THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN EARLY TOWN AS AN ISSUE OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

• Authors: Rossignol Sébastien
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Did towns exist in Central Europe before the arrival of German and Western European settlers in the twelfth century, and before the establishment of chartered towns, created and consciously planned by the newly arrived? Is it appropriate to designate some of the settlements that existed prior to this major process, which would change the face of these regions forever, as towns? The main problem causing all this uncertainty is contained in the fact that, contrary to the situation in later centuries, there is no unequivocal criterion to discern a town from other types of settlements in the area of Europe situated east of the Rhine and north of the Danube prior to the appearance of chartered towns. Most of the definitions social scientists and then applied to past societies, to see if they fit our schemes of understanding. In this article, the question is asked from the point of view of these societies themselves: what did the people of this period imagine a town to be, and how did they apply their understanding of what a town is to the settlements they actually saw before their eyes? Representations of early urban settlements by contemporary authors writing in Latin are very different from the definitions proposed by scholars nowadays. The criteria which are the most usual today to define the urban character of given agglomerations were very far from the concerns of medieval authors. Great caution should be taken when dealing with the words used by medieval authors to describe their societies. What they had in mind was very different from our own conceptions. Apart from that, many of the aspects that were important for medieval authors - beautiful appearance, notoriety of a settlement - simply cannot be verified in the material culture

Keywords

EN

CENTRAL EUROPE; EARLY TOWN

Discipline

• ARCHAEOLOGY: ARCHAEOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Przegląd Archeologiczny
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 57
• Pages: 133-141
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Rossignol Sébastien

• Sébastien Rossignol, York University, Department of History. 2140 Vari Hall, 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10PLAAAA08276