Reviews

Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe by Miri Rubin

siria's review against another edition

3.0

Cities of Strangers is a short (about half of the 200 pages are endnotes) study of strangers, interconnections, and belonging in urban spaces in later medieval Europe. Miri Rubin synthesises a broad array of readings on western, central, and eastern European towns and cities to provide a very readable introduction to the history of urbanisation and the complex nature of lived environments in the Middle Ages. I’m not sure I was entirely convinced by Rubin’s inclusion of “women” under the rubric of “strangers”, and there are a couple of weird errors (e.g. the Nuremberg Chronicle doesn’t have 2000 woodcuts of medieval cities; it doesn’t have 2000 woodcuts in total), but those reservations aside, this is a brisk, accessible introduction to the topic.