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IMC 2007: Sessions

Session 117: Constructing Cities: Text, Imagination, Material Remains and History, I - Northern Europe

Monday 9 July 2007, 11.15-12.45

Sponsor:German Historical Institute, Washington DC
Organiser:Barbara H. Rosenwein, Department of History, Loyola University Chicago
Moderator/Chair:Claudius Sieber-Lehmann, Historisches Seminar, Universität Basel
Paper 117-aConstructing Community: Places of Community in the Writing of Galbert of Bruges
(Language: English)
Miriam Czock, Historisches Institut, Ruhr-Universität, Bochum
Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Local History, Mentalities
Paper 117-bMaterial Remains of the Immediate Past and their Perception in 15th-Century London Chronicles
(Language: English)
Anja B. Rathmann-Lutz, Historisches Seminar, Universität Basel
Index terms: Architecture - General, Historiography - Medieval, Local History, Mentalities
Paper 117-cReclaiming the Past, Creating a New Community: The Civic Chronicles of Metz at the End of the Middle Ages
(Language: English)
Damien Kempf, Mission Historique Française en Allemagne, Göttingen
Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Local History
Abstract

This is the first of two sessions. It concentrates on northern Europe, while the second focuses on the South, since it is commonly assumed that the cities of the North and South differed in development in important ways. Cities are not only spatial units confined by physical frontiers but also imagined virtual spaces. Both the self-image of an urban community and the perception of its past are vital to the unity and development of cities. The subject of this session is how northern European cities fashioned themselves. It looks at their material culture and asks how urban communities perceived and shaped their past for the present. The two sessions taken together will shed light on the differences and the surprising similarities involved in the 'construction of cities'.