Building the Middle Ages: Urbanism and Architecture

Tutor: Caroline Goodson

From the ordered and marble-clad cities of Ancient Rome, a fragmented – and muddier – reality emerged in the early medieval towns and cities of the Mediterranean, Northern Europe, and the British Isles. Some of these medieval cities grew out of the remains of ancient towns, while others sprouted at new centres such as saints’ shrines, strategic military positions and developing trade routes. Others were founded by nascent polities: Vikings, Carolingians, and Muslims all created capitals for their new realms, while in the later middle ages, powerful abbots and bishops built massive abbeys and cathedrals, veritable ecclesiastical cities. Analysis of the diverse nature of the built environment in the middle ages sheds light onto social organization, religious developments, trade patterns, political structures, and the relationship between these and material culture.

The course examines the built environment of Western medieval society from late antiquity to the fourteenth century, considering towns in Byzantium and the Islamic world as points of comparison. Most lectures will focus on a specific site or sites within a determined chronological period, introducing the city and its buildings in their political and social context, and exploring the relationship between the monumental city and the city’s monuments. The sites under examination include cases of monumental urban planning, ‘organic’ evolutions of cities, and multiple points along the spectrum between top-down idealized cities and bottom-up pragmatic cities. One focus of the course will be the range of sources available for exploring the history of medieval cities: archaeological, art historical, and the great variety of textual sources. What do different kinds of sources tell us about the same city, and how do we best make use of them as historians?

Preliminary Reading

S. Bianca. Urban Form in the Arab World: Past and Present. London: 2000, Part I, The Historic Arab-Islamic City.

W. Braunfels. Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture, 900–1900. Chicago: 1988.

N. Christie & S. T. Loseby, eds. Towns in Transition. Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Aldershot: 1996.

H. Clarke and B. Ambrosiani. Towns in the Viking Age, rev. ed. 1995.

K. Creswell. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, rev ed. J. Allan. Aldershot: 1988.

R. Francovich & R. Hodges. From Villa to Village. The Transformation of the Roman Countryside in Italy, c. 400–1000. London: 2003.

C. Frugoni. A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World. Princeton: 1991.

R. Hodges. Dark Age Economics. The Origins of Towns and Trade, 600–1000. London: 1982.

R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse. Mohammed, Charlemagne and the origins of Europe. Archaeology and the Pirenne thesis. London: 1983.

C. Karkov, K. M. Wickham-Crowley, and B. Young, eds. Spaces of the Living and the Dead: An Archaeological Dialogue. Oxford: 1999.

R. Krautheimer. Three Christian Capitals. Berkeley: 1983.

Medieval Practices of Space. B. Hanawalt, M. Kobialka, eds. Minneapolis: 2000. (esp. essays by M. Camille, V. Flint)

L. Mumford. The City in History. New York: 1961.

D. Nicholas. The Growth of the Medieval City. From Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century. London: 1997.

D. Nicholas. The Later Medieval City. London: 1997.

J. Rich, ed. The City in Late Antiquity. London: 1992.

C. Wickham. “The Fall of Rome Will Not Take Place.” in Debating the Middle Ages. B. Rosenwein and L. Little, eds. Oxford: 1998. pp. 45–57