Research

Metropolitan Claims to Authority

Identity, Representation, Historicity

In 1682, the Parisian scholar Alexandre Le Maître attributed the dominant role of Paris and London among the cities of the world to three factors: both were the centers of major empires in which, first, the ruler’s throne; second, the most important markets and financial institutions; and third, “the glory, valor, and strength of a country” were united. The historical argument of a glorious past corresponds in its assessment to the current balance of power in Europe and overseas. In doing so, Le Maître identifies a criterion that is overlooked in many modern definitions of a metropolis: in this sense, metropolitanity is constituted by a strongly developed sense of self-awareness among cities and the elites that shape them, a sense of belonging to a special community from whose size, power, and history current political or cultural claims can be derived. Such expressions of self can be found in foundational city histories and founding myths just as much as in architectural presentations or acts of governance. In this sense, metropolises are inherently consciously designed spaces of memory in which identity-forming narratives are presented and interpreted.

As early as 1984, G. Dragon contrasted the Byzantine imperial capital of Constantinople with a “Constantinople imaginaire,” a construct drawn from late antique and early medieval texts, as well as monuments and architecture, that asserts the city’s claim to significance within the history of salvation. The metropolis’s potential for change is evident not least in the multifaceted literary and cultural discourses about it, which are not only affirmative and future-oriented but also satirical, negative, and nostalgic; the processual nature of the metropolitan is particularly evident here. A specific form of self-referentiality is the actual or virtual exchange with undisputed metropolitan models. This transmetropolitan discourse is also evident in the self-stylization of ancient or medieval cities as “Roma nova” or in solemnly staged relic transfers, for example from Alexandria to Venice (Mark) or from Milan to Cologne (Three Kings). The alignment of local liturgies with supra-local binding patterns and their dissemination also conveys statements about the validity and transformation of the metropolitan status of urban centers.

How can we identify the vehicles and media of such self-referential discourses in the premodern era? Ancient and medieval historiography contains a wealth of self-attributions and external descriptions of the most significant urban centers. The genre of city praise stands out in particular, in which authors narratively process the current achievements and historical significance of their hometown. While such texts are by no means limited to large cities or metropolises, they generally adopt their argumentative patterns and themes from metropolitan models. From a church-historical perspective, late-antique sermons, letters, and inscriptions in particular offer numerous examples of metropolitan claims to authority that employ various figures of argumentation (foundation by an apostle; apostle’s tomb; repository of significant relics; political significance). With the emergence of city chronicles in the late Middle Ages, the textual basis and narrative patterns of identity-forming self-representations expanded; in the case of cities with long-standing traditions such as Rome, Cologne, Milan, or Paris, these certainly included affirmative statements regarding their metropolitan claims to prestige (cf., for example, the *Mirabilia Urbis Romae*, c. 1140, the chronicle of the Cologne town clerk Gottfried Hagen, 1260, the panegyric “De magnalibus urbis Mediolani” by the Milanese patrician Bonvesin de la Riva, 1288, or the “Tractatus de laudibus parisius” by the Parisian magister Jean de Jandun, c. 1320). However, in smaller and medium-sized cities, chronicles increasingly took a critical look at the leadership claims and displays of power of large, supra-regional centers. Similarly, archaeological and art-historical research on the urban structure and design of both public and private spaces in the city reflects discourses on claims to prestige, identity, competition, and role models. Research on Milan during the Roman Empire suggests that metropolitan claims to prestige could be expressed not only through the imitation of the Roman model, but also through deliberate differentiation and a self-assured redefinition of urban, sacral-topographical, or liturgical standards. Conversely, the observation of urban-architectural patterns and models allows archaeological research to make valid statements about urban hierarchies and metropolitan structures in Hellenistic Greece. From this research perspective, external and internal urbanization are closely intertwined, i.e., the planning and design of the city’s urban-architectural structure as well as the development of an urban self-confidence—mostly driven by the elites—and of forms of discourse in which the wealth of historical meanings converges.

Using London—the “first metropolis and cosmopolitan city of the modern era”—as an example, we can analyze a sophisticated literary and theatrical scene in the early modern period, in which urban identity, as well as neighborhood- or group-specific identities, are negotiated just as much as critical or satirical subverting of the historical discourse upheld by elites. The aspirations for representation, as well as the guiding and exemplary role that characterize metropolitanism, are generated and expressed in a continuous discursive exchange between internal and external perspectives. The function of the metropolis as a “point of reference” for others must be viewed in the context of early modern England not only within a national and European framework, but also on a global scale: Here, the historical semantics of metropolitanism are actualized in the self-image of a society expanding outward—as a trading nation and colonial power—and, conversely, through external perspectives brought into the metropolis by the overseas movement of people and goods. The self-referentiality of early modern metropolises, which experienced an explosive increase in population across Europe in the 16th century (see Knittler 2002: 216), thus also involves a constant discursive self-transcendence, as centralizing and diversifying forces are in a constant interplay here. The complexity and pressure for change in metropolitan living conditions generate a density of legal, economic, political, religious, and cultural discourses, whose multilateral interactions in turn reveal and foster contrasts and potential for transformation. Studies of early modern metropolitan discourses based on city chronicles, legal texts, antiquarian, pictorial, and cartographic sources, as well as literary, theatrical, and—last but not least—liturgical and extra-liturgical ritual representations, reveal this interweaving of perspectives alongside their mutual relativization and commentary.

Of particular significance here are the intermedial, self-reflexive, and metafictional elements within these complex interconnections of discourse: Processes of translating and recoding narratives about the metropolis from one medium or form of representation into another—that is, processes of “remediation”—always produce ambivalences and ironies as well—such as when, for example, early modern acting companies, themselves a genuinely urban phenomenon, stage both the centralization and diversification of the metropolis. This allows Reif’s formulation of the “abundance of meanings,” which coalesces into “imaginary worlds” in metropolitan discourses, to be expanded—for the early modern period, for instance—to include a characteristic dynamization and temporalization of such imaginaries: Here, claims, ambitions, and mythologizations are paired with an explicit awareness of their own historicity, of the processual nature of the metropolitan. A preeminent unifying figure, serving as a focal point both internally and externally for the civil-religious communities of medieval Italy, was the city saint—a figure who could be shaped hagiographically and pictorially to meet current needs and who embodied the city’s sense of identity and historical continuity, even across actual breaks in continuity and catastrophes in the history of the diocese and the city. In other context-specific occasions as well, such as the collective commemoration of battle anniversaries, the supra-regional propagation of images and cults of specific saints served as a focal point for the formation of a territorial, cross-group, metropolitan identity with aspects that legitimized and stabilized rule. The Regensburg research program “Premodern Metropolitanism” places an initial focus on the constitution of metropolitan claims to authority and, consequently, on the structure, agents, and media of metropolitan and transmetropolitan discourses. To this end, several of the participating disciplines offer their own research, in particular Classical Archaeology, Art History, History, Liturgy, and English Literature.

Metropolises as the theatrum mundi

Diversity, mobility, innovation, conflicts

Metropolitan societies have been global societies since ancient times, uniting diverse religions, cultures and languages through their international appeal and influence. In 2008, an exhibition on ancient Babylon – which was shown successively in the three European metropolises of London, Paris and Berlin – highlighted the origins of the concept of the globalised city. The dual impetus of innovation and discipline, cultural plurality and social conflict, is a hallmark of metropolitan life. Schwentker speaks of the ‘Janus-faced nature of most megacities – as an urban centre of economic and social modernisation on the one hand, and as a chaotic and cruel Moloch, characterised by poverty, crime and fragmentation, on the other’. With regard to the pre-modern era, the aim is to clarify the specific conditions and forms of social mobility, innovation processes, social discipline and conflict resolution. At the level of political governance, this raises questions concerning the specificity of metropolitan ‘urban rule’, the demands for participation made by metropolitan society, and the strategies of legitimation and representation employed by the social elites. Whilst pre-modern Europe was generally characterised by authoritarian, monocratic or oligarchic forms of government, large cities served from an early stage as ‘laboratories’ for new forms of political socialisation. Recent studies on Paris, for example, show that even in the capital – which was completely co-opted and dominated by the French monarchy, and where no municipal decision-making bodies modelled on those of northern Italy could be established during the Middle Ages – the participation of the social and economic elites in city government was indispensable. The subtle mechanisms of this ‘non-legitimate rule’ exercised by the heads of the Parisian merchants’ guild and their assessors – who, in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, navigated the tension between, on the one hand, the integration and control of an ever-growing and diverse Parisian urban population by the ruling powers, and, on the other hand, the public display of modesty and subordination to royal authority over the city – would provide a worthwhile case study for a transdisciplinary project within the framework of the proposed Research Training Group, involving postgraduate researchers from the fields of medieval urban history (prosopography of the Prévôts des marchands), medieval and early modern legal history (jurisdictional complexity of the Parisian courts and their relationship with the king) and art and architectural history (Representations of the Prévôts des marchands in the urban landscape of Paris) would be involved. The subtle mechanisms of this ‘illegitimate rule’ exercised by the heads of the Parisian merchants’ guild and their assessors – who, in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, found themselves caught between, on the one hand, the integration and control of an ever-growing and diverse urban population of Paris by the ruling authorities, and, on the other hand, the public display of modesty and submission to royal authority over the city – would provide a worthwhile case study for a transdisciplinary project within the framework of the proposed Research Training Group, involving postgraduate researchers from the fields of medieval urban history (prosopography of the Prévôts des marchands), medieval and early modern legal history (the jurisdictional complexity of the Parisian courts and their relationship to the king) and art and architectural history (representations of the Prévôts des marchands in the urban space of Paris).

The innovative potential of metropolitan societies, which is highlighted in many definitions of the term ‘metropolis’, is to be systematically linked, within the proposed Research Training Group, to the social, media-related and technological conditions of the pre-modern era that gave rise to transculturalism, migration and social mobility. The major urban centres offered the best media-related and institutional conditions for the supra-local standardisation of social practices. It was here that various repositories and institutions of knowledge were concentrated; it was here that different social and linguistic cultures came into contact. Moreover, a comparatively higher degree of social and spatial mobility fostered both the willingness and the necessity for innovation in these metropolises. Social, economic and intellectual mobilities are closely interrelated in the major urban centres of the pre-modern era. It is precisely the early forms of ‘globalised’ economic structures, observable in intercontinental long-distance trade during the late Middle Ages and early modern period, that highlight the importance of major international trading centres. In the European and Mediterranean regions, there are in many cases continuities with Greco-Roman port cities (D. Steuernagel). Driven by demographic movements and, in part, by processes of political centralisation, metropolitan cities developed a momentum of their own in terms of economic, social and cultural transactions: ‘Metropolitan cities became megawatt transmitters of new ideas, manners, fashions, leisure activities, patterns of consumption, and new forms of social interaction...’ (Aerts/Clark 1990).

Starting points for this are provided by a wide range of research on cultural transfer and historical migration studies, as well as the volume recently published by the applicants, *Die bewegte Stadt. Mobilität und Innovation in vormodernen Großstädten* (Oberste/Ehrich 2015). An interest in migration, transculturality, social mobility and innovation unites all the disciplines involved in this proposal. From the perspectives of legal and economic history, as well as literary, art, linguistic and ecclesiastical history, the opportunities and challenges posed by the transfer of people and knowledge raise new questions regarding pre-modern urbanity and metropolitan life: in the pre-modern era, social mobility was subject to strict legal and social rules. Nevertheless, it was indispensable to the social system. What role did the urban way of life and the example set by the great urban centres play in reshaping the rules of social mobility? What factors determined the opportunities and limitations of social mobility in cities? Is there a link between mobility, migration and urban innovation? Furthermore, the city functions as an integrative yet also differentiating system. At what point and in what form do social or political control mechanisms come into play to regulate innovation? Beyond the demographic dependence of cities on a continuous inflow of new residents – a point repeatedly emphasised by historians and sociologists – this study aims to highlight the essential importance of cultural regeneration through migration and its institutional regulations. In this context, we therefore seek to examine the cultural conditions necessary for successful processes of information exchange and adaptation in pre-modern cities.

This line of inquiry can be further expanded to include studies on the construction of gender or the topography of extended family groups in the pre-modern era. Dynamic spatial and social mobility inevitably led to the dissolution of traditional family structures. The adoption of ascetic and celibate lifestyles by members of the urban upper classes, particularly in the case of women, was interpreted by late antique authors as an attack on the traditional image of the family and has been inscribed by some female historians into the history of women’s emancipation. With regard to medieval Paris, comparisons with the rural surroundings in the late Middle Ages have shown that households in the French metropolis were significantly smaller and considerably less settled than in peasant society. Gender studies, in particular, have also drawn attention to the significance of pre-modern urban society for the expansion of women’s scope for action in social, economic, legal and political terms. Christine de Pizan’s *Livre de la Cité des dames* (c. 1405) explores not only the cultural and social potential for innovation inherent in urban life, but also the heightened defences against demands for participation from marginalised groups. Christine’s entire body of work is shaped by the social experiences, mental frameworks and cultural riches of the two metropolises, Venice and Paris. Seen in this light, it seems no coincidence that the only documented women’s guilds emerged in Cologne, the largest and most economically significant centre in the German-speaking world.

From a legal-historical perspective, such observations can be described and examined as normative change. Normative change and legal innovation in pre-modern metropolises can be regarded as an area requiring further research. Within the framework of the research programme described here, the process of the reception of learned law could be examined, focusing not on the well-known substantive aspects, but rather on reception as a cultural process that initially takes place in certain leading cities, thereby underscoring their special status as metropolises. On the basis of what considerations, by what means, through which individuals and via what kinds of processes did these metropolises adopt learned law and make it the foundation of their early modern municipal law? In which areas did they resist such adoption? In this context, the law as studied is a prerequisite for the emergence of a sophisticated culture of municipal law that can transcend the law as received; this can be observed in particular in the fields of modern commercial law and modern commercial jurisdiction. The existence of a highly developed commercial law and a professionalised commercial judiciary is just as important for the effective resolution of disputes as it is for the city’s status as a metropolis (cf. the DFG project ‘The Nuremberg Commercial Judiciary: Commercial Judicial Opinions in the Early Modern Period’, University of Würzburg).

It is particularly in the economic sphere that the link between mobility and innovation processes in pre-modern metropolises is most strikingly evident. It was here that both political and economic power were concentrated, driven not least by the financial needs of the metropolis itself. Metropolitan claims to prestige consumed enormous resources, be it the military activities of city-states or imperial cities, or the high costs of urban infrastructure and ceremonial displays. The question here is how these were financed – through taxation or credit, for example from merchant houses or early banking institutions. Which institutions or groups of people determined the city’s needs and ensured they were met? Who met these needs, and at what cost? Furthermore, due to their central role for the surrounding region and hinterland, demand accumulated in metropolises for luxury goods and, increasingly, mass-consumption goods from overseas (spices, coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate, tobacco, cotton textiles, etc.). Morley (‘Metropolis and Hinterland’, 2002) has examined this aspect in relation to the city of Rome during the late Republic and early Imperial period, describing the profound adaptation of the Italic economy to the needs and commercial structures of the metropolis. Both within the metropolis and in trade with the regions exporting these products, entirely new opportunities for earning a living arose at all levels of society. Both vertical and horizontal mobility were therefore far greater in metropolises than in smaller urban centres or, indeed, in rural areas. One might ask, for example, about new occupations, and which groups took them up and why. The high concentration of supply and demand in metropolitan centres consequently also led to increased innovation. In the financial sector, for instance, cities such as Amsterdam and London created new institutions and instruments (modern stock exchanges, shares), thereby leaving behind the late medieval models of northern Italy. Who drove the development of these financial innovations, what were their motives, and what obstacles did they have to overcome? Through what channels (and against what resistance) did these innovations spread to other European trading centres?

Metropolises are characterised not least by the concentration of power structures, by significant potential for conflict, and by innovative conflict-resolution strategies. Whether as an ancient provincial centre, a medieval royal seat or an early modern residence of a princely court – the centralisation of political, administrative and legal structures in individual cities generally constituted a decisive locational advantage in the pre-modern era within the process of urbanisation, contributing to the establishment of hierarchies within regional, national or ‘international’ networks of cities. In metropolitan centres of antiquity, and then increasingly in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, explosive demographic growth – coupled with the political instrumentalisation of the broad urban population (such as the plebs in urban Rome) and the competing claims to participation made by their elites – spurred the search for practices to maintain public order and prevent conflicts. The fragmentation of the metropolitan population into districts, judicial districts, ecclesiastical parishes, neighbourhoods and so on, in turn gives rise to symbolic and pragmatic forms of centralised authority (e.g. royal appellate jurisdiction in the late medieval Parisian legal sphere) and unifying events (e.g. public assemblies) that correspond to the metropolis’s self-image as a whole. Innovations and diversity, as described above as hallmarks of metropolitan law, also give rise to an increased potential for conflict: metropolises are invariably places where different laws and jurisdictions compete with one another for jurisdiction, above all ecclesiastical and secular law and their respective courts, but also different tiers of secular law and different secular courts. These conditions of jurisdictional complexity or hybridity have for far too long been overlooked by modern (legal) historical scholarship, which naturally presupposes the existence of regulations devised according to rational criteria, which do not recognise such competing legal jurisdictions. How was this competition experienced in major cities? Were major cities able to eliminate this jurisdictional complexity through the centralisation of law and the administration of justice, and if so, how?

Global Cities in the Pre-modern Era

In the context of current shifts in the discourse on ‘globalisation’, the perspectives on global cities in the pre-modern era developed here are groundbreaking. From Zygmunt Bauman’s observations on the opposition between ‘globe’ and ‘place’ in the glocalisation model (Bauman 1998) to the consideration of both the possibilities and limitations of transregional mobility in revised models of globalisation (see Graw/Schielke 2012: 19), the reciprocal interconnection between the global and local, decentralised locations is a key feature of current discussions within cultural studies and Area Studies. From a historical perspective, this also includes observations on tendencies towards demarcation in zones of cultural contact, which, as historically documented and reconstructible phenomena, coexist alongside processes of cultural transfer. This gives rise – much as in the comparison of the pre-modern metropolitanity examined in the GRK with contemporary metropolitan studies, urban planning and modern urban sociology – to opportunities for a fruitful exchange between the decentralised phenomena of metropolitanity observed in a series of individual projects in the pre-modern period and more recent theoretical approaches in this field (for example, the claim to ‘metropolitanity’ as a structural pattern shaping urban society is also evident in smaller, decentralised cities in antiquity and the early modern period). 

Even in antiquity, metropolitan societies were global societies, characterised by international appeal and influence, in which diverse religions, cultures and languages, as well as socio-professional and ethnic groups, were united. In 2008, an exhibition at the Pergamon Museum on the history and mythology of ancient Babylon highlighted the origins of the idea of the globalised city (Wullen 2008). Within the disciplines of classical studies and medieval studies, the trend towards identifying early tendencies towards globalisation is the subject of heated debate (cf. Fried 2014). By now, there is scarcely an era or advanced civilisation that has not been examined and re-evaluated from a globalisation perspective. Instances of ‘globalisation’ in the plural (Osterhammel 2011) have been identified in the Sumerian Empire, which had extended its trade networks as far as the Indus; in the Hellenistic and, later, Roman expansion into the Mediterranean world and the Near and Middle East (Truschnegg 2013, Pitts/Versluys 2015 and, critically, Leppin 2017). Thus, from the 3rd century BC onwards, ancient Alexandria served as a centre for the preservation and promotion of all kinds of scholarship and its findings, which were gathered from across the entire Mediterranean world; this was made possible in particular by the convergence of a multitude of trade routes at the city’s seaports and inland ports. However, these routes extended not only across the Mediterranean, but also via the Nile and the Red Sea to India and China. In particular, ‘Eurasian Late Antiquity’ has recently been examined from a globalisation perspective (see Di Cosmo 2018; Preiser-Kappeler 2018; on the associated debates: Humphries 2017). The American historian V. Hansen has even declared the turn of the first millennium to be the birth of globalisation, an era which, at least from a European perspective, has not hitherto been particularly notable for its expansive or innovative drive (Hansen 2020).

Precisely when one takes a critical view of the applicability of the modern model of globalisation to antiquity and the Middle Ages – given the absence of supranational institutions or technologies – the relevance of pre-modern metropolises in this regard comes into focus: We proceed from the assumption that ancient and medieval metropolises, too, provided decisive cultural, technological and economic impetus to their respective eras and cultures; indeed, that in the pre-industrial era, the conditions for global thinking and action could only be created within the multinational and multicultural societies of major metropolises. 

The study of pre-modern metropolitanity can also contribute to understanding processes and phenomena in smaller urban centres when these seek to find their place within metropolitan networks, or when the regional and trans-regional urban network—in constant competition for increased significance—aligns itself as a hierarchical construct with metropolitan models.
Historically, the Greek poleis, the Roman imperial residences and provincial centres with their diverse links to Rome, and the ‘bonnes villes’ subject to the king in late medieval absolutist France also reveal diverse facets of this field of research. In the pre-modern era, a global network of metropolises is inconceivable without strong regional relationships of exchange and hegemonic rule.

Pre-modern metropolises as spaces of conflict and opportunity

The dual impetus of innovation and discipline, cultural plurality and social conflict, is a timeless characteristic of metropolitan life. Schwentker (2006, 15) speaks of the ‘Janus-faced nature of most megacities’ and of ‘economic and social modernisation on the one hand’ and of the ‘chaotic and cruel Moloch, characterised by poverty, crime and fragmentation on the other’. Within the field of literary discourse, these ‘negative’ aspects of metropolitan life also give rise, for example, to satirical reflections on metropolitan claims to prestige in early modern London drama, as well as struggles for prestige within the educational system of late London Humanism – which some observers consider to be becoming too inclusive. Often, these phenomena can only be grasped within literary discourse; for instance, when the social conflicts and economic tensions surrounding control of metropolitan public space in imperial Rome are shifted into the political discourse concerning the good or bad ruler, and are then played out through the metaphors of the old Republic, thereby becoming historicised. The study of political crisis discourses can therefore, in many cases, also be interpreted as an aspect of metropolitan discourses. 

The immense migratory movements that formed the basis of the rapid growth of most metropolises go hand in hand with the dissolution of traditional village-like social structures in city districts, streets and neighbourhoods. Rising crime was one of the inevitable consequences of the process of metropolisation. In Paris, heavy immigration from the second half of the 13th century onwards led to intensive normative and policing efforts on the part of the relevant authorities. Yet, according to the relevant study by B. Geremek, the expanding city offered excellent opportunities not only for traders but also for criminals: ‘Vigilance was inevitably less strict and less effective, and life in the great metropolis provided greater possibilities for profit, as well as more opportunities for crime’ (Geremek 1987: 7; cf. Brendecke 2018). In this field, collaboration is planned with the new SFB 1369 ‘Cultures of Vigilance. Transformations – Spaces – Techniques’ (LMU Munich) is planned, in particular with sub-project B03 ‘The Use of the Senses: Vigilance in Early Modern Cities’ (A. Brendecke), in which the vulnerability of pre-modern metropolises (Augsburg, Florence, Seville) is examined in conjunction with the intensification and regulation of sensory perceptions. 

Metropolises are therefore characterised simultaneously by the accumulation of power structures, by considerable potential for conflict, and by innovative conflict-resolution strategies (cf. Hochmuth/Rau 2006 and, most recently, Priebs 2011). Whether as an ancient provincial centre, a medieval royal seat or an early modern residence of a princely court – the centralisation of political, administrative and legal structures in individual cities generally constituted a decisive locational advantage in the pre-modern era within the process of urbanisation, contributing to the establishment of hierarchies within regional, national or ‘international’ urban networks, which were often also reflected in ecclesiastical structures (Merkt 2019). In metropolitan centres of antiquity and, to an even greater extent, of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, explosive demographic growth – coupled with the political instrumentalisation of the broad urban population (such as the plebs of urban Rome) and the competing claims to participation made by their elites – spurred the search for practices to maintain public order and prevent conflicts (for further regulation of security structures, see Kelly 2013; on the practice of municipal law, see B. Frenz 2003; on practices of peacemaking, see Gonthier 1992; on crime, see Schwerhoff 1991). The fragmentation of the large metropolitan population in legal and political practice into districts, judicial districts, ecclesiastical parishes, neighbourhoods and the like, on the other hand, gives rise to symbolic and pragmatic forms of centralised rule (e.g. royal appellate jurisdiction in the late medieval Parisian legal sphere) and unifying events (e.g. public assemblies) that correspond to the metropolis’s self-image as a whole. However, the metropolitan legal system also gives rise to an increased potential for conflict: metropolises are invariably places where different legal systems and jurisdictions compete with one another for jurisdiction, particularly ecclesiastical and secular law and their respective courts, but also different tiers of secular law and various secular courts. These conditions of jurisdictional complexity or hybridity have for far too long been overlooked by modern legal history. How was this competition experienced in metropolitan centres? Were metropolitan centres able to eliminate this jurisdictional complexity through the centralisation of law and the administration of justice, and if so, how? (cf. Donlan/Heirbaut 2015). 

In an overview of qualitative definitions proposed by Metropolitan Studies that claim relevance for the 19th–21st centuries, Reif highlights increased social agency as the fifth and final criterion: ‘Owing to their sheer size and high density, metropolises create more opportunities for action and ways of life for both individuals and groups; more opportunities for social constitution and for minorities to gain societal acceptance; and more—and genuinely metropolitan—opportunities for success as well as failure, for inclusion as well as exclusion, and for innovation as well as traditional ties’ (Reif 2006: 2f.). This criterion appears to correlate clearly with modern experiences of, and needs for, individual freedoms and opportunities for self-realisation. In a recent article in the weekly newspaper *Die Zeit*, the author refers to the social group of ‘culturally educated city-dwellers’, who are concerned with ‘self-fulfilment, non-conformism and individuality’ (R. Pausch, *Die Zeit* 28/2020: 7). Nevertheless, we encounter this metropolitan space of possibility as early as in a text on Paris from the late Middle Ages. Around 1320, the philosopher Jean de Jandun was expelled from Paris. From exile, he dedicated a lengthy eulogy to Paris, culminating in the beautiful sentence that only as a resident of Paris does one have an existence in the absolute sense; elsewhere, at best, a limited (Opinor te confiteri quod esse Parisius est esse simpliciter; esse alibi non nisi secundum quid) [Jean de Jandun, *Tractatus de laudibus Parisius*, Paris 1867: 74].
The scholar is likely alluding here to Ovid’s *Epistulae ex Ponto*, in particular 1, 8, 20–40. Here, the poet, exiled to the Black Sea, laments that he has been excluded from the urbanae commoda vitae, from the ‘places of the magnificent city’—specifically the markets, temples, marble-clad theatres, the Field of Mars and the splendid gardens—in short, from the ‘delights of the great city’. There is no doubt that this is an exception and that the medieval author, in this praise, was referring to the opportunities for intellectual development offered by the university city of Paris. On the other hand, as early as a century earlier, in Cardinal Jacques de Vitry’s famous description of Paris, we encounter the ambivalence of the metropolis’s ‘attractions’ and ways of life, when Jacques praises his former alma mater for its unrivalled theological research, but at the same time critically notes that in many halls of learning, prostitutes and innkeepers had taken up residence, waiting for their clientele (Jacques de Vitry, *Historia occidentalis*, Fribourg 1972: 92). The idea of the metropolis as a space of heightened possibilities can therefore hardly be regarded – any more than the other points in Reif’s catalogue of metropolitan characteristics – as a defining feature of modernity. 

This becomes particularly clear in the shaping of women’s life stories. In antiquity, the urban space was the only place where women could pursue opportunities beyond the roles intended for them. This can be understood very plausibly in the context of cult: the impulses emanating from the empresses of the 1st century AD – they became priestesses (flaminicae) in the cult of the deified emperors in Rome – opened up new opportunities for self-representation and an enhancement of family prestige through female family members, both for the women of the imperial household themselves and – following their example – for the women of the provincial elite in the cities of the empire. Points of departure for research include, for example, priestesses in the major cities of the province of Asia, who were integrated into male systems of rank and honour or were related to religious and political office-holders in various provinces, thereby also revealing transprovincial family structures (cf. Hemelrijk/Woolf 2013; Edelmann-Singer 2014; ibid. 2016). 

Furthermore, research has long highlighted the employment opportunities and professional activities of patrician women and female artisans in medieval and early modern towns. The four women’s guilds in Cologne are regarded as a model and exceptional case, which can be explained by the significance of Cologne’s cloth production and the scale of the associated trade networks of Cologne merchants (cf. Athenas 2016). However, even without the organisational power of their own guilds, women in urban or metropolitan areas emerged as successful traders, entrepreneurs, money changers, goldsmiths and in many other trades, as a recent study on Pisa impressively highlights (Duval 2018). In the lists of the Paris poll tax (‘Livres de la taille de Paris’), which have been preserved from the years 1296 to 1313, the proportion of working and tax-paying women amounts to around 10 per cent (Roux 1996 and, more recently for the early modern period, Castres 2020). Local research from many European regions confirms this impression that, despite generally strict moral standards and restrictions, women in large cities were more able to deviate from conventional life paths characterised by domestic or monastic seclusion, whether as independent entrepreneurs, Beguines or artists (for examples from Florence, see De la Roncière 1990: 274–284). 

Since discourses on social norms react to such ‘deviations’, it is certainly possible to identify a contemporary awareness of the consequences or ‘dangers’ of the metropolitan sphere of possibility: In the second half of the 13th century, the Dominican Master General Humbert de Romanis left behind a collection of model sermons *ad status*, i.e. addressed to the various estates and groups of contemporary society. Within this broad socio-professional framework, a group of sermons aimed at an urban audience stands out; these, in turn, are divided into the chivalric and merchant upper classes, the artisan middle classes and the poor lower classes. It is only among the upper classes that the wives of wealthy merchants are explicitly addressed; in Humbert’s framework, they are assigned responsibility for the home and children, as well as for almsgiving and care for the poor in the public sphere (Oberste 2002). Church representatives, and in particular the mendicant orders closely associated with the urban elites, unsurprisingly assigned women their traditional roles within the family, society and the Church. Similarly, many municipal charters also laid down social restrictions within the canon of the ‘honourable wife’ (as detailed for Hamburg by Rogge 1998), whilst literary texts were certainly able to embrace and expand upon the urban spheres of possibility. 

Christine de Pizan’s *Livre de la Cité des dames* (c. 1405) plays not only with the cultural and social potential for innovation inherent in urban life, but also with its heightened defence mechanisms against the demands for participation made by marginalised groups (most recently Delogu 2014). Christine’s entire body of work is shaped by the social experiences, mental structures and cultural riches of the two metropolises, Venice and Paris (see Bourassa’s doctoral thesis, 2014). In early modern London, issues of professional agency and gender relations were also addressed in the theatre (see Howard 2007).