Intellectual History Review

ISSN: 1749-6977 (Print) 1749-6985 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rihr20

The uses of space in early modern history

Charles W.J. Withers

To cite this article: Charles W.J. Withers (2015) The uses of space in early modern history,
Intellectual History Review, 25:4, 455-457, DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2015.1090245

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2015.1090245

Published online: 19 Oct 2015.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 455

insisted that, without conrmation of their status, they could not know whether it was in their gift
or not to vote nancial supply to the monarch. By the early 1640s, when everybody had some-
thing to say, such ideas went viral (p. 227) and Larkin shows how the Leveller agitator, John
Lilburne repeatedly and controversially claimed to personify any and every Englishman.
As the Putney Debates conrmed, however, despite consensus regarding the fundamental impor-
tance of free birth, identifying an agreed set of political rights consequent on an Englishmans
free-born status proved impossible. Drawing on Skinnerian interests in neo-Roman theories of
liberty, Larkin also shows how the very fact of arbitrary royal power was increasingly held to
render all seventeenth-century Englishman bondsmen or slaves. Even after Charles Is execution,
Milton thus remained at once lyrically buoyant and compulsively fretful (p. 283) in emphasis-
ing freedoms precarious achievement as well as attendant dangers that Englands new republican
citizens might prove insufciently vigilant and proactive in securing its permanence.
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Larkins is an ambitious intellectual project, accomplished with lively panache. Within her
tripartite structure, she also addresses the implicitly gendered character of debates about English-
ness as manifested, for example, during the Anjou marriage negotiations when the prospect of
Elizabeth I marrying a French suitor provoked widespread fears of inevitable national subjection
and servility. Elsewhere, the discourses martial dimensions are acknowledged as reected, for
instance, in Henry Parkers claims to contrast French kings sole interest in their cavalry with
the traditional importance attached to English infantry in securing military success.
More generally, despite the potential for popular interest in this subject, the books tone (and
price) remain rmly pitched at an academic audience. For example, a casual reference to David
Colcloughs thesis about parrhesia (p. 43) remains unexplained, alongside somewhat laboured
allusions to a sort of Geertzian apprehension of gestural ambiguity: is the contraction of an
eyelid a twitch or a wink, or indeed the parody of a wink? How is one able to tell? One isnt.
That is precisely the problem. (p. 76). The books conclusion addresses the obvious question
regarding the distinctiveness of early modern English attempts to dene national identity but
only a partial answer is supplied in terms of a cursory sketch of contemporary French discourse
and a reliance on Rublack (again) for accounts of medieval German discussions. Similarly,
Larkins concluding attempt to supply a truncated chronological afterlife to these debates is
overly schematic. Ultimately, however, her claims about the enduring nature of this uid,
emotive and often fraudulent discourse of national identity are compelling. As Larkin concludes,
the English had a narrative of distinctiveness and superiority long before they acquired greatness
or before greatness was thrust upon them (p. 301).

Clare Jackson
Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge,
jclj1@cam.ac.uk
2015, Clare Jackson
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2015.1082864

The uses of space in early modern history, edited by Paul Stock, New York, Palgrave MacMil-
lan, 2015, 275 pp., 60 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-137-49003-2

That space is not just location or territory but an analytic category widely used within the huma-
nities and social sciences is now taken for granted. Scholars in numerous elds have for several
years been making reference to the spatial turn with every reason to expect that what they mean
and use by that term is understood by others. Yet, it is also true that what is meant by space
 456 BOOK REVIEWS

and by its epistemologically close travelling companion, place has had different intellectual
purchase and different material and representational forms, now and in the past. Questions of spa-
tiality and their signicance in explanation of human and natural phenomena are, then, common-
place even as they remain complex and contested. Is space to be read as territory, territory as
environment, environment as crudely determinative? If all human activities are spatially
located, that is, are situated and sited, to what extent do the facts of situation constitute human
behaviour there? How, in turn, does the social produce the spatial?
In his editorial introduction, Paul Stock writes that the essays which make up this book
explore the uses of space in two respects: how spatial concepts can be employed by or
applied to the study of history; and how particular spaces or spatial ideas were used for practical
and ideological purposes during specic periods (1). Spatial concepts are shown to be material
and metaphorical. They range here from the map (shown to be both of course), living space,
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sacred space (Amanda Flather on its gendering in early modern England), borderlands (in terri-
torial terms mainly, but also as an imagined political construct), to the city, notions of empire and
imperial action at a distance (Andrew Rudd on Edmund Burke and the trial of Warren Hastings),
and questions of scale in interpreting Malthuss Essay on the Principle of Population (Robert
Mayhew). The particular spaces under review include the English vernacular house
(Matthew Johnson), liminal space (75) in the Ottoman-Hapsburg borderlands (Claire
Norton), the building and symbolic authority of early eighteenth-century St Petersburg (Paul
Keenan), the Academy of Sciences in Paris (Michael Heffernan), this a specic space of
space where debates amongst geographers, astronomers, and politician-courtiers addressed
the meaning and utility of terrestrial space as an arena of scientic calculation and political gov-
ernance (127), and that space between empires (151) as constituted by coastal and insular
microregions in the early-nineteenth century (Lauren Benton and Jeppe Mulich). Stock offers a
brief historiographical overview in his introduction, History and the Uses of Space. Beat
Kmin closes the volume with a short afterword, The Uses of Space in Early Modern History.
Several terms and interpretive strands connect these narrative studies. One such, and strongly
so, is scale. This term is used in the sense of levels of spatial reference upwards and outwards,
as it were, from the individual, to the microgeographical space of the living room, or the church
pew (Johnson and Flather, respectively), to the nation as a constructed space (Norton), to the
global empire as spatially imagined and managed by long-distance, yet fragile, networks of com-
munication or shaped by maritime communities who were, simultaneously, on the edge, and at
the heart, of imperial space (Rudd, and Benton and Mulich). For Mayhew, the simple scalar
trinity of local, national, and global (201) offers both a means to connect the ways in which
Malthus thought about matters of geography differing over space and a means by which
modern scholars may address the ways his work has been received differently over time.
Empire is another. Tsar Peter Is desire to connect Russia to Europe helps explain St Petersburgs
emergence from the Neva marshes: St Petersburg was also a symbolic and political site from which
to rule his emergent Russian empire. For Norton, if the idea of borderlands was a uid entity, so,
too, the respective empires of the Christian Hapsburgs and the Muslims Ottomans must be under-
stood as exible and constructed, the very ideas of empire which sustained them as geo-political
realities in opposition one to another being contingent, socially produced and contextually situ-
ated (66). In Rudds essay, empires were built on words, rhetorical constructions in which legisla-
tive enactments in one place were delayed in their implementation elsewhere. The moral
geographies of empire looked very different when viewed from different places and perspectives.
For Benton and Mulich, the rather nebulous concept of microregions of empire which they
invoke not strictly maritime zones but hybrid land-sea spaces (166) offers a modern-day
spatial category which seems to cut against the historical grain of the deeply imbricated local
global connections which sustained port and island communities within empires.
 BOOK REVIEWS 457

Site, understood as one or more specic social setting, is yet another. Heffernans is the richest
essay in this sense, offering as it does an analysis of how the organisational structure in one socio-
scientic institution constrained what was possible and desirable for French politicians in their
varying conceptions of space: as an absolute and celestial category, reducible to order via Carte-
sian (and, increasingly, Newtonian mathematical principles); as a territorial entity to be responsi-
bly overseen; as the reconguration of natural knowledge into what, then, in its content and
method, was the new science of geography.
Notions of space are always placed and must always be dated. Stock is at pains to note this, cau-
tioning that modern thinking about space as an analytic and explanatory category has deep historical
roots albeit that this is evident in some historical traditions, such as the Annales, more than in others
and that the very category space is not something outside history but is historically contingent,
constructed by specic circumstances and perspectives (56). Not all authors here are equally atten-
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tive to these matters. Claire Norton is: her essay on historiography, ontology, and politics in the early
modern Ottoman-Hapsburg borderlands is exemplary in its awareness of the dangers of explaining
history and its modern uses by working, as it were, backwards geographically: I do not think it is
particularly helpful to anachronistically impose nation-state spatial imaginaries [] on to early
modern conceptions of geopolitical space (78). Several authors are drawn in their essays to the
work of Henri Lefebvre and his ideas on the representation of space, spatial practices, and represen-
tational space. Robert Mayhew offers the strongest advocacy of a strongly nominalist approach.
What, he asks, can space and related geographical concepts like scale do for actual, empirical his-
torical enquiry? (199). First, space can be seen to provide terms that visualise historical concepts
and categories (199). Second, and more ambitiously, spatial categories can be used from a nomin-
alist perspective to order the reading experiences and to structure the narrative line a historian adopts
(200). Thus, nominalist space leads to narrative history (220). Understood in realist terms, however,
space and social practice are not separable in the ways Mayhew supposes, nor can one so easily lump
together spatial categories that have traditionally had different discursive dynamics space, place,
scale (199). As Kmin shows in his afterword, the taxonomies of the spatial turn may be uid
but is this not also true of the categories of periodisation employed by historians? Views about the
world are profoundly shaped by the setting in which those views were formulated and from which
they were travelled; what Thomas Gieryn, in his The Cultural Boundaries of Science (1999),
termed the truth spot. What matters is in showing how that claim to knowledge, in whatever
material or metaphorical form, was shaped by the sites and places in which they were constituted;
ways of worldmaking have different truth spots. The essays which make up The Uses of Space
in Early Modern History provide instructive lessons in this respect.

Charles W.J. Withers

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
c.w.j.withers@ed.ac.uk
2015, Charles W.J. Withers
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2015.1090245

The Enlightenment in practice: academic prize contests and intellectual culture in France,
16701794, by Jeremy L. Caradonna, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2012, xii +
333 pp., $63.50 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0801450600

Judged by its principal goal of broadening scholarly understanding of the French Enlightenments
concours acadmique, Jeremy Caradonnas spirited book well deserves a gong. The