village, divided into narrow strips of land. The map shows dozens of such strips, owned by small landowners. Just to get to their own fields, villagers had to cross paths with one another, and many villages organized some collective forms of labor to deal with this situation.


The last picture shows an estate in Germany, belonging to a monastery:


This is the kind of agricultural enterprise that became much more common in seventeenth-century Europe: consolidated property ownership combined with heavy capital investment (note the size of the farm buildings toward the bottom of the picture). One of de Vries's central arguments is that this organization of the countryside opened new possibilities for Europe's economy. With better equipment and consolidated fields, farms like this could produce more, and they were more oriented to the market than smaller farms.

More on reading history: historians and their documents

Historical knowledge is a complex construction. Some of the facts of history are straightforward—no reasonable person doubts that the Battle of Waterloo actually took place, or that Napoleon lost. But the interesting facts are more complicated. even about something as straightforward as a battle, and especially about the kinds of issues that Jan de Vries considers in The Economy of Europe: how people lived, whether they were getting richer or poorer, what lay behind economic development, why some places advanced and others declined. When we try to answer questions like those, we have to assemble interpretations. Historical interpretation like de Vries's comes partly from the historian's own thinking, his/her ideas about how the world works and how people behave. But it also comes from documents, the materials that people in the past created and left behind for us to examine.

By the time our course starts, in 1600, Europeans were actually churning out a lot of documents about their private lives. Just as we do today, they had to use lawyers and contracts for a lot of the ordinary business of life: dividing up an inheritance, buying, selling, and renting property, giving money to their kids. They also used writing for more personal purposes, for letters, diaries, and memoirs. A book like The Economy of Europe is based on these kinds of documents, whether directly (on topics that de Vries himself has researched) or indirectly (based on the research of others, which he has summarized).

There are millions of pages of these materials, and historians will probably never read all of them; certainly we're nowhere close at this point. That's one reason why there are debates among historians: new materials keep being discovered, and these force us to rethink problems we thought were settled.

Here are some photos of documents from early seventeenth-century France, to give you a sense of what a historian like de Vries is working with. One is an agreement between a wealthy mother and her adult daughter about an inheritance; it lists the goods in the family's Paris mansion. Notice how elegantly both women sign the document (the other signature is by the family's lawyer).



This is the deathbed testament of another woman from the same family, from 1646:



The next is a page from a rental agreement between a landowner and a rich tenant farmer, in southwest France.


These documents were written on paper, standard procedure in the early seventeenth century; because paper was then made entirely out of rags, it was very high quality and has lasted beautifully. But as late as 1550, documents like these were written on parchment, made from sheepskin and much more expensive than paper, like the contract below (it deals with the rental of a big estate):



Notice how much more careful the handwriting is; only a professional could produce handwriting like this, and it would have taken him a lot of time to do so. As written documents became more commonplace, handwriting became faster and less formal, and more people produced it. Because paper was much cheaper than parchment, written documents were less of a major production and much more widely used.

Documents like these were drawn up by notaries, legal specialists akin to our business lawyers; they knew what formalities and terminology had to be used if an agreement was to be valid. Here are a couple of pictures of notaries at work in their offices, one from Germany in the later sixteenth century, the other from Holland in the later seventeenth. There would have been offices like these in every European city, and a big city like Paris had dozens; even many villages had notaries. As the images make clear, business was booming!

Wikimedia Commons under a creative commons licence)

Wikimedia Commons under a creative commons licence)

Reading history

Like everyone else, historians write with specific audiences in mind. Some books are aimed at the general public, some at small groups of specialists; some are textbooks meant just for the classroom, while others try to sort out big problems in ways that will both interest specialists and make sense to those who don't know much about the field. So when reading a work of history, the starting point has to be a question: what kind of book are you dealing with? Knowing which category a book fits into will help you understand what information you can get from it and what you should look for as you read.

Nothing we're reading in this course counts as a textbook, that is, a book that lays out the basics, supplying a simplified narrative of events. Instead, the first three books we're reading are attempts by prominent historians to make sense of some big questions about early modern life. We're starting with the most basic question of them all, how did Europeans keep themselves alive in this period, and what was their life like? (In the coming weeks, we'll move on to books dealing at a similar level with two other basic aspects of early modern life, war and government.) There will be lots of details in all three of these books. But in all of them the details are really secondary to bigger questions, of the kind that we'd ask about any society, including our own. In doing the reading, try not to get bogged down in the details. Instead, ask yourself what matters for a big-picture understanding of this society.

To help in that effort, I'll be posting questions here about each of the readings; they're meant to indicate what I believe matters in the books, as opposed to the details, and they'll form the basis for our class discussions.

1) De Vries focuses on the period 1600-1750; where does that period fit in relation to the Industrial Revolution? To other big events that affected Europe's economic life, like the encounter with the Americas? De Vries argues that this period is important for understanding what happened in the Industrial Revolution; what connections does he see between the two? How could a period of economic crisis produce industrialization?

2) What made this an "age of crisis?" Think both about the signs of crisis, the indicators that the European economy was having a hard time, and about causes—what forces produced the hard times? How hard were hard times in this society?

3) How important were agriculture and the countryside in early modern Europe? Why did so many people live in the countryside? De Vries speaks of "yield ratios" as a key concept for understanding early modern agriculture; what's that about, and what were the period's yield ratios? Why were they so low, and what needed to change in order to improve them?

4) De Vries describes the "divergent paths" that different regions of Europe followed during the early modern period. What's the basic story? Where did conditions improve, and where did they stagnate? On his interpretation, what needed to change in order for agriculture to improve? He also describes an important division between western Europe and the region east of the Elbe River; what was the difference between those two regions, and how did relations between them change?

5) In thinking about how any society changes, an important question concerns the roles of technology and of social arrangements: that is, does a society change because of new inventions and discoveries, or because of new ways of organizing collective life? How does de Vries answer this question for seventeenth-century Europe? Were social or technological changes more important in reshaping European life during this period? What technological and social changes does he see in the period?

Stay tuned—I'll provide some more questions late in the week.

Welcome!

This blog is meant to supplement our classroom work in History 316. It will serve as a way to share some images from the times and places we're studying, cover some details that we didn't have time for in class, and answer questions that come up after class. Comments and questions should go to my UB e-mail address; I'll try to respond quickly to them, and I'll post those that are of general interest.

As a first installment, I'm uploading some images relevant to last week's discussion of European geography. There are three maps—the European states today, the European states in 1600, and a late sixteenth-century map of the world, conveying a sense of what the Europeans knew about the world and what they didn't . Their image of the Americas, the map shows, was hazy; on the other hand, they had a good sense of Africa and Asia—approrpiately, since the Ottoman Empire extended into southeastern Europe and the Islamic states of North Africa were very near. As emphasized in the lectures, Europe in 1600 was already closely connected with other parts of the world. Note also the large number of political units into which Europe was divided in 1600.

I've included also some photos of two northern Italian cities, Vicenza and Verona; in 1600 both of them were under the control of Venice, one of the wealthiest of the small states that dominated the region. These city scenes illustrate several points that we discussed last week. First, these places had a lot of money, the product of Italy's ongoing role as Europe's economic kingpin; check out the elegance of the town houses in which the city's elites lived. Second, even such relatively small cities were sites of intense urban life, with dense populations and a range of urban amenities. Third, images of ancient Rome were a powerful presence in this society. There were the physical remains that the Romans left behind (one of the photos includes Verona's ancient Roman arena), but above all there was the effort to imitate Roman styles-- here visible in the Roman-style architecture of the sixteenth century.

Europe today:

(Image via Wikimedia Commons under a creative commons licence)

Europe in 1600:

(Image via Wikimedia Commons under a creative commons licence)

Europe's geographical imagination-- a world map from 1570:

(Image via Wikimedia Commons under a creative commons licence)

Street scenes (Verona):


The Roman inheritance 1, the real thing:


The Roman inheritance (2), imitating the Romans:





(These are two buildings designed by the great Italian architect Andrea Palladio [1508-1580], one of them an urban palace, the other a theater-- the first indoor theater in Europe since Roman times.)