Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe. II. Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (review)

This book is one of four volumes in a series edited by Robert Muchembled and William Monter. The overarching goal of the series is to investigate the cultural roots of Modern Europe, specifically concerning the “origins of the European identity [that] has become a fundamental issue at the dawn of the twenty-first century” (xxi). The seventeen chapters that comprise this volume take a “cross-national, interdisciplinary and comparative approach” (xxv). Each article considers the city as a site of cultural exchange, examining, from a variety of perspectives and methodologies, how and why cities absorb or simply juxtapose various cultures.

Greeks, Jews, and Turks populate these pages as much as the more well-known European transients (merchants, students, craftsmen, and scholars, for example), but key to the issue of assimilation or segregation that is central to all of these essays is the role of the foreigner. This highlight becomes all the more interesting in light of the fact that townsmen across Europe reached little consensus about which people actually qualified as foreigners, and how desirable their presence in a native city might be. City magistrates in host cities addressed questions of integration and segregation in various ways, expressed in institutional (legal, religious, and economic) and spatial (ghettoes, fondaci) ways. Some cities were more “closed” (for example, Lubeck) than others, and some more “open” (like Hamburg), each with its own historical reasons. Foreigners played decisive roles, sometimes favoring exclusion to strengthen or preserve cultural identity (often accomplished through religious institutions like confraternities and liturgy), and sometimes seeking assimilation by intermarrying with the native population.

As expected in a book about cities, economic exchange is a recurrent theme in many of the chapters, but especially welcome to readers of this journal will be its treatment from the perspective of “Structures and Spaces of Cultural Exchange,” the focus of Part III. An especially fruitful way to consider the dynamics of exchange is to locate the “liminal areas” in the city where the “local [mixed] with the foreign”(204), such as fairs, markets, squares, certain streets, mercantile exchanges, merchants’ lodgings, and even princely residences, and to examine how people used these spaces and invested them with meaning.

The omission of any sustained attention to the role of language in the formation, conservation, or transmission of cultural identity is surprising, given the long-recognized place of language in cultural identity, and regrettable, given the polyglot nature of Europe’s cities. Perhaps language is treated in another volume of this series. But the question of how the channels of effective communication actually worked in these urban towers of Babel remains. Aside from this minor quibble, the inclusion of such diverse places and peoples in a single volume with clear thematic objectives is a laudable accomplishment.