Urban Encounters. Experience and Representation in the Early Modern City

"The present volume is a continuation of the collection Urban Preoccupations: Mental and Material Landscapes (2007), which, like it, grows out of the research project Tolerance and the City. While the earlier volume explored early modern city culture predominantly in terms of cultural difference and its representations, the present volume emphasizes the ways in which early modern city culture is a locus of encounters. More specifically, it focuses on what recent scholars have described as a "lived cultural experience": the sense in which urban existence was seen as inherently unstable or threatening, and the extent to which this perception was dealt with in art or literature. What emerges, as the contributions testify to, is a multi-faceted picture in which separations and boundaries are continually exposed and "productively destabilized". In addition to engaging with the tropes and figures used for the early modern city in works of fiction and art, the volume examines the social and cultural boundaries established in and between cities, but also the ways in which the city itself could be said to constitute an (unstable) boundary. The organization of the volume into two parts, Imagining cities and Encountering cities, accentuates its double theme: investigating the representation and perception of the early modern city together with the crossing and questioning of social and cultural boundaries that emerged in such imagined spaces." (from the Introduction).