The Power of Space: Street Politics in Early Modern Europe (and Beyond): An Introduction

This special issue focuses on the use of political and religious public spaces in early modern Europe and beyond, with a focus on Northern and Southern Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, and the Spanish and the Ottoman Empires. The case studies that make up this volume include different urban contexts and cultures: informal political sites such as the Ottoman port of Acre (Casale and Calcagni); urban spaces of religious conflict in the Low Countries (Van Bruaene); performative spaces of the Imperial city of Augsburg (Tlusty); places of identity in smaller centres in the Kingdom of Naples (de Divitiis); information spaces such as mentideros (gossip corners) in Madrid (Castillo Gómez); and spaces of sociability like Venetian chiovere, i.e., uncultivated outdoor spaces utilized by textile workers for hanging and drying fabrics (Cecchinato). Aiming to offer a street view of early modern politics, this collection seeks to illustrate how ordinary people could interact and collide with power, and in which public urban spaces their political actions could take place. A broader Mediterranean perspective also invites us to problematize Western European political categories that can hardly be applied, for example, to Ottoman society.