Cities in late medieval Europe: the promise and the curse of modernity

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article examines how modern historiography has developed quite differentiated views on the way medieval cities have given expression to renewal and to creativity. ‘National’ traditions have played a highly influential role in modifying the general views articulated in the major syntheses produced by scholars such as Max Weber and Henri Pirenne at the beginning of the twentieth century. An almost jubilant way of looking at the city as the hotbed of modernity gave room, in the decades after the Great War, to pessimism and a negative view on urbanity, before a more nuanced and positive view has been re-established after World War II and in the course of recent paradigmatic changes.