Songs of Sodom: Singing About the Unmentionable Vice in the Early Modern Low Countries

This chapter shows how an early modern theatre society facilitated forms of public debate and the formation of public opinion which Habermas believed to have been absent at the time for lack of proper media and of an engaged and informed public. Using the case of Amsterdam in the 1530s it argues that a sophisticated interplay of theatrical, visual, oral, manuscript and printed media increased public debate, and helped create an interregional movement and the formation of its leadership. Theatrical means were used by various layers of society to create maximum publicity effects. Finally, the chapter argues that, if societies can be characterized by their dominant communication systems, then, given the example of Amsterdam and many other places in and outside the Low Countries, early modern urban society can be termed a theatre society. Keywords:Amsterdam; early modern theatre society; Low Countries; public debate; public opinion

The Elusive Netherlands: the Question of National Identity in the early Modern Low Countries on the Eve of the RevoltThe idea of the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands having any sort of national identity is usually met with understandable scepticism. The constitutional obstacles to the construction of such an identity were formidable, not least the piecemeal formation of the Burgundian dynastic state, whose prince owed homage to the kings of France and to the Holy Roman Emperor for their territories, and some of whose subjects could still seek justice in ‘foreign’ courts . Not surprisingly the early modern Low Countries baffled foreigners, but even those thoroughly familiar with the region did not know whether it belonged to ‘Gallia’ and ‘Germania’, and in particular how the Habsburg Netherlands related to an entity as vague as ‘Nider teutschelant’. The rich yet problematic nomenclature for the Low Countries testifies to these difficulties, which were aggravated by the protean configuration of the Habsburg state and by uncertain relationship between ‘Dutch’ and ‘Teutsch zung’. The state-building activities of Charles V certainly did not resolve the political and cultural confusion, but by 1555 these had helped to foster a stronger consciousness of the Low Countries as a distinctive political community, especially in the ‘core’ provinces. On the eve of the Revolt this found expression, ironically, in the emerging opposition to the presence of Spanish soldiers and to the central government’s religious policy.

Politically active women in the early modern period have often been seen as exceptional figures, notable primarily for their ability to influence decision-making despite societal constraints on female authority. Historians have traditionally focused on examples of women from noble, princely, or royal backgrounds, given the prominence and status that enabled their influence. This article argues that expanding the scope of research to include a broader array of social contexts will allow a clearer understanding of early modern women’s roles as legitimate political agents. We propose three approaches to achieve this, highlighting the potential of new digital tools and technologies. By adopting a more systematic analysis that inherently acknowledges women’s political agency, we can gain deeper insights into the dynamics of power in early modern society.

Abstract:The emergence of factor markets during the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period was of crucial importance for long-term economic development. Despite Flanders and Brabant being situated in one of the most densely urbanised regions within Europe at the time, the current historiographical debate lacks a quantitative analysis of the market for land in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. This article focuses on the transmission of rural property in the southern Low Countries from the 1400s up until the end of the eighteenth century. Using time-series data on the rural land market for a selection of case studies within Inland Flanders and Brabant has enabled me to present a long-run analysis of the changes in the market value of land, the market activity and the overall nature of the rural peasant land market. My findings show a tendency towards fewer but larger holdings being transferred on the land market. The path-dependent nature of this process had a significant impact upon the changing proto-capitalistic nature of agriculture within the southern Low Countries. As per capita market activity declined and the average transfer size increased, the farmers’ dependency on the lease market grew effectively speeding up the pauperisation processes in Inland Flanders.

List of Illustrations Preface, Jan Bloemendal, Arjan van Dixhoorn and Elsa Strietman 1. Literary Cultures and Public Opinion in the Early Modern Low Countries, Jan Bloemendal and Arjan van Dixhoorn 2. 'You serve me well': Representations of Gossip, Newsmongering and Public Opinion in the Plays of Cornelis Everaert, Samuel Mareel 3. 'Please Do Not Mind the Crudeness of its Weave': Literature, Gender and the Polemic Authority of Anna Bijns, Judith Kessler 4. The Morality of Hypocrisy: Gnapheus's Latin Play Hypocrisis and the Lutheran Reformation, Verena Demoed 5. Playing to the Public, Playing with Opinion: Latin and Vernacular Dutch History Drama by Heinsius and Duym, Juliette Groenland 6. Hugo Grotius in Praise of Jacobus Arminius: Arminian Readers of an Epicedium in the Dutch Republic and England, Moniek van Oosterhout 7. Manuscript Pamphlets and Made-Up Performances: New Sources and Challenges in the Study of Public Opinion, Nelleke Moser 8. 'The Cry of the Royal Blood': Revenge Tragedy and the Stuart Cause in the Dutch Republic, 1649-1660, Helmer Helmers 9. 'A Vile and Scandalous Ditty': Popular Song and Public Opinion in a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Village Conflict, Joke Spaans 10. Early Modern Literary Cultures and Public Opinion: An Epilogue in the Form of a Discussion, Jan Bloemendal and Arjan van Dixhoorn Bibliography About the authors Index of Names and Subjects

Sixteenth-century political, religious and intellectual authorities were themselves concerned about the persuasive power of songs and poems. Fearing the divisive potential of such works, they developed special censorship rules such as bans on the treatment of certain subjects, the checking of texts prior to performance, and thereafter prosecution and, where deemed necessary, sanctions. This chapter examines the process of the formation of public opinion in the early modern Low Countries with a special focus on the insufficiently examined role of literature in forming opinions and ways of thinking. It shows that the early modern Low Countries did in fact have the potential to develop a public opinion, and that literary works were important in this regard. The chapter demonstrates that it should be no less natural for historians to use responses to social, political, religious and other issues which appeared in a literary form as well as other sources. Keywords: early modern Low Countries; public opinion

‘The Sharpness of a Smooth Tongue’. Literary Texts and the Formation of Public Opinion in the Early Modern NetherlandsThe Low Countries hardly play any role in international debates about the history of the formation of public opinion in early modern Europe. In the wake of Jürgen Habermas, historians have focused in particular on late seventeenthand eighteenth-century England and France. Scholars have criticised the notion that it was during the eighteenth century that the formation of free public opinion came into existence due to a combination of the periodical press, its critical role and a national readership. Nevertheless, the period before 1700 is hardly referred to at all during discussions about the role of public opinion. During that time a permanent, structured public openness did not exist. However, in the early modern Low Countries many socio-cultural and institutional conditions seem to be present which made the formation of critical public opinion among the population possible. The literary culture of these regions offers an important research subject for studies into the formation of public opinion.

Contents: By way of introduction The elusive Netherlands: the question of national identity in the early modern Low Countries on the eve of the Revolt In defence of the common fatherland: patriotism and liberty in the Low countries, 1555a 1576 Moulded by repression: the early Netherlands Reformation, 1520a 55 The 'inquisition' and the repression of religious dissent in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1521a A legend in the making: news of the 'Spanish Inquisition' in the Low Countries in German evangelical pamphlets, 1546a 1550 Dissident propaganda and political organisation at the outbreak of the Revolt of the Netherlands Posters, pamphlets and prints: the ways and means of disseminating dissident opinions on the eve of the Dutch Revolt Calvinists and 'papist idolatry': the mentality of the image-breakers in 1566 Martyrs with a difference: Dutch Anabaptist victims of Elizabethan persecution The search for religious identity in a confessional age: the conversions of Jean Haren (c.1545a c.1613) Calvinist loyalism. Jean Haren, Chimay and the demise of the Calvinist republic of Bruges Bibliography Index.

Archduke Philip the Handsome promulgated a new constitution for the County of Zeeland (Keure van Zeelandt in Dutch).1 In Antwerp Govaert Bac later printed the text. It was the first time that the central authorities of the Low Countries resorted to printing to disseminate its official acts. This case, and in particular the links between the Antwerp printer Govaert Bac and the Burgundian court in Brussels, provide the starting point for a broader study, exploring the relationship between the community of printers and the central government in the early modern Low Countries. This complex relationship has not yet been the subject of a detailed study. Until now, only the relationship between printers and local, provincial or religious authorities have attracted the attention of scholars. Investigations were notably conducted on the French-speaking part of the Low Countries and Antwerp.

In the Early Modern period, the Low Countries (roughly corresponding to present-day Netherlands and Belgium) were a multilingual hub. In the commercial centres, code-switching and translation from and into multiple languages were the order of the day. In other respects, fundamental shifts occurred. The war that engulfed the area in the second half of the sixteenth century resulted in a territorial division in around 1600. While the Spanish Netherlands in the south were transformed into a bastion of the Counter-Reformation, the Calvinist-dominated Dutch Republic in the north became a global trading empire. Migration, confessional polemics, international publishing and trade, missionary endeavours and the multi-ethnic nature of overseas settlements led to intense translation activity, yet with marked differences between north and south. The essay considers the shifting interactions between translation and multilingualism at the level of society, individuals and texts.

In the past decades, numeracy has taken an increasingly important place in the study of human capital formation, as well as in literacy studies and studies on formal education and book production. In order to understand levels of education, scholars have recently tried to develop new ways to measure the level of education, particularly because it has since become apparent that the measures of literacy historically have not always been very accurate. To measure numeracy, population surveys have been used to show that in the past respondents who were innumerate had a tendency to state their ages as round numbers, ending in 0 or 5. Finding suitable data in the pre-modern age to analyze numeracy via age heaping is a cumbersome task, however. In this article, the authors explore the possibilities of using art, especially individual portraits in which the age of the sitter is indicated on the portrait by means of the Aetatis suae formula, as a source to study human capital formation and numeracy. This article has two main objectives that contribute to different areas of economic history as well as art history. The authors first demonstrate which criteria should be taken into account when building a database, especially for artistic artifacts. Secondly, they use the dataset to contribute to the understanding of numeracy levels among the well-to-do in the Low Countries in the early modern period. The analysis will show that women's numeracy was often even higher than that of men. Notwithstanding the high overall level of women's numeracy compared to other countries in Europe, the authors will also test the recent hypothesis put forward by Peter Földvári, Bas Van Leeuwen, and Van Jieli Leeuwen-Li that when women's ages were mentioned, they were usually reported as part of a married couple and possibly adapted to the ages husbands reported.

In this paper, I argue that the early modern intellectual culture in Early Modern Europe was basically a ‘culture of quaestio’ in which the ‘question’ played a fundamental role as an educational tool, a intellectual method and - as a consequence - as a line of reasoning. Using Peter Paul Rubens’s Double portrait of Seneca and Nero and Pieter Aertsen’s Jesus in the House of Mary and Martha as prime examples, I’ll argue that certain works of art – with artistic ambition – were conceived as quaestiones disputatae rather than self-confirmatory narratives, fully in line with the intellectual/pedagogical principles of quaestiones in the early modern Low Countries.

Introduction to the special issue 'Time and Temporality in the Early Modern Low Countries'.

This essay deals with the nature, background, and consequences of urban patronage for individual rhetoricians in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries. Although this phenomenon is most likely rooted in courtly practice, it is mainly because of the usefulness of rhetoricians in the context of urban public festivals that some of them received financial rewards from city authorities. My analysis shows how in the Low Countries urban festive culture and the oral dissemination of literary texts played an important, and heretofore largely neglected, role in the professionalization and individualization of authorship during the early modern period.

In this paper, we set out to explore trends in mobility levels in six smaller towns in the Low Countries during the late Middle Ages and early modern period. We use pairs of tax lists to divide the population into quintiles and draw up mobility tables. We estimate mobility as the proportion of people moving into a different quintile. We did not find a long-term trend in mobility levels. Mobility levels did fluctuate in the towns we investigate, but we did not find any relation to trends in or levels of population or inequality. Our results suggest that preindustrial urban societies remained fairly rigid. Many people remained either in the top or bottom half of the distribution. It seems particularly people at the top managed to stay at the top.