The Rise of Cities Revisited is not exactly what its title might lead readers to believe. Several of the chapters truly do revisit Adriaan Verhulst’s influential 1999 monograph, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe. However, many do not. This book is better understood as a shotgun-blast overview of current research on medieval urban history in the Low Countries, rather than a volume devoted to the legacy of Verhulst’s theses, or a debate over The Rise of Cities’ core arguments.
The authors’ stated purpose was to produce a “guidebook for scholars, students and professionals” who wish to study the urban history of the Low Countries (16). They also wished to present a state of the field for research into urbanization in this region (19) from a variety of different perspectives. Among the most valuable tools which this book assembles is a helpful bibliography of studies related to urban locations in the Low Countries, covering both regional works and individual works on 250 or so individual cities and towns.
This book has the virtues and vices of many edited collections. The chapters vary widely in scope, methodology, and chronology. They range from textual analysis of twelfth-century borough charters as evidence for urban political agency, to a detailed reconstruction of changes in urban construction materials around 1350, to a comparison of spatial and topographic development in three key urban sites down to the turn of the sixteenth century. The breadth means that it is very difficult to perceive intellectual dialogue between the various chapters, good though they may be individually.
Given the book’s stated purpose as guidebook or composite state-of-the-field, it is worth noting that the chapters serve these goals in very different ways. For outsiders to the history of urbanization in the medieval Low Countries, chapter 5 (an argument about the importance of rulers in creating economic growth in market and industrial centers) and chapter 7 (a discussion of how urban topography was structured by class and political considerations) are the most accessible. Leloup and Speecke both do an admirable job explaining how their work relates to Verhulst’s. They also concisely introduce some major theoretical and interpretive challenges facing students of urban topography. The same can be said for Lambert and Hall’s chapter, which might help researchers influenced by New Institutional Economics see how this case study might answer broad questions about economic development. Els de Paermentier and Jan Dumolyn’s chapter on borough charters is both interesting and clearly participating in broader historiographic debates about the use of the written word in creating the institutions of urban community. While it is less historiographic than the others, Marc Boone’s opening essay on Adriaan Verhulst’s career was engaging on a human level, helping a reader unfamiliar with this particular corner of academe to understand the social and institutional forces that shape its intellectual production. If The Rise of Cities Revisited is intended as a guidebook and to draw in interested researchers from outside, these are the chapters that are most successful at providing an entry point for scholars working outside the region.
The other chapters in the work will be most successful with readers who are familiar with the Low Countries’ medieval history and are already working in the specific fields or sub-fields covered. For example, Ijsselstijn’s attempt to weigh Central Place System and Network System models for the emergence of urban nuclei succeeds at using those models to describe urban change in the Low Countries. Yet it is not wholly clear what pressing questions the models exist to answer, or what insights the typologizing will generate. Similarly, chapter 8, on the material rise of cities, was inspired by an interest in archaeology shared with Adriaan Verhulst, whose arguments about urban genesis turned on analysis of the physical footprint of settlement. But this chapter is highly descriptive, and does not provide a clear access point for an outsider. Scholars already working specifically in this field will know how to assess and value the contents of this chapter better. It might prove useful to someone attempting the kind of broad synthesis the volume’s editors claim the field lacks, post-Verhulst.
The point is not that these are weak essays. Rather, they are clearly contributions to a local or regional scholarly conversation. They might fulfill the authors’ stated hopes for a “guidebook” to some extent. But they cannot be a good entry point for those unfamiliar with the specific contours of this academic sub-culture, because the stakes are not clear unless one is already working in the field.
As a result of the overall fragmentation of the contributions, Keith Lilley’s final essay struggles to draw together the various threads into a coherent whole. One expects that trying to produce a coherent synthesis of the contributions was quite a challenge. If anything, it is a bit unsettling to wrap up a volume whose focus (and strength) is resolutely local and regional history by gesturing toward the truly far-flung international exchange networks of cities like Bruges and Ghent. This raises an interpretive issue: the chapters are strong on local and regional dynamics, but can urbanization of the Low Countries from the twelfth century onward really be best understood by thinking so exclusively on issues internal to the region?
The volume’s production quality is generally high, but uneven. The chapters are consistently interesting, but some could have used a strong copyeditor because the prose is hard to follow in places. For example, Marc Boone’s essay on Adriaan Verhulst’s life and career is helpful for placing Verhulst’s scholarly activity in a broader historical context, yet is slow going in the reading. The quality of the illustrations is high, and they are critical to supporting the text, especially in archaeologically-focused discussions and for depicting urban change over time (chapters 3, 6, 8). Yet this reviewer accidentally erased printed words out of the text itself using only a standard No.2 pencil, while trying to remove his own underlining from a section on p.185.
As is the case with many edited volumes, the chapters in The Rise of Cities Revisited are diverse enough. The contents are diverse enough that one reviewer is unlikely to give all their due and interested readers would do best to pick it up themselves and sample some of what seem to them the book’s most promising offerings.