The Medieval City and Communal Thought, 1200-1919
In this course we will examine the legacy of the medieval European city in communal political thought between the thirteenth and early twentieth centuries. We begin with texts produced by medieval legists, philosophers, and chroniclers such as Philippe de Beaumanoir, Thomas More, and Jean Froissart. Using contemporary scholarship on medieval urban phenomena like guilds, charity, and the commune as a foundation, we then study a series of nineteenth-century radicals who placed aspects of the medieval city at the center of their communal thought: Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Proudhon, Matilda Gage, and Kautsky. These voices represent unexpected mobilizations of the medieval past as inspiration, lesson, and analytical category for understanding the radical outpourings that shook Europe c. 1848-1919.
Ron Makleff is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe focusing on cities, the emergence of the nation-state, and the material and intellectual legacies of archives as institutions of power, memory and forgetting./