Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities

Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They set out to examine the relationship between institutional arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity, and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and economic sphere.

Karel Davids is Chair of Economic and Social History in the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Economics at the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His publications in English include Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences: China and Europe Compared c.700-1800 (2013); The Rise and Decline of Dutch Technological Leadership. Technology, Economy and Culture in the Dutch Republic, 1350-1800 (2008); and numerous articles on technological, economic and maritime history. Bert De Munck is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He has published on urban history, craft guilds and apprenticeship, vocational training and the circulation of knowledge, and the ’repertoires of evaluation’ regarding skills and products. His publications include Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (2012) (co-edited with Anne Winter); Technologies of Learning. Apprenticeship in Antwerp from the 15th Century to the End of the Ancien Régime (2007); and Learning on the Shop Floor. Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship (2007) (co-edited with Hugo Soly and Steven L. Kaplan).