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Stefan Droste, Offensive Engines. Projektemacher und Militärtechnik im langen 18. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag) 2022, 452 S. (Wissenschaftskulturen. Reihe I: Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 3), ISBN 978-3-515-13242-8, EUR 72,00., Francia-Recensio, 2023/2

Malte Griesse, Monika Barget, David de Boer (ed.), Revolts and Political Violence in Early Modern Imagery, Leiden (Brill Academic Publishers) 2021, 360 p. (Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 54), ISBN 978-90-04-46193-2, EUR 99,00., Francia-Recensio, 2022/3

Werner Freitag, Martin Scheutz (Hg.), Ein bürgerliches Pulverfass? Waffenbesitz und Waffenkontrolle in der alteuropäischen Stadt, Wien, Köln, Weimar (Böhlau) 2021, 227 S., 2 Diagr., 19 Ill. (Städteforschung. Reihe A: Darstellungen, 102), ISBN 978-3-412-52108-0, EUR 40,00., Francia-Recensio, 2021/3

Annie Crépin, Bernard Gainot, Maxime Kaci (dir.), Villes assiégées dans l’Europe révolutionnaire et impériale. Actes du colloque de Besançon, 3–4 mai 2017, Paris (Société des études robespierristes) 2020, 247 p., nombr. ill. en n/b et en coul., cartes, plans (Études révolutionnaires, 20), ISBN 978-2-908327-98-4, EUR 20,00., Francia-Recensio, 2021/2

While the siege of Ostend (1601-4) is not overly prominent in modern historiography, it did raise immense attention across Europe in the early 17th century. The operation, which formed part of the Eighty Years’ War of the rebellious Netherlands against the Spanish Habsburg monarchy, was represented as a bloody encounter of inconceivable length in various published formats. Contemporary sources such as broadsheets and printed siege accounts contributed to Ostend’s becoming one of the iconic places of the formation of a new Dutch identity – in spite of its capture by the Spanish. The story of the siege thus substantiates Michel de Certeau’s metaphorical likening of warfare and story-telling as spatial practices. Yet, it is also a reminder of the physical, existential dimension of war. Practices and representations of violence contributed to the making of a “war landscape” (Kurt Lewin), of places, in which new boundaries of identity and alterity were produced. As the muddy trenches of Ostend call to mind early-20th-century war experiences in Flanders, they invite comparative approaches to the general characteristics of “spaces of violence” (Jörg Baberowski). Yet, as will become clear, this massive siege operation, which mobilized thousands of people, can also be regarded in the light of new conceptions of “place,” which emphasize particularities created in the crossing of individual trajectories. An analysis that unites these different concepts of spatial constructions is able to link the physicality of violent encounters and the daily life of the siege to the emergence of the new Dutch state within early modern Europe., Comparativ, Vol 28 No 2 (2018): Room for Manoeuvre: (Cultural) Encounters and Concepts of Place

This thematic issue of Comparativ examines the relationship between place and cultural encounters in conceptual as well as empirical respect. The introduction delineates the discussions revolving around the concepts of place, space, and encounter. It proposes a reappraisal of the concept of place, which had almost been pushed off the agenda by the spatial turn and globalisation debates. The authors of the introduction and of the other thematic contributions argue for a perspective on place which connects spatial configurations and practices of encounter, understanding places as products of social, material, and conceptual relations. In doing so, they take up theoretical reflections about the relationality of place or space as put forward by Tim Ingold (in social anthropology), Doreen Massey (in geography) or Karl Schlögel (in history). All of their approaches emphasize that places are formed in relational processes, often spanning across time and space. In this sense, places are not mere stages or contexts for events of encounter but are being constituted by them. From such a perspective, the room for manoeuvre, which opens up through interaction, becomes apparent: Neither identities nor (hi-) stories are inalterably bound to pre-existing places, but they are just as dynamic as the relations forming particular sites. The great diversity of (cultural) encounters only emerges jointly with the respective places of interaction. Such lines of thought also allow for new approaches to past and current forms of global connections and mobility. In this sense the contributions united in this interdisciplinary thematic issue examine case (or: place) studies from the 17th century up to the present. Grounded in historiographical, literary- and religious-studies scholarship, they undertake to further refine the process-oriented perspective presented in the introduction., Comparativ, Vol 28 No 2 (2018): Room for Manoeuvre: (Cultural) Encounters and Concepts of Place