This article investigates the creation of a shelter for migrants in fifteenth-century Venice. As an ephemeral structure, the shelter raises questions regarding the scope, mutability and materiality of the city's early modern urban fabric. Further, due to its mission to shelter eastern refugees, the shelter is embedded in foreign policy matters stemming from and aiming to stabilize Venetian presence in the eastern Mediterranean. This article positions the structure in the context of an early modern refugee crisis and Venice's multi-pronged urban and architectural responses in poor relief.

Our special issue discusses different perspectives on the important changes that took place in the transition from empire to nation-state at the end of the First World War, focusing especially on transnational connections, structural and historical continuities, and marginal voices that have been fully or partially concealed by the emphasis on a radical national awakening in 1918. Specific articles broach topics such as the implications of 1918 on notions of gender and ethnicity, 1918 and the violence of the “Greater War,” and the legacies and memories of 1918 across the 20th century. Our approach treats the “New Europe” of 1918 as a largely coherent geopolitical and cultural space, one which can be studied in an interdisciplinary fashion. We contend that 1918 is not simply a clean break in which one epoch cleanly makes way for another, but rather it is an ambiguous and contradictory pivot, one which created an “Old-New Europe” caught between the forces of the imperial past and those of the national future. Our intention is not to dismiss entirely the importance of the transformations of 1918 but rather to show how there exists a tension between those changes and the many continuities and legacies that cut across the traditional chronology.

The Reformation exacted considerable changes on towns across Britain, occurring at the same time as the shift away from broadcloths to other economies. Part of the process of change was the de-sacralization of former monastic spaces. The parallel process of increased commons enclosures alongside acquisitions of church lands produced a secularized and privatized landscape which transitioned the medieval city to the modern. The active enclosures by Coventry corporation in the 1530s and 1540s, and local documents rationalizing such actions under the concept of benefiting the common weal, provide a clear example of the process.

The scholarship of high medieval warfare tends not to emphasize the contribution made by urban communities, regarding cities as the passive objects of military campaigning. This article shows that the inhabitants of medieval London, however, had emerged as an organized military community from an early date, and were regarded by contemporaries as unusually disciplined, effective, fighters.