About this book:

Invisible Cities: Using Street-Level Sources for Microhistories of European Urban Life is a practical guide for students and amateurs seeking to reconstruct the textures of everyday urban life from archival fragments. The book argues that by narrowing the scale of research to the level of a single street or neighborhood, we can recover the experiences of ordinary people whose histories are often invisible in grand narratives. It presents microhistory as a method for turning small, specific stories into big insights, using the archive of everyday governance—court records, tax rolls, parish registers, and other local sources—to understand urban life from the ground up.

The core of the book provides a comprehensive toolkit for conducting street-level research. It begins with the foundational steps of formulating a researchable question and navigating the complex world of archives, emphasizing that the feasibility of a project depends on the availability of local sources. It then details the critical reading of specific record types, including maps and toponyms for spatial orientation; court records for conflict and everyday norms; tax rolls for wealth and occupation; and parish registers for family, demography, and belonging. The book further explores a wide range of other crucial sources, such as notarial deeds, guild minutes, city directories, poor relief files, and migration papers, explaining the unique strengths of each for reconstructing the lives of women, families, laborers, and the poor.

Beyond sourcing and reading, the book introduces practical methods for analysis and interpretation. It emphasizes the importance of technical skills like paleography for deciphering old scripts and systematic strategies for re-identifying individuals across different records. The guide introduces modern tools like GIS for spatial analysis and data cleaning and coding techniques to manage information effectively. Throughout, the book advocates for a "stereoscopic" approach, layering qualitative interpretation with quantitative checks to strengthen arguments without losing narrative detail.

Finally, the book frames this entire process within a strong ethical framework. It insists on the responsible handling of sources, acknowledging that the people in these archives did not consent to be studied and that their stories, especially those involving poverty, crime, and illness, must be treated with respect and care. The guide concludes by bringing all these elements together, offering advice on writing compelling narratives and creating effective visualizations. The goal is to empower researchers to move from scattered notes to coherent stories, turning the "invisible cities" of the past into vivid, evidence-based histories grounded in the lives of those who lived them.

What You'll Find Inside:

• A practical guide to creating 'microhistories' of European cities by focusing on the intimate scale of the street, using everyday archival sources like court records, tax rolls, and parish registers to reveal the lived texture of the past.
• Step-by-step instruction on how to find, access, and navigate archives, learn to read historical scripts (paleography), and manage the challenges of name changes and data linking to construct coherent biographies and family histories from fragmented records.
• In-depth exploration of specific source types, such as court records for conflict and daily life, tax rolls for wealth and occupation, and parish registers for kinship and demography, highlighting the unique insights each can provide for an urban historian.
• Introduction to a modern toolkit for historical analysis, including simple quantitative methods for qualitative data, spatial methods like GIS for mapping social patterns, and strategies for building reproducible, ethical, and transparent research workflows.
• A strong emphasis on the ethics of historical research, covering privacy, representation, and respectful handling of the often-involuntary sources of marginalized people, guiding the writer to craft compelling narratives from data without stereotyping or sensationalism.

Who's It For:

This book is primarily aimed at students of history and urban studies, as well as amateur researchers and genealogists who want to move beyond simple family tree tracing to understand the daily lives and social contexts of their ancestors. It is specifically designed for those interested in the social history of European cities, who are comfortable with a hands-on, practical approach and are eager to learn how to use a wide variety of archival sources to reconstruct the past from the ground up, without needing advanced statistical or technical expertise.