The introduction to this special collection addresses a fundamental issue: the link between
The spatial turn in the humanities, and more recently even more so in the Digital Humanities, raises fundamental questions about the places and spaces where culture and knowledge are/were produced, interpreted, performed, and disseminated. The contributions to this special collection will approach these questions from different perspectives.
As many other historians working with cultural theory, our thinking has been shaped profoundly by Michel Foucault's ideas, most notably (but not uniquely) the works in which he addresses knowledge as a product of culture, time, and power relations, for instance in
Michel Foucault's book
As historians of the late medieval period, specialising in the history of reading, we have re-read the
a constellation of anonymous and historical rules, always determined in the time and the space that have defined in a given epoch, and for a given social, economic, geographical or linguistic area, the preconditions regulating the practice of making statements.
Foucault uses the term "l'archive" for this general system of formation and transformation of "statements." The regulating information contained in the archive is mostly implicit, while statements can take the form of events and of material discursive acts.
To state that statements are persistent, that does not mean that they remain in the realm of memory, or that one can retrieve what they were intending to say; but it does mean that they have been preserved thanks to a certain amount of material supports and techniques (of which the book is obviously only one example), according to certain types of institutions (among many others, the library), and with certain statutory terms (which are not the same when it concerns a religious text, a legal regulation, or a scientific truth).
Ideas such as these about the importance of the materiality of the surviving textual witnesses and the societal processes that have determined their preservation over more than five centuries are very insightful for our research into religious reading by the laity, in part based on material books and material contexts. Not unlike Michel Foucault in the late 1960s, we are interested in the different ways past societies experienced, transmitted and used knowledge: religious ideas expressed in the vernacular languages of Europe during the long fifteenth century, and the ways in which past societies constructed, preserved and disseminated knowledge (
A central point in Foucault's understanding of history, as expressed in the
Archaeology also makes visible relations between discursive formations and non-discursive fields (institutions, political events, practices, and economic processes).
Practices are important in Foucault's archaeology and they are central to our thinking about the history of religious reading in the late Middle Ages as well: we are not only interested in texts and material books, but also in the historical practices relating to these objects, the ways in which people handled and used them, reproduced and read them—alone and in communities.
These human and societal practices in relation to the
Although only Foucault's lecture
Knowledge does not exist by itself. It is also embedded in artifacts or embodied in individuals, communities, or institutions […] Moreover, knowledge does not exist without the practices that construct it, fix it, and make its circulation and transmission possible. Knowledge does not exist without the artifacts conveying it. These artifacts could be material objects, such as handwritten or printed books, notebooks, tablets, oral discourses, instruments, hand-made objects: they could also be gestures and savoir-faire, practices; they could be oral or written statements.
This approach to knowledge as a process is strongly influenced, as Jacob shows, by the sociology of science and the "ethnography of laboratory life" inspired by the works of
By implementing this "practical turn" and shifting the focus from the "traditional" philological textual analysis to practices, interactions, instruments, and production techniques, Jacob paves the way for a large-scale comparative approach—both chronological and geographical. He stresses, moreover, the collective value of these practices, performed by individuals but often determined by professional, intellectual, and cultural milieus, which define their normativity and syntax as well as their dissemination and assimilation through several processes of learning and education.
This
Essential in this new approach, which reconstructs knowledge within the frame of the
The instrumental role of the notion of space, its history and transformations, through the duality of utopia and heterotopia.
In fact, Foucault's thinking, together with that of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Pierre Bourdieu,
Even though Michel Foucault's
Another example of "how we would do history differently now" is Foucault's treatment of historical periods: short periods, clearly delimited in time and cultural space by processes of change and transformations, such as the French Classical period. As a consequence of his treatment of historical fault lines (explicitly not the same as the traditional historical periodisation), Foucault represents historical societies—at least in his archaeological works—as distant and entirely disconnected from the present day. In our approach (inspired by globalisation and the information society surrounding us), we are interested in connections, exchanges and sharing. This can, for example, result in modern information technologies informing our understanding of historical reading practices, such as hypertexts and open access that have helped us to see the importance of paratexts in medieval books and chained "common profit" books.
Furthermore, Foucault's objects of research are somewhat immobile to our taste and he does not seem to address transfers, mobilities, exchanges and shared practices over geographical distances and between different cultures. Strongly informed by microhistory, our approach aims to reconstruct how small-scale events reflect macrohistorical developments and investigates how they are related to them. Microhistory is also the study of the local in its connection to the global.
Above we have already touched upon Foucault's initial ideas about the importance of materiality in the study of discursive acts, which led him later to include materiality more explicitly in his thinking, such manifestations of power in objects and their arrangements.
An important point, which is underestimated in Jacob's programmatic description, but which relates our approach to the
Not the history of literature, but of that rumour alongside it, of that everyday writing, so quickly erased, which never obtains the status of the work of art or which is immediately divested of this honour.
This resonates strongly with our own approach that is also inspired by "history from below," focusing on the lives, ideas and experiences of ordinary people living in an urban context, such as artisans and servants. In spite of historical commonplaces, these people have left their traces in the historical documentation, even that of the Middle Ages; many of them were literate and they co-shaped the religious reading cultures and textual cultures of the long fifteenth century. In fact, we are convinced that the
Another aspect of materiality and spaces in our historical research in which we differ from Foucault's and Jacob's ideas is that these can serve, for us, as a "gateway to experiences in the past." This may be the result of the sensation of "timeless time" and the annihilation of geographical distances created by the information society of the early twenty-first century,
An example how historical
The "Hidden Cities" apps, created for several European towns, allow to toggle between a modern digital map and a georectified historical map to see, by means of GPS, one's position both in the modern and the historical city. The use of historical maps for studying the urban network of
The idea of approaching the urban spaces as archives, in which several
A deep map is a finely detailed, multimedia depiction of a place and the people, animals, and objects that exist within it and are thus inseparable from the contours and rhythms of everyday life. Deep maps are not confined to the tangible or material, but include the discursive and ideological dimensions of place, the dreams, hopes, and fears of residents—they are, in short, positioned between matter and meaning.
This "cartographical" research line restates, moreover, the fundamental correlation between social interactions and spatial practices and perceptions, which is the cornerstone of modern approaches to space and place.
Spatial research is a powerful and innovative direction of the humanities and maybe even more so in research in premodern history. This approach includes locating history, but even more importantly spatialising history, i.e. to inquire into the creation of material and conceptual spaces by societies, as well as the agency of man-made and natural spaces on societies and human behaviour. Moving away from older initiatives that sought above all to confirm ideas about national exceptionalism and cultural borders, recent directions in spatial research are strongly informed by modern cultural theory, based directly on Foucault's works or by approaches inspired by his thought. The further development of spatial approaches for the humanities, as well as research into the history of spatial thinking in the humanities are a first centre of interest of this collection.
For the contributions to this collection we are furthermore interested in
In addition, even if some medieval and early modern
A reflection on the two key concepts of "savoir" and "lieu" is extremely important when using the "
For a similar approach, see Catherine M. Soussloff ed.,
Michel Foucault,
Foucault,
Foucault,
Foucault,
Foucault,
Foucault,
Christian Jacob,
Jacob, "Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces," 86.
Jacob, "Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces," 86–87. This theme is at the focus of a new research project, lead by Christian Jacob, launched in September 2020:
Jacob, "Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces," 88.
Jacob, "Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces," 89. This approach has been extensively rehearsed in the two collective volumes resulting for the
See "practical turn," in Jacob,
Jacob, "Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces," 97.
Jacob, "Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces," 96–98.
See "spatial turn," in Jacob,
Following this line of thought, it is worth mentioning that in the second volume of the series
Sabrina Corbellini and Margriet Hoogvliet, "Late Medieval Urban Libraries as Social Practice: Miscellanies, Common Profit Books and Libraries (France, Italy, the Low Countries)," in
See for example: Carlo Ginzburg, "Microhistory, Two or Three Things That I Know about It,"
Jeroen Duindam's recent work on the history court societies in Europe, Moghul India and China is a good example of this approach: Jeroen Duindam,
Michel Foucault,
Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,"
Foucault,
Manuel Castells,
Edward Soja, "Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination," in
"PUblic REnaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present," funded by the Humanities in European Research Area (HERA) (2019–2022); PI Fabrizio Nevola, University of Exeter, UK, involving researchers from universities in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, see
Keith D. Lilley, "Materialising the City: Mapping in the Imaging and Imagining of Medieval Urban Spaces," in
The importance of the connection between the urban and the spatial has been recently restated by Richard Rodger and Susanne Rau, "Thinking Spatially: New Horizons for Urban History,"
David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, Trevor M. Harris, eds.,
Susanne Rau,
For these concepts and figures, see Rau,
See the methodology of layers (substrates, nodes, and networks) for doing global history of the Middle Ages as proposed in Naomi Standen, "Colouring Outside the Lines: Methods for a Global History of Eastern Eurasia 600–1350,"
The contributions of this collection are based in part on the stimulating discussions during the international workshop at the NIAS/Lorentz Center @Snellius in Leiden, the Netherlands: "Spaces and Places of Religious Knowledge Transfer in Early Modern Cities," 30 January 2017 – 2 February 2017.