Riitta Laitinen

Cultural history of early modern European streets

Cultural History of Early Modern Streets-An Introduction, Riitta Laitinen with Thomas Cohen 1. Urban Landscapes: Houses, Streets and Squares of 18th Century Lisbon, Maria Helena Barreiros 2. Mechanisms of the Hue and Cry in Kolozsvar in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, Emese Balint 3. Urban Order and Street Regulation in Seventeenth-Century Sweden, Riitta Laitinen & Dag Lindstrom 4. To Pray, To Work, To Hear, To Speak: Women in Roman Streets c. 1600, Elizabeth S. Cohen 5. Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice, Alexander Cowan 6. To See and To Be Seen: Beauty in the Early Modern London Street, Anu Korhonen Index

Cultural History Of Early Modern Streets— An Introduction

The articles in this collection deal with the early modern street—a public space that was never completely separate from other public spaces, or indeed from private spaces. This introduction presents central themes for the following six articles that explore the history of the street in various European towns. Public and private, order and disorder, and control and hierarchy are discussed, and the inextricable link between the material and the immaterial in the history of the street is emphasized.

Urban Order and Street Regulation in Seventeenth-Century Sweden

This article examines how, in the early modern towns of Stockholm and Abo, royal interests, town planning, street building and maintenance, and street behavior related to ideas and ideals of urban order. Town laws and ordinances, royal letters and some town court records are employed to tell a story of royal interest in well-ordered, impressive, successful towns; various street plans for the capital and the smaller provincial towns; and the varying execution of renewal plans. It is evident that the capital was to reflect the royal person and the state and that streets and street behaviour were important in this regard. But in towns outside the capital, especially in concrete street maintenance, the centrality of streets does not clearly emerge. The burghers in towns operated as individuals—there was no bottom-up or top-down plan or supervision.

Banishment, Urban Community and Judicial Practice: Thieves in mid-17th-century Turku

The practice of banishing thieves, and the changes that took place in that practice in mid-17th-century Turku, illuminates the issues of building a good urban community as well as the changes that were happening in law and judicial practice in early modern Sweden. Variations and changes in punishing thieves in the 1640s and 1650s in Turku show that the position of the thief in the urban community, and the amount that was stolen, affected the courts’ considerations throughout the two decades. Nevertheless, an ongoing tendency towards moderation in sentencing is visible in courts, and the influence of a new penal ordinance of 1653 is noticeable. The banishment of thieves, even if it removed unwanted people from town, was no more strongly connected to the goal of creating a good community than other punishments were. Both banishment and other punishments, however, were connected to the conceptions of an ordered and harmonious community. The court cases, nevertheless, show that the makeup of the Turku urban community was more open than the strict moral or legal guidelines of the time would suggest.