The Market and the City: Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The early modern period is often characterised as a time that witnessed the rise of a new and powerful merchant class across Europe. From Italy and Spain in the south, to the Low Countries and England in the north, men of business and trade came to play an increasingly pivotal role in the culture, politics and economies of western Europe. This book takes a comparative approach to the effect such merchants and traders had on the urban history of market places - streets, squares and specific buildings - in some of the great commercial European cities between the 15th and 17th centuries. It looks at how this in period, the transformations of designated commercial areas were important enough to modify relationships throughout the entire urban context.

Market places tend to be very ancient, continuing to function for centuries on the same location; but between the middle of the 14th and the first decades of the 17th, their structures began to change as new regulations and patterns of manufacture, distribution and consumption began to install a new uniformity and geometry on the market place. During the period covered by this study, most major European cities undertook the rebuilding of entire zones, constructing new buildings, demolishing existing structures and embellishing others.

This book analyses the intentions of innovation, in parallel with the sanitary and hygienic reasons, the juridical regulations of the architecture of certain building types and the urban strategies as efficient tools to better control the economic activities within the city.

Contents: Introduction
Orbem in urbe vidimus...: Toward a topography of trade in the early modern city
Studying the configuration of space
The notion of 'portus': a permanent square
Order amidst mixed use
Thousands of variations and the transmission of models
Long-term reform
The 'longue durée' and architectural history
The 'ease of provisioning': Sites and images
The market insula
The bridge with shops
Physical discontinuity, chronological continuity
The market in the city: At the beginning, on the outskirts: Venice
Paris
Nuremberg
Elsewhere, in the centre: Augsburg
Lübeck
Little by little, greater articulation: Venice, once again
Florence
Antwerp
Amsterdam
The diffused model: Seville
London
Diversity, fragmentation, form
Disorder and mixed use: The concept of 'boundary': Norms and increasing trade
Interference and interplay: stands, shops, houses
Ownership and conflicts of interest
The culture of the square and its image
Legal and physical boundaries
The regularity of the square: The square's geometry and the 'line' of shops: Venice: San Giacomo at Rialto
Florence: the Uffizi and the corridor
Genoa and Piazza Banchi
Seville and the problem of the 'plaza mayor'
Some buildings: Covered markets, 'halles', 'drapperie'
La Halle aux Draps
Le Fabbriche Vecchie
The Clothworkers' Hall
Bread, meat, fish, fruit and vegetables: Along the banks of the Grand Canal
In the centre of Florence
In the cities of Spain
The city of London
Banks, businesses and the bourse: The Antwerp Bourse
The Royal Exchange of London
The Amsterdam Bourse
The Casa Lonja of Seville
The Loggia in Genoa
'Fondaci': public warehouses and lodgings: The surplus granaries: In the dominion of the Venetian Republic
On the Iberian Peninsula
In the cities of the North
The 'albergarie' of the Germans, the Turks, and the Persians in Venice
The Hansa House in Antwerp
Indexes.