Urban Panegyric and the Transformation of the Medieval City 1100–1300 by Paul Oldfield (review)

Paul Oldfield's recent book, Urban Panegyric and the Transformation of the Medieval City 1100–1300, presents a new reading of a classic literary canon. Between 1100 and 1300, a population boom coupled with rural migration, climate change, and an economic revival consolidated wealth into urban centers—European cities were born and with them, textual works singing their praises. Through seven chapters, a robust introduction, concise conclusion, and copious excerpts from myriad sources, Oldfield explores civic consciousness through written laudatory material.

The first three chapters of Oldfield's book—"Introduction," "Sources," and "Interpretation and Audience"—might be considered an extended overview. Here he outlines the constraints of his study, for example, the overrepresentation of Italian works of urban panegyric (discussed in "Sources"). However, where many scholars before him have failed, Oldfield succeeds in his goal of writing a pan-European perspective, adeptly interweaving textual excerpts from a range of authors and regions without being unwieldy. He accomplishes this in part by breaking from the canonical tradition and defining urban panegyric as "any textual record that can be interpreted as praising (implicitly or explicitly) an aspect of urban life" (4). In fact, the heterogeneity of urban praise underpins Oldfield's entire study. For Oldfield, urban panegyric need not be considered one strict genre, but, and as his work successfully demonstrates, it was a trope that manifested itself in a variety of ways—as physical descriptions of the built environment, as detailed accounts of the origins of a city, as conceptual musings, and as short passages embedded in larger, seemingly unrelated works. Urban panegyric at times relied on "formulaic packaging" (44) and drew from an ancient literary tradition but, as Oldfield argues throughout these pages, still conveyed and reflected contemporary transformations of European urban realities post-1100. Vernacular writing and poetry (discussed in "Interpretation and Audience") were especially influential and worked in tandem with rising literary rates to reach a broader lay audience, reflecting one of the substantial shifts in European culture after 1100.

Chapters 3 through 7 take a thematic approach to the laudes civitatum. As described in chapter 3, "The Holy City," medieval cities were inextricably linked to Christian belief, from the Garden of Eden to Jerusalem, therefore laudatory works were likewise endowed with spiritual associations. Through the praise of sacred geometry and religious architecture (Lucian writing on Chester), emphasis on the triumph of Christianity over paganism (Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris), associations to particular patron saints (Cuthbert in Durham), and urban piety (Versus de Verona), Oldfield argues that urban panegyric helped generate "positive emotional and physical attachments" between medieval cities and the Holy City, Jerusalem (61). In a compelling twist, Oldfield counters the "The Holy City" in the following chapter, "The Evil City," contending that the many critiques of cities can also be understood as urban panegyric. Despite the fears of violence, impiety, corruption, drunkenness, and fires precipitated through the rise of the mercantile class, a burgeoning profit economy, and dense populations, "the city was more clearly than ever in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a place where good things—community, salvation, charity—could happen, and it was sin, not the city itself, which would pervert this" (110). The danger of sin indirectly reinforced the spiritual, holy city trope by providing its opposite: the "good" city as a counter that could only be saved by God alone.

The origins and regional nuances of the European commercial revival in the central Middle Ages is debated, but commercial activity and the city's resources were nevertheless a subject of praise in written works as outlined in chapter 5, "City of Abundance." Commercial activity was associated with abundance and therefore worthy of praise as a signal of wealth (William of Malmesbury's Gesta Pontificum Anglorum), sustenance for conquering armies (Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada's Historia de rebus Hispanie), and symbols of urban innovation like long distance trade (anonymous thirteenth-century Genovese poem) and craft specialization (Jean Renart's L'Escoufle). This...