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.

In urban life, streets are elemental, but urban history seldom places them centre stage. It tends to view them as mere backdrops for events or social relations, or to study them as material constructions, the fruit of urban planning, but largely vacant of inhabitants. Examining people and streets in tandem, the contributors to this volume strive towards more integrated urban history. They discuss the social and political processes of early modern street life, and the discursive play in which streets figured. Six chapters, based in Sweden-Finland, England, Portugal, Italy, and Transylvania, discuss the subtle interplay of the material and immaterial, public and private, planned order and versatility, spontaneous invention, control and resistance a " all matters central to how streets worked. Contributors are Emese BAlint, Maria Helena Barreiros, Elizabeth S. Cohen, Thomas V. Cohen, Alexander Cowan, Anu Korhonen, Riitta Laitinen, and Dag LindstrAm.

Despite the fact that, if only by number, small and peripheral cities played an important role in fifteenth and sixteenth-century European print culture, book history has mainly been dominated by monographs on individual big book centres. Through a number of specific case studies, which deploy a variety of methods and a wide range of sources, this volume seeks to enhance our understanding of printing and the book trade in small and peripheral European cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to emphasize the necessity of new research for the study of print culture in such cities.

Concepts of visual communication form an explanatory framework for discussing the visual expressions of urban symbolic communication in urban life in towns in the center of Europe in the late medieval and early modern period, including the dramatic times of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This book examines the role of images and visual representation by concentrating on the varieties of symbolic communication in towns that made a range of relationships visual: the status and role of urban civic, professional, and religious communities and the relations between the town and its lord or powerful families and individuals. The geographical framework of this book is the region in the former Habsburg countries north of the Danube River embracing the region between western Bohemia and what is today eastern Slovakia, including the borderland towns of northern Austria. Two studies focus on specific local and occupational communities in the Prague towns, but most of the texts in this book focus on small towns by contemporary European standards in which many forms of urban topography, buildings, objects, and monuments survive, even though few written sources have been preserved. Accessing a wide range of literature in regional languages and German for English speakers, this collection describes typical urban landscapes in early modern Central Europe outside the well-known Central European urban centers and traditional areas of study. The book is a relevant new contribution to medieval and early modern studies, not only covering an underappreciated geographical area but also addressing general questions about the history of rituals and performance as well as visual culture, communication, and identity discourses in late medieval and early modern urban space.

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Drawing together common features of society from a range of different contexts throughout Europe, from Italy and Spain to Poland and Russia, Early Modern European Society surveys the sweeping changes affecting Europe from the end of the fifteenth century to the early decades of the eighteenth century. Henry Kamen includes discussion on:European identities, frontiers and languageleisure, work and migrationreligion, ritual and witchcraftthe aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the poorgender rolessocial discipline and absolu.