Buyers and Sellers: Retail circuits and practices in medieval and early modern Europe

by Bruno Blonde (Editor), Peter Stabel (Editor), Jon Stobart (Editor), Ilja Van Damme (Editor)

Overview

Consumption is now a critical issue in late medieval and early modern historical and cultural studies. While we know increasingly about regulatory systems, we know much less about the daily practice of buying and selling. This book brings together contributions from urban historians, social historians and art historians to explore the issues of exchange, shopping behavior, social interactions, gender and physical space. Contributions deal with Italy, the Low Countries and England. In the articles in this volume lines of continuity between the medieval and early modern period have been stressed. In addition, some critical questions have been raised. Were markets necessarily less modern compared to fixed shops? How did changing consumers and consumer patterns interact with the retailer? The essays published here also emphasize the need to study different commercial circuits in their context. These circuits often overlapped and could not artificially be isolated from one another. Authors B.Blonde, R.Britnell, D.Calabi, H. Deceulaer, D. Gentilcore, V. Harding, B. Lemire, F.Nevola, J.Shaw, E.Steegen, P.Stabel, J. Stobart, L. Van Aert, I. Van Damme, C.Walsh, E.Welch. Bruno Blonde is Director of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp. His current research interests include: urban history, social inequality and living standards, consumption and retailing history and historical social network analysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9782503515809
Publisher:	Brepols Publishers
Publication date:	04/28/2006
Series:	Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800) Series , #9
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.80(d)

Table of Contents

Retail circuits and practices in medieval and early modern Europe: an introduction     7
The fairs of early modern Italy     31
Renewal of the shop system: Italy in the early modern period     51
'Piu honorati et suntuosi ala Republica': botteghe and luxury retail along Siena's Strada Romana     65
From the market to the shop. Retail and urban space in late medieval Bruges     79
Markets, shops, inns, taverns and private houses in medieval English trade     109
Sites of desire: shops, selds and wardrobes in London and other English cities, 1100-1550     125
Shops, markets and retailers in London's Cheapside, c. 1500-1700     155
Dealing with diversity: pedlars in the Southern Netherlands in the eighteenth century     171
Changing consumer preferences and evolutions in retailing. Buying and selling consumer durables in Antwerp (c. 1648-c. 1748)     199
Clothes, cabinets and carriages: second-hand dealing in eighteenth-century England     225
Plebeian commercial circuits and everyday material exchange in England, c. 1600-1900     245
Martino Grimaldi and the merchant-charlatans of early modern Italy     267
Liquidation or certification? Small claims disputes and retail credit in seventeenth-century Venice     277
Trade and gender emancipation: retailing women in sixteenth-century Antwerp     297
Eighteenth-century Maastricht shopkeepers and their hinterland customers     315
The social relations of shopping in early-modern England     331