The year 2019 marks the centenary of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's famous Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries). In the first chapter of this book, Huizinga writes:
Between town and country, too, the contrast was very marked. A medieval town did not lose itself in extensive suburbs of factories and villas; girded by its walls, it stood forth as a compact whole, bristling with innumerable turrets … The contrast between silence and sound, darkness and light, like that between summer and winter, was more strongly marked than it is in our lives. The modern town hardly knows silence or darkness in their purity, nor the effect of a solitary light or a single distant cry.Footnote 1
Huizinga's nostalgic description of the late medieval town situates the urban setting apart from rural surroundings and other milieus. In the remainder of the book, however, the urban nature of the Low Countries is only alluded to very sparsely. Huizinga may have been the founder of the fields of cultural history and pioneered the history of mentalities, but he was not a historiographical protagonist in the development of urban history. This was in contrast to his Belgian contemporary Henri Pirenne, whose work on medieval urban democracies and the social and economic ups and downs of cities in the Low Countries continues to influence urban historians today. Indeed, Huizinga might even be called an anti-hero of urban history, and his critics have pointed out his lack of interest in the different characteristics of social groups – privileging royalty and the aristocracy in The Waning of the Middle Ages – his unwillingness to identify different paths of historical change – focusing on what he saw as the decay of the late medieval period – and, perhaps fundamentally for this review, his disregard for the power and importance of urban culture in the Burgundian realm.Footnote 2 Huizinga may thus have found little to like in aspects of the recent postgraduate work on medieval urban history surveyed here. The firm source bases of these dissertations, often built on extensive and impressive purpose-built databases, would likely not have struck a chord with Huizinga who preferred a more intuitive and empathetic approach. Yet, he would surely have appreciated their focus on the later Middle Ages and the openness to insights from other disciplines such as archaeology, sociology, political theory and studies of memory that is evident in the many doctoral dissertations on medieval urban history in the Low Countries. Each of the dissertations examined here thus provide fresh insights and are constitutive of recent directions in this field.
It is now eight years since Jelle Haemers examined the postgraduate work produced on the urban history of the medieval Low Countries in this journal and, with this in mind, this review builds on the work he began.Footnote 3 However, it also reflects the changing trends in the scholarship too. In the first section, I examine the work done on urban material culture, whilst the second section deals with economic shifts in the region. The third section discusses urban governance and in the last section I give an overview of the theses on memory and poor relief.
True colours: late medieval urban material culture
Johan Huizinga was impressed by the art of the later Middle Ages, especially by its combination of realism and symbolism, as well as its colourfulness. Indeed, it was a visit to an art exhibition on the so-called Flemish Primitives in Bruges that produced the historical inspiration that led Huizinga to write The Waning. Historians and historians of art nowadays consider such famous pieces, for example the paintings of Van Eyck, Van der Weyden and Memling, as part of a wider material culture. The recent research on this material culture in the medieval Low Countries is hemmed in between historiography on Renaissance Italy on the one hand and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch Republic on the other.Footnote 4 For Italy, Jacob Burckhardt and more recently Richard Goldthwaite have laid bare the connection between the consumption patterns of urban elites – who had an income large enough to pay for this magnificence and splendour – and the rise of Renaissance culture.Footnote 5 Jan de Vries places the cradle of modern consumer society in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.Footnote 6 These consumers were, however, no longer just found amongst the elite. Consumption of inexpensive consumer goods that brought comfort and pleasure and created domesticity spread out to a much more socially diverse group of consumers. A recent project at the Centre for Urban History at Antwerp investigated precisely the social foundations and repercussions of changes and continuities in late medieval material culture in the Low Countries’ cities by analysing hundreds of inventories, both post-mortem and after confiscation. This enterprise has resulted in three different Ph.D. dissertations which respectively focused on clothing (Isis Sturtewagen), cooking and dining (Inneke Baatsen) and the organization of spaces and decorations within the house (Julie De Groot).Footnote 7 Although the three dissertations make use of the same database of inventories, each dissertation tackles different debates – on fashion, the relation between social manners and material culture, functional specialization within the house and domesticity – with all three relying on strong empirical foundations. The collective database of inventories is supplemented (to different degrees in each dissertation) by visual evidence from paintings by the Flemish Primitives and from prints, etiquette manuals, cookbooks, contemporary literature, extant material objects and archaeological reports. The three dissertations also link the material culture found in the inventories to different social groups, categorized according to the number of rooms mentioned in the inventory, which serves as a proxy for wealth.
Isis Sturtewagen's dissertation addresses the common cliché that the clothing of non-elite citizens was dull and drab. Lower-income and middling groups were dressed in the same colours as elites, but what made for social differentiation was the intensity and quality of the dye, alongside the type of fabric (silk, mixed textiles and woollens). Moreover, small decorations could be added and the right accessories mattered a great deal in late medieval Bruges. The deterioration of Bruges’ economy in the sixteenth century seriously affected incomes and, in turn, the clothing that citizens were able to wear. Yet, not only income determined what Bruges’ people wore, with occasion, age, gender, marital status and general decorum also playing important roles. It is these factors, and not the fairly weak sumptuary laws of the Low Countries, which determined what the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century inhabitants of Bruges wore. What the Bruges example demonstrates is that there was no such thing as the gradual democratization of fashion. Inneke Baatsen's work shows that dining practices were similarly interwoven with the social dynamics of urban society: tastes, modes of eating, use of table utensils and dining settings changed considerably in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and differed along social lines. Rich households had separate dining rooms, some of them even reserved for special occasions, while the less well-off ate in their kitchens, which were becoming increasingly convivial spaces. What was on the table – and especially the quality of the dishes and the refinement of the vessels – also signified social identity. Moreover, dining culture became more individualized, with each dining guest starting to have their own plate and utensils. Table manners too signified social and cultural capital and became an indicator of growing social polarization. In the third thesis, Julie De Groot draws on the place descriptions and room labels in the inventories to reconstruct the lay-out of Bruges’ houses. Doing so, she catches a glimpse of the actual use, context and lived reality of the decorative objects figuring in the inventories. Paintings, for example, were often clustered around house altars, indicating the degree of private devotion of the inhabitants of late medieval Bruges. The debate on the history of domesticity is fraught by the difference between public and private, and Bruges’ houses often had both dimensions: a public environment, like a shop, workshop or office, and more separate, domestic areas. Besides growing functional specialization in larger houses, in which each room had an exclusive function – for example, there were no beds in the kitchen – there was growing social specialization, meaning the maintenance of certain rooms to be used at specific times and by different people. Through these changes, Bruges citizens consciously furnished and organized their houses and, in doing so, transformed them into homes. All three dissertations compare their findings about Bruges with other cities in the Low Countries and abroad, while at the same time emphasizing the particular context and evolution of Bruges society reflected in its material culture. Surely, a twenty-first-century Johan Huizinga would have appreciated the sensitivity to materiality, colour, cultural practices and domesticity represented in these dissertations.
Economic shifts
Late medieval Bruges, and the economy that produced the material culture described in the previous section, looms large in the flurry of other dissertations on medieval urban history in the Low Countries.Footnote 8 Botho Verbist draws on a complex database of the extensive account ledgers of the Bruges broker Wouter Ameyde, who was active in the final years of the fifteenth and the first of the sixteenth centuries, to analyse the important role of brokers on the Bruges market and the use of double-entry book-keeping. Traditionally, brokers in fifteenth-century Bruges have been characterized as an old and parasitic institution: they were rent-seekers who were no longer necessary in a commercial city where ever more foreign merchants resided on a permanent basis. This alleged conservatism would eventually spell the demise of the Bruges market, when, throughout the fifteenth century, merchants started to frequent the more liberal Brabant fairs, an argument put forward by, among others, Henri Pirenne.Footnote 9 Verbist demonstrates that brokers became increasingly specialized in certain commodities, and Ameyde was no exception, establishing close contacts with producers in Bruges’ industrial hinterland and countryside and offering access to this supply network to his clients. Brokers like Ameyde offered legal guarantees, representation and payment services, at low fees, making them valuable to traders, many of whom stayed in Bruges throughout the trade year. Moreover, the brokers became merchants themselves; a finding that indicates the need to rethink the historiography on medieval Bruges as a centre of commerce dominated by foreign traders. Verbist emphasizes the discursive function of medieval accounting: written accounts, especially when structured according to the principles of double entry, acted as proof and signalled a reputation for honesty and professionalism towards the clients, often foreigners, of Bruges’ brokers and innkeepers. This type of book-keeping was also used in pragmatic fashion: book-keepers like Ameyde adapted the system to their own needs, which could change over time.Footnote 10
Bruges and its outport system in the Zwin estuary have also drawn the attention of archaeologists in recent years. Building mainly on non-invasive state-of-the-art archaeological techniques, Jan Trachet and colleagues from archaeology, history and geology have laid bare the changes in the Zwin landscape between 700 and 1550. Focusing on Michem, Monnikerede and Hoeke, the archaeological evidence shows how Bruges’ growing importance as a commercial town was made possible by the alteration of the landscape, from a coastal to a port environment. As Bruges lies 15 kilometres from the shore, these changes precipitated the development of a string of outports along the Zwin and the topography of these outports is now clearly established. In addition, Bruges’ trade links are observable in the archaeological remains found in the Zwin, such as ‘exotic’ cobblestones from the region around Berwick-upon-Tweed and the beaches of the Baltic Sea – used as ship ballast by Hanseatic traders – whilst Flemish sand is found at Wismar.Footnote 11
Shifts in commercial activity were not limited to Bruges’ outports and there has been considerable recent debate on the relocation of the commercial gateways in the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Footnote 12 Bruges had to give way to Antwerp after the revolts of the last two decades of the fifteenth century, while the Dutch Revolt toppled Antwerp to the benefit of Amsterdam. Such divergent trajectories of particular cities are methodologically instrumentalized in several of the dissertations reviewed here. Andrea Bardyn, for example, tackles one of the big questions in the historiography on the late medieval economy: how did women fare in the urban economy after the Black Death? The Brabant towns of Leuven, in economic decline during the second half of the fifteenth century, and Antwerp, with a booming commercial economy in that same period, figure as case-studies. Besides different economic structures and development, customary laws and political events also differed, and Bardyn shows how these factors affected women's agency in both towns. Contrary to most recent work on women's agency in the post-Black Death economy which concentrates on the labour market, Bardyn focuses on women's participation in the financial and real estate markets. While women's legal position was declining elsewhere in the later Middle Ages, exactly the opposite happened in cities such as Antwerp, where women's capital was drawn into the growing commercial economy. What mattered for participation and defined their capacities in the financial market was the life-stage at which they found themselves. Previous work has highlighted rich widows but single and married women, including Beguines, were not to be ignored in this market. An important finding of this study is that men tended to spread their investments over annuities, real estate and short-term loans whereas women usually only engaged in long-term money-lending in return for a fixed annual income. Some women were active investment managers, unlike the passive and ‘incompetent’ female bearers of lineage assets found in other Low Countries towns. The evidence from Antwerp's growing economy and more lenient legal system shows that the patriarchal restructuring of property was not a general phenomenon across the Low Countries during the fifteenth century, it was specific to particular contexts, mainly those of industrial decline in the textile sectors and weakening urban middle-class groups.Footnote 13
Besides the private market for finance and real estate, registered in the aldermen's deeds registers used by Bardyn, there was also a lively market for public credit in the towns, recorded in the city accounts. Rudolf Bosch taps into these sources and into the rich historiography on urban finances in Flanders, Brabant and Holland. The originality of his dissertation lies in the selection of two towns, Arnhem and Zutphen, in the duchy of Guelders in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, a land-locked political entity outside of the maritime core of the Low Countries, usually considered as peripheral by historians of the medieval Low Countries. Here again, an intercity comparison forms the crux of the dissertation. Arnhem and Zutphen retained more financial autonomy than towns in Flanders, Brabant and Holland. Even if the counts and dukes of Guelders wanted to tap into urban credit, capital and taxes to pay for their wars as much as their Burgundian competitors, they were much more dependent on their domain.Footnote 14 Another difference was the relatively late, in this case only at the end of the fifteenth century, demand for insight into and control of the city accounts by craft guilds. This was also the period when urban finances deteriorated as the result of increasing loans and gifts to the duke. The Guelders towns allied with their duke to keep out Burgundian rule after the traumatic Burgundian occupation of 1473–77. Guelders’ urban elites chose to increase taxes to support the duke, while at the same time making sure that their prince did not become too strong through the renewal of existing and acquisition of new urban privileges. The characteristics of urban finances were thus similar to those of other Low Countries’ towns: predominant indirect taxation based on excises and the use of funded urban debt as extraordinary revenue in times of need.Footnote 15
Urban governance
The same desire to compare different towns and to include regions on the historiographical periphery is to be found in the dissertation by Ben Eersels on the participation of craft guilds in the urban government of Leuven (duchy of Brabant), Maastricht (a double lordship with feudal ties to both the duke of Brabant and the prince-bishop of Liège) and Sint-Truiden (prince-bishopric of Liège) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Footnote 16 Central questions in this dissertation are the degree of participation of certain craft guilds, the identity of craft guild figures in urban government, the political agendas of craft guilds, the strategies used to secure demands and the channels of communication through which they voiced these agendas. Leuven, and Brabant in general, witnessed fewer revolts than the county of Flanders or the Liège region because of its reliance on diplomatic means, based on constitutional texts balancing the powers of the different political stakeholders in the duchy. The prince-bishopric of Liège was characterized by an almost constant succession of revolts caused by a large number of political actors of which none was able dominate the others, whether prince-bishops, towns or invading foreign princes. Whereas political life in the county of Flanders and the city of Liège are common subjects in political historiography, civic political participation through craft guilds in Brabant and other Liègeoise towns remains unexplored. Participation by craft guilds in urban government in the three towns was never a given; formal representation of craft guilds in the city council could be revoked and regained afterwards. Contrary to previous studies on Flemish towns, Eersels’ prosopographic research shows the absence of a process of oligarchization in urban government. There was a high turnover of craft guild members who acted as guild representatives in the city council, most of whom were middle class with strong networks rather than wealthy members who simply used guild membership for access to urban power. In all three cities, the urban government consulted with and was petitioned by the craft guilds, which demonstrates the latter's influential position in urban politics. Yet one should not characterize these craft guilds as democratic: while craft guilds often represented themselves as the upholders of the common good, lower-status artisans and non-members were kept outside the political process in which guilds participated. Moreover, other organizations such as parishes or neighbourhoods were excluded from political power by the craft guilds, which claimed to speak on behalf of the urban commune. This dissertation thus reflects the current characterization of medieval urban politics as poly-nuclear: power was shared and disputed by different organizations which themselves were dominated by intra-group struggles.Footnote 17
Janna Coomans tackles the preoccupation with the common good in cities of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Low Countries from a totally different angle: urban public health. Medieval historians collectively sigh when confronted with a popular imagination that constructs medieval cities as filthy and disease-ridden and Coomans demonstrates that urban authorities took significant actions to improve public health. The study argues that actions undertaken to improve urban health and sanitation had a strong impact on the governance of the urban population and social practices, actions which were themselves the object of negotiation between different urban groups. Drawing on a mixed theoretical framework, the thesis borrows from theories of space, governance, Michel Foucault's concepts of biopower and actor-networks, and is founded on a robust source-base with three detailed case-studies of Ghent, Leiden and Deventer. Alongside the secondary literature on the entire Low Countries, the reader gets to know what the perceived challenges to public health were, how these were dealt with and how this impacted the cities politically, socially and economically. What emerges from this research is a clear sense that responses to public health problems were not ad hoc, but a consistent and routine intervention by urban authorities. The Black Death may have been a sizeable challenge, but the policing of public health clearly predated the epidemic. To understand medieval public health, one should also consider the roles of fire, military threats, access to and quality of water (and in the context of the Low Countries, protection against water), food production and quality, garbage disposal, pig-keeping and stray dogs, and even migration and prostitution. Through measures that governed all these domains, urban authorities intervened in what we today would see as the private spheres of urban inhabitants; justifying these actions by emphasizing how they contributed to communal well-being. To enforce the rules, urban governments relied on specialized supervisors, urban officials such as market overseers adding public health to their responsibilities and talebearers who received part of the fine. Urban governments also co-operated with individual petitioners, informal networks, neighbourhood organizations and guilds. Coomans’ investigation into medieval public health thus provides a better understanding of government interventions into the lives of urban dwellers and on the way public health affected urban space.Footnote 18 This attention to the interplay between mentality and practice would, one suspects, have pleased Huizinga.
Memory and poor relief
Memory or memoria – obviously a topic of interest to Huizinga as a historian of mentality – has been another subject of considerable research in the urban history of the Low Countries over the last few years.Footnote 19 Tineke Van Gassen's Ph.D. dissertation provides an in-depth insight in the documentary memory of the late medieval city of Ghent between the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. This study asks where, how and why Ghent's city government kept, ordered and inventoried its charters, privileges, cartularies and administrative documents, and investigates what role these documents played in the city's turbulent political history. It thus asks what the function of a medieval city archive was. These questions mirror recent research on the social history of premodern archives.Footnote 20 This study brings together urban history, history of administration and archives, mnemonic practices, the increasing reliance on writing and the study of social identities. This is a field of research that is not strongly developed in the southern Low Countries, where the archival practices of rulers and religious institutions have drawn much more attention. While this is a study of Ghent, Van Gassen compares her findings with the archival situation in that other important Flemish city, Bruges. Ghent's city government went to great lengths to protect its important documents, keeping them in treasure boxes under lock and key in closed-off rooms. Different urban officers each had a key and the treasure boxes could only be opened when all keys were present. The distribution of the keys also reflected the distribution of urban political power. Interestingly, Ghent's urban archive was first located in the tower of the church of Saint-Nicolas, to be moved to the Franciscan monastery in the fourteenth century. Only at the beginning of the fifteenth century was the archive transferred to Ghent's belfry. Van Gassen observes that initiatives to copy important texts and privileges and take an inventory of the archive almost always took place in years of political crisis. She also shows that the archive as a form of urban social memory could be weaponized for political purposes. In addition, this dissertation brings together and provides detailed analyses of a large range of urban documents, which will be of interest to many urban historians not merely those concerned with the Low Countries.Footnote 21
Hannelore Franck considers another facet of memory in the late medieval towns of the Low Countries: the relation between remembrance and care for the afterlife – or memoria in the medieval sense – on the one hand and caritas or poor relief on the other. She investigates anniversaria – masses for the salvation of oneself or others on an annual or more frequent basis – at parish poor tables in the city of Bruges between 1270 (the first year of documentation relating to the institution of a parochial poor table) and 1584 (the end of the Bruges Calvinist republic). Many memorial services had a charitable component: annuities, tithes or sums of cash paid for the foundation, which allowed the poor table to distribute bread or other foodstuffs among the parish poor to increase the number of mass attendants. The more prayers, the greater chances for the founder's salvation. The practice of poor relief by parish institutions lies at the intersection of different historiographical traditions: studies into poor relief, civic religion, community formation, as well as religious and ecclesiastical history. However, Franck asserts that the precise connection between liturgy and poor relief and its long-term evolution has not received enough attention. Bruges constitutes an excellent case-study for several reasons: the wealth of a commercial metropolis made for well-endowed and hence well-documented parish poor tables. The growing influence of Protestantism, which culminated in a Calvinist republic between 1578 and 1584, also affected the working of the Catholic parish poor tables and the pioneering role of the western Flemish region in poor relief reforms in the sixteenth century. The main finding of this study is the constancy of the relationship between caritas and memoria, even when religious crisis struck the city. The poor tables retained a fairly high degree of autonomy over time while at the same time they maintained ties with the urban and church governments and other charitable and corporative organizations in Bruges. Even in the sixteenth century when voices for the centralization of poor relief became louder, these organizations displayed a remarkable resilience; although, in the end, the poor tables had to seize control and autonomy. In theory, donations were eternal but poor tables reduced, compounded and sometimes even stopped certain foundations. At risk were those foundations that decreased in value in real terms over time, like annuities and tithes. Donors, therefore, started to use cash lump sums. The question remains whether the poor relief financed by foundations was sufficient. Poor tables were able to increase poor relief for short periods, but were ineffective because of their fixed income in longer periods of crisis. The profile of the donors changed over time: in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries they mostly came from the urban elites, but in the fifteenth century, as a result of the economic boom, it was mainly the upper middle class which founded many requiem masses and contributed to urban poor relief. The donors were obviously concerned with their own salvation and instrumentalized poor relief to achieve this. Yet there was more to their apparent generosity: large donations bestowed prestige and status on the donor. The number and value of the foundations also waxed and waned in line with the economic conjuncture of Bruges.Footnote 22 A similar study by Douwe Faber on late medieval Leiden largely confirms Franck's findings. In Leiden, however, the city government's control of the relations between founders, poor tables, church fabrics and ecclesiastical authorities was stronger than in Bruges, whilst both cities demonstrate the omnipresence and frequency of annual masses in cities.Footnote 23
Whereas Franck and Faber focus on one city, comparing their subjects with others through secondary literature, Auke Rijpma takes a wider perspective in his dissertation. This study deals with several towns and regions in the Low Countries: Leiden, Utrecht, Ghent and their surrounding countryside. He considers the connection between religious and charitable foundations and the provision of public services. This includes poor relief and religious services, but also education, and deals with poor tables, hospitals, monasteries, chapters, church fabrics and benefices. While Franck's and Faber's theses can be characterized as religious and social history, Rijpma's work is very much economic history, basing its investigation on extensive quantitative analysis. The central question of this thesis is the extent to which religious and charitable institutions provided public services, how these services were financed and whether regional differences can be observed. Large foundations and rural foundations mainly drew their income from land ownership, whereas annuities – usually also based on land – were equally important for urban foundations. Smaller gifts were especially important for church fabrics and poor tables. Rijpma shows that particular foundations spent income on particular kinds of services: church fabrics, for example, financed education. Aggregating a large amount of data, it becomes clear that social expenditure was highest – on a per capita level – in cities without a strong industrial sector, but where guilds held powerful positions.Footnote 24
Johan Huizinga would, I hope, be pleasantly surprised to see the variety and depth of current research on medieval urban history in the Low Countries, a history which he was reluctant to include in his Waning of the Middle Ages. A willingness to compare several cities or to focus on one city and consider it within the framework of wider European urban historiography, the strong foundations of these studies built on extensive archival research and an openness to theories from other fields of history and other disciplines are the key strengths of all the theses covered in this review. In his 2011 review, Jelle Haemers observed the growing importance of new methods: prosopography, discourse analysis and social network analysis to name a few.Footnote 25 These methods are present in the theses considered here as well and continue to augment the arsenal of the urban historian. Many of these dissertations have engaged in the construction of large, sophisticated databases which produce detailed statistical data. What is perhaps still missing is the implementation of advanced methods from digital humanities: transcribing is still done in the old-fashioned manner, there is no digital text corpus analysis and GIS is not exploited in most theses.Footnote 26 This does not downplay the quality of the research and maybe the research is still best done by drawing on traditional methods. The future and, one hopes, another of these reviews will show whether medieval urban historians in the 2020s will work very differently from this bright generation.
