A kora újkori város területe, mint közösségi cselekedet: Nagyszombat példája
The Territory of the Early Modern Town as a Collective Act

Summary/Abstract: In recent years the historians’ interest towards the problems of spatiality arose and changed in contrast to the earlier period, especially in urban history. Our earlier studies have shown that the medieval walls of Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia) provided a stage for a peculiar social practice between the 16th and 18th centuries. This can be said about any kind of social use of space, but Nagyszombat has an extraordinary set of sources that made it possible to apply statistical and cartographic methods in not less than five time frames. Based on the results of such investigations we can point out that the analysis of these fields are necessary for the understanding of social processes, because of their mutual influence on each other. The walkthrough order of the urban tax registers and the data that can thus be localised express this mutual influence in an extraordinarily intensive manner. The narration and rhetorics of the existence of the urban community is expressed through the route of the tax-collectors as a process going on at the town’s territory. This is a manifestation of a power technique that collects the data in an archaic way. Later on the same thing was done in another way, in a scientific, methodical manner. Spatiality was then expressed not through maps, but rather through the reference points used during the route. Thus, the map that mirrors the premodern situation is in this respect anachronistic. With our current methods however we are not able to reconstruct how the burghers seen their own space in the period when the source itself was produced.

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