A primary rationale for this session is the “spatial turn” in the humanities, which calls for increased attention to the ways in which representations of space consolidate, question, or challenge broader social and political hierarchies. Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the “social production of space”, for example, illustrates how social interactions and hierarchies are created and reinforced by space; meanwhile, Martina Löw describes how people, goods, and political and economic systems interact with one another to shape the functions and experiences of urban spaces. In early modern literary studies, these theories have elicited scholarly conversations surrounding how depictions of urban spaces reflect these complex, interwoven social dynamics. Studies such as Luca Zenobi’s 2021 article “Mobility and Urban Space in Early Modern Europe” and the 2019 edited volume Knowledge and the Early Modern City: A History of Entanglements discuss the importance of the city as a physical space that facilitates and conditions social interactions and hierarchies. Similarly, Emily Kuffner’s Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque (2019) discusses literary representations of prostitution in relation to attempts to control women’s sexuality via spatial measures (e.g., confinement) in early modern Spanish cities.
This session also finds its rationale in the increasing importance of material culture in early modern literary studies and the city’s status as a primary site in which material objects are produced, exchanged, and consumed. On one hand, the materiality of the city itself was increasingly apparent in the early modern period as architects revamped major metropolises such as Rome, Madrid, and London, changing the physical shape and material experience of the cityscape via new street plans, building designs, and decorative objects. On the other, the early modern world’s major cities were also sites of material exchange where local and global commodities were placed on display and integrated into the sights, sounds, and textures of the urban milieu. While not focused exclusively on the early modern period, recent scholarship such as the 2020 edited volume The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History has called for increased attention to literature’s ability to shape and be shaped by the material urban environments in which it is produced.
Albrecht Classen will open the session with an investigation of metropolitan women’s spaces in early modern French and German literature. Dr. Classen traces the evolution of female-centered spaces from Boccaccio (1350) to Marguerite de Navarre (1558), noting how female narrators and protagonists are increasingly depicted as actors in particular urban spaces despite the socially constructed, gendered nature of these spaces.
William Rampone’s presentation further considers the relationship between the city and gender relations in his analysis of prostitution and marriage in Philip Massinger’s The City Madam. He considers how women are depicted as commodities within the economic system of early modern London, exposing the ways in which urban life facilitates the circulation of female bodies as material commodities.
The next presentation by Víctor Sierra Matute will consider other facets of materiality in early modern cities as he analyzes literary descriptions of the soundscape of the Praça do Pelourinho Velho in Lisbon. Noting that Lisbon was a major hub for the circulation of goods and people from Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa, Dr. Sierra Matute argues that these networks of commodities and human agents leave their mark on representations of the local, sensorial experience of cities.
Finally, Dr. Rania Huntington’s study of the city of Suzhou in Qian Xiyan’s 17th-century Chinese tales considers the ways in which local histories and geographies engage with broader historical and cultural concepts of commerce and social dynamics. She considers the intermingling of the miraculous with the mundane in Chinese concepts of the city, shedding light on the ways that studying the city’s materiality can reveal broader spiritual and aesthetic ideals.
This panel will provide a forum for a discussion of cross-cultural understandings of the urban experience in an increasingly globalized early modern world. As this panel will likely attract scholars of multiple national literatures, each presentation will be limited to no more than fifteen minutes to allow for fifteen minutes of discussion.