Virtual Places: Index

Countries

France Great Britain Italy Japan Ottoman Empire Roman Empire

Cities

• Amsterdam
• Berlin
• Breslaw
• Edinburgh
• Halle
• Hamburg
• Leipzig
• London
• Munich
• Philadelphia
• Rio de Janeiro
• Utrecht

Editorial

Virtual Places is one of our younger projects at Marteau - designed to offer you access to 17th- and 18th-century representations both textual and visual of the world.

Ideally we should offer different perspectives on places of this world - London: Where can you lodge, where can you eat, which are the coffee-houses you should visit (and whom would you meet there)? What about the infrastructure of bookshops, brothels, intellectuals to be visited (in case you are one of those learned visitors). Where would sailors prefer to live?

One would like to get information about the social structure of the place, the number of residents, household size, composition of typical households, and one would like to get the city’s calendar with its cultural events, its performances of operas and comedies, its public executions and typical festivities.

Wikipedia has become a medium of general use. Imagine we could get historians from different fields to feed their special knowledge into a special Wikipedia remaining in the past and linking within it. Imagine what Robert Darnton did for Paris with his An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris – imagine that would be done by more than one hand with more than one perspective in joint ventures with the communication the Wikipedia software allows.

This is the aim of this project. Contact the editors at mailto:verlagshaus@pierre-marteau if you want to join us and if you feel ready to open pages on aspects of early 18th century cities and towns you have investigated into. Get an account and start something colleagues might join.