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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N M E D I E VA L
E U RO P E A N H I S TO RY

General Editors
joh n h . a rn old pat r i c k j . ge a ry
and
joh n wat ts
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/09/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/09/18, SPi

Urban Panegyric and

the Transformation of
the Medieval City,
1100–1300
PAU L O L D F I E L D

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/09/18, SPi

3
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/09/18, SPi

Acknowledgements
Having read so much panegyric over the course of writing this book, it is such a
great delight to finally have the opportunity to reverse the flow and deliver my own
praise for countless individuals who have provided invaluable advice, support, and
inspiration. I thank my colleagues (past and present) in History at the University
of Manchester for numerous insightful conversations about praise and cities,
­particularly Georg Christ, Katy Dutton, Paul Fouracre, Charles Insley, Stephen
Mossman, and Martin Ryan. I am also very grateful for the support of the
University in granting a period of research leave, and also to the British Academy
for the award of a mid-career Fellowship for six months in 2016, both of which
provided me with valuable time and space to enrich and develop this project. In
addition, I have had the great fortune to receive superb support from staff at vari-
ous libraries: the document supply team in the University Library for locating
numerous inter-library loans on my behalf; and staff in the Special Collections at
the John Rylands Library, Manchester, those at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and
the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh who enabled me to consult important
incunabula and manuscripts. I must also thank the editorial team at Oxford
University Press, Stephanie Ireland, Cathryn Steele, the anonymous readers, and
the series editors John Arnold and especially John Watts, all of whom have sup-
ported and guided me with great patience and skill: this book is immeasurably
stronger as a result. A great pleasure in working on such a big project is the oppor-
tunity it opens up for speaking with and learning from colleagues elsewhere in
academia. Aside from my aforementioned colleagues at Manchester and Oxford
University Press, I have also had the great fortune to have received crucial assistance
and expert advice from Laura Ashe, David Bachrach, Andrew Brown, Ardis
Butterfield, Jan Dumolyn, Tim Greenwood, Tom Licence, Maureen Miller, James
M. Murray, David Rollason, Dennis Romano, Jeffrey Ruth, Graeme Small,
Fabrizio Titone, Steven Vanderputten, Gary Warnaby, and Chris Wickham. A spe-
cial thanks is always reserved for Graham Loud and his willingness to offer his
expertise and guidance and for Ian Moxon likewise with his invaluable assistance
with difficult Latin passages and for generously offering his own translations.
The support and enthusiasm of friends and family has, however, been the most
crucial factor in helping me see this project through to its completion. Their curi-
osity and comfort repeatedly served as a tonic and I am left amused and touched
at being surrounded by loved ones who now know far more than any non-academic
should about things medieval! But, in particular my wife Kate, and my young sons
Finlay and Sebastian, have truly demonstrated to me the paradox of praise; that the
more praiseworthy a thing is, the harder it is to articulate that praise. For where to
start and where to stop praising three so very important individuals to me? To say
Kate encouraged and strengthened me, and to report that Finlay and Sebastian
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/09/18, SPi

vi Acknowledgements

showed such pride and delight in my endeavours, reflects mere glimmers of a much
deeper, much more inspiring, and wholly irreplaceable support which they
unknowingly but unconditionally gave. No praise can encapsulate what this has
meant to me. No praise can convey how fortunate I feel. And no praise can stand
as thanks for the smile that now crosses my face as I think of all their warmth and
of all their mischief.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/09/18, SPi

Contents

Introduction 1
1. The Sources: An Overview 23
2. Interpretation and Audience 36
3. The Holy City 61
4. The Evil City: Urban Critiques 95
5. The City of Abundance: Commerce, Hinterland, People 111
6. Urban Landscapes and Sites of Power 130
7. Education, History, and Sophistication 160
In Praise of the Medieval City: Conclusions 187

Bibliography 191
Index 212
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/09/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

Introduction

A process of intensive urbanization marked Europe’s twelfth and thirteenth ­centuries.

This much has been abundantly clear ever since Henri Pirenne’s pioneering thesis
and the rich and contested historiography it has generated on the history of
medieval Europe’s cities.1 If one can question the morphologies, chronologies,
continuities, and intensities evident throughout the course of medieval urbaniza-
tion, the tangible reality of physical change affected in those cities is irrefutable.
Demographic, material, commercial, and topographic transformation occurred
within cities—in simple terms they became bigger, more influential within wider
economic networks, and their layout more complex and more textured—while
numerous urban settlements were established ex novo; and these processes reached
their apex, or experienced crucial accelerations, roughly during the two centuries
running from 1100 to 1300. Consequently, cities could now harness newfound
political, commercial, cultural, and military influence which positioned them at
the centre of Europe’s map of power politics.
To note, however, that change occurred, and to try to measure it in quantifiable
terms (this city’s population doubled, that city built twenty new churches), is to
present only half the picture. The other half was an imagined city built on con-
stantly renewable cultural memories, emotions, and affinities; a malleable city
which could be more meaningful and intrinsic to an urban inhabitant’s lived
­experience. Thus, another crucial facet to change and urbanization in our period
was the formation of civic consciousness.2 It was underpinned by the rapid growth
of urban populations and conurbations and the concomitant competition for
resources and status which this aroused among urban centres. This necessitated
greater focus on affective conduits for affinities—the language of citizenship, the
cultivation of patron saints, the production of civic histories, the construction
of civic buildings, and the delineation of more expansive and regularized public
spaces, to name but a few—all of which could bind together expanded urban

1 H. Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. F. D. Halsey (Princeton,
1925); examples of wide-ranging comparative works on the medieval city include: E. Ennen, Die
Europäische Stadt des Mittelalters (Göttingen, 1972); D. Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City:
From Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century (London, 1997); K. D. Lilley, Urban Life in the
Middle Ages, 1000–1450 (Basingstoke, 2001); P. Boucheron et al., Histoire de l’Europe urbaine. Tome.
1. De l’Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle. Genèse des villes européenes (Paris, 2003); C. Loveluck, Northwest
Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. a d 600–1150: A Comparative Archaeology (Cambridge, 2013).
2 For important, though broad, discussion see: P. Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition:
Plato to Rousseau (Chapel Hill, 1992), pp. 118–39.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

2 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

l­andscapes and communities in ways which personal, face-to-face relationships

alone could not, and which could project a positive (often imagined) image of the city.
Integral to the generation of civic consciousness was the capability to d
­ isseminate
its core messages, and in the period post-1100 we see such capabilities put into
practice in ways which had arguably not been achieved on such a widespread scale
since antiquity. Increased literacy rates and the development of new centres of
education, the maturation and expanded aspirations of urban governments, the
management of the physical urban landscape, and novel expressions of religious
devotion, particularly among the laity, all stimulated more articulate attachments
to, and understandings of, the city which attempted to transcend the increasingly
eclectic groupings which co-habited the urban landscape. This civic consciousness
created appreciation of the positive values connected with the urban world,
attached pride to one’s home city, and countered negative, disparaging perspectives
on the city. It was nuanced in scholarly circles by exposure to Aristotle’s Politics,
which became available once again in the thirteenth century, and also by a deeper
engagement with Ciceronian texts which emphasized the unified communitas and
its civic obligations.3 Drawing from these ideas, that influential medieval thinker
Thomas Aquinas identified the ‘ultimate community’ in the self-sufficient civitas.4
Thus, identifying and understanding the development of civic awareness opens
up the possibility of evaluating what the more fundamental urban transformations
of the period meant, in qualitative terms, to some of those who directly experi-
enced them. Crucially, it allows us to assess which aspects of this great phase
of urbanization challenged, empowered, bewildered, and defined contemporary
city-dwellers, and to evaluate what the city represented to them. And framing the
foregoing sketch is the acknowledgement that medieval notions of urban living
can continue to question the so-called myth of modernity ‘as a radical break with
the past’.5 For civic consciousness in the Central Middle Ages was very much a
conscious ‘mode of being’ well before commentators of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries—such as the celebrated cultural observer Walter Benjamin—identified
‘civicness’ as an emblem of modernity.6
Civic consciousness is, of course, a more ephemeral entity to identify than a
newly built city wall or parish church; it can appear in all manner of guises, often
underlying rather than directly defining developments, and its interpretation

3 D. Luscombe, ‘City and Politics before the coming of the Politics: some illustrations’, in D. Abulafia,
M. Franklin, M. Rubin (eds), Church and City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 41–3.
4 Luscombe, ‘City and Politics’, p. 48; H-J. Schmidt, ‘Societas christiana in civitate: Städtekritik
und Städtelob im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift, CCLVII, ii (1993), pp. 333–4.
5 See D. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (Hoboken, 2013), who prefers to see the formation of
modernity less in terms of breaks and more so in ‘decisive moments of creative destruction’ (p. 1).
6 For an overview on Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the city see G. Gilloch, Myth and
Metropolis. Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–20. A. Butterfield, ‘Chaucer and
the Detritus of the City’, in A. Butterfield (ed.), Chaucer and the City (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 3–22
offers an excellent survey on how Benjamin’s approach can be applied to thinking on the city, and
concludes with the observation, important for assessing the medieval city, ‘that modernity is always
changing, and has always been there’ (p. 22). See also M. Boone, ‘Cities in Late Medieval Europe. The
Promise and the Curse of Modernity’, Urban History, XXXIX (2012), pp. 329–49 for an excellent
discussion of the role of the medieval city in scholarly discourses on modernity.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

Introduction 3

invariably open-ended. Fortunately, many of the key components of civic

­consciousness were absorbed into, and articulated most vividly by, literary works
which offered praise of cities—urban panegyric—which were produced in far
greater quantity during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than at any previous
point. Crucially too, the messages within these works of urban panegyric reached
a far greater audience than had been the case for comparable forms in the Early
Middle Ages. Their material ostensibly addressed the most prominent, laudatory
features of urban living, but at the same time tapped into a range of qualitative,
quantitative, and functional transformations that were occurring throughout
Medieval Europe’s cities so as to serve as commentaries on what the medieval city
meant to (at least some of ) its inhabitants. Indeed, used reflectively these works
also demonstrate what the city was not, or what it should not be, those points on
which urban life might be censured. In short they act as cultural texts, a ‘storage
medium’ for the construction of cultural memories.7
The present study thus utilizes this vital body of material which has, to my
mind, not been sufficiently integrated into studies of medieval urban life. Urban
panegyric has often been dismissed as being too bound by convention, rhetoric,
and exaggeration and therefore rather sidelined from understandings of the medi-
eval city. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the messages within urban
panegyric are indeed highly valuable ones. It represents the first sustained
­examination of the content and significance of urban panegyric in the Central
Middle Ages. It will connect the production of urban panegyric to two major
underlying transformations in the medieval city. It will explore how the physical
and functional changes in medieval cities influenced the production of laudatory
material on the city and by extension how this shaped civic consciousness.
Connected to this, it will ask, vice versa, what that material can reveal about urban
transformation. It will also locate the role of urban panegyric in the wider ideological
battle which orbited around the concept of the medieval city; one in which new
discourses emerged after c.1100 and which contested notions of the evil and the
good city.

U R B A N PA N E G Y R I C A N D I T S S O U RC E S

This work aims to track both physical and ideological change associated with the
city during the crucial period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and uniquely
to do so through the prism of urban panegyric, a vastly undervalued textual
record which offers a significant voice on these transitions and which has yet to
be examined extensively nor fully connected to wider urban transitions. It will
provide a wide and comparative geographic analysis, incorporating material on
England, Flanders, France, Germany, Iberia, Northern and Southern Italy and
Sicily, and (occasionally) the Near East. In Chapter 2 we will discuss at greater
length how the material within some of the sources can be interpreted. But it is

7 A. Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. S. B. Young (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 161–2.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

4 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

important to establish some very broad methodological parameters at the outset,

by considering how this study defines urban panegyric.
Urban panegyric appears in many literary shapes and sizes, but simply put,
I identify it here as any textual record that can be interpreted as praising (implicitly
or explicitly) an aspect of urban life. Thus, for example, seemingly uncomplicated
‘descriptions’ of cities can often be viewed—as will be shown in this study—as
implicit praise. At the more explicit end of the scale, at its most formulaic, and
arguably most discernible, urban panegyric was influenced by the laus civitatis.
This literary template crystallized during Antiquity via rhetorical treatises on
the construction of panegyric and encomium which were produced by some
of the most renowned rhetoricians and grammarians of the day: Quintilian,
Hermogenes, Priscian, and Menander Rhetor to name some of the most ­important.8
Collectively these works demonstrated ways in which praise could be applied to a
city, and their guidance remained influential, not least because its flexibility ­covered
most of the fundamental characteristics of the city in the Middle Ages. Popular
subjects for praise included: the origins of a city and the etymology of its name,
its physical size, its material legacy (religious and secular buildings; monumental
structures such as city walls, towers, and gates; public spaces such as squares,
amphitheatres and marketplaces), its wealth and commercial vitality, its geographical
situation and layout (including fertility of surrounding lands), the attributes/
achievements of its inhabitants (especially if they were pious, learned, or famous)
and (from the Christian era) of its chief patron saints, and the city’s status com-
parative to other urban centres. The classical influences derived from the early
rhetorical texts on urban panegyric were subsequently overlaid by Christian under-
standings of the city (for more see Chapter 3) to ensure that there were some
broader framing devices, agendas, and commonalities which underpinned some of
the medieval praise we shall encounter.
An eighth-century Lombard text called De Laudibus Urbium did attempt to aid
an author in the production of urban panegyric, and echoes some of the earlier
classical rhetoricians:
The first praise of cities should furnish the dignity of the founder and it should include
praise of distinguished men and also gods, just as Athens is said to have been established
by Minerva: and they shall seem true rather than fabulous. The second [theme of praise]
concerns the form of fortifications and the site, which is either inland or maritime and
in the mountains or in the plane. The third concerns the fertility of the lands, the boun-
tifulness of the springs, the habits of the inhabitants. Then concerning its ornaments,
which afterwards should be added, or its good fortune, if things had developed unaided
or had occurred by virtue, weapons and warfare. We shall also praise it if that city has
many noble men, by whose glory it shall provide light for the whole world. We should
also be accustomed for praise to be shaped by neighbouring cities, if ours is greater, so

8 For an excellent summary of the pre-1100 material see J. Ruth, Urban Honor in Spain. The Laus
Urbis from Antiquity through Humanism (Lewiston, 2011), Chapters 1–2.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

Introduction 5
that we protect others, or if lesser, so that by the light of neighbours we are illuminated.
In these things also we shall briefly make comparison.9
The tract then showed the reader how to perform such a comparison. Yet, this
type of explicit instruction on the praise of cities was remarkably rare in the Middle
Ages. Thus, despite the guidance of classical rhetorical manuals and the evident
continuities and recurring themes within aspects of medieval urban panegyric, no
linear literary tradition of urban praise developed nor any authoritative taxonomy
of laudatory qualities was established. Astrid Erll’s analysis suggests that ‘only when
authors and recipients of a mnemonic community share the knowledge of genre
conventions [ . . . ] can one speak of the existence of a genre.’10 For the Middle Ages
it remains problematic to establish how far authors and audience were explicitly
aware of such genre conventions rather than absorbing them at a more subcon-
scious cultural level. For these reasons the present study makes no attempt to delin-
eate nor to offer a definitive model of what constitutes the laus civitatis and urban
panegyric in general. Praise within the laus civitatis model could focus on any
combination of laudatory attributes, exclude some, and nuance others. The laus
civitatis template (and urban panegyric more broadly) is at best a loose category,
which in itself demonstrates the variety of ways to praise and conceptualize cities.
Each example of praise (and conversely censure) needs to be assessed individually
and then comparatively by considering authorship, context, purpose, and type of
source, and then, of course, by focusing on the content of the praise itself. Text and
context cannot be separated.11
Understandably, the type of distinctive praise which formed extensive passages
of texts, or which represent ‘free-standing’ works in their own right, has dominated
scholarship on urban panegyric. Some of the most celebrated examples, all of
which will be encountered in this study, are the Mirabilia Urbis Romae on Rome
(c.1143), William FitzStephen’s description of the city of London, its origins, and
its future (c.1173), and Bonvesin da la Riva’s distinguished De Magnalibus Urbis
Mediolani on the city of Milan (1288).12 Indeed, J. K. Hyde’s seminal study in the
1960s showcased the importance of many of these works.13 Yet on closer inspec-
tion it becomes apparent that these major laudes civitatum are a mixed bag, diverse

9 De Laudibus Urbium, Latin text in G. Fasoli, ‘La coscienza civica nelle “Laudes Civitatum” ’, in
her Scritti di storia medievale, ed. F. Bocchi et al. (Bologna, 1974), p. 295 n. 6.
10 Erll, Memory, p. 74. 11 Erll, Memory, p. 171.
12 An edition of the Mirabilia Urbis Romae can be found in Codice topografico della città di Roma,
eds. R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, vol. III (Rome, 1946), pp. 17–65; William FitzStephen, Vita
Sancti Thomae in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J. Craigie Robertson, Rolls Series,
LXVII, vol. III (London, 1877). There is also a translation of FitzStephen’s description of London by
H. E. Butler, reproduced in F. Stenton, Norman London: An Essay (Introduction by F. Donald Logan)
(New York, 1990), pp. 47–60; Bonvesin da la Riva, De Magnalibus Mediolani (Le Meraviglie di
Milano), ed. and trans. P. Chiesa (Milan, 2009).
13 J. K. Hyde, ‘Medieval Descriptions of Cities’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, XLVIII
(1965–6), pp. 308–40.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

6 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

in content, purpose, and form.14 Many are embedded in much larger tracts,
like the aforesaid description of London which serves as a prologue to William
FitzStephen’s Vita of Thomas Becket. In some works too—the Gesta Treverorum
for Trier, Boncampagno da Signa’s for Ancona, or Martin da Canal’s for Venice, for
example—praise is conveyed implicitly through an entire text which takes a city as
its central reference point. The Gesta Treverorum, for instance, has been described
quite rightly as written by an author ‘who incorporated into his chronicle every-
thing that contributed to the glory of the Treveri’.15 In others it can be detected
indirectly in strategies which enhanced a city’s reputation without applying overt
praise, perhaps by simply recording an urban foundation legend which projected
the city’s origins into a distant past.16 Furthermore, some works which considered
the city as a universal entity and presented that entity in a positive light—such
as the Christian philosophers Alain de Lille in the twelfth century and Albert Magnus
in the thirteenth—have also been included here as types of urban panegyric.17 All
of this reflects the varied forms panegyric could take and the diversity of the textual
source types through which it appeared: chronicles, annals, poems, chansons and
romances, hagiographies, letters, sermons, legal, political, and theological treatises,
customary tracts, and administrative documents.
The approach in the present study therefore recognizes the heterogeneity within
the body of works conventionally labelled as laudes civitatum and takes a more
holistic interpretation of what constitutes urban panegyric and where to locate
it. The corpus of ‘major’ laudes civitatum distract from the considerably larger
occurrence of what Elisa Occhipinti termed microlaudes, smaller passages of urban
­panegyric and description of varied forms and length inserted into larger works.18
Sometimes these may simply be a line or two within a text, sometimes more, but
their concision and subtextual implications can be powerful and articulate deep-
rooted messages. This approach allows us to consider small passages of praise in
the same terms, and potentially of the same value, as ‘recognized’/‘major’ laudes
civitatum. Thus, to offer two seemingly polarized examples from the thirteenth
century, it might be possible to compare and utilize on an equal footing John de

14 D. Romagnoli, ‘La coscienza civica nella città comunale italiana: il caso di Milano’, in F. Sabaté
(ed.), El mercat: un món de contactes i intercanvis (Lleida, 2014), pp. 59–62 notes the fluid overlap evi-
dent in the so-called mirabilia, itineraria and laudes civitatum genres.
15 W. Hammer, ‘The Concept of the New or Second Rome in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, XIX
(1944), pp. 57–8.
16 Gesta Treverorum, ed. G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, VIII (Hannover,
1848), pp. 130–200; see the important work by H. Thomas, Studien zur Trierer Geschichtsschreibung
des 11. Jahrhunderts, insbesondere zu den Gesta Treverorum (Bonn, 1968); and K. Krönert, L’Exaltation
de Trèves. Écriture hagiographique et passé historique de la métropole mosellane VIII–XIII siècle (Ostfildern,
2010), pp. 277–87.
17 Alain de Lille, Opera Omnia, ed. J-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, CCX (Paris, 1855), cols. 200–3;
the sermons in which Albert delivered his discourse on the city are edited by J. B. Schneyer in ‘Alberts
des Grossen Augsburger Predigtzyklus über den hl. Augustinus’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et
médiévale, XXXVI (1969), pp. 100–47 [henceforth: Albert Magnus, Augsburg Sermon Cycle].
18 E. Occhipinti, ‘Immagini di città. Le Laudes Civitatum e la rappresentazione dei centri urbani
nell’Italia settentrionale’, Società e Storia, XIV (1991), p. 25.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

Introduction 7

Garlande’s Parisiana Poetria (c.1231–35), a student textbook on Latin prose and

verse, which contains under the section on constructing hyperbole a short sentence
on the city of Paris (‘The famous name of Paris reaches to the stars, and its borders
contain the human race’), alongside Bonvesin’s aforementioned De Magnalibus
Urbis Mediolani, a book dedicated to the praise of the city of Milan and consisting
of eight chapters covering the cities virtues: location, buildings, inhabitants, wealth,
strength, faith, liberty, nobility.19 John’s praise of Paris, as short as it may be, merely
reflects the tip of an iceberg. Below it, submerged, lie numerous literary and
­cultural traditions and evident links to urban realities which were left u ­ narticulated
but believed by the author to be sufficiently understood and resonant to serve as
part of a pedagogic tool for local university students. The brief praise of Paris’s
hosting of a large and eclectic population taps into some of the oldest literary fea-
tures of urban panegyric but also speaks directly to thirteenth-century e­ xperiences
of urban life, as cities (particularly Paris) expanded, became the locus of diverse
communities, and their rulers willingly promoted their power through the govern-
ance and protection of the mosaic of peoples inhabiting their cities. Bonvesin, on
the other hand, might provide far more explicit and explicated praise, but the same
background of literary and cultural influences mixed with lived urban experiences
suffuses the text. Approached in this way, the issue then is one of degree not type.
Similarly, one could compare the often passing, but crucial representations of
the city in any number of ‘secular’ and ‘fictionalized’ Epic and Romance works
with the extensive, and distinct, prologue of William FitzStephen’s Vita of Thomas
Becket which was entitled Descriptio nobilissimae civitatis Londoniae (c.1173).20 In
some of the former, for example Jean Renart’s L’Escoufle (c.1200–2), supportive
urban inhabitants and the city itself (in this case Montpellier) act as agents e­ nabling
the redemption of the chief characters (Aelis and Guillaume).21 Several scholars
have demonstrated how these types of works can be used as entry points into the
conflicted aristocratic and mercantile perceptions of the city while telling us a great
deal about both positive and negative experiences of urban life in the Central
Middle Ages.22 In FitzStephen’s work, the description of London is informative
and rich, but like L’Escoufle its ‘background’ noises are equally as important (par-
ticularly the use of classical authors such as Virgil and Plato, and the imperial claims
made for London) as is the juxtaposition of this descriptio with a hagiographical

19 John de Garlande, The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garlande, ed. and trans. T. Lawler (New
Haven, 1974), Chapter 6, p. 129: ‘Sidera Parisius famoso nomine tangit, Humanumque genus
­ambitus Urbis tangit’.
20 William FitzStephen, Vita Sancti Thomae, pp. 2–13.
21 Jean Renart, L’Escoufle, trans. A. Micha (Paris, 1992).
22 J. Le Goff, ‘Warriors and Conquering Bourgeois. The Image of the City in Twelfth-Century
French Literature’, in his Medieval Imagination, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 1992), pp. 151–76;
U. Mölk, ‘Die literarische Entdeckung der Stadt im französischen Mittelalter’, in J. Fleckenstein and
K. Stackmann (eds), Über Bürger, Stadt und städtische Literatur im Spätmittelalter (Göttingen, 1980),
pp. 203–15; M. Harney, ‘Siege Warfare in Medieval Hispanic Epic and Romance’, in I. A. Corfis and
M. Wolfe (eds), The Medieval City Under Siege (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 177–90, emphasizes the
broad distinction between epics which presented the knights’ desire to acquire the city against the
chivalric romances which showed the knights being absorbed into the city (pp. 187–8).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

8 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

text. Both tell us much about medieval urban identities and the conceptualization
of the medieval city.
Thus, the present study will also utilize less well-known, and often shorter,
pieces of laudatory and conceptual material. This heterogeneity of source
types—which will be set out in more detail in Chapter 1—represents another
salient indicator of transformation in the urban world. Through combining this
diverse corpus of material it will be demonstrated that the messages within the
so-called ‘major’ laudes civitatum were simultaneously far more quotidian and
far less generic than had previously been thought, and that some of the seem-
ingly derivative material within them become more meaningful once properly
contextualized.

H I S TO R I O G R A P H Y

Fortunately, this study has been able to utilize some key scholarship on medieval
urban identities, on literary criticism, on audience and reception, on cultural
­studies, and on cultural geography.23 It has also drawn on studies from the social
sciences to help further understand, for example, the formation of group identities,
notions of legitimacy, and interpretations of crowds, all of which shaped medieval
perceptions of the city.24 While there exists a huge historiography on the medieval
city, scholarship directly on medieval urban panegyric is remarkably meagre.
Among the broader (though still regrettably brief ) treatments there are, however,
several important studies. The aforementioned work by J. K. Hyde played a crucial
role in placing medieval works of urban panegyric on the radar of many scholars.
While Hyde’s analysis is rather narrow with its approach to city descriptions
(descriptiones) which rejected works which he deemed too short or interconnected
with another text to be autonomous, it nonetheless presented an important under-
pinning interpretation:

23 A work which remains fundamental in any discussion of urban identities is S. Reynolds,

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford, 2nd edition, 1997), pp. 155–218;
on literary criticism see A. Minnis and I. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.
Vol. 2: The Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2005) and A. Bennett and N. Royle, An Introduction to Literature,
Criticism and Theory (Edinburgh, 4th edition, 2009); on literacy, audience, and reception see:
J. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: from Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore, 1989);
D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading. The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800–1300
(Cambridge, 1994); W. J. Ong, ‘Orality, Literacy and Medieval Textualization’, New Literary History,
XVI (1984), pp. 1–12; M. Mostert and A. Adamska (eds), Uses of the Written Word in Medieval Towns:
Medieval Urban Literacy, II (Turnhout, 2014); Erll, Memory; on cultural geography in a medieval
urban context see: K. D. Lilley, City and Cosmos. The Medieval World in Urban Form (London, 2009).
24 For example: M. J. Hornsey et al., ‘Relations between High and Low Power Groups: the
importance of legitimacy’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, XXIX (2003), pp. 216–27;
D. Waddington and M. King, ‘The Disorderly Crowd: from Classical Psychological Reductionism to
Socio-Contextual Theory: the impact on public order policing strategies’, The Howard Journal, XLIV
(2005), pp. 490–503; R. M. Chow et al., ‘The Two Faces of Dominance: the differential effect of
ingroup superiority and outgroup inferiority on dominant-group identity and group esteem’, Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, XLIV (2008), pp. 1073–81.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

Introduction 9
The gradual elaboration of descriptive literature from the tenth to the fourteenth
­centuries represents not so much the growth of a literary tradition as a change in its
subject-matter. The medieval descriptiones are a manifestation of the growth of cities
and the rising culture and self-confidence of the citizens.
Indeed, for Hyde, prior to 1400 a genuine medieval literary tradition of the laus
civitatis ‘was either lacking, or at the best sporadic’, and these works of praise
instead tend to ‘reflect successive stages in the fortunes of medieval cities’.25 Later,
Occhipinti’s work, although solely examining Italy, suggested a compelling meth-
odological approach to urban panegyric. By acknowledging the importance of (the
already noted) microlaudes, Occhipinti highlighted the impossibility of construct-
ing an evolutionary line of development among such works owing to the extreme
diversity among the types of sources. Instead, Occhipinti saw greater value in ­mining
these sources for what they tell us about civic self-identity and their representations
of the city rather than in attempting to identify an autonomous literary genre with
distinct characteristics.26 Aligned to this approach, Harmut Kugler’s study empha-
sized the need for scholars to recognize the heterogeneity of works praising cities.
It acknowledged the value of studying these as literary works but also stressed the
importance of contextualizing them within their contemporary urban settings.27
Hyde’s, Occhipinti’s, and Kugler’s methodologies underpin this present study.
Other studies have done a great deal to frame some of the key themes of this
study, by elucidating the spiritual and ideological understandings of the city, and
highlighting the interrelationship between urban praise and condemnation. Hans
Hans-Joachim Schmidt’s masterful analysis of the Christian moralizing and alle-
gorical interpretation of the medieval city in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
makes much of the interplay with fundamental urban transitions, and is comple-
mented by Thomas Renna’s works on Cistercian thinking on the city.28 And Paolo
Zanna’s excellent study built a nuanced picture of the classical and biblical legacies
framing medieval urban descriptions, and his examination of elegiac works dem-
onstrated their significance for medieval conceptions of the city.29

25 Hyde, ‘Medieval Descriptions’, pp. 308–10.

26 Occhipinti, ‘Immagini’, pp. 25–6.
27 H. Kugler, Die Vorstellung der Stadt in der Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters (Munich, 1986),
especially pp. 17–26.
28 Schmidt, ‘Societas christiana’, pp. 297–354; T. Renna, ‘The City in Early Cistercian Thought’,
Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses, XXXIV (1983), pp. 5–19 and ‘The Idea of the City in Otto of
Freising and Henry of Albano’, Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses, XV (1984), pp. 55–72.
29 P. Zanna, ‘Descriptiones Urbium and Elegy in Latin and Vernaculars in the Early Middle Ages’,
Studi Medievali, XXXII, 3rd series (1991), pp. 523–96. More focused, localized, examinations have
also been produced. A sample would include: Fasoli, ‘coscienza civica’, pp. 293–318; M. Accame
Lanzillotta, Contributi sui Mirabilia urbis Romae (Genoa, 1996); D. Kinney, ‘Fact and Fiction in the
Mirabilia Urbis Romae’, in É. Ó Carragáin and C. Neuman de Vegvar (eds), Roma Felix. Formation
and Reflections of Medieval Rome (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 235–52; Ruth, Urban Honor; G. Rosser,
‘Myth, Image and Social Process in the English Medieval Town’, Urban History, XXIII (1996),
pp. 5–25; J. Scattergood, ‘Misrepresenting the City. Genre, intertextuality and Fitzstephen’s Description
of London (c.1173)’, in his Reading the Past. Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Dublin,
1996), pp. 15–36; Le Goff, ‘Warriors’, pp. 151–76; Mölk, ‘literarische Entdeckung’, pp. 203–15;
Kugler, Vorstellung der Stadt; A. Haverkamp, ‘ “Heilige Städte” im hohen Mittealter’, in F. Graus (ed.),
Mentalitäten im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 119–56.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

10 Urban Panegyric and the Medieval City, 1100–1300

Two additional works require particular mention, however, because they have
been important to the present study in addressing specific topics that will be
­covered here. Carrie E. Beňes’ study on urban origin legends demonstrates the
growing interest (in this case in Northern Italy from 1250 to 1350) in civic histories
and foundation myths in an increasingly classicizing environment.30 The work will
be drawn upon, particularly in Chapter 7, but the way Beňes demonstrated how
such legends were projected to a wider audience in several different media supports
some of my methodological approaches presented in Chapter 2. Keith Lilley’s
monograph likewise combines the abstract with the concrete to show how theoretical
conceptions of the city could be mapped onto, and influence the layout of, the
physical city, and used to promote the notion of holy cities: this approach will be
valuable for the analysis in Chapters 2 and 3 below.31
Perhaps the most salient feature of the entire body of scholarship is the dearth of
in-depth book-length studies on a European-wide spectrum. Carl-Joachim Classen
produced a welcome and erudite monograph on descriptiones and laudes urbium.
However, in reality it represents an extended article-length study, half dedicated to
the classical period, and the brief examination halts at the twelfth century.32 Chiara
Frugoni also offered a thought-provoking examination of the changing concept of
the city throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In combining an ­analysis
of architectural, topographic, iconographic, and textual sources, Frugoni pointed
the way towards a more holistic and interdisciplinary approach. That said, as the
work proceeds, it becomes increasingly and then (in chapters covering the Later
Middle Ages) exclusively focused on Italy.33 There is, therefore, a need for an in-
depth, methodologically flexible and interdisciplinary approach to this subject, but
it has yet to be achieved and very little sustained comparative analysis across medi-
eval Europe has been conducted. The present study aims to offer a small step
towards addressing this.

PA R A M E T E R S O F T H E S T U D Y

It is important to acknowledge where this study’s limits lie. First, the very idea of
the city has always been a contested subject field. Indeed, the terminology used for
urban settlements in the Middle Ages itself was highly fluid and open to various
interpretations. The most frequently used label, civitas, reflected ‘a double heritage
from Antiquity, a concept of political philosophy and an administrative term’.34

30 C. E. Beňes, Urban Legends. Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250–1350
(University Park, Pa, 2011).
31 Lilley, City and Cosmos.
32 C-J. Classen, Die Stadt im Spiegel der Descriptiones und Laudes Urbium in der antiken und mit-
telalterlichen Literatur bis zum Ende des zwölften Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim, 1980). See the assessment
of Classen’s book in Kugler, Vorstellung der Stadt, pp. 23–4.
33 C. Frugoni, A Distant City. Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World, trans. W. McCuaig
(Princeton, 1991).
34 P. Michaud-Quantin, Universitas: expressions du mouvement communautaire dans le Moyen-Âge
latin (Paris, 1970), p. 111.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/09/18, SPi

Introduction 11

It represented both the Ciceronian ideal of a city as a community of individuals

brought together under the same law, and as an imperial jurisdictional category for
an urban centre and its dependent territories.35 In the Early Middle Ages, as
­bishops invariably took over political and administrative leadership in many post-
Roman cities, the term civitas also became synonymous with urban episcopal centres.
However, other meanings abounded in the Middle Ages. Civitas could imply a
walled or fortified centre, a settlement with a legal status recognized in a charter of
privileges, an administrative locus, a place of a certain demographic density and
physical size, or one with particular commercial and consumer functions. Alongside
this, other terms were applied to centres which could appear to have urban charac-
teristics: urbs, municipium, villa, or oppidum could often be used interchangeably
with the label civitas.36 Thus, the ‘richness of the general lexicon’ of the medieval
city undoubtedly poses challenges for establishing typologies, particularly when we
add in seemingly intermediary terms such as portus, burgus (a term originally con-
nected to a settlement’s military functions), and suburbium, all of which could
contain urban associations.37 This terminology likewise varied depending on the
education and agenda of the author applying the term.38
For some commentators the city could be the physical entity—its buildings and
infrastructure—for others, like the Christian philosopher St Augustine (d.430) it
is the inhabitants, or a particular mode of being.
In his Etymologies (c. ad 615–636) Isidore of Seville offered his own influential
interpretation of the city:
A city (civitas) is a multitude of people (hominum multitudo) drawn together by a bond
of community, named after its ‘citizens’ (dicta a civibus), that is, from the inhabitants
of the city (ab ipsis incolis urbis) [. . .] Now urbs is the name for the actual buildings,
while civitas is not the stones, but the inhabitants.39
Isidore thus echoed the Ciceronian and Augustinian position of the city (civitas)
as a community, which dwelled in a particular physical setting, the urbs. Later
Christian thinking of the Middle Ages witnessed a partial shift from Augustine’s
equation of city with community, to twelfth-century ideas of the city as a ‘place’,
in line no doubt with the marked material expansion of many urban centres at this

35 Michaud-Quantin, Universitas, pp. 111–12.

36 Boucheron et al., Histoire de l’Europe urbaine, pp. 287–8; sometimes urbs could denote a city of
higher status, connected no doubt to its intrinsic association with the city of Rome: Michaud-
Quantin, Universitas, pp. 117–19; for specific examples from Normandy see P. Bouet, ‘L’image des
villes normandes chez les écrivains normands de langue latine des XI et XII siècles’, in P. Bouet and
F. Neveux (eds), Les villes normandes au Moyen Âge. Renaissance, essor, crise. Actes du colloque de Cerisy-
la-Salle, 8–12 octobre 2003 (Caen, 2006), pp. 320, 327–8.
37 Boucheron et al., Histoire de l’Europe urbaine, pp. 369–70. Burgus/burg became a particularly
common urban designation in medieval Germany and to a lesser extent France: F. Opll, ‘Das Werden
der mittelalterlichen Stadt’, Historische Zeitschrift, CCLXXX (2005), pp. 567–73.
38 Opll, ‘Das Werden der mittelalterlichen Stadt’, p. 567.
39 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), vol. II.
XV.I.II. My translation slightly adapts the one found in The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans.
S. A. Barney et al. (Cambridge, 2006), XV.II.I, p. 305.
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