“Peripheral Matters: Contesting Civic Space on the Militarized Edge”
Michael Wolfe

The advent of gunpowder weaponry profoundly altered the nature of urban defenses in late medieval and early modern France.  The premium long placed on the verticality of walls and towers gradually gave way to a militarized zone that spread ever further horizontally into the suburban fringe known as the faubourg.  In time, this new urban periphery encompassed a substantial amount of space carved out by municipal authorities through a process of appropriation, demolition, and construction.  This process occasionally sparked confrontations between property-owners and officials; it also created new kinds of civic spaces that served any number of purposes beyond the obvious ones related to security.  Indeed, the military zone that ringed most towns during this period only felt the sting of war on rare occasions; for the most part, the walls, platforms, escarpments, and so on, sat idle, so to speak, except for new construction and upkeep.  My paper will examine the diverse ways in which the militarized edge of town between 1450 and 1600 became a place used and frequently contested by many different groups making up a town’s inhabitants.  Night watchmen and gatekeepers provided an official presence in these areas.  However, municipal records from towns such as Amiens and Montauban indicate that much else went on in the urban periphery.  These areas offered a place for work, play, dangerous liaisons, dumping bodies and other rubbish, stealing building materials, grazing animals and fishing (if water was available), and sundry other pursuits.  How people lived with and authorities sought to regulate the fortified periphery of towns provides us a new vantage point from which to understand urban politics and culture at this time.  Originally intended to protect towns, the militarized edge also regularly revealed some of the tensions and fractures found in urban communities as different groups vied to appropriate or control public space.