Urban Panegyric and The Transformation of The Medieval City 1100 1300 Paul Oldfield All Chapter

Urban Panegyric and the
Transformation of the Medieval City,

1100-1300 Paul Oldfield
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joh n h . a rn old pat r i c k j . ge a ry
and
joh n wat ts
Urban Panegyric and

the Transformation of
the Medieval City,
1100–1300
PAU L O L D F I E L D
1
3
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Acknowledgements
Having read so much panegyric over the course of writing this book, it is such a
great delight to finally have the opportunity to reverse the flow and deliver my own
praise for countless individuals who have provided invaluable advice, support, and
inspiration. I thank my colleagues (past and present) in History at the University
of Manchester for numerous insightful conversations about praise and cities,
particularly Georg Christ, Katy Dutton, Paul Fouracre, Charles Insley, Stephen
Mossman, and Martin Ryan. I am also very grateful for the support of the
University in granting a period of research leave, and also to the British Academy
for the award of a mid-career Fellowship for six months in 2016, both of which
provided me with valuable time and space to enrich and develop this project. In
addition, I have had the great fortune to receive superb support from staff at vari-
ous libraries: the document supply team in the University Library for locating
numerous inter-library loans on my behalf; and staff in the Special Collections at
the John Rylands Library, Manchester, those at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and
the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh who enabled me to consult important
incunabula and manuscripts. I must also thank the editorial team at Oxford
University Press, Stephanie Ireland, Cathryn Steele, the anonymous readers, and
the series editors John Arnold and especially John Watts, all of whom have sup-
ported and guided me with great patience and skill: this book is immeasurably
stronger as a result. A great pleasure in working on such a big project is the oppor-
tunity it opens up for speaking with and learning from colleagues elsewhere in
academia. Aside from my aforementioned colleagues at Manchester and Oxford
University Press, I have also had the great fortune to have received crucial assistance
and expert advice from Laura Ashe, David Bachrach, Andrew Brown, Ardis
Butterfield, Jan Dumolyn, Tim Greenwood, Tom Licence, Maureen Miller, James
M. Murray, David Rollason, Dennis Romano, Jeffrey Ruth, Graeme Small,
Fabrizio Titone, Steven Vanderputten, Gary Warnaby, and Chris Wickham. A spe-
cial thanks is always reserved for Graham Loud and his willingness to offer his
expertise and guidance and for Ian Moxon likewise with his invaluable assistance
with difficult Latin passages and for generously offering his own translations.
The support and enthusiasm of friends and family has, however, been the most
crucial factor in helping me see this project through to its completion. Their curi-
osity and comfort repeatedly served as a tonic and I am left amused and touched
at being surrounded by loved ones who now know far more than any non-academic
should about things medieval! But, in particular my wife Kate, and my young sons
Finlay and Sebastian, have truly demonstrated to me the paradox of praise; that the
more praiseworthy a thing is, the harder it is to articulate that praise. For where to
start and where to stop praising three so very important individuals to me? To say
Kate encouraged and strengthened me, and to report that Finlay and Sebastian
vi Acknowledgements
showed such pride and delight in my endeavours, reflects mere glimmers of a much
deeper, much more inspiring, and wholly irreplaceable support which they
unknowingly but unconditionally gave. No praise can encapsulate what this has
meant to me. No praise can convey how fortunate I feel. And no praise can stand
as thanks for the smile that now crosses my face as I think of all their warmth and
of all their mischief.
Contents
Introduction 1
1. The Sources: An Overview 23
2. Interpretation and Audience 36
3. The Holy City 61
4. The Evil City: Urban Critiques 95
5. The City of Abundance: Commerce, Hinterland, People 111
6. Urban Landscapes and Sites of Power 130
7. Education, History, and Sophistication 160
In Praise of the Medieval City: Conclusions 187
Bibliography 191
Index 212
Introduction
A process of intensive urbanization marked Europe’s twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This much has been abundantly clear ever since Henri Pirenne’s pioneering thesis
and the rich and contested historiography it has generated on the history of
medieval Europe’s cities.1 If one can question the morphologies, chronologies,
continuities, and intensities evident throughout the course of medieval urbaniza-
tion, the tangible reality of physical change affected in those cities is irrefutable.
Demographic, material, commercial, and topographic transformation occurred
within cities—in simple terms they became bigger, more influential within wider
economic networks, and their layout more complex and more textured—while
numerous urban settlements were established ex novo; and these processes reached
their apex, or experienced crucial accelerations, roughly during the two centuries
running from 1100 to 1300. Consequently, cities could now harness newfound
political, commercial, cultural, and military influence which positioned them at
the centre of Europe’s map of power politics.
To note, however, that change occurred, and to try to measure it in quantifiable
terms (this city’s population doubled, that city built twenty new churches), is to
present only half the picture. The other half was an imagined city built on con-
stantly renewable cultural memories, emotions, and affinities; a malleable city
which could be more meaningful and intrinsic to an urban inhabitant’s lived
experience. Thus, another crucial facet to change and urbanization in our period
was the formation of civic consciousness.2 It was underpinned by the rapid growth
of urban populations and conurbations and the concomitant competition for
resources and status which this aroused among urban centres. This necessitated
greater focus on affective conduits for affinities—the language of citizenship, the
cultivation of patron saints, the production of civic histories, the construction
of civic buildings, and the delineation of more expansive and regularized public
spaces, to name but a few—all of which could bind together expanded urban
1 H. Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. F. D. Halsey (Princeton,
1925); examples of wide-ranging comparative works on the medieval city include: E. Ennen, Die
Europäische Stadt des Mittelalters (Göttingen, 1972); D. Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City:
From Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century (London, 1997); K. D. Lilley, Urban Life in the
Middle Ages, 1000–1450 (Basingstoke, 2001); P. Boucheron et al., Histoire de l’Europe urbaine. Tome.
1. De l’Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle. Genèse des villes européenes (Paris, 2003); C. Loveluck, Northwest
Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. a d 600–1150: A Comparative Archaeology (Cambridge, 2013).
2 For important, though broad, discussion see: P. Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition:
Plato to Rousseau (Chapel Hill, 1992), pp. 118–39.
2 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300
landscapes and communities in ways which personal, face-to-face relationships

alone could not, and which could project a positive (often imagined) image of the city.
Integral to the generation of civic consciousness was the capability to d
isseminate
its core messages, and in the period post-1100 we see such capabilities put into
practice in ways which had arguably not been achieved on such a widespread scale
since antiquity. Increased literacy rates and the development of new centres of
education, the maturation and expanded aspirations of urban governments, the
management of the physical urban landscape, and novel expressions of religious
devotion, particularly among the laity, all stimulated more articulate attachments
to, and understandings of, the city which attempted to transcend the increasingly
eclectic groupings which co-habited the urban landscape. This civic consciousness
created appreciation of the positive values connected with the urban world,
attached pride to one’s home city, and countered negative, disparaging perspectives
on the city. It was nuanced in scholarly circles by exposure to Aristotle’s Politics,
which became available once again in the thirteenth century, and also by a deeper
engagement with Ciceronian texts which emphasized the unified communitas and
its civic obligations.3 Drawing from these ideas, that influential medieval thinker
Thomas Aquinas identified the ‘ultimate community’ in the self-sufficient civitas.4
Thus, identifying and understanding the development of civic awareness opens
up the possibility of evaluating what the more fundamental urban transformations
of the period meant, in qualitative terms, to some of those who directly experi-
enced them. Crucially, it allows us to assess which aspects of this great phase
of urbanization challenged, empowered, bewildered, and defined contemporary
city-dwellers, and to evaluate what the city represented to them. And framing the
foregoing sketch is the acknowledgement that medieval notions of urban living
can continue to question the so-called myth of modernity ‘as a radical break with
the past’.5 For civic consciousness in the Central Middle Ages was very much a
conscious ‘mode of being’ well before commentators of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries—such as the celebrated cultural observer Walter Benjamin—identified
‘civicness’ as an emblem of modernity.6
Civic consciousness is, of course, a more ephemeral entity to identify than a
newly built city wall or parish church; it can appear in all manner of guises, often
underlying rather than directly defining developments, and its interpretation
3 D. Luscombe, ‘City and Politics before the coming of the Politics: some illustrations’, in D. Abulafia,
M. Franklin, M. Rubin (eds), Church and City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 41–3.
4 Luscombe, ‘City and Politics’, p. 48; H-J. Schmidt, ‘Societas christiana in civitate: Städtekritik
und Städtelob im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift, CCLVII, ii (1993), pp. 333–4.
5 See D. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (Hoboken, 2013), who prefers to see the formation of
modernity less in terms of breaks and more so in ‘decisive moments of creative destruction’ (p. 1).
6 For an overview on Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the city see G. Gilloch, Myth and
Metropolis. Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–20. A. Butterfield, ‘Chaucer and
the Detritus of the City’, in A. Butterfield (ed.), Chaucer and the City (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 3–22
offers an excellent survey on how Benjamin’s approach can be applied to thinking on the city, and
concludes with the observation, important for assessing the medieval city, ‘that modernity is always
changing, and has always been there’ (p. 22). See also M. Boone, ‘Cities in Late Medieval Europe. The
Promise and the Curse of Modernity’, Urban History, XXXIX (2012), pp. 329–49 for an excellent
discussion of the role of the medieval city in scholarly discourses on modernity.
Introduction 3
invariably open-ended. Fortunately, many of the key components of civic

consciousness were absorbed into, and articulated most vividly by, literary works
which offered praise of cities—urban panegyric—which were produced in far
greater quantity during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than at any previous
point. Crucially too, the messages within these works of urban panegyric reached
a far greater audience than had been the case for comparable forms in the Early
Middle Ages. Their material ostensibly addressed the most prominent, laudatory
features of urban living, but at the same time tapped into a range of qualitative,
quantitative, and functional transformations that were occurring throughout
Medieval Europe’s cities so as to serve as commentaries on what the medieval city
meant to (at least some of ) its inhabitants. Indeed, used reflectively these works
also demonstrate what the city was not, or what it should not be, those points on
which urban life might be censured. In short they act as cultural texts, a ‘storage
medium’ for the construction of cultural memories.7
The present study thus utilizes this vital body of material which has, to my
mind, not been sufficiently integrated into studies of medieval urban life. Urban
panegyric has often been dismissed as being too bound by convention, rhetoric,
and exaggeration and therefore rather sidelined from understandings of the medi-
eval city. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the messages within urban
panegyric are indeed highly valuable ones. It represents the first sustained
examination of the content and significance of urban panegyric in the Central
Middle Ages. It will connect the production of urban panegyric to two major
underlying transformations in the medieval city. It will explore how the physical
and functional changes in medieval cities influenced the production of laudatory
material on the city and by extension how this shaped civic consciousness.
Connected to this, it will ask, vice versa, what that material can reveal about urban
transformation. It will also locate the role of urban panegyric in the wider ideological
battle which orbited around the concept of the medieval city; one in which new
discourses emerged after c.1100 and which contested notions of the evil and the
good city.
U R B A N PA N E G Y R I C A N D I T S S O U RC E S
This work aims to track both physical and ideological change associated with the
city during the crucial period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and uniquely
to do so through the prism of urban panegyric, a vastly undervalued textual
record which offers a significant voice on these transitions and which has yet to
be examined extensively nor fully connected to wider urban transitions. It will
provide a wide and comparative geographic analysis, incorporating material on
England, Flanders, France, Germany, Iberia, Northern and Southern Italy and
Sicily, and (occasionally) the Near East. In Chapter 2 we will discuss at greater
length how the material within some of the sources can be interpreted. But it is
7 A. Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. S. B. Young (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 161–2.

important to establish some very broad methodological parameters at the outset,

by considering how this study defines urban panegyric.
Urban panegyric appears in many literary shapes and sizes, but simply put,
I identify it here as any textual record that can be interpreted as praising (implicitly
or explicitly) an aspect of urban life. Thus, for example, seemingly uncomplicated
‘descriptions’ of cities can often be viewed—as will be shown in this study—as
implicit praise. At the more explicit end of the scale, at its most formulaic, and
arguably most discernible, urban panegyric was influenced by the laus civitatis.
This literary template crystallized during Antiquity via rhetorical treatises on
the construction of panegyric and encomium which were produced by some
of the most renowned rhetoricians and grammarians of the day: Quintilian,
Hermogenes, Priscian, and Menander Rhetor to name some of the most important.8
Collectively these works demonstrated ways in which praise could be applied to a
city, and their guidance remained influential, not least because its flexibility covered
most of the fundamental characteristics of the city in the Middle Ages. Popular
subjects for praise included: the origins of a city and the etymology of its name,
its physical size, its material legacy (religious and secular buildings; monumental
structures such as city walls, towers, and gates; public spaces such as squares,
amphitheatres and marketplaces), its wealth and commercial vitality, its geographical
situation and layout (including fertility of surrounding lands), the attributes/
achievements of its inhabitants (especially if they were pious, learned, or famous)
and (from the Christian era) of its chief patron saints, and the city’s status com-
parative to other urban centres. The classical influences derived from the early
rhetorical texts on urban panegyric were subsequently overlaid by Christian under-
standings of the city (for more see Chapter 3) to ensure that there were some
broader framing devices, agendas, and commonalities which underpinned some of
the medieval praise we shall encounter.
An eighth-century Lombard text called De Laudibus Urbium did attempt to aid
an author in the production of urban panegyric, and echoes some of the earlier
classical rhetoricians:
The first praise of cities should furnish the dignity of the founder and it should include
praise of distinguished men and also gods, just as Athens is said to have been established
by Minerva: and they shall seem true rather than fabulous. The second [theme of praise]
concerns the form of fortifications and the site, which is either inland or maritime and
in the mountains or in the plane. The third concerns the fertility of the lands, the boun-
tifulness of the springs, the habits of the inhabitants. Then concerning its ornaments,
which afterwards should be added, or its good fortune, if things had developed unaided
or had occurred by virtue, weapons and warfare. We shall also praise it if that city has
many noble men, by whose glory it shall provide light for the whole world. We should
also be accustomed for praise to be shaped by neighbouring cities, if ours is greater, so
8 For an excellent summary of the pre-1100 material see J. Ruth, Urban Honor in Spain. The Laus
Urbis from Antiquity through Humanism (Lewiston, 2011), Chapters 1–2.
Introduction 5
that we protect others, or if lesser, so that by the light of neighbours we are illuminated.
In these things also we shall briefly make comparison.9
The tract then showed the reader how to perform such a comparison. Yet, this
type of explicit instruction on the praise of cities was remarkably rare in the Middle
Ages. Thus, despite the guidance of classical rhetorical manuals and the evident
continuities and recurring themes within aspects of medieval urban panegyric, no
linear literary tradition of urban praise developed nor any authoritative taxonomy
of laudatory qualities was established. Astrid Erll’s analysis suggests that ‘only when
authors and recipients of a mnemonic community share the knowledge of genre
conventions [ . . . ] can one speak of the existence of a genre.’10 For the Middle Ages
it remains problematic to establish how far authors and audience were explicitly
aware of such genre conventions rather than absorbing them at a more subcon-
scious cultural level. For these reasons the present study makes no attempt to delin-
eate nor to offer a definitive model of what constitutes the laus civitatis and urban
panegyric in general. Praise within the laus civitatis model could focus on any
combination of laudatory attributes, exclude some, and nuance others. The laus
civitatis template (and urban panegyric more broadly) is at best a loose category,
which in itself demonstrates the variety of ways to praise and conceptualize cities.
Each example of praise (and conversely censure) needs to be assessed individually
and then comparatively by considering authorship, context, purpose, and type of
source, and then, of course, by focusing on the content of the praise itself. Text and
context cannot be separated.11
Understandably, the type of distinctive praise which formed extensive passages
of texts, or which represent ‘free-standing’ works in their own right, has dominated
scholarship on urban panegyric. Some of the most celebrated examples, all of
which will be encountered in this study, are the Mirabilia Urbis Romae on Rome
(c.1143), William FitzStephen’s description of the city of London, its origins, and
its future (c.1173), and Bonvesin da la Riva’s distinguished De Magnalibus Urbis
Mediolani on the city of Milan (1288).12 Indeed, J. K. Hyde’s seminal study in the
1960s showcased the importance of many of these works.13 Yet on closer inspec-
tion it becomes apparent that these major laudes civitatum are a mixed bag, diverse
9 De Laudibus Urbium, Latin text in G. Fasoli, ‘La coscienza civica nelle “Laudes Civitatum” ’, in
her Scritti di storia medievale, ed. F. Bocchi et al. (Bologna, 1974), p. 295 n. 6.
10 Erll, Memory, p. 74. 11 Erll, Memory, p. 171.
12 An edition of the Mirabilia Urbis Romae can be found in Codice topografico della città di Roma,
eds. R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, vol. III (Rome, 1946), pp. 17–65; William FitzStephen, Vita
Sancti Thomae in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J. Craigie Robertson, Rolls Series,
LXVII, vol. III (London, 1877). There is also a translation of FitzStephen’s description of London by
H. E. Butler, reproduced in F. Stenton, Norman London: An Essay (Introduction by F. Donald Logan)
(New York, 1990), pp. 47–60; Bonvesin da la Riva, De Magnalibus Mediolani (Le Meraviglie di
Milano), ed. and trans. P. Chiesa (Milan, 2009).
13 J. K. Hyde, ‘Medieval Descriptions of Cities’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, XLVIII
(1965–6), pp. 308–40.
in content, purpose, and form.14 Many are embedded in much larger tracts,
like the aforesaid description of London which serves as a prologue to William
FitzStephen’s Vita of Thomas Becket. In some works too—the Gesta Treverorum
for Trier, Boncampagno da Signa’s for Ancona, or Martin da Canal’s for Venice, for
example—praise is conveyed implicitly through an entire text which takes a city as
its central reference point. The Gesta Treverorum, for instance, has been described
quite rightly as written by an author ‘who incorporated into his chronicle every-
thing that contributed to the glory of the Treveri’.15 In others it can be detected
indirectly in strategies which enhanced a city’s reputation without applying overt
praise, perhaps by simply recording an urban foundation legend which projected
the city’s origins into a distant past.16 Furthermore, some works which considered
the city as a universal entity and presented that entity in a positive light—such
as the Christian philosophers Alain de Lille in the twelfth century and Albert Magnus
in the thirteenth—have also been included here as types of urban panegyric.17 All
of this reflects the varied forms panegyric could take and the diversity of the textual
source types through which it appeared: chronicles, annals, poems, chansons and
romances, hagiographies, letters, sermons, legal, political, and theological treatises,
customary tracts, and administrative documents.
The approach in the present study therefore recognizes the heterogeneity within
the body of works conventionally labelled as laudes civitatum and takes a more
holistic interpretation of what constitutes urban panegyric and where to locate
it. The corpus of ‘major’ laudes civitatum distract from the considerably larger
occurrence of what Elisa Occhipinti termed microlaudes, smaller passages of urban
panegyric and description of varied forms and length inserted into larger works.18
Sometimes these may simply be a line or two within a text, sometimes more, but
their concision and subtextual implications can be powerful and articulate deep-
rooted messages. This approach allows us to consider small passages of praise in
the same terms, and potentially of the same value, as ‘recognized’/‘major’ laudes
civitatum. Thus, to offer two seemingly polarized examples from the thirteenth
century, it might be possible to compare and utilize on an equal footing John de
14 D. Romagnoli, ‘La coscienza civica nella città comunale italiana: il caso di Milano’, in F. Sabaté
(ed.), El mercat: un món de contactes i intercanvis (Lleida, 2014), pp. 59–62 notes the fluid overlap evi-
dent in the so-called mirabilia, itineraria and laudes civitatum genres.
15 W. Hammer, ‘The Concept of the New or Second Rome in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, XIX
(1944), pp. 57–8.
16 Gesta Treverorum, ed. G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, VIII (Hannover,
1848), pp. 130–200; see the important work by H. Thomas, Studien zur Trierer Geschichtsschreibung
des 11. Jahrhunderts, insbesondere zu den Gesta Treverorum (Bonn, 1968); and K. Krönert, L’Exaltation
de Trèves. Écriture hagiographique et passé historique de la métropole mosellane VIII–XIII siècle (Ostfildern,
2010), pp. 277–87.
17 Alain de Lille, Opera Omnia, ed. J-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, CCX (Paris, 1855), cols. 200–3;
the sermons in which Albert delivered his discourse on the city are edited by J. B. Schneyer in ‘Alberts
des Grossen Augsburger Predigtzyklus über den hl. Augustinus’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et
médiévale, XXXVI (1969), pp. 100–47 [henceforth: Albert Magnus, Augsburg Sermon Cycle].
18 E. Occhipinti, ‘Immagini di città. Le Laudes Civitatum e la rappresentazione dei centri urbani
nell’Italia settentrionale’, Società e Storia, XIV (1991), p. 25.
Introduction 7
Garlande’s Parisiana Poetria (c.1231–35), a student textbook on Latin prose and

verse, which contains under the section on constructing hyperbole a short sentence
on the city of Paris (‘The famous name of Paris reaches to the stars, and its borders
contain the human race’), alongside Bonvesin’s aforementioned De Magnalibus
Urbis Mediolani, a book dedicated to the praise of the city of Milan and consisting
of eight chapters covering the cities virtues: location, buildings, inhabitants, wealth,
strength, faith, liberty, nobility.19 John’s praise of Paris, as short as it may be, merely
reflects the tip of an iceberg. Below it, submerged, lie numerous literary and
cultural traditions and evident links to urban realities which were left u narticulated
but believed by the author to be sufficiently understood and resonant to serve as
part of a pedagogic tool for local university students. The brief praise of Paris’s
hosting of a large and eclectic population taps into some of the oldest literary fea-
tures of urban panegyric but also speaks directly to thirteenth-century e xperiences
of urban life, as cities (particularly Paris) expanded, became the locus of diverse
communities, and their rulers willingly promoted their power through the govern-
ance and protection of the mosaic of peoples inhabiting their cities. Bonvesin, on
the other hand, might provide far more explicit and explicated praise, but the same
background of literary and cultural influences mixed with lived urban experiences
suffuses the text. Approached in this way, the issue then is one of degree not type.
Similarly, one could compare the often passing, but crucial representations of
the city in any number of ‘secular’ and ‘fictionalized’ Epic and Romance works
with the extensive, and distinct, prologue of William FitzStephen’s Vita of Thomas
Becket which was entitled Descriptio nobilissimae civitatis Londoniae (c.1173).20 In
some of the former, for example Jean Renart’s L’Escoufle (c.1200–2), supportive
urban inhabitants and the city itself (in this case Montpellier) act as agents e nabling
the redemption of the chief characters (Aelis and Guillaume).21 Several scholars
have demonstrated how these types of works can be used as entry points into the
conflicted aristocratic and mercantile perceptions of the city while telling us a great
deal about both positive and negative experiences of urban life in the Central
Middle Ages.22 In FitzStephen’s work, the description of London is informative
and rich, but like L’Escoufle its ‘background’ noises are equally as important (par-
ticularly the use of classical authors such as Virgil and Plato, and the imperial claims
made for London) as is the juxtaposition of this descriptio with a hagiographical
19 John de Garlande, The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garlande, ed. and trans. T. Lawler (New
Haven, 1974), Chapter 6, p. 129: ‘Sidera Parisius famoso nomine tangit, Humanumque genus
ambitus Urbis tangit’.
20 William FitzStephen, Vita Sancti Thomae, pp. 2–13.
21 Jean Renart, L’Escoufle, trans. A. Micha (Paris, 1992).
22 J. Le Goff, ‘Warriors and Conquering Bourgeois. The Image of the City in Twelfth-Century
French Literature’, in his Medieval Imagination, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 1992), pp. 151–76;
U. Mölk, ‘Die literarische Entdeckung der Stadt im französischen Mittelalter’, in J. Fleckenstein and
K. Stackmann (eds), Über Bürger, Stadt und städtische Literatur im Spätmittelalter (Göttingen, 1980),
pp. 203–15; M. Harney, ‘Siege Warfare in Medieval Hispanic Epic and Romance’, in I. A. Corfis and
M. Wolfe (eds), The Medieval City Under Siege (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 177–90, emphasizes the
broad distinction between epics which presented the knights’ desire to acquire the city against the
chivalric romances which showed the knights being absorbed into the city (pp. 187–8).
text. Both tell us much about medieval urban identities and the conceptualization
of the medieval city.
Thus, the present study will also utilize less well-known, and often shorter,
pieces of laudatory and conceptual material. This heterogeneity of source
types—which will be set out in more detail in Chapter 1—represents another
salient indicator of transformation in the urban world. Through combining this
diverse corpus of material it will be demonstrated that the messages within the
so-called ‘major’ laudes civitatum were simultaneously far more quotidian and
far less generic than had previously been thought, and that some of the seem-
ingly derivative material within them become more meaningful once properly
contextualized.
H I S TO R I O G R A P H Y
Fortunately, this study has been able to utilize some key scholarship on medieval
urban identities, on literary criticism, on audience and reception, on cultural
studies, and on cultural geography.23 It has also drawn on studies from the social
sciences to help further understand, for example, the formation of group identities,
notions of legitimacy, and interpretations of crowds, all of which shaped medieval
perceptions of the city.24 While there exists a huge historiography on the medieval
city, scholarship directly on medieval urban panegyric is remarkably meagre.
Among the broader (though still regrettably brief ) treatments there are, however,
several important studies. The aforementioned work by J. K. Hyde played a crucial
role in placing medieval works of urban panegyric on the radar of many scholars.
While Hyde’s analysis is rather narrow with its approach to city descriptions
(descriptiones) which rejected works which he deemed too short or interconnected
with another text to be autonomous, it nonetheless presented an important under-
pinning interpretation:
23 A work which remains fundamental in any discussion of urban identities is S. Reynolds,

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford, 2nd edition, 1997), pp. 155–218;
on literary criticism see A. Minnis and I. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.
Vol. 2: The Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2005) and A. Bennett and N. Royle, An Introduction to Literature,
Criticism and Theory (Edinburgh, 4th edition, 2009); on literacy, audience, and reception see:
J. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: from Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore, 1989);
D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading. The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800–1300
(Cambridge, 1994); W. J. Ong, ‘Orality, Literacy and Medieval Textualization’, New Literary History,
XVI (1984), pp. 1–12; M. Mostert and A. Adamska (eds), Uses of the Written Word in Medieval Towns:
Medieval Urban Literacy, II (Turnhout, 2014); Erll, Memory; on cultural geography in a medieval
urban context see: K. D. Lilley, City and Cosmos. The Medieval World in Urban Form (London, 2009).
24 For example: M. J. Hornsey et al., ‘Relations between High and Low Power Groups: the
importance of legitimacy’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, XXIX (2003), pp. 216–27;
D. Waddington and M. King, ‘The Disorderly Crowd: from Classical Psychological Reductionism to
Socio-Contextual Theory: the impact on public order policing strategies’, The Howard Journal, XLIV
(2005), pp. 490–503; R. M. Chow et al., ‘The Two Faces of Dominance: the differential effect of
ingroup superiority and outgroup inferiority on dominant-group identity and group esteem’, Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, XLIV (2008), pp. 1073–81.
Introduction 9
The gradual elaboration of descriptive literature from the tenth to the fourteenth
centuries represents not so much the growth of a literary tradition as a change in its
subject-matter. The medieval descriptiones are a manifestation of the growth of cities
and the rising culture and self-confidence of the citizens.
Indeed, for Hyde, prior to 1400 a genuine medieval literary tradition of the laus
civitatis ‘was either lacking, or at the best sporadic’, and these works of praise
instead tend to ‘reflect successive stages in the fortunes of medieval cities’.25 Later,
Occhipinti’s work, although solely examining Italy, suggested a compelling meth-
odological approach to urban panegyric. By acknowledging the importance of (the
already noted) microlaudes, Occhipinti highlighted the impossibility of construct-
ing an evolutionary line of development among such works owing to the extreme
diversity among the types of sources. Instead, Occhipinti saw greater value in mining
these sources for what they tell us about civic self-identity and their representations
of the city rather than in attempting to identify an autonomous literary genre with
distinct characteristics.26 Aligned to this approach, Harmut Kugler’s study empha-
sized the need for scholars to recognize the heterogeneity of works praising cities.
It acknowledged the value of studying these as literary works but also stressed the
importance of contextualizing them within their contemporary urban settings.27
Hyde’s, Occhipinti’s, and Kugler’s methodologies underpin this present study.
Other studies have done a great deal to frame some of the key themes of this
study, by elucidating the spiritual and ideological understandings of the city, and
highlighting the interrelationship between urban praise and condemnation. Hans
Hans-Joachim Schmidt’s masterful analysis of the Christian moralizing and alle-
gorical interpretation of the medieval city in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
makes much of the interplay with fundamental urban transitions, and is comple-
mented by Thomas Renna’s works on Cistercian thinking on the city.28 And Paolo
Zanna’s excellent study built a nuanced picture of the classical and biblical legacies
framing medieval urban descriptions, and his examination of elegiac works dem-
onstrated their significance for medieval conceptions of the city.29
25 Hyde, ‘Medieval Descriptions’, pp. 308–10.

26 Occhipinti, ‘Immagini’, pp. 25–6.
27 H. Kugler, Die Vorstellung der Stadt in der Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters (Munich, 1986),
especially pp. 17–26.
28 Schmidt, ‘Societas christiana’, pp. 297–354; T. Renna, ‘The City in Early Cistercian Thought’,
Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses, XXXIV (1983), pp. 5–19 and ‘The Idea of the City in Otto of
Freising and Henry of Albano’, Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses, XV (1984), pp. 55–72.
29 P. Zanna, ‘Descriptiones Urbium and Elegy in Latin and Vernaculars in the Early Middle Ages’,
Studi Medievali, XXXII, 3rd series (1991), pp. 523–96. More focused, localized, examinations have
also been produced. A sample would include: Fasoli, ‘coscienza civica’, pp. 293–318; M. Accame
Lanzillotta, Contributi sui Mirabilia urbis Romae (Genoa, 1996); D. Kinney, ‘Fact and Fiction in the
Mirabilia Urbis Romae’, in É. Ó Carragáin and C. Neuman de Vegvar (eds), Roma Felix. Formation
and Reflections of Medieval Rome (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 235–52; Ruth, Urban Honor; G. Rosser,
‘Myth, Image and Social Process in the English Medieval Town’, Urban History, XXIII (1996),
pp. 5–25; J. Scattergood, ‘Misrepresenting the City. Genre, intertextuality and Fitzstephen’s Description
of London (c.1173)’, in his Reading the Past. Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Dublin,
1996), pp. 15–36; Le Goff, ‘Warriors’, pp. 151–76; Mölk, ‘literarische Entdeckung’, pp. 203–15;
Kugler, Vorstellung der Stadt; A. Haverkamp, ‘ “Heilige Städte” im hohen Mittealter’, in F. Graus (ed.),
Mentalitäten im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 119–56.
Two additional works require particular mention, however, because they have
been important to the present study in addressing specific topics that will be
covered here. Carrie E. Beňes’ study on urban origin legends demonstrates the
growing interest (in this case in Northern Italy from 1250 to 1350) in civic histories
and foundation myths in an increasingly classicizing environment.30 The work will
be drawn upon, particularly in Chapter 7, but the way Beňes demonstrated how
such legends were projected to a wider audience in several different media supports
some of my methodological approaches presented in Chapter 2. Keith Lilley’s
monograph likewise combines the abstract with the concrete to show how theoretical
conceptions of the city could be mapped onto, and influence the layout of, the
physical city, and used to promote the notion of holy cities: this approach will be
valuable for the analysis in Chapters 2 and 3 below.31
Perhaps the most salient feature of the entire body of scholarship is the dearth of
in-depth book-length studies on a European-wide spectrum. Carl-Joachim Classen
produced a welcome and erudite monograph on descriptiones and laudes urbium.
However, in reality it represents an extended article-length study, half dedicated to
the classical period, and the brief examination halts at the twelfth century.32 Chiara
Frugoni also offered a thought-provoking examination of the changing concept of
the city throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In combining an analysis
of architectural, topographic, iconographic, and textual sources, Frugoni pointed
the way towards a more holistic and interdisciplinary approach. That said, as the
work proceeds, it becomes increasingly and then (in chapters covering the Later
Middle Ages) exclusively focused on Italy.33 There is, therefore, a need for an in-
depth, methodologically flexible and interdisciplinary approach to this subject, but
it has yet to be achieved and very little sustained comparative analysis across medi-
eval Europe has been conducted. The present study aims to offer a small step
towards addressing this.
PA R A M E T E R S O F T H E S T U D Y
It is important to acknowledge where this study’s limits lie. First, the very idea of
the city has always been a contested subject field. Indeed, the terminology used for
urban settlements in the Middle Ages itself was highly fluid and open to various
interpretations. The most frequently used label, civitas, reflected ‘a double heritage
from Antiquity, a concept of political philosophy and an administrative term’.34
30 C. E. Beňes, Urban Legends. Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250–1350
(University Park, Pa, 2011).
31 Lilley, City and Cosmos.
32 C-J. Classen, Die Stadt im Spiegel der Descriptiones und Laudes Urbium in der antiken und mit-
telalterlichen Literatur bis zum Ende des zwölften Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim, 1980). See the assessment
of Classen’s book in Kugler, Vorstellung der Stadt, pp. 23–4.
33 C. Frugoni, A Distant City. Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World, trans. W. McCuaig
(Princeton, 1991).
34 P. Michaud-Quantin, Universitas: expressions du mouvement communautaire dans le Moyen-Âge
latin (Paris, 1970), p. 111.
Introduction 11
It represented both the Ciceronian ideal of a city as a community of individuals

brought together under the same law, and as an imperial jurisdictional category for
an urban centre and its dependent territories.35 In the Early Middle Ages, as
bishops invariably took over political and administrative leadership in many post-
Roman cities, the term civitas also became synonymous with urban episcopal centres.
However, other meanings abounded in the Middle Ages. Civitas could imply a
walled or fortified centre, a settlement with a legal status recognized in a charter of
privileges, an administrative locus, a place of a certain demographic density and
physical size, or one with particular commercial and consumer functions. Alongside
this, other terms were applied to centres which could appear to have urban charac-
teristics: urbs, municipium, villa, or oppidum could often be used interchangeably
with the label civitas.36 Thus, the ‘richness of the general lexicon’ of the medieval
city undoubtedly poses challenges for establishing typologies, particularly when we
add in seemingly intermediary terms such as portus, burgus (a term originally con-
nected to a settlement’s military functions), and suburbium, all of which could
contain urban associations.37 This terminology likewise varied depending on the
education and agenda of the author applying the term.38
For some commentators the city could be the physical entity—its buildings and
infrastructure—for others, like the Christian philosopher St Augustine (d.430) it
is the inhabitants, or a particular mode of being.
In his Etymologies (c. ad 615–636) Isidore of Seville offered his own influential
interpretation of the city:
A city (civitas) is a multitude of people (hominum multitudo) drawn together by a bond
of community, named after its ‘citizens’ (dicta a civibus), that is, from the inhabitants
of the city (ab ipsis incolis urbis) [. . .] Now urbs is the name for the actual buildings,
while civitas is not the stones, but the inhabitants.39
Isidore thus echoed the Ciceronian and Augustinian position of the city (civitas)
as a community, which dwelled in a particular physical setting, the urbs. Later
Christian thinking of the Middle Ages witnessed a partial shift from Augustine’s
equation of city with community, to twelfth-century ideas of the city as a ‘place’,
in line no doubt with the marked material expansion of many urban centres at this
35 Michaud-Quantin, Universitas, pp. 111–12.

36 Boucheron et al., Histoire de l’Europe urbaine, pp. 287–8; sometimes urbs could denote a city of
higher status, connected no doubt to its intrinsic association with the city of Rome: Michaud-
Quantin, Universitas, pp. 117–19; for specific examples from Normandy see P. Bouet, ‘L’image des
villes normandes chez les écrivains normands de langue latine des XI et XII siècles’, in P. Bouet and
F. Neveux (eds), Les villes normandes au Moyen Âge. Renaissance, essor, crise. Actes du colloque de Cerisy-
la-Salle, 8–12 octobre 2003 (Caen, 2006), pp. 320, 327–8.
37 Boucheron et al., Histoire de l’Europe urbaine, pp. 369–70. Burgus/burg became a particularly
common urban designation in medieval Germany and to a lesser extent France: F. Opll, ‘Das Werden
der mittelalterlichen Stadt’, Historische Zeitschrift, CCLXXX (2005), pp. 567–73.
38 Opll, ‘Das Werden der mittelalterlichen Stadt’, p. 567.
39 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), vol. II.
XV.I.II. My translation slightly adapts the one found in The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans.
S. A. Barney et al. (Cambridge, 2006), XV.II.I, p. 305.
time.40 Connected to this association with place, the interrelationship with the
countryside, as we shall see in Chapter 5, could offer an important framework for
defining the city. Rather crude dichotomies might be established between the
worlds inside and outside the city wall: the urban as metaphor for ‘civilized’ and
the rural for ‘unsophisticated’; the city as ‘haven’ and the country as ‘wild’, or, to
turn it around, the ‘corrupt’ city of man versus the ‘moral/simple’ ‘natural’ world;
or the ‘chaotic’ city juxtaposed with the solitude and the metaphorical ‘desert’ of
the rural.41 The interrelationship was, of course, far more mutually dependent
than this, both in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. At the same time, the revived
interest in Aristotle’s Politics in the thirteenth century also ensured that the term
civitas retained a broader meaning as the ‘body politic’, an associational
interpretation more layered than a simple expression of a location that was urban-
ized.42 As city laws were developed to consolidate this associational drive so too did
the allure of having access to the rights those laws brought. Consequently, from the
twelfth century onwards individuals were more willing to self-identify as a civis or
its close derivative burgensis to flag up this membership of a civic association with
the benefits it might convey, and urban governments were more determined to
control who could use the term.
In practice, then, medieval commentators offered nuanced and varied criteria to
identify the city.43 The Vita Mathildis (written from 1111 to 1116) by the monk
Donizone of Canossa offers one revealing case of a contemporary commentary on
what a city should be. His work contained an urbana altercatio between Canossa
and Mantua which indicates that several different criteria were all thrown into the
mix when conceptualizing the city. In the altercatio, both Canossa and Mantua vie
to assert their urban credentials in order to claim the relics of Matilda’s father
Boniface. Mantua claims boldly and simply: ‘I am called a city (‘Urbs ego sum
dicta’), you, Canossa, are merely a stronghold (‘arx’)’; and ‘nowhere else is it right
for such a body to be than in a city’.44 Canossa accepted that Mantua may have the
name of city (‘Urbis nomen habes’) but that it could not claim great honour (‘sed
40 M. Richter, ‘Urbanitas-rusticitas: linguistic aspects of a medieval dichotomy’, Studies in Church

History, XVI (1979), pp. 152–3.
41 This drew on Aristotle’s position, which was more accessible in the twelfth century, that those
who organized themselves within cities could be termed true beings, those outside were not: see
C. E. Honess, From Florence to the Heavenly City. The Poetry of Citizenship in Dante (London, 2006),
p. 23; J. Le Goff, ‘The Town as an Agent of Civilisation, c.1200–c.1500’, trans. E. King, in C. M. Cipolla
(ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. I, Chapter 2 (London, 1971), pp. 6, 12.
42 Luscombe, ‘City and Politics’, pp. 44–5.
43 For discussion of the urban–rural relationship in Antiquity and in the Old Testament in particu-
lar, see L. L. Grabbe, ‘Introduction and Overview’, in L. L. Grabbe and R. D. Haak (eds), ‘Every City
shall be Forsaken’. Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient Israel and the Near East (Sheffield, 2001), pp. 30–3
where the author presents the view of an oppositional relationship between city and country in the
Middle Ages. For more on the latter see M. Richter, ‘Urbanitas-rusticitas’, pp. 147–57. However,
B. Beck, ‘Les villes normandes au Moyen Âge: de la ville réelle à la ville rêvée’, in P. Bouet and F. Neveux
(eds), Les villes normandes au Moyen Âge. Renaissance, essor, crise. Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle,
8–12 octobre 2003 (Caen, 2006), pp. 337–8, argues that separation between town and country was
more evident in Antiquity than the Middle Ages.
44 Donizone di Canossa, Vita di Matilde di Canossa, ed. and trans. P. Golinelli (Milan, 2008),
Bk. I.VIII, lines 601, 605, p. 58.
Introduction 13
non es grandis honore’).45 For Mantua might have many inhabitants (‘populos
multos habeas’), but it lacked triumphs because it did not have a circuit wall to
protect it.46 Canossa’s fortifications, on the other hand, rendered it impregnable.47
Mantua responded that it had a marvellous church, bishop, priests, and many ven-
erated relics; Canossa claimed in turn that its own direct dependence on the pap-
acy conferred freedom and higher nobility.48 The remainder of the altercatio then
shifts to Canossa’s efforts to deny Mantua an esteemed classical heritage by refuting
the latter’s claim to be the birthplace of Virgil. The altercatio ends with an apparent
victory for Canossa, but it seems a hollow one, and indeed Canossa ‘commands’
Mantua to keep Boniface’s relics.49 Thus, the recognition of the city here was iden-
tified variously with its materiality, its inhabitants, spirituality, cultural esteem, and
heritage. Another example can be found in the sermons of the great thirteenth-
century philosopher Albert Magnus, who combined several criteria within his
potent neo-Platonic/Augustinian emphasis on the city. Albert identified its four
quintessential characteristics thus: fortification (munitio), sophistication (urbanitas),
unity (unitas), and liberty (libertas).50
More modern, but contested, definitions of the city, as can be seen in Lewis
Mumford’s influential commentary of 1937, broadened the measures notably:
‘The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organisa-
tion, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of
collective unity’.51 Medieval historians of the twentieth century continued to set
out the varied criteria for defining the medieval city: from Rodney Hilton’s prefer-
ence for occupational heterogeneity as one of the main markers of the urban to
Jacques Le Goff’s compelling association between the number of Mendicant con-
vents and the size and wealth of a city.52 But the careful treatment of the issue by
medievalists further demonstrates how difficult and indeed misleading it could
be to present a single, monolithic definition of ‘city’ or ‘urban’. In truth, not one
of the multiple ways of categorizing the city is fully satisfactory and deserves
privileging. All the ‘cities’ in this present study were identified at some point in the
Middle Ages as either a civitas, urbs, municipium, villa, or oppidum. Encapsulated
45 Donizone di Canossa, Vita, Bk. I.VIII, line 606, p. 58.

46 Donizone di Canossa, Vita, Bk. I.VIII, lines 607–14, p. 58.
47 Donizone di Canossa, Vita, Bk. I.VIII, lines 618–32, p. 60.
48 Donizone di Canossa, Vita, Bk. I.VIII, lines 638–75, pp. 60–2.
49 Donizone di Canossa, Vita, Bk. I.VIII, lines 679–748, pp. 64–8.
50 Albert Magnus, Augsburg Sermon Cycle, pp. 100–47 (quote at p. 105). For a similar Augustinian
view of the city, but different in some of its salient facets, see the ideal city proposed by William of
Auvergne, bishop of Paris (1228–49): J. Le Goff, ‘An Urban Metaphor of William of Auvergne’, in his
Medieval Imagination, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 1992), pp. 177–80.
51 L. Mumford, ‘What is a City?’, Architectural Record (1937), reproduced in R. T. LeGates and
F. Stout (eds), The City Reader (London, 2011), p. 93. For a survey of the sociological approach to
cities see B. D. Nefzger, ‘The Sociology of Preindustrial Cities’, in L. L. Grabbe and R. D. Haak (eds),
‘Every City shall be Forsaken’. Urbanism and Prophecy in Ancient Israel and the Near East (Sheffield,
2001), pp. 159–71.
52 R. H. Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study (Cambridge,
1992), especially pp. 6–7, 33, 152; J. Le Goff, ‘Ordres mendicants et urbanisation dans las France
médiévale’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, XXV (1970), pp. 924–46; See also J. B. Freed,
The Friars and German Society in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1977), p. 52.
within these terms was a spread of political, legal, religious, material, military,
and economic functions, with different authors/works emphasizing some of these
functions over others.53 The ensuing study should then at least offer the reader
several angles through which to see how flexible these definitions of the city could
be, and to consider some of them as they might apply in the Middle Ages.
The chronological parameters of this work, 1100 to 1300, inevitably impose
certain artificial boundaries. Comparable works interlinking with comparable urban
developments of course existed before and after these dates, and consequently we
will sometimes move earlier and later in time. However, the overwhelming rise in
output in works of urban panegyric and the most intense phase of medieval
urbanization correlate primarily with the twelfth and thirteenth c enturies and this
period therefore remains the focus of the study. Also, as already pointed out, com-
parative analysis is fundamental to this work in order to move beyond the more
localized studies. The present study therefore attempts to utilize as wide a range of
source types as applicable and spread them as evenly as possible both chronologically
and geographically. In doing so, I hope to strike a balance between breadth and
depth, offering some more intensive analyses on particular works and cities, while
keeping in mind the universality or the uniqueness of patterns and differences
which might well be missed if we focused on a more narrow body of texts. At the
same time, conversely, there is a lack of source coverage for many of Europe’s
medieval cities. For some cities we have very little material, for others only one or
two works which arguably provide momentary snapshots. In some cases—for the
Flemish cities of Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres—the near silence in our source records
for this period is both astonishing and surely significant. In other words, there are
inevitably chronological and geographical gaps in this study, and there are equally
source hotspots—Italy obviously—which we cannot and should not avoid.
U R B A N T R A N S F O R M AT I O N , 1 1 0 0 – 1 3 0 0 :
T H E B A C KG RO U N D
Before setting out the plan of this book we should also make the important point
that, while the work does not follow a chronological analysis, some of the salient
themes in this study and the nature of the sources themselves experienced change
over time, and this will be teased out in places. Most cities in 1300 looked different
and were doing things differently to those of 1100. This must be kept in mind,
with the obvious caveat that our picture must surely be distorted by the greater
quantity of evidence available as we move towards the latter date. Each thematic
chapter will contextualize and highlight this more fully, but it will be useful here
53 All three labels, particularly, urbs and civitas, were often used interchangeably, but sometimes
urbs could denote a city of higher status, see Michaud-Quantin, Universitas, pp. 111–19 and for spe-
cific examples for Normandy see P. Bouet, ‘L’image des villes normandes chez les écrivains normands
de langue latine des XI et XII siècles’, in Bouet, ‘L’image des villes’, pp. 320, 327–8.
Introduction 15
in at least the broadest of brush strokes to remind ourselves of some of the most
significant aspects of urban growth and then revisit them in subsequent chapters.
Above all, after 1100, cities were shaped by a rapid rise in population, stimulated
by rural migration, climatic change, and the revival of the economy, which c entred
wealth in cities, and this in turn attracted further migrants. Figures for medieval
urban populations are notoriously problematic, and growth could be uneven and
hit temporary downturns through plague and war, but by the mid-to late thir-
teenth century some truly large cities had emerged. Several Italian cities may
have had populations above 100,000, such as Milan (perhaps even as high as
150–200,000), Florence, Venice, Naples, and Palermo.54 Recent estimates suggest
a population of around 80–100,000 for London in 1300, and perhaps an even
higher figure for Paris.55 Rome’s population, and numerous other cities—Bruges,
Cologne, Montpellier, Rouen, Seville—may have reached somewhere in the region
of 40–50,000 by 1300.56
Yet the most important statistic is the one on relative growth—most cities of all
ranks in Europe appear to have doubled in size at some point between the start of
the twelfth and the end of the thirteenth century, whether it be a York expanding
from c.8,000 in 1086 to c.23,000 in c.1290, or a Padua from c.15,000 in 1174 to
c.35,000 in 1320.57 And this level of relative growth is of course to be amplified in
those cases where ‘new’ cities were founded, a phenomenon which peaked in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.58 Most cities expanded beyond their original
footprint during this period, establishing extra-mural suburbs, or even incorporat-
ing them in newly expanded circuits of city walls, as occurred most spectacularly
at Florence in the thirteenth century.59 Cities consequently underwent a physical
transformation in line with commercial revival and Church reform. The twelfth
and thirteenth centuries was therefore an era of intensive urban construction. New
shrine centres, cathedrals, and religious complexes, like Santo Stefano at Bologna,
city walls, gates and towers, and guildhouses marked a new urban skyline. Distinct
secular spaces also re-emerged, pioneered in thirteenth-century Italy with commu-
nal palace complexes and public piazzas. At a more quotidian level, multi-storey
buildings and subdivided tenements became more common, as did stone housing,
54 See E. Hubert, ‘Le construction de la ville: sur l’urbanisation dans l’Italie médievale’, Annales.
Histoire, Sciences Sociales, LIX (2004), pp. 109–19; for the debates on Milan’s population see P. Grillo,
Milano in età comunale (1183–1276): istituzioni, società, economia (Spoleto, 2001), pp. 39–41 and
P. Racine, ‘Milan à la fin du XIII siècle: 60,000 ou 200,000 habitants?’, Aevum, LVIII (1984),
pp. 246–53; see also the brief but useful survey, Nicholas, Growth of the Medieval City, pp. 178–82.
55 S. Rees Jones, York: The Making of a City, 1068–1350 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 236–7; B. M. S. Campbell
et al., A Medieval Capital and Its Grain Supply: Agrarian Production and Distribution in the London
Region, c.1300 (Cheltenham, 1993), pp. 8–11.
56 C. Wickham, Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 (Oxford, 2014), p. 112;
Nicholas, Growth of the Medieval City, pp. 178, 180.
57 Rees Jones, York, p. 236; Nicholas, Growth of the Medieval City, p. 182.
58 The classic work remains M. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in
England, Wales, and Gascony (London, 1967); see more recently Lilley, City and Cosmos, especially
pp. 41–73.
59 See the work of F. Sznura: L’espansione urbana di Firenze nel Dugento (Florence, 1975) and ‘Civic
Urbanism in Medieval Florence’, in A. Molho, K. Raaflaub, and J. Emlen (eds), City States in Classical
Antiquity and Medieval Italy (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 403–18.
funded by newly rich merchants and artisans.60 These stone houses reflected both
status and the need for protection stimulated by the growth of urban populations
and the density of housing constructed in flammable materials. Stone housing, and
the development from c.1200 of civic building regulations to ensure stone party
walls, thus served as a means for the more wealthy to protect property and
merchandise against fire and urban disorder.
And, as a result of migration and trade, most urban populations by 1300 were
more diverse in background and composition (and more transient) than they had
been in 1100. It should be no surprise that, against this backdrop, cities began to
define membership of the urban community more closely. But such was the social
fluidity that in reality cities ‘tolerated several citizenships’, with gradations of legal
rights and obligations functioning within them.61 In sum, the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries represented one of the most intense and complex periods of population
growth in European history prior to the nineteenth century, and witnessed signifi-
cant transformation in urban social ordering and city topographies.
Concomitant to this demographic expansion was the commercial revival of the
Central Middle Ages. By 1100, mercantile and artisanal groups were certainly
prominent features of the urban landscape, but by 1300, guilds and confraternities
had formed around many of these merchant and specialized craft groups, project-
ing conspicuous wealth and influence through rituals, festivities, monumental
buildings (such as the aforesaid stone houses and towers), and also, in some cases,
claiming political power in urban government.62 In line with the commercial
boom, markets became ever more the focal point of urban communities and were
regulated more strictly. As the thirteenth century progressed, improved farming
techniques saw bigger surpluses in urban hinterlands reaching city markets. The
development of international trading fairs and networks, aided by the expansion of
Latin Christendom’s frontiers, also saw luxury goods from distant lands appear in
cities, along with more and more foreign merchants, who in some cases established
mercantile enclaves in their host cities. Underpinning these transformations, by
the late thirteenth century, Europe’s urban economies were highly monetized and
technically more sophisticated through the introduction of systems of credit,
insurance, bills of exchange, and banking facilities. Historians quite rightly see the
thirteenth century as the point at which a true profit economy, rooted in cities,
emerged in Western Europe and as a period in which a new focus on numbers and
data came to the fore.63
Equally, urban governments were ruling in a very different manner by 1300.
Two centuries earlier, many urban governments—especially in Italy—were starting
to develop embryonic communal institutions, or at the least urban elites were
aspiring to a more prominent role in the government of their own cities. Over the
course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, several cities—not just in Northern
60 Hubert, ‘construction de la ville’, pp. 121–2. 61 Riesenberg, Citizenship, p. 111.

62 Loveluck, Northwest Europe, pp. 302–27, 328–60.
63 See L. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 1978);
A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978), pp. 180-7; Romagnoli, ‘coscienza
civica’, pp. 69–74.
Introduction 17
Italy, but to lesser degrees in England, Iberia, France, Flanders, and Southern
Italy—had attained a much higher level of self-government, either through formal
communal bodies, or via more informal agreements with higher authorities.
Indeed, these centuries witnessed a surge in associational movements—communes,
guilds, and confraternities—all of which developed their own norms of social
action and political practice.64 Even if numbers remained restricted and processes
could hardly be described as democratic within these associations, a greater pro-
portion of urban inhabitants in Europe could play a role in urban government
than had been the case in 1100. And urban governments were becoming ever
more interventionist as their administrative complexity and capabilities crystal-
lized. Civic councils, again pioneered in Italy but echoed elsewhere, took more
interest in their urban hinterlands, in taxation, in the urban environment (both
aesthetically and functionally), in justice, in commercial enterprise, and in exter-
nal military policy.65 The new demographic and commercial wealth of cities had
assisted greatly in this process. Urban social hierarchies became more fluid too,
with certain kin-groups able to utilize new forms of liquid wealth and social
esteem to rise to prominence. By the same process, established elite families could
rapidly lose their status, and no wonder that the motif of Fortuna and her
Wheel—signalling the cyclical rotation of success and failure—was so resonant in
the Central Middle Ages.66 This should remind us of the fragility of wealth, the
limitations of urban welfare support, and the omnipresent spectre of poverty in
medieval cities.
The development of more intensive urban governments which were simultaneously
more accessible to a wider body of the urban populace also generated a deleterious
by-product: urban faction and conflict. New constellations of power formed
within cities, they could be based around professions, migrant communities, reli-
gious, landed and mercantile communities, and even by city quarter. As cities
acquired greater power, so that power became ever more contested. This could be
internal: urban uprisings blighted the Italian communes, especially in the thir-
teenth century, but they were a feature of most cities in our period. And it could
be external: cities were coveted by higher authorities, kings and emperors, for their
wealth and political and military potential. Cities might pull away from those
higher authorities, or conversely become entangled in higher power politics and
consequently find themselves attacked and conquered. From the mid-twelfth cen-
tury onwards many monarchies were visibly constructing more centralized and
powerful administrative states—above all in England (though of course here the
‘centralized state’ was already a prominent feature in the eleventh century), France,
64 For an excellent study see: O. G. Oexle, ‘Peace Through Conspiracy’, in B. Jussen (ed.), Ordering
Medieval Society. Perspectives on Intellectual and Practical Modes of Shaping Social Relations, trans.
P. Selwyn (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 285–322.
65 F. Bocchi, ‘Regulation of the Urban Environment by the Italian Communes from the Twelfth
to the Fourteenth Century’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, LXXII (1990), pp. 63–78.
66 R. L. Greene, ‘Fortune’, in J. R. Strayer (ed.), Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 3 (New York,
1985), pp. 145–7 and also the discussion in the introduction of ‘Hugo Falcandus’, The History of the
Tyrants of Sicily by Hugo Falcandus, 1153–69, trans. G. A. Loud and T. E. J. Wiedemann (Manchester,
1998), pp. 37–8.
Southern Italy, and Iberia—and the control of cities, especially the major
metropolises, was integral to this both pragmatically and symbolically. This was
particularly so when embryonic ‘capitals’ (and I use this word in the very loosest
sense) were forming from the late twelfth century in places like London and Paris,
both of which transformed from de-facto ‘chief cities’ to bureaucratic centres of
monarchy, and also at Palermo. Likewise, revived notions of reform or renovatio
placed Rome once again firmly at the centre of a universal entity. If necessary, con-
trol of cities could be achieved by force, but more often collaboration and cooper-
ation was the state of play between monarchy/emperor/pope and city. The ongoing
compromises and negotiation to achieve this, however, could certainly create ten-
sion. This is not to say that cities were not peaceful places too, or that they were
more violent in 1300, but rather that there were now greater possibilities for con-
flict at several different levels.
A revived economy also combined with new currents of spiritual reform and lay
piety—already crystallizing in the early eleventh century—to change the religious
landscape of the medieval city. Great new or extended cathedrals, both in the
Romanesque and Gothic styles, were being constructed in many medieval cities
from the late eleventh century and would dominate the cityscape both physically
and mentally. Church reform and ecclesiastical organization also gave the papacy a
greater presence in many cities of Latin Christendom. Increasing evidence for
investment in urban saints’ cults additionally saw the development of multiple
shrine centres in several cities. A city such as Benevento could by the start of our
period claim the bodies of some 220 saints in the city cathedral and the monastery
of Santa Sofia alone. But the important point is that many were rediscovered and
translated to new, worthier shrines in the twelfth century, and the laity participated
more directly in these public events.67 As mentioned too, growing urban popula-
tions required the restructuring of the parish network and the building of more
churches to meet the needs of the laity. Particularly by the thirteenth century, this
demand was also met by the crystallizing of urban religious confraternities and
other lay-spiritual associations. Alongside these signs of communal religiosity there
was also a simultaneous lay interest on a more individualized personal level along
with new understandings of the fate of the soul. Thinking on Purgatory was
refined, salvation increasingly became an individual responsibility, and Christ’s
suffering during the Passion was experienced in a more emotively visceral manner.
The construction of new public urban cemeteries, and sites replicating the Passion
in some medieval cities, such as the Santo Stefano complex at Bologna, seem to
reflect this spiritual climate and new projection of emotions.68 Then, from the
67 G. Luongo, ‘Alla ricerca del sacro. Le traslazioni dei santi in epoca altomedioevale’, in A. Ruggiero
(ed.), Il ritorno di Paolino (Naples/Rome, 1990), p. 35 n. 76; A. Vuolo, ‘Agiografia benevantana’, in
G. Andenna and G. Picasso (eds), Longobardia e longobardi nell’Italia meridionale. Le istituzioni
ecclesiastiche (Milan, 1996), pp. 199–237.
68 On urban burial sites see C. Bruzelius, ‘The Dead come to Town: preaching, burying, and build-
ing in the Mendicant Orders’, in A. Gajewski and Z. Opačić (eds), The Year 1300 and the Creation of
a New European Architecture (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 203–24.
Introduction 19
early thirteenth century, the rise of the Mendicant Orders established friaries in
many European cities and ensured the presence of a new, conspicuous, and urban
religious order offering charity and edification through sermons. In short, by 1300,
urban communities experienced more points of contact with religious institutions
and conduits to salvation within the city itself than ever before.
Finally, we must also acknowledge the steady evolution of the city as a centre
of knowledge transmission. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, standards of
education and numbers of students in cathedral and urban schools appear to
have increased in line with the developments of the so-called Twelfth-Century
Renaissance.69 Thus, an alternative to a monastic education became more viable
and a greater cross-fertilization occurred between learning, religious institutions,
commerce, and lay urban communities. The emerging school at St Paul’s Cathedral
in London serves as an indicative example: here in the twelfth century we find
several learned figures, such as the chronicler Ralph de Diceto, and canons named
Quintilian and Cyprian (who were father and son), suggesting an association with
classical knowledge and rhetoric. Other canons displayed expertise in mathemat-
ics, law, and astronomy, while one had a kin-group connection with a family of
moneyers. Indeed, a measure of length was inscribed within the new nave of the
cathedral and thus ‘St Paul’s foot’ became a standard measurement used in com-
mercial transactions within the city, while legal business was also conducted within
the cathedral.70 Furthermore, in some cities by the start of the thirteenth century,
universities were established, providing a more distinctive institutional framework
for education and marking a true watershed in the generation of knowledge in
Europe. Alongside this, the Mendicants, motivated by a strong educational agenda,
also established their own urban schools in many cities. Underpinning these
changes we find widespread evidence for the growth of literacy, particularly among
the laity, much of which could be termed, by the thirteenth century, ‘pragmatic
literacy’ aimed at merchants, judges, and civic officials who increasingly needed to
work with the written word.71 Consequently, while monasteries still played a cru-
cial role, cities became loci for cultural production and the generation of k nowledge,
and it should not be surprising that works focusing on urban histories became
more popular.
In closing, it is important to stress that by 1300 all the aforesaid developments
ensured the fundamental importance of the city to the leading political actors of
the Middle Ages. Not just monarchs, as seen above, but influential churchmen
(popes, bishops, and abbots), powerful members of the landed nobility and urban
elites sought to utilize the city as a platform for their power. The richness of
69 See I. P. Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c.1100–1330
(Cambridge, 2012), pp. 8–51; and the contributions in R. L. Benson, G. Constable, and C. D. Lanham
(eds), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1982).
70 D. Keene, ‘From Conquest to Capital: St. Paul’s c.1100–1300’, in A. Burns, A. Saint, and D. Keene
(eds), St. Paul’s: the Cathedral Church of London, 604–2004 (New Haven, 2004), pp. 27–8.
71 See the works cited in footnote 23 above and see the contributions in R. Britnell (ed.), Pragmatic
Literacy. East and West, 1200–1300 (Woodbridge, 1997).
the urban landscape offered a symbolic stage (as we shall see in greater detail in
Chapters 3, 4, and 6) for such actors to project legitimacy and authority and thus
to make claims on the city’s governance, productivity, and military potential. Civic
ceremonies and rituals were an effective way to articulate and defend such claims,
particularly as the itinerary of their performance might assert control over actual
spaces within the city. Likewise, other groups within the urban community could
utilize them as mechanisms for protest or as expressions of identity, solidarity, and
status. Thus, a variety of processions and ritual performances were promoted by a
number of agents and groups associated with the city, and they became regular
features of urban life and its ever more complex textures. In this context, the
production of urban panegyric might be viewed as a textual counterpart to this
climate of procession, ritual, and identity affirmation.
S T RU C T U R E
The foregoing discussion has mapped out the contours of development of some of
the more integral components of urban life across the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, components which we shall revisit time and again as this study pro-
gresses. The book will commence, in Chapter 1, with an overview of the main
sources utilized, followed, in Chapter 2, by a more extensive discussion of the
methodology adopted throughout; establishing how this study interprets and
utilizes the evidence within works of urban panegyric. Other crucial objectives in
the second chapter will be the demonstration of how far authors of urban panegyric
were familiar with the urban world, and to what extent the material within their
works was disseminated to wider audiences. It is the contention here that the
authors were often very much part of the urban experience and that the reception
of their material was more extensive than previously considered and that this pro-
vides added significance to the role of these works in the process of urban change.
The overriding purpose, therefore, of the second chapter is to establish a frame-
work which signals the importance of the material within works of urban panegyric
both as a record of transformation in the urban world and as an agent within
that process.
Chapters 3 and 4 will then present the two diametrically opposed extremes by
which the city was understood in order to frame the later chapters. In Chapter 3
we will examine the presentation of cities as holy entities. It will combine biblical,
Augustinian, and monastic understandings of the city and its place within wider
Christian discourse, with an analysis of several works which map the emergence,
or revival, of urban-based cults, and which praise the city’s religious buildings,
officials, and place in a Christian hierarchy. Conversely, Chapter 4 will examine the
nature of criticism aimed at the city in the period 1100–1300, as the good-versus-
evil-city dialectic raged. While the roots of the evil-city paradigm can be located in
works of lamentation and censure of the city produced in the Ancient world,
developments in the Central Middle Ages added potency and nuance. The spiritual
Introduction 21
reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries espoused withdrawal from a riotous,
crowded world and presented the cloister as a new Garden of Eden. These perspec-
tives were not a monastic monopoly, however, and secular sources could also view
the city with great suspicion. Some of this was driven by revived interest in the
Classics and thus encouraged a Sallustian moralizing interpretative approach.
Equally, some secular rulers, fearful of the growing independence of urban com-
munities, and inherent factionalism, were a highly receptive audience for the por-
trayal of the sinister city. In some cases, works were produced with an eye to an
imagined future, to urge a populace to unite, to appreciate and defend the glories
of their city against internal implosion or external intervention, and this was often
presented in the form of a lamentation for the city’s impending fate, which in turn
could be read as praise for what could be lost. The aim, then, of Chapters 3 and 4
will be to emphasize the contested ideological climate surrounding the city. From
this it will be argued that, while urban panegyric drew on a range of ancient and
pre-established templates, this ‘competition’ for the city ensured that positive rep-
resentations of the city needed also to be compelling and to resonate with the
genuine lived and future experience of the medieval urban inhabitant.
The subsequent chapters then identify some of the other key themes articulated
by, and evidenced within, medieval urban panegyric; themes which drill down to
some of those core transformations just discussed which were occurring in the
medieval city. Chapters 5 and 6 focus directly on two key features of many works
of urban panegyric: praise of the city’s commerce and resources, both natural and
human, and of its material splendour. While Chapter 4 shows that the urban ‘mass’
aroused criticism, and condemnation also struck at the city’s fostering of an
avaricious profit economy, here we will see that conversely population size and
commerce were also reasons for pride. Chapter 5 will consider the focus on com-
mercial exchange, resources, and productivity, while Chapter 6 will examine how
some works, in a climate of rapid demographic growth, extolled the physical urban
landscape. As part of this we will explore how and why several works of urban
panegyric track the process through which some cities aspired to a greater political
influence, or to a more articulated confirmation of their status, sometimes in the
form of embryonic ‘capitals’. These chapters will also consider how the expansion
in population and commercial capacity led to a growing ‘culture of numbers’ evi-
dent in some works (most famously in Bonvesin da la Riva’s praise of Milan). This
revealed a greater interest in specific quantities, sizes, measurements, and particular
topographies and emerged out of the so-called twelfth-century renaissance and the
increased commercial imperative to calculate and quantify.
Finally, Chapter 7 pulls many of the threads of the preceding chapters together.
It will revisit the development of civic consciousness and examine how this process
created increased pride and interest in a city’s history and its famous deeds. This
thirst for a relationship with the past, and particularly the construction of urban
origin accounts, was evident in several of our works of urban panegyric. At the
same time, it went hand in hand with the renewed interrelationship between the
city and knowledge generation, driven by rising literacy rates and the so-called
twelfth-century renaissance in learning and interest in the Classics. The chapter

will explore what features of the urban past, above all an ancient one, were deemed
worthy of emphasis and why this might have been. Alongside this, it will also
explore the renewed interplay between the city and notions of civilized culture as
urban schools and universities flourished and manuals of etiquette were produced
for civic elites. The collective outcome of all these chapters is a book that places the
idealized and the imagined city in relationship with the lived and the changing
city, and which through this interaction creates a deeper understanding of city
praise and the multifaceted experience of urban living in the Middle Ages.
1
The Sources
An Overview
Before interpreting our sources more closely, it is necessary first to offer a tour
d’horizon in order to demonstrate their heterogeneity. This, it must be stressed, will
not cover every source used in this study, and each source will be handled on a
case-by-case basis when encountered subsequently, but brief illustration of some of
the main sources and source-types will help situate the reader more firmly in the
analysis that follows. Urban panegyric was disseminated via hagiographies, poems,
chronicles, epistles, charters, encyclopaedia, and works of compilation, texts focused
directly on one city and its history, vernacular texts, and sermons. The pattern of
reception for these works was equally diverse, and different elements of different
works aimed at and reached different audiences, and this will be considered in more
detail in Chapter 2. At the same time, it is also imperative to acknowledge that
many works do not fit neatly into particular categories or literary genres. The Gesta
Treverorum, for example, might appear to be a historiographical work, but it also
synthesizes a large corpus of hagiographic material from Trier.1 The attempt to
arrange the works below, therefore, inevitably reflects some artificial grouping. The
survey will commence also with a short discussion on pre-1100 material simply to
remind the reader at this point that the later works did not exist in a vacuum.
As noted in the introduction, works of panegyric generally contained praise
focused on one, but more usually a combination, of the following: origins of the
city and the etymology of its name; prestige based on size in material, symbolic,
and human terms; the splendour of its buildings and other monumental structures;
its wealth and commercial strength; its geographical setting and layout; the
achievements and characteristics of its population often framed by accomplish-
ments associated with knowledge, religiosity, and military valour; and the city’s
status in relation to other urban centres. All our sources, as heterogeneous as they
are, in one way or another drew from this list and then adapted the material sub-
stantially to fit specific contexts. This much is already evident in some notable
works of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. One such celebrated and
extended work in praise of the city, in this case on Antioch, was produced by
Libanius in c.360. It was widely disseminated and explored, among many other
praiseworthy attributes, the city’s productivity and pleasing climate, its esteemed
1 Krönert, L’Exaltation de Trèves, pp. 285–7.

founders and rulers, and its large and eclectic populace.2 Slightly later, the rhetorician
Ausonius (d. c.393) produced his Ordo Urbium Nobilium which consolidated the
notion of a hierarchy of cities.3 It listed twenty in order of fame, focusing primarily
on their commercial attributes: Rome, Constantinople, Carthage, Antioch, Alexandria,
Trier, Milan, Capua, Aquileia, Arles, Seville, Córdoba, Tarragona, Braga, Athens,
Catania, Syracuse, Toulouse, Narbonne, and Bordeaux. By the early Middle Ages,
most works praising the city were shaped by the presence of Christianity and
appeared in verse form: two of the earliest and most famous were for Milan (Versum
de Mediolano Civitate, c.730–40) and Verona (Versus de Verona, c.796) respectively.4
Both focus on the city’s material splendour and its saintly protectors, although the
Versus de Verona in particular still finds space to acknowledge the city’s pagan past.5
Also from the late eighth century could be added the short verse praise of his
native city by Charlemagne’s famous courtier, Alcuin of York, which appeared
at the start of his longer poem on the city’s bishops, rulers, and saints. It eulogized
the city’s Roman imperial past, its ‘high walls and lofty towers’, its fertility and
attraction to foreign settlers.6 Alcuin offers a lament too on the end of the Roman
era at York. The lamentation thus links to another strand of early medieval pan-
egyric which noted great cities by mourning their capture, decay, or destruction,
and which drew on classical and biblical precedents (more of which in Chapters 3
and 4).7 Such poetic laments were produced for Aquileia (attributed to its patriarch,
Paulinus, d.802) and one for Modena, seemingly composed in c.900 when the city
was threatened by Magyar raids.8 Paulinus has also been attributed with a poem on
Rome, focused especially on its cults of St Peter and Paul, and needless to say that
there was a long tradition of poetry on the city stretching back to Antiquity.9
2 Translated in G. Downey, ‘Libanius’ Oration in Praise of Antioch (Oration XI)’, Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, CIII (1959), pp. 656–81.
3 Ausonius, Ordo Urbium Nobilium, in R. P. H. Green (ed.), Opera [Scriptorum classicorum bib-
liotheca Oxoniensis] (Oxford, 1999), pp. 189–95.
4 Both authors remain anonymous and both poems are edited in Versus de Verona, Versum de
Mediolano Civitate, ed. G. B. Pighi (Bologna, 1960).
5 For analysis see Hyde, ‘Medieval Descriptions’, pp. 4–7; Frugoni, Distant City, pp. 57–64.
6 Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York, ed. and trans. P. Godman, (Oxford, 1982), pp. 4–7.
7 Zanna, ‘Descriptiones Urbium’, pp. 523–96.
8 Versus de Destructione Aquilegiae, ed. E. Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Poetae Latini
Aevi Carolini, vol. I (Berlin, 1881), pp. 142–4; for translations of the Aquileia and Modena poems:
P. Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (London, 1985), pp. 106–13, pp. 324–7; Frugoni,
Distant City, pp. 65–7; Hyde, ‘Medieval Descriptions’, pp. 7–8.
9 Edited by E. Dümmler in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, vol. I
(Berlin, 1881), pp. 136–7; C. Witke, ‘Rome as “Region of Difference” in the Poetry of Hildebert of
Lavardin’, in A. S. Bernardo and S. Levin (eds), The Classics in the Middle Ages: Papers of the Twentieth
Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (Binghamton, 1990),
pp. 404–6. The Versus Romae (c.878) represents another elegiac poem on Rome. Granier offers an
extensive analysis of the poem and concludes that it inverted the traditional categories of urban praise
by using them as channels through which to actually critique Rome: T. Granier, ‘À rebours des laudes
civitatum: les Versus Romae et le discours sur la ville dans l’Italie du haut Moyen Àge’, in C. Carozzi
and H. Taviani-Carozzi (eds), Le médiéviste devant ses sources: questions et methodes (Aix-en-Provence,
2004), pp. 131–54. See also The Silvae of Statius, trans. B. R. Nayle (Indianapolis, 2004): the Silvae of
Statius (mid-40s to mid-90s ad), termed ‘occasional poetry’, included praise of Córdoba as birthplace
of Lucian (Silvae 2.7, verses 30–43, p. 89) and of Naples for its peace, beauty, climate, buildings, and
entertainment (Silvae 3.5, verses 110–46. p. 120).
The Sources: An Overview 25
It should be noted that the Modena lament occurs at the outset to the life of
St Gimignano, bishop of Modena. Locating urban praise at the start of saints’
lives and deeds of bishops (Gesta episcoporum) proved a popular format, no doubt
building on a prominent strand of classical rhetorical treatises that focused on the
praise of individuals. Indeed, a work such as the ninth-century Vita of the Bishop
Athanasio I of Naples (840–72) by the Neapolitan cleric John the Deacon incorp-
orated several facets of the laus civitatis. At a time when Naples was vying with
Capua for regional supremacy and aiming for metropolitan status, the Vita’s
opening chapter eulogized the city’s amenities, its fortifications (which it claimed
had been notably extended during the Gothic Wars, first by Belisarius and then
by Narses), and its classical traditions associated both with the famous ‘magician-
poet’ Virgil and the Augustus Octavian. It claimed Naples to be the oldest of Italy’s
cities (‘universarum eam antiquissimam esse Italicarum urbium’), and, after Rome,
inferior to no other. As one would expect, the Vita also praised the city’s Christian
faith. It boasted numerous churches, monasteries, and nunneries which day and
night offered up prayer, with Greek and Latin clerics chanting in unity. Its first
bishop, St Asprenus, was ordained by none other than St Peter, and the city was
guarded by St Gennarus and St Agrippinus. In short, Naples, called thus because
it was ‘the mistress of nine cities’ (‘novem civitatum dominatrix’), was a ‘city of mercy
and piety (“civitas misericordiae et pietatis est”) fortified by complete integrity’.10
There are several comparable examples, and some particularly developed versions
of urban praise were produced in the eleventh century. Again from Milan, which
appears to have developed a distinct local tradition of urban panegyric, one finds the
De Situ Civitatis Mediolani at the beginning of a work which covers Milan’s first
bishops starting with the famous Apostle St Barnabas, companion of St Paul and
reputed founder of the Milanese Church.11 Paolo Tomea’s meticulous research has
convincingly dated this anonymous work to c.998–1018.12 The importance of the
praise delivered in the De Situ is amplified by its utilization by Bonvesin da la Riva
in his De Magnalibus Mediolani in the late thirteenth century.13 The De Situ praises
the fertility of Milan’s territories (particularly the abundance of wine), its exalted
place both in the empire and in the Christian Church, the beauty and industry of
its people, and the etymology of the city’s name. Dating to the second half of that
century, Sigebert of Gembloux’s praise of Metz (De Laude Urbe Mettensis) is also
found at the start of a hagiographical text, a Vita of Bishop Theoderic I of Metz
(d.984).14 Sigebert, a prolific author who spent most of his time as a monk at the
10 Vita et Translatio S. Athanasii Neapolitani Episcopi (BHL 735 e 737) Sec. IX, ed. A. Vuolo (Rome,
2001), pp. 115–19. See also G. Vitolo, Città e coscienza cittadina nel Mezzogiorno medievale (secc.
IX-XII) (Salerno, 1990), pp. 9–13; Granier, ‘À rebours des laudes civitatum’, p. 143; H. Delehaye,
‘Hagiographie napolitaine’, Analecta Bollandiana, LVII (1939), pp. 5–64.
11 An accessible Latin edition and Italian translation of the De Situ Civitatis Mediolani is provided
at xxxv–xxxvii of Chiesa’s 2009 edition of Bonvesin da la Riva’s De Magnalibus.
12 P. Tomea, Tradizione apostolica e coscienza cittadina a Milano nel medioevo. La leggenda di san
Barnaba (Milan, 1993), pp. 19–20, 361–6, 418–19.
13 Bonvesin, De Magnalibus, xxxviii, and, for example, Bk. V.XI, p. 104.
14 Sigebert of Gembloux, Vita Deoderici Episcopi Mettensis, Monumenta Germaniae Historica,
Scriptores, IV, ed. G. H. Pertz (Hanover, 1841), pp. 476–9 and also M. Chazan, ‘Erudition et conscience
Benedictine abbey of Gembloux near Namur, said little directly about the citizenry
but focused his praise on Metz’s material grandeur, its buildings, churches, and for-
tifications, its fertile, well-watered hinterland, and on the etymology of the city’s
name. The Annolied (produced between 1077 and 1081 in Early Middle High
German) might also be seen as a quasi-hagiographical text, for it merges sacred and
secular history and also appears to be an attempt to sanctify Bishop Anno of Cologne
(d.1075).15 Within it are several passages on great German cities and their origin
stories, especially Cologne (‘the most beautiful town ever built in Germany’).16
Even in such a brief survey it is clear that Italian cities dominated the field of
urban praise in the early Middle Ages, undoubtedly as a result of the more entrenched
urban culture and deeper urban continuities which prevailed after the collapse of
the Roman Empire. But if this study could do for this earlier period what it aims
to do for that post-1100, a much broader geographic spread of works would emerge.
The aforementioned praise by Sigebert and the Annolied demonstrate this. So too
Dudo of St Quentin’s chronicle (dated c.1000 × 1020) on the Normans, with its verse
praise of ‘opulent’ Rouen, and Gerhard von Seeon’s Carmen Bambergense (of 1012),
dedicated to Emperor Henry II, which commends Bamberg as a centre of learning
(another Cariath Sepher, the biblical ‘town of letters’).17
For the period under study here—1100–1300—praise of cities certainly appeared
in tried and trusted formats. Thus, urban panegyric continued to be embedded in
hagiographical works, often in a prologue. Perhaps most famously, William FitzStephen
(a clerk of Thomas Becket) provided an extended description of the city of London
(of c.1173) in the opening to his Vita of St Thomas Becket, while Richerius of
Metz (c.1135) offered a laus of Tours and Metz in an extended prologue to his verse
life of St Martin.18 The Vita of St Petronio (first produced in Latin in 1162–80,
followed by a more coherent and detailed late thirteenth-century vernacular version
based on a different manuscript tradition) featured several passages which glorified
the city of Bologna.19 A Vita of St Lambert (c.1144–45) by a canon Nicholas merged
holy and episcopal histories in order to explain Liège’s promotion to a city and its
claims for local pre-eminence, while the Translatio of St Andrew (thirteenth century)
urbaine dans “L’Éloge de Metz” de Sigebert de Gembloux’, Cahiers lorrains, III–IV (1992), pp. 441–53;
Frugoni, Distant City, pp. 68–9; Classen, Stadt, pp. 50–1; Schmidt, ‘Societas Christiana’, pp. 324–5.
15 F. G. Gentry, ‘German Literature to 1160’, in F. G. Gentry (ed.), A Companion to Middle High
German Literature to the Fourteenth Century (Leiden, 2002), pp. 103–6.
16 Das Annolied, trans. G. Dunphy, at http://www.dunphy.de/Medieval/Annolied, quote at section
7 [accessed 02/02/16].
17 Dudo of St Quentin, De Moribus et Actis Primorum Normannie Ducum, ed. J. Lair (Caen, 1865),
Bk. IV.90, pp. 247–8 and translated in Dudo of St Quentin, History of the Normans, trans.
E. Christianesen (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 100; Gerhard von Seeon, Carmen Bambergense, ed. K. Strecker,
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Poetae Latini medii aevi 5, 1,2 (Leipzig, 1937), pp. 397–9; Classen,
Stadt, pp. 46–7.
18 Richerius of Metz, Vita S. Martini episcopi Turonensis, ed. R. Drecker in R. Wirsel (ed.),
Programm des königlichen Gymnasiums zu Trier für das Schuljahr 1885–86 (Trier, 1886), pp. 1–22.
19 The Latin Vita Sancti Petronii episcopi et confessoris is edited in F. Lanzoni, S. Petronio vescovo di
Bologna nella storia e nella leggenda (Rome, 1907), pp. 224–50; it was reproduced (and consulted for
the present study) in E. Cecchi Gattolin, Il santuario di Santo Stefano in Bologna (Modena, 1976),
appendix I, pp. 3–8; the vernacular vita is edited in Vita di san Petronio, ed. M. Corti (Bologna, 1962),
xiii–xxxix.
set out Amalfi’s virtues in order to show why it had deserved to receive such esteemed
relics in 1208.20
Also worth mentioning here is the Vita Mathildis (written from 1111 to 1116) by
the monk Donizone of the monastery of Sant’Apollonio di Canossa. It represents
a verse paean to the Canossa dynasty (Donizone’s own title for the work was De
principibus Canusinis), but it has a hagiographical flavour in its portrayal of Countess
Matilda of Tuscany (d.1115) and her father Boniface. Indeed, Donizone hoped to
encourage Matilda to choose his monastery as her family’s mausoleum.21 And,
like several hagiographical works which are concerned with sanctifying the location
of a cult, within it are laudatory passages on cities, particularly the rhetorical dispute
(in Bk. I.VIII) in which Canossa and Mantua extol their own urban credentials
and virtues in order to claim possession of the body of Matilda’s father.22 Closely
associated in form to these hagiographical works are other texts which might be
termed Gesta episcoporum and which often contained urban panegyric.23 Thus,
praise of Metz (heavily dependent on Sigebert of Gembloux’s work) opened the
early twelfth-century Gesta Episcoporum Mettensium, while the Anglo-Norman
historian William of Malmesbury included several short laudatory passages on
cities (Bristol, Canterbury, Chester, Cologne, Norwich, York, among others) in his
Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (c.1125), a historical catalogue of the bishoprics and
leading monasteries of England.24
Praise of cities in poetic form also continued to be popular. Indeed, a number of
the aforesaid hagiographies were produced in verse, to which we could add the
likes of the Vita of Adelbert II, archbishop of Mainz (d.1141) which was composed
by Anselm of Havelberg (in c.1142) and praised cities—Mainz, Reims, Paris,
Montpellier—connected to the saint’s life.25 Three of the most influential poets of
the twelfth century included urban panegyric within their works: Hildebert of
Lavardin produced two famous poems in the mid-twelfth century which at the
same time lamented and eulogized Rome; Hugh Primas offered praise of Amiens
and Reims; and the Archpoet acclaimed (and lamented) Pavia and Novara in his
work.26 There are also several more extensive laudatory works in verse which focus
20 Vita Landiberti auctore Nicolai, eds. B. Krusch and W. Levison, Monumenta Germaniae Historica,
Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, VI (Hannover, 1913), pp. 407–29; R. Adam, ‘La Vita Landiberti
Leodiensis (ca 1144–45) du chanoine Nicolas de Liège’, Le Moyen Age, CXI (2005), pp. 503–28;
Translatio Corporis S. Andree Apostoli de Constantinopoli in Amalfiam, ed. P. Pirri, in P. Pirri, Il duomo
di Amalfi e il chiostro del paradiso (Rome, 1941), pp. 135–48.
21 See R. Houghton, ‘Reconsidering Donizone’s Vita Mathildis: Boniface of Canossa and Emperor
Henry II’, Journal of Medieval History, XLI (2015), p. 392.
22 Donizone di Canossa, Vita, ix–xii, and Bk. I.VIII, pp. 58–68; Frugoni, Distant City, pp. 75–6.
23 See C. Santarossa, ‘The Creation of a Model for the Episcopal Historiography: the Liber de
Episcopis Mettensibus of Paul the Deacon’, Studi Medievali, LV, 3rd series (2014), pp. 551–64.
24 Gesta Episcoporum Mettensium, ed. G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, X,
(Hannover, 1852), p. 534; William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the Bishops of England/Gesta Pontificum
Anglorum, trans. D. Preest (Woodbridge 2002), 3, 91–2, 99, 134, 139, 196–7, 208, 291.
25 Anselm of Havelberg, Vita Adelberti II Moguntini, ed. P. Jaffé, Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum,
III (Berlin, 1866), pp. 563–603.
26 Hildebert of Lavardin, Carmina minora, ed. A. B. Scott (Leipzig, 1969), no. 36 pp. 22–4,
no. 38 pp. 25–7; Hugh Primas and the Archpoet, ed. and trans. F. Adcock (Cambridge, 1994); see also
P. Godman, The Archpoet and Medieval Culture (Oxford, 2014).
on one city or a particular event associated with it. The Bergamese scholar Mosè
del Brolo dedicated a lengthy piece (although the extant version is incomplete) called
the Liber Pergaminus (dated to c.1118) to praise of Bergamo and its surrounding
territories.27 Around the same time, following Pisa’s capture of the Balearic Islands
(1113–15), the city’s government commissioned the Liber Maiolichinus (c.1117–
c.1125), a work of verse in 3,500 hexameters imbued with civic pride and contain-
ing several allusions to the city’s ancient and esteemed roots.28 Another famed
maritime city, Genoa, was also the subject of a verse praise of the late thirteenth
century by an anonymous poet.29 A particularly notable and extensive work of
verse was the Versos de Julia Romula o La Urbe Hispalense (1250) by Guillermo
Pérez de la Calzada, which glorified Seville through an account of its capture in
1248 by Fernando III of Castile.30 Among the countless other poems which
praised cities are the already mentioned Vita Mathildis, a short Old English poem
(conventionally dated to c.1104 × 1115) on Durham’s magnificence, location, and
relic collections; an anonymous poem comparing Rouen to Rome, produced
around 1148 for the new Duke of Normandy, Geoffrey of Anjou; the epic-style
Carmen de expugnatione Almariae urbis (c.1149) which commended the role of
León in the capture of Muslim-ruled Almeria; and the Versus de dignitate urbis
Tornacensis (second-half of the twelfth century) in which the city of Tournai speaks
in the first person (particularly about its ancient history and lucrative trade).31
27 Mosè del Brolo, Liber Pergaminus, ed. G. Gorni, Studi Medievali, XI, 3rd series (1970),
pp. 409–60.
28 Liber Maiolichinus de gestis Pisanorum illustribus, ed. C. Calisse, Fonti per la storia d’Italia, XXIX
(Turin, 1966); G. Scalia, ‘“Romanitas” Pisana tra XI e XII secolo: le iscrizioni romane del Duomo e la
statua del console Rodolfo’, Studi Medievali, XIII, 3rd series (1972), pp. 791–843; C. Wickham,
Sleepwalking into a New World. The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (Princeton,
2015), pp. 71–5; M. Campopiano, ‘The Problems of Origins in Early Communal Historiography:
Pisa, Genoa, and Milan compared’, in M. Mostert and A. Adamska (eds), Uses of the Written Word in
Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy, II (Turnhout, 2014), p. 235.
29 Anonimo Genovese, in Poeti del Duecento, ed. G. Contini, vol. 1 (Milan/Naples, 1960),
pp. 750–9. A partial translation of this poem can be found in T. Dean (trans.), The Towns of Italy in
the Later Middle Ages (Manchester, 2000), pp. 21–3.
30 The version of the poem used in the present study is the one edited (with a Spanish translation
and useful introduction) in Guillermo Pérez de la Calzada, Un poema latino a Sevilla, Versos de Julia
Rómula o la urbe Hispalense de Guillermo Pérez de la Calzada (1250), ed. and trans. R. Carande
Herrero (Seville, 1986). There is also an edition in L. Charlo Brea, J. A. Est.vez Sola, R. Carande
Herrero (eds), Chronica Hispana saeculi XIII, Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis,
LXXIII (Turnhout, 1997). See also Ruth, Urban Honor, pp. 144–9.
31 (Durham) An edition is contained in T. W. O’Donnell, ‘The Old English Durham, the Historia
de sancto Cuthberto, and the Unreformed in Late Anglo-Saxon Literature’, Journal of English and
Germanic Philology, CXIII (2014), pp. 131–55 who also disputes the dating, pushing it back to the
early eleventh century; C. B. Kendall, ‘Let Us Now Praise a Famous City: Wordplay in the OE
“Durham” and the Cult of St. Cuthbert’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXXXVII (1988),
pp. 507–21 and J. Grossi, ‘Preserving the Future in the Old English Durham’, Journal of English and
Germanic Philology, CXI (2012), pp. 42–73 (with a translation of the poem at p. 44), however, argue
for the later date. (Rouen) Edited and translated in E. Van Houts, ‘Rouen as another Rome in the
Twelfth Century’, in L. Hicks and E. Brenner (eds), Society and Culture in Medieval Rouen, 911–1300
(Turnhout, 2013), pp. 101–24. (Almeria) El ‘Poema de Almeria’ y la Épica Románica, ed. and trans.
H. Salvador Martinez, (Madrid, 1975) contains a Latin edition and Spanish translation. I have used
this edition, and the English translation in S. Barton and R. A. Fletcher (eds), The World of El Cid:
Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2000), pp. 250–63. (Tournai) Versus de dignitate
Encomiastic verse on cities was also incorporated into larger works: Godfrey of
Viterbo’s Pantheon (c.1190), which defies easy categorization but broadly functioned
as a Staufen world chronicle, drew on legendary material and incorporated verse
eulogies of several cities, such as Cologne and Bamberg.32 Similarly, the English
scholar Alexander Neckam (d.1217) incorporated praise and censure of a number
of cities (including Autun, Lyon, Milan, Paris, Pavia, Ravenna, Rome, Toulouse,
and Venice) in his De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae, a wide-ranging verse treatise on
natural philosophy.33
On the other hand, after 1100, urban panegyric worked its way more frequently
into narrative sources than before and it also appeared in what were effectively
new formats. Consequently, from the twelfth century, prose panegyric became
more prominent and secular in tone, as Jeffrey Ruth has noted, although urban
praise continued to have spiritual and religious facets through its repeated appli-
cation in hagiographies, sermons, and other records produced by ecclesiastical
writers.34 Again, here we can only offer a representative sample of the type of
material available. Among narrative and chronicle accounts there are several valuable
works. The famous First Crusade chronicle, the anonymous Gesta Francorum of
c.1100 (and the various works which were subsequently based upon it) contained
a laudatory description of Antioch, and in a comparable context, at the time of
the Second Crusade, the (almost certainly) Anglo-French priest who authored
the De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi (c.1148) provided a double-edged description
of the city of Lisbon prior to its capture.35 Several accounts associated with the
crusading movement of course offered material on the city of Jerusalem and also
Constantinople, but perhaps one of the fullest descriptions is found in William of
Malmesbury’s chronicle of the English kings, the Gesta Regum Anglorum (c.1127).
Here the reader is treated to lengthy coverage of some of the great cities of Christianity:
Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Antioch.36
Brief descriptions of cities, all laudatory in essence, appear in narratives across
Western Europe. In Iberia, the Primera cronica general de Espana, commissioned
and edited by Alfonso X of Castile (and worked on incrementally in the decades
after his death in c.1284 and completed around the 1320s) recounted, for example,
the capture of Seville in 1248 and extolled the city’s virtues.37 From Southern Italy,
urbis Tornacensis, ed. G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, XIV (Hannover, 1883),
pp. 357–8.
32 Godfrey of Viterbo, Pantheon, ed. G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, XXII
(Hannover, 1872), pp. 107–307.
33 Alexander Neckam, De Naturis Rerum libri duo/De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae, ed. T. Wright,
Rolls Series, XXXIV (London, 1863).
34 Ruth, Urban Honor, pp. 87–8.
35 Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, ed. and trans. R. M. T. Hill (London, 1962),
pp. 76–7; De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi. The Conquest of Lisbon, ed. and trans. C. W. David (New York,
1936; reissued with new foreword by Jonathan Phillips, 2001), pp. 90–7; and for further discussion on
the author’s identity, pp. xx–xxvi.
36 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum/The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans.
R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), pp. 612–20, 622–32, 640–2.
37 Primera crónica general de España, eds. R. Menéndez Pidal and O. Catalán, 2 vols. (Madrid,
1977–8), ii. 768–70; the passage on the capture of Seville is also translated by S. Doubleday in
the chronicle on the deeds of King Roger II of Sicily, by the Campanian abbot
Alexander of Telese (c.1136), contained a short, pointed praise of Capua.38 From
Normandy, the monk Orderic Vitalis incorporated laudatory passages on Rouen in
his Ecclesiastical History (completed by c.1143), and from Germany, Otto, Bishop
of Freising, included short praise of the likes of Mainz and Zurich in his Gesta
Friderici Imperatoris (c.1158).39 From England, the mid twelfth-century Gesta Stephani
contained short passages on Exeter, Bristol, Bath, and Oxford.40 We should also
include here the famous work of Geoffrey of Monmouth. His influential Historia
Regum Britanniae (completed c.1150) offered a largely fabricated history of early
Britain up to the sixth century, but one which also provided valuable insights into
twelfth-century discourses on the origins of London, its future (through Merlin’s
Prophecies in Book VII), and the status of other cities such as York.41
Praise within epistles also becomes more prominent from the twelfth century.42
This could be in the shape of epistolary poems like Rodulfus Tortarius’ verse
epistle Ad Robertum (post-1106) which presented the city of Caen as a hive of
commercial activity alongside the seductive splendour of Bayeux.43 Or praise could
appear in more conventional letter-writing. A letter by an anonymous author (almost
certainly written in 1190 by the so-called ‘Hugo Falcandus’ who produced an
earlier narrative account of the Sicilian kingdom) which praised (and lamented) a
number of Sicilian cities was addressed to a Peter the Treasurer of the Church of
Palermo.44 Similarly, Gui of Bazoches, a French cleric and chronicler, wrote a letter
(between 1175 and 1190) to a friend extolling the delights of Paris.45 As will
become apparent in Chapter 7, urban panegyric was also expressed through a city’s
function as an educational hub. With the development of urban and cathedral
O. Constable (ed.), Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources (Philadelphia,
1997), pp. 217–20. See also A. Rodríguez, ‘Narratives of Expansion, Last Wills, Poor Expectations
and the Conquest of Seville (1248)’, in J. Hudson and S. Crumplin (eds), ‘The Making of Europe’:
Essays in Honour of Robert Bartlett (Leiden, 2016), pp. 128–30.
38 Alexander of Telese, Alexandri Telesini Abbatis Ystoria Rogerii Regis Sicilie Calabrie atque Apulie,
ed. L. de Nava (Rome, 1991), Bk. II.66, p. 55. An English translation is in G. A. Loud (trans.), Roger II
and the Creation of the Kingdom of Sicily (Manchester, 2012), p. 102.
39 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1968–80),
vol. II, Bk. IV, p. 224; vol. III, Bk. V, p. 36; Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I. Imperatoris, eds.
B. De Simon and G. Waitz (Hannover/Leipzig, 1912), Bk. I.VIII, pp. 24–5; Bk. I.XIII, p. 28; an English
translation is available: Otto of Freising, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, trans. C. C. Mierow (New
York, 1953), pp. 42, 45–6.
40 Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter (Oxford, 1976), pp. 32, 56, 58, 140.
41 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain/Historia Regum Britannie, ed.
M. D. Reeve and trans. N. Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), Bk. I.23, pp. 28–31; II.27, p. 35; III.53, pp. 66–7.
42 Although praise in this form also had a long pre-existing tradition, see for example Statius’
panegyric on Naples in a letter to his wife of c.93 ad: Silvae, 3.5 pp. 117–21.
43 Rodulphus Tortarius, Carmina, eds. M. B. Ogle and D. M. Schullian (Rome, 1933), Epistula IX,
pp. 319–30.
44 The letter is edited in ‘Hugo Falcandus’, La Historia o Liber de Regno Sicilie e la Epistola
ad Petrum Panormitane Ecclesie Thesaurium, ed. G. B. Siragusa, Fonti per la storia d’Italia, XXII
(Rome, 1897), pp. 169–86; and an English translation is in ‘Hugo Falcandus’, The History of the Tyrants
of Sicily by Hugo Falcandus, 1153–69, trans. G.A. Loud and T. E. J. Wiedemann (Manchester, 1998),
pp. 252–63.
45 Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, eds. H. S. Denifle and É. Chatelain, vol. I (Paris, 1889),
no. 54, pp. 55–6.
schools in the twelfth century, and the rise of universities in the thirteenth, a wider
body of letters and documents circulated which praised cities as centres of learning.
The aforesaid letter of Gui of Bazoches fits with that trend, to which one could add
the founding charters (or recruitment adverts) of the universities of Naples (1224)
and Toulouse (1229) with their praise of their host cities, or any number of papal
missives on the thirteenth-century University of Paris with their wordplay on Paris
(Parisius) as paradise (Paradisus).46
The production of works associated with the new climate of university educa-
tion would also include the aforementioned Parisiana Poetria (c.1220) of the
scholar John de Garlande, and his Dictionarius (c.1200), textbooks both aimed at
Parisian students. The latter, which takes the form of a guided tour through Paris,
might be read as a work underpinned by both praise and critique of that city.47
Perhaps more significantly, the Dictionarius could be categorized alongside two
other types of prominent sources on urban panegyric in the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries. First, encyclopaedia and other works of compilation became
more common in our period, and some inevitably covered cities. Positive descrip-
tions of cities were contained in the famous geographical treatise known as the
Book of Roger (c.1154) which was commissioned by Roger II of Sicily and produced
by the Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi. These descriptions ranged across
Europe (and beyond) but become fuller and more laudatory for Sicily, particularly
for the cities of Catania, Messina, and Palermo.48 The aforementioned Pantheon
of Godfrey of Viterbo and the De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae of Alexander Neckam
would also fit here, as would the Otia Imperialia (c.1210) of Gervase of Tilbury,
with its recording of fascinating material on the ancient origins of London and
popular Neapolitan legends on Virgil which served to aggrandize Naples.49 So
too, the Franciscan Bartholomew Anglicus’s encyclopaedic work De Proprietatibus
Rerum (c.1245) which in Book XV on De Regionibus offered laudatory entries on
several European cities.50 As a result of its practical utility with its valuable medical
and geographical information, and its fusing of Augustinian theology with
some Aristotelian works of natural science recently available in Europe, the De
Proprietatibus Rerum is widely acknowledged to have been the ‘most popular
medieval encyclopaedia’.51 Another important work for our study, an eclectic text
46 L’Epistolario di Pier della Vigna, eds. E. D’Angelo et al. (Soveria Mannelli, 2014), pp. 489–91
with Italian translation at pp. 491–3; Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, no. 51, p. 50, no. 72,
pp. 129–31. See also S. C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University. The Schools of Paris and their Critics,
1100–1215 (Stanford, 1985), pp. 12–17.
47 John de Garlande, Parisiana Poetria; John de Garlande, The Dictionarius, trans. B. Blatt Rubin
(Kansas, 1981).
48 Muhammad al-Idrisi, La Première Géographie de l’Occident, trans. P-A. Jaubert and revised by
H. Bresc and A. Nef (Paris, 1999), pp. 307–9, 312, 314.
49 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia. Recreation of an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and
J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), Bk. II.17, pp. 398–9; Bk. III.12–13, pp. 576–85; Bk. III.112, pp. 802–3.
50 M. C. Seymour et al., Bartholomaeus Anglicus and his Encyclopedia (Aldershot, 1992), pp. 1–16,
158–71. The Latin edition which I have consulted is the Incunabulum published at Cologne, and
dated c.1472, held at the John Rylands Library, Manchester.
51 E. Keen, The Journey of a Book. Bartholomew the Englishman and the Properties of Things
(Canberra, 2007), p. 3. Seymour, et al., Bartholomaeus Anglicus, pp. 11–35.
with edifying functions, is the De Preconiis Hispanie (c.1278) of the Franciscan

Juan Gil de Zamora.52 Described as a ‘hybrid document with scholarly, ethical and
didactic aims’, it was a work of encomium and guidance for Sancho IV, the son and
successor of Alfonso X of Castile (d.1284).53 The De Preconiis Hispanie included
a lengthy chapter (VIII) on the etymologies and early histories of several Iberian
cities, and also ended with a passage praising the site of the city of Zamora.54
Second, in focusing solely on Paris, the aforementioned Dictionarius also links
to works which were entirely framed around one city, and which usually boosted a
city’s reputation through explicit or implicit praise. Such works became increasingly
popular in the post-1100 era. We have already encountered the Liber Maiorichanus
for Pisa, the Liber Pergaminus for Bergamo, and the late thirteenth-century poem
on Genoa, all works in verse. To this list we could add the chronicle (completed
c.1140–44) by the notary Falco which focuses on his native city of Benevento and
the Liber de Obsidione Ancone (c.1198), a work by the university master Boncompagno
da Signa which recounts the siege of Ancona in 1176 and is suffused with praise
for the city and its inhabitants.55 Thirteenth-century examples would include the
anonymous Chronica de Origine Civitatis Florentiae (c.1204) for Florence and
Martin da Canal’s Estoire de Venise (1267 × 1275).56 Alongside these are three cele-
brated, and closely connected, works of the twelfth and early thirteenth century
which focus on Rome and, in varying ways, the material legacies of its classical and
early Christian history: the Mirabilia Urbis Romae (c.1143) possibly by the canon
Benedict of St Peter’s, Rome; the Graphia Aureae Urbis Romae (c.1155), quite likely
the work of the prolific Montecassino historian and forger Peter the Deacon; and
the De Mirabilibus Urbis Romae (c.1200) by the Englishman Master Gregory.57 Of
course, one of the most famed and developed works of urban panegyric is the pre-
viously mentioned De Magnalibus Urbis Mediolani (1288). The author, Bonvesin
da la Riva, a tertiary in the order of the Humiliati and a teacher of grammar, pro-
duced a remarkable and extensive treatise on Milan and its virtues.58
It is immediately apparent from this short survey that Italian cities dominate
this source-type, and this has contributed inevitably to a greater concentration of
research on the interrelationship between Italy, urban panegyric, and civic con-
sciousness. As if to prove the point, relatively minor cities like Lodi received such
52 Juan Gil de Zamora, De Preconiis Hispanie, ed. M. de Castro (Madrid, 1955).

53 Ruth, Urban Honor, p. 137.
54 De Preconiis Hispanie; Gil later produced a text (in c.1282) called the De Preconiis Civitatis
Numantine which was framed as a lament for the city of Zamora and was largely copied from the more
extended De Preconiis Hispanie, see Ruth, Urban Honor, p. 138.
55 Falcone di Benevento, Chronicon Beneventanum, ed. E. D’Angelo (Florence, 1998); Boncompagno
da Signa, Liber de Obsidione Ancone, ed. and trans. P. Garbini (Rome, 1999).
56 Chronica de Origine Civitatis Florentiae, ed. R. Chellini (Rome, 2009), vii–ix, pp. 3, 5–6, 25, which
greatly influenced subsequent Florentine historical works, such as the Gesta Florentinorum, vernacular
histories, and famed authors such as Brunetto Latini, Giovanni Villani, and Dante Alighieri; Martin
da Canal, Les Estoires de Venise, ed. A. Limentani (Florence, 1972); an English translation is also now
available: Martin da Canal, Les Estoires de Venise, trans. L. K. Morreale (Padua, 2009).
57 All edited in Codice topografico della città di Roma, vol. III: Mirabilia Urbis Romae, pp. 17–64;
Graphia Aureae Urbis Romae, pp. 77–110; Master Gregory, De Mirabilibus Urbis Romae, pp. 143–67.
58 Bonvesin, De Magnalibus.
treatment in the verse form of the De laude civitatis Laude (c.1252), by an

anonymous Franciscan.59 But the point should be clear that non-Italian cities are
also represented in this source-type. The Gesta Treverorum (first compiled probably
by a monk of the Trier monastery of St Eucharius in c.1100, with a continuation
in c.1132), for example, is devoted to the history of Trier and full of laudatory
material, particularly related to the city’s putative early history.60 A certain Lucian,
quite likely a monk, produced the De Laude Cestrie (c.1195–c.1200), a work on
Chester which could fit into several categories. In its extant, and incomplete ver-
sion, it is c.80,000 words, about three quarters of which broadly praises Chester
through a discussion of the etymology of the city’s name, a Neo-Platonic/Augustinian
reading of the city’s topography, and a long excursion on Chester’s four guardian
saints (a city gate being dedicated to each one) which verged into the territory of
hagiography. The remaining quarter of the work contains discussion on spiritual
meditation and the relationship between the secular and religious orders of the
Church.61 A final example, the vernacular Vraies Cronikes de Tournai (c.1290) syn-
thesized earlier works on Tournai’s putative esteemed origins to produce a work that
implicitly praised the city’s urban government and loyalty to the Capetian mon-
archs of France.62
Two final innovations also influenced the production and dissemination of
urban panegyric post-1100. First, was the rise of works in the vernacular, a devel-
opment which gained pace at the turn of the thirteenth century and which
ensured greater circulation of the material (for more on this see Chapter 2).
59 De laude civitatis Laude, ed. and trans. A. Caretta (Lodi, 1962). I have also consulted the manu-
script of this poem held at Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv. 18.4.10, fols. 38r–40r to
check the transcription which Caretta was only able to make from a photocopy, and I am satisfied with
its accuracy. It should be pointed out that this poem, which is preceded in the manuscript by a copy
of a work of Isidore of Seville (fols 1r–23r) and the index of the chapters of Godfrey of Viterbo’s
Speculum regum (fols. 23v–38r), does not actually have a title assigned to it in the original. It com-
mences simply with the first verse (‘Iuxta ripam Adue sedet urbs iocunda’) towards the bottom of
fol. 38r following a short gap separating it from the aforementioned Speculum regum.
60 Gesta Treverorum; Krönert, L’Exaltation de Trèves, pp. 301–2.
61 I have consulted the sole manuscript—Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 672—of Lucian’s
De Laude Cestrie at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Mark Faulkner has recently provided an excellent
online edition and translation of key excerpts from the De Laude Cestrie (http://www.medievalchester.
ac.uk/texts/facing/Lucian.html?page=0) [accessed 25/01/16]. Selected excerpts were also edited by
M. V. Taylor, ‘Extracts from the MS. Liber Luciani De laude Cestrie written about the year 1195 and now
in the Bodleian Library, Oxford’, The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, LXIV (Manchester, 1912).
In this study, I shall use Faulkner’s translation but alongside it place in brackets the manuscript
foliation for each translation in order that the reader can locate them in their original context should
they so wish. See also M. Faulkner, ‘The Spatial Hermeneutics of Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie’, in C. A. M.
Clarke (ed.), Mapping the Medieval City. Space, Place and Identity in Chester c.1200–1600 (Cardiff, 2011),
pp. 78–98.
62 Les Vraies chroniques de Tournai, ed. and trans. Y. Coutant (Louvain-La-Neuve, 2012); see also
K. Krause, ‘Edifier, moraliser et plaire: les Vraies Cronikes de Tournai et le manuscript Paris, BNF,
fr. 24430’, in J. Pycke and A. Dupont (eds), Archives et manuscrits précieux tournaisiens, vol. 3
(Tournai, 2009), pp. 85–94; G. Small, ‘Les origines de la ville de Tournai dans les chroniques légendaires
du bas Moyen-Âge’, in J. Dumoulin and J. Pycke (eds), Les grands siècles de Tournai (Tournai, 1993)
pp. 81–113; I. Glorieux, ‘Tournai, une ville fondée par un soldat de Tullus Hostilius? À propos des
origines légendaires de la cité des Cinq clochers’, (2004) http://bcs.fltr.ucl.ac.be/FE/08/Tournai.html
[accessed 19/01/16].
Chansons de Geste and Romances accounted for a significant proportion of early

vernacular writing, and in many the city featured, both in a positive and negative
function. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, important material
on the city appears in the works of Chrétien de Troyes—most vividly in La Cont
du Graal (where the cities in question are fictional)—in Jean Renart’s L’Escoufle
(which uses Montpellier as one of the key settings in the narrative), in Bertrand
de Bar-sur-Aube’s Girart de Vienne (Vienne), the Charroi de Nimes (Nimes and
Orange), and in Aiol (Poitiers and Orléans).63 In addition, several other afore-
mentioned works from different literary genres appeared in vernacular in their
original versions, for example, chronicles such as the Primera cronica general de
Espana, the Estoires de Venise of Martin da Canal, and the Vraies Cronikes for Tournai.
Also, vernacular works were composed in the newly formed Puys of north-west
Europe. These poetic, lay a ssociations produced verse compositions, some of which
were framed by civic pride and praise of the city (for more see Chapter 2). In this
context, though not north-west European, we might also recall the anonymous
author who composed a vernacular verse praise of Genoa in the late thirteenth
century.64 Other works were adapted (and sometimes notably revised) into the
vernacular: the Mirabilia Urbis Romae was reworked into the mid-thirteenth-century
Le Miracole de Roma, the vernacular Vita San Petronio significantly expanded the
earlier Latin vita, while Book XV (containing material on cities) of Bartholomew
Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum was translated into Anglo-Norman perhaps
as early as c.1260.65
A second innovation took the form of sermons, most of them public, most in
the vernacular, and increasingly delivered in urban settings via the emergent men-
dicant orders. Numerous sermons dealt directly or indirectly with the city, praising
and censuring it. It might well be that Lucian’s work on Chester was adapted for
sermons, while the De laude civitatis Laude almost certainly was. The philosopher
and Cistercian monk Alain de Lille compared the city to the Christian community
in one of his sermons (Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, Civitas Dei) from the later twelfth
century in the diocese of Laon.66 Later, between 1257 and 1263, the great scholar
and Dominican Albert Magnus delivered a sermon-cycle (almost entirely in German)
at Augsburg in which he meditated on the comparison between the City and the
Church.67 And at Florence in c.1300, the Dominican preacher Remigio de’Girolami
presented the seven virtues of Florence in one of his sermons.68
63 Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail in The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans.
D. Staines (Bloomington, 1993) and Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal,
ed. K. Busby (Tübingen, 1993); Jean Renart, L’Escoufle; Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube, Girart de Vienne,
trans. B. Guidot (Paris, 2006); Le Charroi de Nimes, trans. H. J. Godin (Oxford, 1936); Aiol. A Chanson
de Geste, trans. S. C. Malicote and A. Richard Hartman (New York, 2014).
64 Anonimo Genovese, pp. 751–9.
65 [Le] Miracole de Roma, in Codice topografico della città di Roma, eds. R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti,
vol. III, (Rome, 1946), pp. 116–36; Barthélemy L’Anglais, Le Livre des Regions, ed. B. A. Pitts
(London, 2006).
66 Alain de Lille, Opera Omnia, cols. 200–3. 67 Albert Magnus, Augsburg Sermon Cycle.
68 The Latin extract is provided in C. T. Davis, ‘An Early Florentine Political Theorist: Fra Remigio
de’Girolami’, in his Dante’s Italy and Other Essays (Philadelphia, 1984), p. 206, fn. 30.
Countless other examples could be added. However, the preceding source

discussion has aimed to provide an overview of the diversity and broad groupings
of the material available. And while this monograph is based primarily upon the
aforementioned body of textual sources, it will nuance and support the evidence
within them by also turning to urban material culture (coinage, seals, architecture,
inscriptions, and archaeology) and evidence on the city’s soundscape.69
69 For more on these other sources see Chapter 2.

2
Interpretation and Audience
From around 1100, cities were praised through an increasingly large, diverse, and
novel corpus of sources; this in itself is indicative of deep change in the medieval
city. Much of this praise was ostensibly rooted in long-standing literary traditions
which emerged in the classical period, and which thereafter, under the influence
of Christian models, experienced a gradual but discernible mutation in form
during the early medieval period. With this in mind, the aim of this chapter is
twofold: first, to establish some of the ways in which the sources can be utilized;
second, to demonstrate the urban connections of several authors of urban panegyric,
and to consider how some of the latter was disseminated to wider audiences after
1100. In doing so, this chapter establishes the significance of works of urban
panegyric for understanding transformations in the urban world in the period
1100–1300.
I N T E R P R E T I N G PA N E G Y R I C : FA B R I C AT I O N ,
H Y P E R B O L E , A N D T RU T H
Some of the earliest forms of city praise in Antiquity were embedded in the teaching
of rhetoric, and particularly in one of its subdivisions known as epideictic or
demonstrative rhetoric.1 This branch of rhetoric had both a moralizing and didactic
mission which engaged with praise and censure and was often associated with poetic
discourse.2 Its defining principles were transmitted into the Middle Ages, initially
through rhetorical handbooks utilized in monastic and other schools, and historical
writing itself was viewed as a branch of rhetoric.3 While it is vital to be wary of the
multiplicity of agendas subsumed within works of praise, equally they should not
be dismissed as self-serving fabrications nor interpreted as entertainment or fiction
as understood in the modern sense. Indeed, works of praise pose methodological
challenges comparable to those created by ‘standard’ historical narratives, which are
1 J. A. Burrow, The Poetry of Praise (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 8–9; M. S. Kempshall, Rhetoric and the
Writing of History (Manchester, 2011), pp. 138–68.
2 Indeed, this interrelationship was nuanced further by the use of praise of one thing to censure
something else. For an example, see the English monk Richard of Devizes’s praise of Jews as condem-
nation of lax Christian behaviour: R. Levine, ‘Why Praise Jews: Satire and History in the Middle
Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, XII (1986), pp. 291–6.
3 M. Otter, ‘Functions of Fiction in Historical Writing’, in N. Partner (ed.), Writing Medieval History
(London, 2005), p. 118.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lettres de
voyage (1892-1913)
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Title: Lettres de voyage (1892-1913)
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Release date: November 27, 2023 [eBook #72244]
Language: French
Original publication: Paris: Payot, 1922
Credits: Véronique Le Bris, Laurent Vogel and the Online

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTRES DE

VOYAGE (1892-1913) ***
RUDYARD KIPLING
LETTRES DE VOYAGE
(1892-1913)
PAYOT & CIE, PARIS

106, BOULEVARD SAINT-GERMAIN
1922
Tous droits réservés
OUVRAGES DE RUDYARD KIPLING
A LA MÊME LIBRAIRIE :
LA GUERRE SUR MER, in-16 6 francs.

LES YEUX DE L’ASIE, Petit in-16 3 »
Les lettres intitulées : “D’un lit de marée a l’autre” furent publiées
d’abord dans le “Times”; celles intitulées : “Lettres à la famille”
dans le “Morning Post”; et celles intitulées : “L’Égypte des
Magiciens” dans “Nash’s Magazine”.
Seule traduction française autorisée

Tous droits réservés pour tous pays
D’UN LIT DE MARÉE A L’AUTRE
(1892-95)
EN VUE DE MONADNOCK.
A TRAVERS UN CONTINENT.
LA LISIÈRE DE L’ORIENT.
NOS HOMMES D’OUTRE-MER.
TREMBLEMENTS DE TERRE.
UNE DEMI-DOUZAINE DE TABLEAUX.
« LES CAPITAINES COURAGEUX ».
RIEN QUE D’UN CÔTÉ.
LETTRES D’UN CARNET D’HIVER.
EN VUE DE MONADNOCK
Succédant au temps grisâtre et morne de l’Atlantique, un

véritable flot de soleil hivernal accueillit notre vaisseau, dès qu’il
toucha l’Amérique. Nos yeux désaccoutumés en clignaient,
cependant que le New-Yorkais, qui est, comme nul ne l’ignore, la
modestie même, nous assurait : « En fait de belles journées nous
avons mieux : attendez seulement… » (telle ou telle époque) « allez
donc voir » (tel ou tel quartier de la ville). Pour nous, notre bonheur
était au comble et au delà de pouvoir comme à la dérive monter et
redescendre les rues resplendissantes, non sans nous demander,
pourquoi il fallait que la plus belle lumière du monde fût gaspillée sur
les trottoirs les plus détestables qui soient ; faire indéfiniment le tour
du square de Madison, parce que celui-là était rempli de bébés
admirablement habillés jouant à la « Caille », ou contempler
révérencieusement les sergents de ville de New-York, Irlandais aux
larges épaules, au nez camus. Où que nous allions, nous
retrouvions le soleil, prodigue, illimité, travaillant neuf heures par
jour, le soleil avec les perspectives aux lignes nettes et les couleurs
de sa création. La seule pensée que quelqu’un eût osé qualifier ce
climat de lourd et humide, voire de « presque tropical », causait un
choc. Pourtant il vint ce quelqu’un et il nous dit : « Allez au Nord, si
vous voulez du beau temps, alors du beau temps. Allez dans la
Nouvelle Angleterre. »
Ainsi, par un après-midi ensoleillé, New-York disparut avec son
bruit et son tumulte, ses odeurs complexes, ses appartements
surchauffés et ses habitants beaucoup trop énergiques, tandis que
le train se dirigeait vers le Nord, vers les pays de la neige. Ce fut
soudain, d’un seul coup — presque, aurait-on dit, dans un seul tour
de roues — que celle-ci apparut, recouvrant l’herbe tuée par l’hiver
et changeant en mares d’encre les étangs gelés qui paraissaient si
blancs à l’ombre d’arbres grêles.
A la tombée de la nuit, une petite ville construite en bois, toute
blanche, drapée et silencieuse, vint se glisser le long des portières et
la forte lumière du wagon éclaira un traîneau, dont le conducteur
était enfoui jusqu’au nez dans des foulards et des fourrures, filant au
tournant d’une rue. Or, on a beau l’avoir contemplé dans les livres
d’images, le traîneau tel qu’on se le représente est loin d’être ce qu’il
est en réalité, un simple moyen de locomotion à la fin d’un voyage.
Mais il vaut mieux ne pas se montrer trop curieux, car l’Américain qui
vient de vous raconter en détail comment un jour il lui était arrivé de
suivre de Chelsea à la Tour de Londres, un soldat écossais portant
le kilt, par pure curiosité pour ses genoux découverts et son sporran,
rirait de l’intérêt que vous manifestez pour ce vulgaire traîneau.
Le personnel du train — sans aucun doute c’en serait fait de la
grande nation américaine si elle était privée de la noble société des
garde-freins, conducteurs, contrôleurs des wagons Pullman, facteurs
nègres et crieurs de journaux, — racontait, étalé à l’aise dans les
compartiments de fumeurs, de délectables histoires de voies
bloquées par la neige sur la ligne de Montréal, d’attaques
désespérées — quatre locomotives précédées d’un chasse-neige —
qu’il fallait livrer à des amas atteignant trente pieds de hauteur ; du
plaisir qu’on a à marcher sur le haut des wagons de marchandises
pour bloquer un train tandis que le thermomètre marque trente au-
dessous de zéro.
« Cela revient meilleur marché de tuer des gens de cette façon
que de mettre des freins à air comprimé sur les convois de
marchandises », dit le garde-frein.
Trente degrés au-dessous de zéro ! température inconcevable,
oui, jusqu’à ce qu’on y entrât en plein en sortant du train à minuit, et
que le premier contact avec cet air clair et immobile vous eût coupé
la respiration comme le fait un plongeon dans la mer. Un morse,
assis sur un monticule de laine, nous accueillit dans son traîneau. Il
nous enveloppa de manteaux de peaux de chèvre aux longs poils,
nous mit des passe-montagnes se rabattant sur les oreilles, des
peaux de buffles, des couvertures, puis encore des peaux de buffle,
tant et si bien que nous aussi ressemblions à des morses et
évoluions avec presque autant de grâce. L’air était tranchant comme
la lame d’une épée fraîchement aiguisée ; l’haleine gelait sur les
revers des habits, on ne sentait plus son nez, et les yeux pleuraient
amèrement de ce que les chevaux avaient hâte de rentrer à l’écurie,
et pour la bonne raison que filer rapidement dans une atmosphère à
zéro degré fait venir les larmes aux yeux. Sans le carillon des grelots
du traîneau on aurait pu se croire dans un rêve : nul bruit de sabots
sur la neige ; seuls les patins poussaient parfois un léger soupir en
franchissant quelque ondulation de terrain, et les collines alentour,
drapées de blanc, gardaient un silence de mort. Le Connecticut
cependant avait gardé sa vie, traînée liquide et noire à travers la
glace compacte. On pouvait entendre l’eau grognant, tel un roquet,
aux talons de petits icebergs. Partout ailleurs il n’y avait sous la lune
que de la neige qui s’était amoncelée jusqu’à hauteur des barrières
de pierre ou qui, à leur sommet, retombait en festons d’argent ; de la
neige entassée des deux côtés de la route, alourdissant les pins et
les sapins des bois, et où, par contraste, l’air semblait tiède comme
dans une serre chaude. Le spectacle qui s’offrait à nous était d’une
indescriptible beauté car la nature, avec un dédain tout japonais
pour la perspective, avait tracé là, en noir et blanc sa plus
audacieuse esquisse que venaient modifier de temps en temps les
crayons hardis et toujours mobiles de la lune.
Au matin l’autre partie du tableau nous fut révélée sous les
couleurs du soleil. Pas un seul nuage au ciel qui, sur la ligne
neigeuse de l’horizon, reposait tel un saphir sur du velours blanc.
Des collines d’un blanc éclatant, d’autres tachetées et bordées de
bois comme d’une fourrure, se dressaient au-dessus des surfaces
compactes et blanches de la plaine tandis que le soleil éclaboussait
d’une orgie de lumière leurs multiples broderies, jusqu’à en éblouir
les yeux. Çà et là sur les versants exposés, la chaleur du jour — le
thermomètre marquait presque 40 — et le froid de la nuit avaient
formé sur la neige une croûte chauve et brûlante, mais, en général,
tout était recouvert d’une poudre fine, prête à capter la lumière
comme dans un prisme et à la refléter en des milliers de cristaux. Au
milieu de cette magnificence, tout comme si de rien n’était, un
traîneau de bois, tiré par deux bœufs roux aux longs poils, chargé de
troncs d’arbres dénués d’écorce et saupoudrés d’une poussière de
diamant, descendit le chemin dans un nuage de glaciale buée.
Confondre le traîneau qu’on emploie comme moyen de
locomotion et celui consacré aux charrois de marchandises est,
dans cette région, un signe d’inexpérience et c’est, je crois, la
preuve que l’on n’est un propre à rien que d’imaginer qu’on conduit
les bœufs comme cela se fait ailleurs, en leur tortillant la queue de
façon scientifique. Muni de mitaines rouges, de guêtres de feutre
montant jusqu’aux genoux, et, il se peut aussi, d’un manteau gris
argent de peau de rat, le conducteur accompagne son attelage en
criant : Huehan, tout comme on le raconte dans les récits
américains. Les paroles du charretier expliquent bien des choses en
ce qui touche les histoires écrites en dialecte, car même les
meilleures sont pour la plupart des lecteurs un véritable châtiment.
Maintenant qu’il m’est arrivé d’entendre l’accent long et traînant de
Vermont, je m’étonne non point de ce que les contes de la Nouvelle
Angleterre soient imprimés en ce que, pour les besoins de la cause,
nous appellerons de l’anglais et de la typographie anglaise, mais
bien plutôt de ce qu’ils n’aient pas paru en suédois ou en russe, car
notre alphabet est vraiment trop limité. Cette région appartient, selon
des lois, — inconnues aux États-Unis, — mais admises dans le
monde entier, en propre au roman de la Nouvelle Angleterre et aux
femmes auteurs qui l’écrivent. Voilà ce que l’on sent dans l’air
même, dès qu’on aperçoit ces chalets de bois peints en blanc,
abandonnés dans la neige, cette maison d’école à l’aspect sévère,
et ces habitants — hommes des fermes, femmes qui travaillent
autant qu’eux, avec peut-être moins de joies dans leur vie — ces
autres demeures, bien peintes, aux toits bizarres, appartenant à
Monsieur un Tel, juge, avocat ou banquier, tous potentats dans cette
métropole de six mille habitants située à proximité de la gare de
chemin de fer. Et l’on se rend mieux compte encore de ce qu’est
cette atmosphère, lorsqu’on lit dans les journaux locaux des
annonces de « soupers fins » ou de « réunions pieuses » organisés
par telle ou telle secte, sandwichées au milieu de paragraphes qui
témoignent d’un intérêt sympathique et fraternel, et qui prouvent bien
que les gens du district vivent, — sans cependant s’égorger entre
eux, — sur un pied d’effarante intimité.
Les descendants de la vieille souche, ceux qui habitent les plus
anciennes demeures, nés et élevés alentour, ne voudraient à aucun
prix vivre en dehors de la ville, mais il y a des gens du Sud, vrais
fous, ceux-là, (hommes et femmes de Boston et autres cités
semblables) qui vont jusqu’à construire des maisons en rase
campagne, à trois et même à quatre kilomètres de la Grand’Rue qui
a 400 mètres de long et qui est le centre de la vie et de la
population. Avec les étrangers, surtout s’ils ne font pas leurs
provisions d’épicerie « dans la Rue », autrement dit en ville, la ville a
peu de rapports ; n’empêche qu’elle sait tout, et même davantage,
de ce qui se passe parmi eux. Leurs vêtements, leur bétail, leurs
idées, les manières de leurs enfants, leur façon de traiter leurs
domestiques et tout autre chose imaginable, est rapportée,
examinée, discutée, et rediscutée encore du haut en bas de Main
Street. Or la sagesse que possède Vermont n’étant pas toujours
suffisante pour parvenir avec la délicatesse voulue à la pleine
compréhension de tous les problèmes de la vie d’autrui, commet
parfois des erreurs pathétiques et, de ce fait, la ville en vient aux
prises. On voit donc que par le monde entier les villes de province
d’une certaine dimension ne diffèrent pas essentiellement les unes
des autres. La conversation des fermiers roule sur leurs fermes :
questions d’achats, d’hypothèques et de vente, de droits
d’enregistrement, de lignes de délimitations et d’impôts vicinaux.
C’est au beau milieu de la Nouvelle Zélande, à la lisière des plaines
où courent les chevaux sauvages que j’entendis ce genre de
conversation pour la dernière fois, lorsqu’un homme et une femme, à
trente kilomètres de leur plus proche voisin passèrent la moitié de la
nuit à discuter exactement les mêmes questions que celles qui
formaient le fond de la conversation des gens de la Grand’Rue, à
Vermont, États-Unis.
Il existe au moins un homme dans l’État que cette localité
exaspère. C’est un garçon de ferme, élevé dans un hameau à vingt
ou trente kilomètres de la voie ferrée la plus proche et qui, audace
sans pareille, s’est un jour aventuré jusqu’ici. Mais l’agitation et le
tumulte de la Grand’Rue, la clarté inaccoutumée des lampes
électriques, son pâté de maisons de commerce construites en brique
rouge, à cinq étages, l’effraient et l’inquiètent. Aussi a-t-il pris du
service dans une ferme bien loin de ces plaisirs délirants et
s’empresse-t-il de dire : « On m’a offert vingt-cinq dollars par mois
pour travailler dans une boulangerie de New-York, mais pas de
danger qu’on me voie dans quelque New-York que ce soit ; j’ai vu
Main Street et j’en suis tout retourné. » Ses capacités consistent à
rentrer le foin et à soigner le bétail. La vie de la ferme en hiver n’est
d’ailleurs pas l’oisiveté relative dont on parle tant. Chaque heure, au
contraire, semble avoir ses soixante minutes de travail, car le bétail
est tenu dans les étables et mange sans fin ; il faut mener boire les
poulains, dans les étangs gelés dont on doit au besoin briser la
glace et emmagasiner de la glace pour l’été. C’est alors seulement
que commence le vrai travail, entendez par là rentrer le bois de
chauffage, car la Nouvelle Angleterre n’a que ses forêts pour se
ravitailler en combustible. A l’automne on marque les arbres, juste
avant la chute des feuilles, en faisant une entaille dans l’écorce ;
plus tard on les abat, on les coupe en bûches de quatre pieds de
long, et dès que la neige amie le permet, on les amène en traîneau
jusqu’au bûcher. Ensuite on peut s’occuper des besoins de la ferme,
et celle-ci, tout comme une arche de pont, n’est jamais en repos.
Puis vient la saison du sirop d’érable. Lorsque la sève commence à
travailler on fait des incisions dans les majestueux érables pour la
recueillir dans de petits seaux de dimensions absurdes (une vache
dont on trairait le lait dans un dé donnerait une idée de la
disproportion) et la vider ensuite dans des chaudrons.
Enfin (c’est le moment où l’on se réunit pour la récolte du sucre)
on verse le sirop bouillant dans des récipients en fer remplis de
neige fraîche où il durcit, tandis qu’en faisant semblant d’aider l’on
se rend poisseux, et tout le monde, garçons et filles flirtent à plaisir.
Même l’introduction d’appareils brevetés à évaporer le sucre n’a pas
porté atteinte aux amourettes.
Les hommes avec qui flirter sont assez rares, bien que la disette
soit moins grande dans les villes possédant leurs propres
manufactures — où l’amoureux peut se rendre le dimanche de New-
York, — que dans les fermes et les villages… Les hommes sont
partis : les jeunes, pour livrer bataille à la fortune plus loin, à l’ouest,
tandis que les femmes demeurent, demeurent éternellement,
comme il en va toujours pour elles. Dans les fermes, lorsque les
enfants partent, le vieux père, la vieille mère s’efforcent de faire
marcher la maison sans aide, et le lot qui échoue à la femme est fait
de labeur et de monotonie. Parfois elle devient folle, même assez
fréquemment pour affecter les statistiques de recensement, mais le
plus souvent, espérons-le, elle meurt. Dans les villages où les
travaux pénibles ne sont pas d’une nécessité aussi urgente, les
femmes trouvent à se consoler en formant des clubs et des cercles
littéraires ; elles acquièrent ainsi, à leur façon, beaucoup de sagesse
et de philosophie. Leur méthode certes n’est pas toujours
recommandable, car le comble de leurs souhaits, c’est de posséder
des faits, savoir qu’elles en seront à telle ou telle page d’un volume,
allemand ou italien, avant telle date, et qu’elles auront lu les livres
qu’il fallait, de la bonne manière. En tous cas, elles ont quelque
chose à faire, ce qui leur donne l’illusion qu’elles sont occupées. On
a dit que les récits de la Nouvelle Angleterre étaient restreints,
étriqués ; mais ces aperçus, même lointains, de la terrible vie d’où ils
sont tirés, servent de justification à l’auteur, car, en raison de sa
dureté même, on peut sculpter une coquille de noix de mille façons
différentes.
A vingt-cinq ou trente milles au delà des collines, sur la route des
Montagnes Vertes, se trouvent des fermes délaissées, bâties dans
un pays aride, gardées avec acharnement tant qu’il y eut quelqu’un
pour s’en occuper, puis finalement abandonnées au flanc des
collines, comme autant de chapitres terminés de lamentables
histoires. Au delà de cette désolation il y a des forêts où l’ours et le
daim trouvent encore la paix et où parfois même le castor oublie
qu’on le persécute et ose construire son gîte.
C’est un homme qui aimait les bois pour eux-mêmes et non par
amour du carnage qui m’a raconté tout cela ; un homme de l’Ouest,
aux gestes lents, à la voix calme, qui avait traversé en skis les
plaines neigeuses et qui ne rit même pas lorsque je lui empruntai
ses chaussures pour essayer de marcher. Mais les gigantesques
appareils, semblables à des raquettes de tennis, sur lesquelles sont
tendues des peaux de bête, ne sont pas faciles à manier, et si vous
oubliez de maintenir les talons bien au sol, l’arrière traînant sur la
neige, c’est la pirouette avec la sensation de tomber dans l’eau
profonde, les chevilles attachées à une ceinture de sauvetage. Si
vous perdez l’équilibre, n’essayez pas de le reprendre, mais laissez-
vous choir, moitié assis, moitié à genoux, en couvrant le plus
d’étendue possible. Puis, lorsque vous aurez attrapé le pas du loup,
c’est-à-dire lorsque vous saurez glisser adroitement un pied par-
dessus l’autre, vous oublierez bien vite vos chevilles endolories pour
jouir du plaisir qu’on trouve à traverser des épaisseurs de neige
profondes de six pieds et à prendre des raccourcis par-dessus les
barrières ensevelies.
L’homme de l’Ouest me traduisit les marques faites sur la neige ;
il me montra comment un renard (cette partie du pays est remplie de
renards qu’on tire au fusil parce que la chasse à cheval est
impossible) laisse derrière lui un certain genre de piste, car il marche
avec circonspection, comme un voleur, différente de celle du chien
qui, n’ayant rien à se reprocher, plonge et enfonce de ses quatre
pattes écartées ; comment les racoons et les écureuils s’endorment
tout l’hiver et comment les daims, à la frontière canadienne, font, en
piétinant, de longs sentiers profonds appelés cours, où ils sont
surpris par des hommes importuns, munis d’appareils
photographiques, qui les tiennent par la queue lorsqu’ils sont
enlisés, et par ce moyen parviennent à reproduire sur l’écran leur
dignité apeurée. Il m’a parlé aussi des gens, des mœurs et des
coutumes de ces habitants de la Nouvelle Angleterre ; comment ils
fleurissent et prospèrent dans le Far-West, le long des lignes de
chemin de fer les plus récentes, où la rivalité de deux compagnies
se disputant les mêmes défilés provoque presque la guerre civile ;
comment il existe un pays pas très loin d’ici, appelé la Calédonie,
peuplé d’Écossais, gens très forts en affaires, capables à ce point de
vue d’en remontrer aux habitants de la Nouvelle Angleterre eux-
mêmes, et qui, Américains-Écossais de naissance, nomment encore
leurs villes d’après les cités de leur race économe et prospère…
Tout cela était plein de charme pour moi, aussi nouveau que le bruit
régulier des snow-boots mordant la neige, et le silence éblouissant
des collines.
Au delà de la chaîne des montagnes la plus éloignée, où les pins
se détachant sur l’unique pic solitaire s’estompent et ne forment plus
qu’une légère brume bleue, une véritable montagne, et non pas une
colline, pointait vers le ciel, pareille à quelque gigantesque ongle de
pouce.
— Ça, c’est Monadnock, me dit l’homme de l’Ouest, toutes les
collines portent un nom indien. Vous avez laissé Wantastiquet à
droite en quittant la ville.
Vous avez dû remarquer que bien souvent un mot revient à la
mémoire au bout de plusieurs années, réveillant toutes sortes
d’associations saugrenues. J’avais rencontré ce nom de Monadnock
sur le papier dans une parodie éhontée du style d’Emerson, avant
même que le style ou les vers n’eussent présenté quelque intérêt
pour moi. Mais le mot m’avait frappé à cause de certains rythmes,
entre autres ceux-ci :
… sommet couronné, contemporain

de la crête de Monadnock ;
et mes ailes étendues
touchent l’Est et l’Ouest…
Plus tard, le même mot, recherché pour le même motif que le

nom béni de la Mésopotamie, me conduisit à Emerson, à son poème
sur le pic lui-même, vieux géant sage « absorbé dans ses affaires
avec le ciel », qui nous rend sensés et sobres, et nous libère de
toute petitesse lorsque nous mettons notre confiance en lui. Aussi
Monadnock en était-il venu à vouloir dire tout ce qui aide, guérit ; tout
ce qui calme, et lorsque, ayant gagné le centre du New-Hampshire,
je le vis apparaître, il ne manqua point à ses promesses. Dans cette
tranquillité absolue, une branche de sapin pliant sous son trop lourd
fardeau de neige s’affaissa d’un pied ou deux, avec un petit soupir
de fatigue ; puis la neige glissa et le rameau oscillant se redressa et
vivement rejoignit ses camarades.
En l’honneur de Monadnock nous fîmes cet après-midi-là une
statue de neige représentant Gautama Bouddha, portrait un peu trop
ramassé et non d’une symétrie parfaite, mais à la taille impériale et
reposante. Lui, faisait face à la montagne et tout à coup, des
hommes passant en traîneau sur la route, s’arrêtèrent pour le
regarder. Or, les réflexions pleines d’étonnement de deux fermiers
de Vermont sur la nature et les propriétés d’un dieu ventru valent la
peine qu’on les écoute. Ce n’était nullement sa race qui les intriguait,
car il était d’un blanc agressif, mais les tailles arrondies ont l’air de
n’être plus à la mode dans l’État de Vermont, du moins l’affirmèrent-
ils avec force jurons curieux et rares.
Le lendemain, toutes les vaines futilités disparurent dans une
tempête de neige qui remplit les creux des collines d’une
tourbillonnante brume bleue, inclina les branches des arbres si bas
qu’il fallait baisser la tête en passant et ne pas craindre d’être
saupoudré et effaça la trace des traîneaux.
Notre Mère Nature est merveilleusement ordonnée si on la laisse
faire. Ce jour-là, elle arrondit tous les angles, nivela toutes les
pentes, et borda si bien le lit blanc, qu’il s’étendait sans le moindre
pli jusqu’à l’échine des sapins et des pins qui ne voulaient pas
s’endormir.
— En ce moment, me dit l’homme de l’Ouest, tandis que nous
nous dirigions vers la gare et, hélas ! vers New-York, toutes mes
traces ont disparu ; mais à la fonte des neiges, d’ici une semaine ou
un mois, elles reparaîtront et montreront où j’ai passé !
Idée bizarre, n’est-ce pas ? Imaginez un meurtre commis dans
les bois déserts, une rafale de neige qui recouvre les traces du
meurtrier s’enfuyant avant que le vengeur du sang versé n’ait
enseveli le cadavre, et puis, une semaine plus tard, le retrait de la
neige traîtresse, révélant pas à pas le chemin que Caïn avait pris,
découvrant une à une les empreintes fatales de ses snow-boots
comme autant de disques noirs sur le blanc du chemin, jusqu’au
bout.
Il y aurait tant et tant à écrire, si cela en valait la peine, sur cette
drôle de petite ville près de la gare du chemin de fer, dont la vie
semble glisser, en toute apparence, aussi doucement que les
coupés montés sur les traîneaux, mais qui à l’intérieur est troublée
par les haines, les soucis et les jalousies tourmentant toutes les
âmes, sauf celles des dieux. Par exemple, — mais non, il vaut mieux
se rappeler la leçon que donne Monadnock, et Emerson qui dit
d’autre part : « Zeus hait les gens officieux et ceux qui font trop. »
Qu’il existe de pareilles gens, une voix traînante et nasillarde qui
traverse la Grand’Rue, l’atteste. Un fermier est en train de détacher
ses chevaux d’un poteau faisant face à un magasin, il reste le licol à
la main et exprime son opinion, à un voisin, et au monde en
général :
— Pour quant à ces Andersons ! c’te clique-là, je t’ dis moi, que
ça n’a aucune idée de saveoir vivre !
A TRAVERS UN CONTINENT
On ne se soustrait pas facilement à une grande ville. Nous

avions encore tout un continent à traverser et pour cette raison nous
nous attardions dans New-York, tant et si bien que nous avions des
remords à l’idée de quitter cette ville qui nous rappelait le foyer.
Pourtant, plus on l’étudiait, plus elle nous révélait ses grotesques
tares : ses rues mal pavées, ses rues elles-mêmes, sa mauvaise
police municipale et des conditions sanitaires qui, sans la mer
charitable, seraient pires encore. Personne, jusqu’ici, n’a abordé le
problème de l’administration de New-York dans l’esprit voulu ; c’est-
à-dire, en le considérant comme le résultat d’une incapacité, d’un
manque de civilisation barbare, crasseux, et d’un gaspillage effréné.
Personne non plus ne le fera, très probablement, car toute réflexion
qu’on oserait émettre sur cette auge longue et étroite serait
interprétée comme une attaque malveillante dirigée contre l’esprit et
la majesté de la Grande Nation Américaine et se terminerait en
comparaisons irritantes. Pourtant, même à supposer que d’une
façon permanente toutes les rues de Londres fussent sens dessus
dessous et tous les réverbères renversés, cela n’empêcherait pas
les rues de New-York, prises en bloc, de ressembler étonnamment à
une plage de Zanzibar ou aux abords d’un village zoulou. Des
rigoles, des trous, des ornières ; des pavés pointus et tout de
travers ; des trottoirs mal entretenus, aux bordures dépassant le
niveau de deux à trois pouces ; des rails de tramways faisant saillie
sur la chaussée ; des matériaux de construction éparpillés jusqu’au
milieu de la rue ; de la chaux, des planches, des pierres taillées et
des boîtes à ordures semées généreusement partout ; les voitures
s’aventurant au hasard ; de lourds camions rencontrant des coupés
aux croisements des rues ; des poteaux chancelants, grossièrement
taillés et non peints ; des becs de gaz titubants et tordus ; et,

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Urban Panegyric and the

Transformation of the Medieval City,

Urban Panegyric and

A process of intensive urbanization marked Europe’s twelfth and thirteenth ­centuries.

2 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

l­andscapes and communities in ways which personal, face-to-face relationships

invariably open-ended. Fortunately, many of the key components of civic

7 A. Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. S. B. Young (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 161–2.

4 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

important to establish some very broad methodological parameters at the outset,

6 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

Garlande’s Parisiana Poetria (c.1231–35), a student textbook on Latin prose and

8 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

23 A work which remains fundamental in any discussion of urban identities is S. Reynolds,

25 Hyde, ‘Medieval Descriptions’, pp. 308–10.

10 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

It represented both the Ciceronian ideal of a city as a community of individuals

35 Michaud-Quantin, Universitas, pp. 111–12.

12 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

40 M. Richter, ‘Urbanitas-rusticitas: linguistic aspects of a medieval dichotomy’, Studies in Church

45 Donizone di Canossa, Vita, Bk. I.VIII, line 606, p. 58.

14 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

16 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

60 Hubert, ‘construction de la ville’, pp. 121–2. 61 Riesenberg, Citizenship, p. 111.

18 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

20 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

22 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

twelfth-century renaissance in learning and interest in the Classics. The chapter

1 Krönert, L’Exaltation de Trèves, pp. 285–7.

24 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

The Sources: An Overview 25

26 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

The Sources: An Overview 27

28 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

The Sources: An Overview 29

30 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

The Sources: An Overview 31

32 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

with edifying functions, is the De Preconiis Hispanie (c.1278) of the Franciscan

52 Juan Gil de Zamora, De Preconiis Hispanie, ed. M. de Castro (Madrid, 1955).

The Sources: An Overview 33

treatment in the verse form of the De laude civitatis Laude (c.1252), by an

34 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

Chansons de Geste and Romances accounted for a significant proportion of early

The Sources: An Overview 35

Countless other examples could be added. However, the preceding source

69 For more on these other sources see Chapter 2.

Title: Lettres de voyage (1892-1913)

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Release date: November 27, 2023 [eBook #72244]

Original publication: Paris: Payot, 1922

Credits: Véronique Le Bris, Laurent Vogel and the Online

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTRES DE

PAYOT & CIE, PARIS

LA GUERRE SUR MER, in-16 6 francs.

Seule traduction française autorisée

Succédant au temps grisâtre et morne de l’Atlantique, un

… sommet couronné, contemporain

Plus tard, le même mot, recherché pour le même motif que le

On ne se soustrait pas facilement à une grande ville. Nous

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A process of intensive urbanization marked Europe’s twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

landscapes and communities in ways which personal, face-to-face relationships