Description: Offering a new interpretation of the pre-modern urban past, Cities, Texts and Social Networks highlights contemporary experiences of the city and their mediation through written, visual and environmental evidence. Comprising twelve essays that model important new ways of re-imagining the urban world, it points to significant patterns of socialisation in medieval urban milieus, particularly with respect to the role of sanctity, the evolution of charitable landscapes and the coalescence of formal institutions and informal networks of human interaction.
Review Quotes: 'I can think of no better testament to the power of nodes and networks than this fine collection of essays.' The Medieval Review 'In sum, the editors can be congratulated on making a highly useful intervention in urban studies. The volume gives a good snapshot and critique of the current state of medieval urban history and provides several stimulating essays to provoke creative new research.' English Historical Review 'Wide-ranging, this thematically and conceptually ordered content is coherent, well edited and the overall approach innovative...' Journal of Medieval Archaeology 'Symes' often scathing critique of a scholarship that has conceptualized the Middle Ages as a 'temporal subaltern' because of the emphasis placed on printing and surviving documentation as a means by which to judge a society, her challenge of Habermasian theory, and her adoption of soundscapes, rather than print, as a way to public discourse, is a good note on which to end this ground-breaking volume.' European History Quarterly