摘要：One of the aftermaths of the cultural turn in the humanities was that the way of thinking about the world and perception of reality attracted the attention of historical scientists. New methodological challenges brought about an increased interest in the issue of the image of the town and perception of towns and townspeople by historians,art historians and literary historians,marked since the 1980s. However,it is noteworthy that the tradition of research on the representation of towns,whether created by means of iconography or words,is earlier than the influence of postmodernism. Already in 1925 Robert Ezra Park,a pioneer of the urban sociology,paid attention to the significance of the town as a mental phenomenon,resulting from processes of perception1 . The research on the literary and artistic forms of creating the town image developed many years later,from the mid-20th century. Simultaneously,in his book The Image of the City published in 1960,an American urbanist,Kevin Lynch,presented the results of the research on individual processes of perceiving the town and shaping its mental images2 . In the early 1970s Aron Gurevich considered the image of the world and medieval mode of perceiving the world as universal categories,critical to the understanding of the European Middle Ages3 . The works of geographers and a French philosopher,Henri Lefèbvre,published in the 1970s,inspired further studies of the perception of the urban space and the creation of its image4 . At the time,under the influence of the Annales school,the issue of the image of towns aroused interest of scholars studying the culture and burgher’s mentality. Near the end of the 1970s,the symptoms of the methodological breakthrough emerged. Its essential feature was the departure from universal images of the world in favour of the individual perception;moreover,the processes of perceiving and creating images started to be considered in the broad context of social and political conditions. In the histoire de l’imaginaire Jacques Le Goff advanced the study of the use of images in the act of creation of individual and collective identities5 . Furthermore,Otto Gerhard Oexle presented an inspirational study on the interpretation schemes employed in the processes of perception in the Middle Ages, which indicated new possibilities of research on reading and understanding the meanings implicit in the images6 . The methodological trend of imagined history (Vorstellungsgeschichte) developed since the 1980s,has contributed to the increase of the interest in issues of the urban image as well7 . This approach is still present in the European historiography.
