Abstract
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.
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Notes
Paul Stock, “The Real-and-Imagined Spaces of Philhellenic Travel,” European Review of History—Revue européenne d’histoire 20, no.4 (2013): 527–528.
See the discussions in, for example, Diarmid A. Finnegan, “The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science.” Journal of the History of Biology 41 (2008); Angelo Torre, “Un ‘tournant spatial’ en histoire? Paysages, regards, ressources.” Annales 63, no.5 (2008);
Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009);
Ralph Kingston, “Mind Over Matter: History and the Spatial Turn.” Cultural and Social History 7, no.1 (2010);
Malte Rolf, “Importing the ‘Spatial Turn’ to Russia: Recent Studies on the Spatialisation of Russian History,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11, no.2 (n.s.) (2010);
Richard Wright, “What Is Spatial History?” (Stanford: Stanford University Spatial History Lab, 2010) https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/media/images/publication/what%20is%20spatial%20history%20pub%20020110.pdf;
Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis, and Kathryn Gleadle, “Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn,” Women’s History Review 21, no.4 (2012).
See especially Joanna Guldi, What Is the Spatial Turn? (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Scholars Lab, 2010) http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/what-is-the-spatial-turn/;
Guldi, “Landscape and Place,” in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). See also
John Randolph, “The Space of Intellect and the Intellect of Space,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 212–231.
Leopold von Ranke, “Preface” to the first edition of Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples (1824), in Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. Georg G. Iggers, trans., Wilma A. Iggers (London: Routledge, 2011), 85–87.See also
Ranke’s “Introduction” to this work trans. Philip A. Ashworth (London: Bell, 1887), 1–17.
Guldi, “The Spatial Turn in History” (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Scholars Lab, 2010) http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/the-spatial-turn-in-history/index.html. See also
Bonnie G. Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 100, no.4 (1995): 1166–1169.
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, abridged Richard Ollard (London: HarperCollins, 1992), xiv, x.
Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; reprinted London: Verso, 2008), 86–87. See also
Kevin Archer, “Regions as Social Organisms: The Lamarckian Characteristics of Vidal de la Blache’s Regional Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83, no.3 (1993): 498–514.
See David N. Livingstone, “Environmental Determinism,” in Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, ed. John Agnew and David Livingstone (London: Sage, 2011), 368–380.
For a useful bibliography see Simon Gunn, ““The Spatial Turn: Changing Histories of Space and Place,” in Identities in Space: Contested Territories in the Western City since 1850, ed. Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 1–14. See also Guldi, “Landscape and Place,” 70–72.
See Barney Warf and Santa Arias, “Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space into the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in The Spatial Turn, ed. Warf and Arias, 3. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no.1 (1986): 22–27;
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
See also David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990);
Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London; Routledge, 2003);
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989);
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
Lynn Hunt “Introduction” to Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 7.
See also Roger Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Ralph Kingston, “Mind Over Matter,” 112.
See, for example, Andrew Scull, The Insanity of Place / The Place of Insanity: Essays on the History of Psychiatry (London: Routledge, 2006);
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994);
Robert Titler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c. 1500–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991);
W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
J. B. Harley. “Text and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps,” in J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton, intro. J. H. Andrews (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 35.
Santa Arias, “Rethinking Space: An Outsider’s View of the Spatial Turn,” GeoJournal 75 (2010): 31.
Arias, “Rethinking Space,” 31; David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (1973) (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, rev. edn. 2009).
Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan. “The Place of Space in the Study of the Social,” in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, 2002), 133, 140.
Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), xiii–xvi.
Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne, “At Home and in the Workplace: A Historical Introduction to the ‘Spatial Turn,’” History and Theory 52 (2013): 317.
Kingston, “Mind Over Matter,” 113–114. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (London: Verso, 2006);
Edward Said, Orientalism, rev. edn. (London: Penguin, 2003).
Steven Casey and Jonathan Wright, “Introduction,” to Mental Maps in the Early Cold War Era, 1945–68, ed. Steven Casey and Jonathan Wright (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1.
See, for example, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995);
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Pamela K. Gilbert, ed., Imagined Londons (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002);
John Rennie Short, Making Space: Revisioning the World 1495–1600 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004)
Charles Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), esp. 6–21.
Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, rev. edn. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 1.
See also John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972).
See Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, “Spectacle and Text”: Landscape Metaphors in Cultural Geography,” in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley (London: Routledge, 1993), 57–77. For an overview see
Susanne Seymour, “Historical Geographies of Landscape,” in Modern Historical Geographies, ed. Brian Graham and Catherine Nash (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), 194.
Philip Ethington, “Placing the Past: “Groundwork” for a Spatial Theory of History,” Rethinking History 11, no.4 (2007): 475–476.
Kingston, “Mind Over Matter,” 112–114; Lief Jerram, “Space: A Useless Category for Historical Analysis?,” History and Theory 52 (2013): 417. See also
David Matless, “An Occasion for Geography: Landscape, Representation, and Foucault’s Corpus,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992): 41–56.
Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett, “Introduction: Material Powers”; and Chris Otter, “Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History,” both in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, ed. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, 2010), esp. 5–8, 43–46.
David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).
Daniel Brewer, “Lights in Space,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37, no.2 (2004): 184.
Denis Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and Its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993);
Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity.
See Daniel Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3
Peter J. Arnade, Martha C. Howell, and Walter Simons, “Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no.4 (2002): 516, 541. See also Otter, “Locating Matter,” 54.
Mike Crang, “Spaces in Theory, Spaces in History and Spatial Historiographies,” in Political Space in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Beat Kümin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 264. See also
Crang, “Time: Space,” in Spaces of Geographical Thought, ed. Paul Cloke and Ron Johnson (London: Sage, 2005), 199–217.
Jerram, “Space,” 414. On materiality and causation in historical study see Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History: Thing, Practice, and Politics,” The Journal of British Studies 48, no.2 (2009): 283–307.
Martina Löw, “The Constitution of Space: The Structuration of Spaces through the Simultaneity of Effect and Perception,” trans. Rhodes Barrett, European Journal of Social Theory 11, no.1 (2008): 43–44.
Ross, Emergence of Social Space, 9. For some problems surrounding spatial and environmental determinism see: Gabriel Judkins, Marissa Smith, and Eric Keys, “Determinism within Human-Environment Research and the Rediscovery of Environmental Causation,” The Geographical Journal 174, no.1 (2008): 17–29;
James M. Blaut, “Environmentalism and Eurocentrism,” The Geographical Review 89, no.3 (1999): 391–408.
See Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant, “Whig History and Present-Centred History,” The Historical Journal 31, no.1 (1988): 1–16;
Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
These questions are influenced by Jerram, “Space,” 418; Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris, “Preface,” in Identities and Space, ed. Gunn and Morris, x; Gerd Schwerhoff, “Spaces, Places and the Historians,” History and Theory 52 (2013): 430.
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Stock, P. (2015). History and the Uses of Space. In: Stock, P. (eds) The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_1
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