Knowledge and the Early Modern City

A History of Entanglements

Bert De Munck, Antonella Romano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429808432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Knowledge and the Early Modern City uses case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to examine the relationships between knowledge and the city and how these changed in a period when the nature and conception of both was drastically transformed.

Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations, impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks in which human and non-human elements continually interact and acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices, shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of cities on knowledge production and innovation.

Providing the ideal starting point for those seeking to understand the role of urban institutions, actors and spaces in the production of knowledge and the development of the so-called 'modern' knowledge society, this is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern history and knowledge.

PART I

Knowledge and the staging of the city

1

THE THEATRUM AS AN URBAN SITE OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, C. 1560–1620

Anne-Laure Van Bruaene¹

Introduction

Around 1550, Europe rediscovered the theatre – or rather, to be more precise, the idea of the theatre. In the Prologue of the edition of the plays of the Antwerp landjuweel festival in 1561, it was described as

A beautiful construction … built in Athens, which was called Theatrum in Greek. It had the form of half a circle or ring. Inside, in the middle, it was round and narrow. At the top it became gradually broader and wider, with stairs going upwards. It was very high, delightful and skilfully crafted, in order that the burghers and inhabitants of the aforementioned city, while seated, would have adequate places to watch the plays appropriately, hear them perfectly, and understand them completely.²

From this moment onward the theatre was everywhere: in books about classical architecture and about ancient ruins inside and outside Italy, but also in books about almost everything else: from geography, history, ethnography, ethics, botany, machines, warfare to calligraphy, women, heretics and demons.

As numerous studies have shown, the theatrum was a metaphor that fitted well with humanists’ desire to transmit knowledge in a comprehensive and ordered manner: as in a Greek or Roman theatre, the spectator in the early modern theatre of knowledge could see and comprehend perfectly what was being presented before his eyes. Hence, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century, hundreds of books appeared (both in Latin and in the vernacular) which had theatrum or a derivative in their title. Famous examples are Giulio Camillo’s L’Idea del Theatro (art of memory, Florence 1550), Theodor Zwinger’s Theatrum Vitae Humanae (general knowledge, Basel 1565), Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (geography, Antwerp 1570) and Jean Bodin’s Universae Naturae Theatrum (natural philosophy, Lyon 1596).³ Humanists used other notions too – such as museum or encyclopaedia – to express their epistemological ideal of knowing everything about the world and presenting it in a structured and engaging manner.⁴ However, few scholars have paid attention to the fact that, in contrast to these other concepts, the theatrum also implied a claim about the civic value of knowledge.⁵ The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century museum, for example, was a semi-private space meant for collecting that was created for princes and rich merchants.⁶ The theatrum, on the other hand, derived its meaning from the Greek and Roman theatres that had been open infrastructures where all layers of society participated in drama festivals that celebrated the civic community.⁷

When we move from the realm of intellectual thought to that of social practice, we can see an interesting paradox: while in early modern Europe the theatrum metaphor gained in popularity, the performance of drama lost its civic nature in many regions. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and parallel with the rediscovery of the ancient theatre, European urban drama changed significantly, on both the material and social levels. From the late medieval period until well into the sixteenth century, most plays were staged outside. They took place in the public sphere of towns, for example on market places, before the town hall or on graveyards. Common occasions were market days, political celebrations and religious feast days. Especially during religious processions, a considerable part of the population was involved in the staging of tableaux vivants and other spectacles.⁸ However, around 1600 mainstream drama moved inside in many regions, into playhouses that were especially built for this purpose alone. These new playhouses were called theatres, as the early examples of The Theater (London 1576) and the Teatro Olimpico (Vincenza 1585) explicitly show. Yet, in their effort to materially embody the classical heritage, Renaissance theatres created their own social dynamics between actors, spectators and the urban environment. The audience was now expected to pay an entrance fee, and acting was increasingly seen as a profession instead of a devotional practice or an edifying pastime.⁹ While early modern theatre halls were indeed urban infrastructures, in most European regions Renaissance theatre was less preoccupied with civic community building than ancient theatre or medieval drama.

In Renaissance Europe, the idea of the theatre preceded the built theatre. This is suggestive of the strength of the theatrum metaphor in particular, and of the influence of humanist conceptions of knowledge in general. Yet, most scholars seem to dismiss the possibility that the older civic drama played a role in these cultural transformations.¹⁰ I contend that, during the period before the introduction of built theatres in the Low Countries, there was a direct relationship between urban drama and public festival on the one hand, and the wider, international idea of the theatre, on the other. This led to a civic conception of knowledge that was rooted in the public sphere, but which also found its expression through books and prints. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, most plays in the Low Countries were staged by the chambers of rhetoric (rederijkerskamers), amateur guilds devoted to drama and poetry. A majority of their membership belonged to the urban middling groups, but in the larger cities, the scene was dominated by a cultural elite comprising visual artists and other highly skilled artisans. Many rederijker performances were public events that were sponsored by the city, often upon the occasion of religious processions or peace celebrations.¹¹ In the second half of the sixteenth century, in large cities like Antwerp, the tableaux vivants of the rederijkers, which traditionally presented biblical, classical or mythological subject matters, were transformed into emblematic representations of various types of knowledge. As I will argue, this evolution took place in direct connection with developments in commercial book production in Antwerp and other major urban centres. In this period, the media of drama and book shared many characteristics since they both combined recognizable spatial arrangements (stages and frames) that emphasized the special status of knowledge, with an essentially visual rhetoric (using posing actors or pictorial representations) in order to convey their didactic message.¹²

In what follows, I focus on these transformations in the large urban centres of the Low Countries by discussing the period between the 1561 landjuweel festival – a large rederijker competition – in Antwerp and the 1617 opening of the Nederduytsche Academie in Amsterdam. First, I argue that the landjuweel festival not only documents the early preoccupation of the rederijkers with the idea of the theatre, but also the introduction of new representational modes in Netherlandish civic drama, namely the so-called ‘(poetical) points’, which had much in common with the equally new genre of the printed emblem. These innovations were also visible in the context of contemporary Antwerp processions or ommegangen, which gave rise to specific subgenres in the print business. Second, I demonstrate that around the same time the public performance of drama became heavily politicized as a result of the political and religious instability that eventually led to the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648). I maintain that precisely in the early years of the Dutch Revolt, the influence of the public stage on the commercial book page was considerable. Authors from the Low Countries wrote or composed a great many theatrum books. The most prominent of these authors was Abraham Ortelius, whose Theatrum Orbis Terrarum can be seen as the very first modern world atlas. Ortelius’s wide intellectual circle consisted of a number of poets, artists, humanists and polemicists, among others Jan van der Noot, Lucas d’Heere, Hans Vredeman de Vries, Richard Verstegan, Jodocus Hondius and Zacharias Heyns, who also authored theatrum books (including series of prints and manuscripts). Some of these men were directly involved in rederijker performances or the staging of public ceremonies. Finally, I contend that the didactic ideal of knowledge transfer embodied by these men continued to have a fundamental influence on urban cultural and intellectual developments in both the Habsburg Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, although there was a growing tendency towards the commodification of theatre and entertainment. The theatrum first appeared as a material construct in 1594 in both North and South (with the theatrum anatomicum in Leiden as the best known example),...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Knowledge and the early modern city: an introduction
• PART I: Knowledge and the staging of the city
• PART II: Urban agency, science, technology and the making of the city
• PART III: Imperial cities, knowledge for empires?
• Index