Although its general narrative is already well known, Antwerp's trajectory from the late fifteenth century onwards continues to impress. From fewer than 10,000 inhabitants at the end of the fourteenth century, the city reached 100,000 inhabitants in the 1560s. It became one of the largest cities north of the Alps, and at the same time a major international market, the main gateway for trade between Italy and north-western Europe and a distinct cultural bridge between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – before losing part of its appeal and population by the close of the sixteenth century. Corresponding to Antwerp's ‘Golden Age’ (1535–65), this rapid growth contributed to a unique series of social, economic, political and cultural dynamics, some of which featured the Italian Renaissance in a key role.
Antwerp in the Renaissance aims to offer a fresh look at the city's history by exploring the kinds of changes that occurred in various fields during the sixteenth century and the role that Italians, Italian culture and the Italian Renaissance played in them. Edited by Bruno Blondé and Jeroen Puttevils (colleagues at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp), this book is the result of an informal research group launched on the topic several years ago at the University of Antwerp, and is dedicated to Prof. Hugo Soly, a great specialist on the city. The editors have brought together essays from several historians working on early modern Antwerp from different angles. The result is a collection of 12 rich chapters, all written in English, that efficiently plunge the reader in the sixteenth-century city. Contributions are presented thematically in the editors’ introductory chapter, but a topographical reading is worth a try here, in order to expand on the idea of immersion that this book provides: from a focus on the middle-class closet to the town hall via the rhetoricians’ chambers, the authors lead us through diverse terrains where new dynamics were developing at the time.
Researching probate inventories, Bruno Blondé, Jeroen Puttevils and Isis Sturtewagen explore the contents of wardrobes in order to show how local industry adapted to offer urban middling sorts of people import substitutions for certain luxury goods (they focus on silk products) that normally came from the Italian peninsula. Three chapters then take the reader beyond the household and into the world of workshops. Bert De Munck shows that, probably within the scope of demographic expansion and changing labour relations, Christian and confraternal brotherhood ideas among guilds tended to recede throughout the sixteenth century in favour of instrumental and bureaucratized corporative structures. Hadewijch Masure demonstrates how Antwerp's confraternities tended to be increasingly exclusive and were evolving, perhaps not entirely due to demographic pressures, from private-active to public-passive participation, even before the Catholic Reformation. Koenraad Jonckheere explains how Italian and antique models had a growing impact on Antwerp's artistic activity during the sixteenth century but also how economic matters, image theoretical debates and persisting artistic traditions contributed to shaping Antwerp's Renaissance art.
A series of chapters then leads the reader out of the workshops to the great outdoors: places of exchange and the streets. Jeroen Puttevils researches the contours of Antwerp's trade and shows how Low Countries native merchants managed to grow despite Antwerp's tendency to favour foreign merchants. Krista De Jonge, Piet Lombaerde and Petra Maclot track the evolutions of Antwerp's urban fabric throughout the sixteenth century with particular attention to the major stylistic changes inspired by antiquity. Erik Swart explains how the use of classical references in a military context was seen as a sign of virtue, notably to help justify and initiate changes or local experiments.
Back inside, Dave De Ruysscher visits offices and demonstrates that changes in Antwerp's law resulted from an interplay between mercantile practices, late medieval legal literature and contemporary humanist interpretations. Anne-Laure Van Bruaene shows how Antwerp's festive traditions, often organized within chambers of rhetoricians, were constantly reinterpreted by newcomers and infused with new ideas during the sixteenth century, and argues that this created a means of overcoming urban divides. According to Herman Pleij, chambers of rhetoricians were also at the heart of literary changes, as members drew on classical models without copying them. Finally, this journey through important places within the city is mirrored in Jelle De Rock's fascinating chapter discussing changes in city representations, with a particular emphasis upon how the viewpoint from which Antwerp was depicted changed in relation to cartographers’ goals throughout the sixteenth century.
One of the many interests of this book is that it shows how fruitful it is to intersect geographical scales of analysis when investigating the complexity of a city's evolution: Antwerp's specific dynamics are continuously explored by considering both very local factors (demographic growth, industrialized hinterlands, etc.) and more global ones (strong ties with Italy, the international market, etc.). This book demonstrates how this permanent mix of scales and factors underlies the unique qualities of Antwerp's history.
