Parallel polis

Cities in Central Europe as Imagined Communities, 1450–1800

Miller, Jaroslav

An interdisciplinary book uniquely combining methods and concepts of history, sociology and literary science. The monograph explores the normative idea of a premodern city as it should be, namely as the ideal(ized) community, politically autonomous entity based upon republican values with its own mythology and also as a strictly symmetrical place being the distinctive feature of the rational human civilisation. Though expressed in numerous urban rituals, symbolical acts, public festivities and urban architecture, the normative concept of the city was above all embedded in written and printed sources. The book‘s findings are based upon a spectrum of narrative sources involving urban chronicles, political treatises, panegyrics, family memoirs, descriptions of cities, instructions summarizing principles of good governance, and also the literary genre of utopia. All of them referred to the normative image of a premodern urban community by highlighting the idealized and therefore largely imagined principles of urban republicanism. By covering the period 1450–1800, the monograph explores also the gradual collapse of idealized premodern communities and the rise of modern urban societies. Geographically, research has focused upon cities and towns in peripheries that have been traditionally ignored by the mainstream urban history. The largely “unknown urban Europe“ comprises the Bohemian Lands, Polish-Lithuania and Hungary with significant overlaps to German Lands and Austria.