The Uses of Space in Early Modern History

P. Stock

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137490049
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

While there is an growing body of work on space and place in many disciplines, less attention has been paid to how a spatial approach illuminates the societies and cultures of the past. Here, leading experts explore the uses of space in two respects: how space can be applied to the study of history, and how space was used at specific times.

1

History and the Uses of Space

Paul Stock

Introduction

The Uses of Space in Early Modern History argues for the fundamental importance of space in historical study. Space—by which I mean the emplacement, distribution, and connection of entities, actions, and ideas—has become an increasingly important topic in the humanities and social sciences. This volume shows how spatial approaches can be used to understand the societies, cultures, and mentalities of the past. The essays gathered here explore the uses of space in two respects: how spatial concepts can be employed by or applied to the study of history; and how particular spaces or spatial ideas were used for practical and ideological purposes during specific periods. All are grounded in specific case studies, but their procedures and focuses also suggest broader methodological and intellectual implications which resonate beyond those particular contexts. Some, for example, explore how domestic or religious ideologies structured, or were structured by, early modern social spaces and interactions. Others interrogate the political objectives and symbolic meanings integral to city design, or analyze the spatial strategies that define imperial space and practice.

Individually then, the contributions show how space can be integral to a number of disciplinary subfields: the histories of gender, everyday life, cities, borderlands, empires, political economy, science, and emotion. Collectively, however, they explore the imbrication of materiality and representation in the understanding and experience of space. They show how material spaces and other contextual circumstances give shape to ideas about, say, territory and religion, or gender roles and imperial power. However, they also show how those ideas help to structure the construction and experience of actual sites. In this respect, the volume allows us to see how spaces are built using physical materials, as well as in rhetorical and cultural terms. It explores the mentalities that inspire and structure conceptions of space; but it also investigates the consequences of those constructions, that is, their concrete effects and the realities that they influence.¹ The Uses of Space in Early Modern History therefore directly engages with one of the central questions of historical research: the relationship between ideas and activity. It contends that a serious investigation of historical spaces can cast new light on the relationship between thought and practice in past societies.

This introductory essay serves several purposes. Firstly, it shows how space has long been an important part of disciplined historical study. Although there are important connections between the “spatial turn” and the “cultural turn,” the two are not identical, and this must be emphasized if the importance of space in history is to be fully exploited. Indeed, the study of space can help historians develop new perspectives on certain critical issues, most notably questions about agency and causation, and the relationship between material and intellectual life. Lastly, the essay introduces the articles that comprise this volume, showing how—together and individually—they represent an approach to space that encompasses both the material and the representational.

The history of space

How important is space in history? The “spatial turn” is often presented and understood as a phenomenon from the late twentieth century and the twenty-first century.² In fact, however, the study of the past has long been saturated with spatialized concepts, both as evidential historical categories and as historiographical frameworks: nation, empire, border, public, domestic, network, and so on. As Joanna Guldi’s pioneering work on the “spatial turn” has shown, space has long played an important, even foundational, role in disciplined historical theory and practice.³ Leopold von Ranke, for instance, took the “space of nations” as both the subject and the organizing principle of his enquiries. When he argues that “nations have evolved in unity and kindred movement” and laments the “division” afforded by the Reformation and political strife, Ranke proposes a historical trajectory driven by certain spatialized activities—migration, conquest, centralization—as well as a historiographical vocabulary for assessing that progress in terms of successful “union.”⁴ In other words, Ranke is writing a kind of “spatial history”; a particular way of thinking about space—the idea of national consolidation—underpins his interpretation of historical events and change. Moreover—and this is an important point—Ranke’s archival method is precisely located. His research involved travelling to specific archives and enduring various practical challenges: arduous journeys, poor accommodation, decaying documents, or closed collections. In this respect, he writes spatial history in another sense; his work is the product of interaction with specific material spaces. As Guldi notes, “to write history, as the historical discipline was invented, was very much a matter of interacting with the material landscape . . . The historian’s route, traveling across diverse landscapes, was the single continuous thread that made possible the forging of an integrated story about the modern nation.”⁵

Another prominent example of the importance of space in history comes from the Annales movement. The Annales, of course, employed different scalar perspectives in order to consider historical events within spatial frameworks larger or smaller than the nation state. Bloch’s La Société Féodale (1939) and Braudel’s La Méditerranée (1949), for instance, combine interest in trans-state regions with attention to localized specifics. Braudel speaks of the “need to see on a grand scale,” but also notes that the Mediterranean is not a spatial totality: it is a “complex of seas . . . broken up by islands, interrupted by peninsulas, ringed by intricate coastlines,” each with their own interconnected contexts.⁶ By using different spatial frameworks to choose, focus, and circumscribe certain topics, the Annales were able to offer new perspectives through which to interpret the events of the past. More fundamentally, however, the Annales also saw space as an active force in shaping history. They talk about geographical and environmental factors—mountains, plains, coastlines, climate—as having direct bearing on historical occurrences. As Braudel argues, “human life responds to the commands of the environment, but also seeks to evade and overcome them, only to be caught in other toils.”⁷ This was not, of course, a unique idea. Some scholars have detected the influence of early twentieth-century geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache who identified the supposed “personalities” of different geographical regions by arguing that people and landscape mutually imprint one another.⁸ And of course, climactic theories—in which environmental circumstances are said to influence societal and individual development—have a very long provenance, reaching back through Jean Bodin and Montesquieu to Hippocrates and Strabo.⁹ The important point to emphasize here is the centrality of space for the Annales movement in both historiographical and historical terms: not only do they present a set of spatial perspectives through which to reconsider the past, but material space is also seen to actively influence historical events.

I am arguing, then, that particular ideas about space are integral to several historiographical traditions. There are other examples. Guldi devotes especial attention to the radical landscape historians of the mid-twentieth century. Works such as Henry Randall’s History in the Open Air (1936) and W. G. Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape (1955) show how the study of natural and built environments can offer evidential insights not accessible to solely documentary methodologies. By foregrounding questions about landholding, land use, everyday experiences, and so on—in other words, by taking spatial contexts seriously—these works pioneered important developments in social history, material culture, and the history of everyday life.¹⁰ One might also mention how urban and architectural history explores the relationship between buildings and socio-cultural practice: for example, the development of different architectural styles, urbanization, city planning, and so on.¹¹

It is important to acknowledge this depth of historiographical interest in space. The “spatial turn” is often most associated with certain late twentieth-century thinkers: a range of founding theoretical texts such as Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” (1967, published 1984) or Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974), and several highly influential cultural geographers, including David Harvey, Edward Soja, and Doreen Massey.¹² However, by acknowledging the significance of space in other, earlier, traditions we can see these figures as part of developing historical and historiographical interests in space, rather than as the creators of a “spatial turn” ex nihilo. Instead, Lefebvre, Harvey, and their followers brought to the study of space a set of theoretical assumptions useful for historians. Firstly, that space is socially and culturally contingent: neither material spaces nor societal ideas about them are unchanging universal categories; rather, they are historically specific cultural products—in Lefebvre’s famous dictum, “(social) space is a (social) product.”¹³ Secondly, Lefebvre and the rest propose that spaces are both instruments and evidence of uneven power dynamics and ideological agendas.¹⁴

One might say, then, that these scholars have applied to the understanding of space some of the key insights of the 1970s “cult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  History and the Uses of Space
• 2  Living Space: The Interpretation of English Vernacular Houses
• 3  Gender and the Organization of Sacred Space in Early Modern England c. 1580–1640
• 4  Liminal Space in the Early Modern Ottoman-Habsburg Borderlands: Historiography, Ontology, and Politics
• 5  A Space between Two Worlds: St. Petersburg in the Early Eighteenth Century
• 6  The Spaces of Science and Sciences of Space: Geography and Astronomy in the Paris Academy of Sciences
• 7  The Space between Empires: Coastal and Insular Microregions in the Early Nineteenth-Century World
• 8  Space, Sympathy, and Empire: Edmund Burke and the Trial of Warren Hastings
• 9  A Tale of Three Scales: Ways of Malthusian Worldmaking
• 10  The Uses of Space in Early Modern History—An Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index