International conference “Present in the City. Urban temporalities and rhythms in Northwestern Europe (14th-17th centuries)”

FR

From 1 to 3 October, the University of Lille (France) will host an international symposium dedicated to urban temporalities

DESCRIPTION

“Temporalities are a common code for deciphering space and giving an account of a complex, contextualized world”. This quotation from geographer Françoise Lucchini (2015) opens up an original reading of urban space, considered in the rhythm of its own pulsations. The city, as a space that is built, developed, inhabited and conceived, has been the subject of numerous studies, which have occasionally introduced a temporal dimension to their reflections, enabling us to better grasp the dynamics of its evolutions and urban practices. However, it has to be said that the “sense of time”, captured in the rhythms of daily life and the planned organization of places, has attracted more attention from geographers, urban planners, sociologists and historians of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The acceleration of time induced by industrialization, the great urban metamorphoses that accompanied it and the development of new technologies undoubtedly makes it easier to take hold of this elusive material that is time and to forge a presentist “regime of historicity”, supposedly specific to the contemporary period, according to the expression conceived by François Hartog (2003). 

And yet, for several decades now, Peter Burke’s (2004) commentary on Jacques Le Goff’s pioneering observations on “merchant time” has been inviting us to explore the living matter of medieval and early modern cities, to better understand the meaning of the multiplicity of temporalities concentrated in a single place, and to question the relationship between the “field of experience” and the “horizons of expectation” of medieval communities (Koselleck 1979). There is thus another cultural history of time to be written, in which forms of presentism other than the one that prevails today may have asserted themselves. 

At least, that’s the idea behind this meeting, part of the SNSF-Sinergia project “Capturing the Present in Northwestern Europe (1348-1648)”. The aim is to capture not only the measurement of present time, but also the feeling of its passing, which so troubled the mind of Saint Augustine and all those who strove to define it. The question of subjectively experienced time may seem trivial. But placing it in a particular context, determined by as many parameters as places, social status, ages, activities, individual or collective ambitions, political or economic imperatives, etc., gives it all its richness and fulfils the wishes of Marc Bloch, for whom history must approach “the human moment when these currents tighten in the powerful node of consciences” (Bloch, 1949). In the comparison offered by a vast Western urban Europe, which will support studies more specifically dedicated to its northern part, in order to grasp its specificities, the aim of this meeting is to observe city dwellers caught up in the game of multiple temporalities that cross them and feed their sense of belonging or exclusion to different social groups. 

How do city dwellers (and those who pass through these places) live in the present? How do they share this individual experience within the communities to which they refer or are assigned? Can we speak of time communities , shaped by the contours of a social group, political membership or shared faith? What degree of awareness and what cultural foundation underlies this apprehension and representation of the present, considered as much for its own sake as for the past it synthesizes and the future it heralds? These are just some of the questions that will be addressed. Daily rhythms, the dynamics of events, intimate time, risk control and the impact of accidents, the suspension of action – these are just some of the perspectives that will enable historians of practical sources, literature and images to examine the city as lived and thought in the present(s) of those who live in it. 

LANGUAGES

English/French

ORGANIZERS

Élodie Lecuppre Desjardin (elodie.lecuppre@univ-lille.fr ); Sebastian Hackbarth (sebastian.hackbarth@univ-lille.fr) ; Anne-Frédérique Provou (annefrederique.provou@univ-lille.fr)

PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS

IRHiS-UMR 8529 (Univ. Lille, CNRS)
Salle de séminaire (A1.152)

Université de Lille
Site du Pont-de-Bois
59653 Villeneuve d’Ascq 

PROGRAMME

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