Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej (Jan 2015)
Główne nurty badań nad przestrzenią miasta średniowiecznego
Abstract
THE MAJOR LINES OF RESEARCH ON MEDIAEVAL TOWN SPACE The article reflects on the paradigm of research on urban space and history introduced in the 1980s, which views space as a process and a product of the human being and human groups, independent of the geographical dimension. This paradigm is founded on concepts of cultural geography on the one hand and on the history of mentality and Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space on the other. Applying it to historical studies requires revising views on borders between spaces; treating space as dynamic, constantly changing its significance and dependent on human activity; concentrating on issues of perceiving, living in, experiencing and imagining space; relating everyday life and ritual practices to the perception of space; considering the space of gender; qualifying space with new epithets thanks to which it can acquire new meanings (literary, imaginary, utopian space); opening to the multidimensionality and multifunctionality of the notion of space; and departing from the topographic dimension. A crucial factor in making space an autonomous topic in the history of towns in the perspective of cultural studies was research on urban rituals. The article points to the contexts of new theories in studies on space, by which the authors mean the 20thcentury philosophical reflection and historiographic tradition of research on urban space. As to the philosophical reflection, they focus on the views of neo-Kantians: Martin Heidegger, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. In the discussion of the historiographic tradition, on the other hand, they stress the issues which were noticed as early as in the 19th century and which converge with the topics highlighted by the so-called spatial turn. The authors postulate working out a new paradigm, close to but not identical with the one discussed in the article, for the purpose of research on Polish towns (especially as regards the Middle Ages, due to the scarcity of sources), which would facilitate studying space as a human product not only in unrepresentative large towns and make up for the limitations of the question-naire method, which is conditioned by the scarcity of sources.
