IMC 2025: Sessions
Session 148: Economies of Urban Spaces, I: Historiographies
Monday 7 July 2025, 11:15-12:45
| Organiser: | Aline Vonwiller, Departement Geschichte, Universität Basel |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Tobias Hodel, Walter Benjamin Kolleg / Digital Humanities, Universität Bern |
| Paper 148-a | Introducing the State of Research: Economies of Urban Spaces (Language: English) Index terms: Art History - General, Economics - Rural, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Social History |
| Paper 148-b | Disrupting the Modernist Narrative: The Economic Logic of Late Medieval Merchants (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - General, Economics - Urban |
| Paper 148-c | Dealing with a Property Crisis: How Did People Behave in a Medieval Town? (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - General, Economics - Urban, Social History |
| Abstract | This session (I) is part of a session series (I – III). It analyzes the mutual impact between studies of the economic importance of urban space and historiographic narratives about the contribution of late medieval cities to economic transformations. The focus on urban space presents a challenge to conventional narratives of medieval economic and social history. In contrast to trade and commerce, the economic significance of urban property and its contribution to the making of the medieval marketplace has been understudied. Its association with rural economies and ecclesiastical bodies is an obvious reason for this. At a closer look, however, the urban space is inseparably intertwined with the urban marketplace. It is tied to institutions (formal and informal) and aligned with economic strategies encompassing patrimonialisation, commercialisation and (precarious) household economies of the lower classes alike. The session has a twofold objective. Firstly, to discuss landed property as part of urban economies and as part of a historical transformation of economic culture that took place in the late Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Times. Secondly, to improve and differentiate our understanding of this transformation and its contribution to the historiographical narratives about the emergence of modern capitalism. |