City, Citizen, Citizenship, 400-1500: A Comparative Approach

This open access book explores how medieval societies conversed about the city and citizen in texts, visual imagery and material culture. It adopts a long-term, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspective, bringing together contributions on the early, high, and later Middle Ages, covering both the medieval East and West, and representing a wide variety of disciplinary angles and sources. The volume is first and foremost about medieval perceptions and their articulation in text, image and material form. The principal focus is not on cities or citizenship per se, but on those who used such concepts, wrote about them, and visualized and depicted them. At the same time, the book seeks to address why the city remained such a salient concept also in non-urban contexts - the periphery, the desert, the monastery - and how medieval thinking on the ideal city and civic community could involve denunciation of the earthly city and its institutional trappings. It thus pushes scholarly boundaries, but also seeks to escape deeply entrenched notions of citizenship as either a form of political participation or legal status.

Els Rose holds the Chair of Late and Medieval Latin at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and guided the NWO VICI project ’Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, 400-1100’ (2017-2023). She has published widely on Latin liturgical traditions in the early medieval West, and on the Latin rewritings of early Christian apocryphal literature.

Robert Flierman is Assistant Professor of Medieval Latin at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. From 2018 to 2022, he worked as a postdoc in the NWO VICI project ’Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, 400-1100’.He currently leads the NWO VIDI project ’Lettercraft and Epistolary Performance in Early Medieval Europe’ (2023-2027).

Merel de Bruin-van de Beek was a PhD candidate in the NWO VICI project ’Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, 400-1100’. Her research focuses on the employment and function of citizenship terminology in the late antique sermons of Maximus of Turin, Augustine of Hippo and Peter Chrysologus of Ravenna.