sessions : Tales of the City: Outsiders’ Descriptions of Cities in the Early Modern Period (I-II) - at the RSA annual meeting 2006

Ambassadors, merchants, bankers, scholars, artists, architects, to name but a few, were all groups that travelled extensively during the Early Modern period. The outsiders’ gaze on the cities they came into contact with- perceived both in terms of architectural space and social practices- were frequently communicated formally or informally by means of letters, dispatches and other literary means. Within an international perspective, the recipients of such information- whether friends, family or princely employers- were hungry for details of daily life and new fashions, as well as for reports of construction projects or urban developments. Such descriptive texts offer a complimentary point of view to that of sources such as chronicles and diaries, tax accounts and legislation, that were produced by insider-residents, and that are widely used by scholars of urban history. This section seeks to bring together papers that consider such outsiders’ descriptions of the cities they came into contact with, Papers cross national or linguistic boundaries, with the observer immersed in environments quite alien to their own, pointing out what did outsiders particularly notice, to what degree was their point of view conditioned by such factors as their own urban experience, or that of their guide or guide-book, how far is the content of descriptions shaped by their audience.