Students taking this subject explore how people lived in the cities of pre-industrial Europe. We focus on early-modern European cities before 1850. Themes include streets and squares, buildings, contrasts between town and country, and the appearance of rooms, houses and palaces. We read forms of society from the evidence of their living spaces, asking what each suggests about their inhabitants: whether royal, bourgeois and noble, or homeless, working poor and humble. Drawing on scholarships of place, space and art, also called cultural history and geography, we keep asking the same focus question in the many case studies in this history subject: how did local, communal and personal aspirations for self-expression shape the places and spaces in which people lived, and how did those spaces and places shape the people and their aspirations? While they are mentored at every stage, students have lots of scope in this subject to research topics and to present their findings in new ways.

Subject rules

Readings