Introduction. Unmarried and Unknown

Abstract

This essay introduces a special issue on The Lure of the City that examines the attraction of towns to unmarried men and women in the Low Countries during the early modern period and the nineteenth century. The issue has the relation between singles and cities as its main focus. Singles were present in disproportionately large numbers in urban areas, but the question is why? This essay sets out the historiographical framework for the contributions in the issue, discusses the sources and methodologies used, and provides a brief overview of the evolution of singleness in the Low Countries. The contributions all demonstrate the relevance of a comparative approach. It is revealed that towns and cities not only attracted but also created singles, that they offered different opportunities for different groups of unmarried people and that they affected men and women differently. Finally, it appears that not every town and city was attractive to men and women without a spouse.

Counting Couples: The Marriage Banns Registers of the City of Amsterdam, 1580–1810

“…A first limitation is caused by the nature of the source itself: as the registers served to register the banns of intended marriages, the dataset by definition contains no information on Amsterdam citizens who never got engaged to be married. The substantial part of the population that remained single, both among men and women, can thus not be captured with this dataset (De Moor, 2014;Devos et al, 2015Devos et al, , 2016. Also, the registers contain information on individuals for only one (or more, if the individual remarried) static moment(s) in their lifetime, that is; their details at the moment they registered their marriage banns.…”

A Rural World in Transition: The Countryside of Buenos Aires according to the First National Population Census of the Argentinian Republic (1869)

“…Mercedes, en cambio, tenía una zona urbana notablemente importante, por lo menos desde mediados de la década de 1850. 10 Sumado a esto, unos años antes de la confección del censo, se produjeron en Mercedes dos acontecimientos de suma importancia: en 1865 llegaba el ferrocarril y en el mismo año se instauraba la primera sucursal del Banco Provincia. Estos hechos aumentaron la importancia que tenía el partido como sede comercial de la región.…”