Content area
Full Text
URBAN SOCIETIES IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE: 1500-1700. By Jaroslav Miller. Historical Urban Studies Series. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008. xii, 292 pp., maps, gazetteer, tables, appendices, bibliography, index. ISBN (cloth) 978-0-7546-5739-2.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 Western scholarship began to pay more attention to East-Central Europe as a separate field of historical research. Evidence of this is the new monograph by Jaroslav Miller (Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic). After a number of years of working and training at Western universities and research centers, he has given us this definitive work on the urban societies of East-Central Europe in the early modern period.
The author quite aptly characterizes the present situation, in which detailed urban historical research, available mostly in local languages, is practically inaccessible to Western scholars, whereas the latter see East-Central Europe in their studies without clear focus, rather than from a "bird's eye" perspective (p. 3). Miller attributes this to the stifling effect of the postwar "iron curtain," which deprived historians from the Soviet-bloc countries of any opportunity to present an objective account of the history of their region. At the same time, the leading Western historians of urban life (Jan de Vries, Paul Hohenberg, Lynn Hollen Lees, Christopher Friedrichs, Alexander Cowen, Herbert Knittler) often relied on inaccurate demographic information, made random selections of their sources, and oversimplified the historical realities in East-Central Europe. Yet one could not help noticing that Miller himself occasionally falls into the trap of selectivity and simplification. Thus he effectively excludes the urban communities of Ukrainian and Belarusian lands that were part of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth. Except for a few references to Lviv and Vilnius, his monograph...