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John Hinks, Knowledge and the Early Modern City: A History of Entanglements, ed. Bert de Munck and Antonella Romano, The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 589, December 2022, Pages 1839–1841, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac230
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Extract
The case-study approach is often well suited to an edited collection of essays, especially since the ‘grand narrative’ approach has itself been consigned to history. Case-studies are ‘snapshots’ which can help to illuminate the bigger picture, though running the risk of seeming too fragmented. However, this selection of case-studies is successful partly because of its focus on the early modern period in Western Europe and partly thanks to the substantial and perceptive introductory essay by editors Bert de Munck and Antonella Romano which explains the context very effectively. The book’s subtitle, ‘a history of entanglements’, is highly appropriate as the city has a key role—in fact a multiplicity of roles—in creating and disseminating knowledge, but is in turn shaped and re-shaped by that knowledge and the technologies it engenders. These urban roles may be exercised by the city itself, through its structure of local governance (providing encouragement or investment), by creative individuals (thinkers, inventors, leaders of industry and commerce), and by merchants, with their long-distance networks of contacts providing a two-way traffic in information and new knowledge. These case-studies provide ample evidence of a variety of networks: civic, personal, scholastic, commercial and mercantile—plus, in some situations, religious—which were crucial to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. In early modern Europe, imperial networks were especially important: not only because new knowledge was distributed from centres to peripheries but also because colonies often played a key role in the formation and modification of knowledge. As these essays ably demonstrate, knowledge formation in early modern urban spaces was instrumental in particular in the emergence of modern science—a development in which printing and publishing played a key role. Printing, though primarily an urban activity, was ‘embedded in economic and intellectual networks stretching far beyond individual cities and even regions’ (p. 5).
