Dates: 16 et 17 novembre 2023

Lieux: ULB campus du Solbosch (16/11) et VUB campus de la Plaine (17/11)

Descriptif de l’événement (en anglais):

Urban life has always been intrinsically tied to the city’s market for food. With today’s ever- increasing urban populations and unseen climatic and agricultural challenges, the significance of studying food markets has come even more to the fore. Understood both in the physical and abstract sense, food markets have been central to the main urban concerns, like ensuring food supply, providing revenues, or preserving social order. Because of this importance, food markets crystallised multiple key stakes for authorities, producers, consumers, and other urban actors, making their regulation a strategic issue. It is therefore not surprising that from the first medieval written texts to modern legislations, a huge body of regulative measures has been produced to supervise them. Although the societal, technological, economic and regulatory context shifted throughout the centuries, the actors’ need and desire to retain control over urban food markets remained unchanged.

The historiography on European urban food markets has stressed their structural importance for urban economies and has revealed how they were shaped by the interests of the actors rather than by self-regulating mechanisms. However, research has predominantly been constrained to classical chronological boundaries and has failed to consider the persisting need for regulation on food markets from a diachronic perspective, which would allow a more extensive view of continuity and change in this vital aspect of urban life.

Seeking to adopt such a long-term perspective and to explore more fully than before the social and political dynamics underlying these regulations, this conference will bring together recent research into motivations, reasoning and strategies applied by economic actors in the making of food market regulations in European cities from the 15th to the 20th century. Through its wide chronological and geographical scope, the conference seeks to confront different methodologies to study the ever-present matter of food market regulation as well as different approaches of various historical actors, institutions, and contexts in handling enduring concerns.

Inscription: https://www.vub.be/en/event/food-rules-city Attention: le nombre de places est limité et les inscriptions seront clôturées le 09/11/2023.

Programme :

Programme :

Thursday 16.11.2023

9h30-10h00 : Registration and coffee

10h00-10h15: Welcoming speech

10h15-11h15 : Keynote by prof. dr. em. Steven L. Kaplan (Cornell University), “Thinking about how to study Food Provisioning and Market Regulations”

11h15-11h30: Coffee break

Session 1 : Establishing Urban Food Market Regulations

11h30-13h00:

Janny van Doorn (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), “Of Accomplished Facts and Obstruction of Justice: Fish Market Regulation in Late Medieval Bruges”

Nicolas Brunmayr (Université Libre de Bruxelles), “Regulating the Quality of Herring in the Low Countries’ Trade to Cologne in the 15th Century: From General to Specific Developments”

13h00-14h00 : Lunch

14h00-15h30:

Brendan Röder (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), “Shaping Food Regulations from Below. ‘Food Vigilance’ and Urban Meat Control in Early Modern Augsburg”

Robin Rose Southard (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), “Shaping Food Rules From Below? Petition and Complaint as a Means of Influencing Regulation in 18th Century Brussels ”

15h30-16h00: Coffee break

Session 2: Constraints on Urban Food Regulations: Seasonality and Agency

16h00-17h30:

Maroesjka Verhagen (Universiteit van Amsterdam), “Seasonal Foods Shaping the City Everyday Functioning of Amsterdam’s Food Provision from Its Hinterlands (c. 1600-1800)”

Olav Hofland (European University Institute), “Cooking for Communists: Professional Cooks in the USSR during the 1950s”

Friday 17.11.2023

10h-10h15: Welcome and coffee

10h15-11h15: Keynote by prof. dr. Antonella Campanini (Università di Bologna), “Market Regulation and Communication Strategies: Urban Authorities, Food Supply and Consumer Information in Bologna in the 16th Century”

11h15-11h20: Coffee break

Session 3 : Communication and Legitimization of Urban Food Regulations

11h20-12h00: Dennis De Vriese (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), “How to sell New Ways of Selling?: Rhetoric of (De)regulation in the Brussels Meat Market 1770-1860”

12h00-13h00: Lunch

Session 4 : Regulating the Urban Food Market through Taxation

13h00-15h15

Davide Morra (University of Naples « Federico II”), “Kings, Citizens and Tax Farmers. Governing the Food Market in the Towns of the Kingdom of Naples (c. 1390-1540)”

Daniele Ognibene (Università di Bologna), “Shaping Local Customs for Encouraging Non Local Spice Trade through Bologna (15th Century)”

Bartlomiej Karnasiewicz (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torún), “Having Respect for the Expense of Brewers: Brewing Tariffs in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18^th Century”

15h15-15h45: Coffee break

15h45-16h30: Concluding remarks by prof. dr. em. Steven L. Kaplan

17h00: Informal drinks