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Book Review: Peter N. Miller: Peiresc’s Mediterranean World

closely related to the opportunities offered by cities for ‘gay and lesbian urbanity’ (Gregory Woods) – sited in ‘Parks, public lavatories, shopping arcades or markets ... gay bars and nightclubs’ (p. 233) – although the wider world of prostitution and adult entertainment remains relatively unexplored. As Kevin R. McNamara and Timothy Gray suggest in their concluding chapter, what one catches sight of, arising from all these papers, is something they dub (in a homage to William Empson) ‘some versions of urban pastoral’ – ‘the ways of reflecting on, and reimagining, the human condition as it is expressed through, and in relation to, urban landscapes’ (p. 257). All this is to say nothing of colonial cities (Seth Graebner), reflected in literature by authors living in North and West Africa and writing in French, and postcolonial cities (Caroline Hebert), exemplified by the work of Frantz Fanon, Michael Ondaatje and Ivan Vladislavić. Yet one misses in this Companion one thing in particular: after all, while the term pagan derives from the Latin for a country dweller, i.e. precisely someone not living in a city, in antiquity the sacred was closely related to the phenomenon of the city, a site enclosing sacred shrines and temples – and later churches, mosques, gurdwaras, etc. Yet, aside from the opening reference to the tale of Inanna and Enki and a few passing references to the New Jerusalem, the religious or spiritual dimensions of the city find little discussion here. Perhaps, just as there is never enough time fully to explore a great city, so the topic of cities must inevitably run up against a publishing house’s tightly policed constraints on space? What this Companion undoubtedly does achieve is to bear out the truth of Heidegger’s remark (cf. p. 18) that the question ‘what is a city’ can only be answered by the affirmation that ‘the πόλις is and remains what is properly worthy of question’; alongside the questions of which city next to visit and which book next to read.