Southern Low Countries Research Articles

Inter-Urban Alliances and the Archives of Legitimacy in the Southern Low Countries, 1250–1450

Inter-Urban Alliances and the Archives of Legitimacy in the Southern Low Countries, 1250–1450

Colourful rivers: archaeobotanical remains of dye plants from urban fluvial deposits in the southern Low Countries (Belgium)

Colourful rivers: archaeobotanical remains of dye plants from urban fluvial deposits in the southern Low Countries (Belgium)

Cultural transfer and literary culture in eighteenth-century Brussels. French journalists as cultural mediators

ABSTRACT The eighteenth-century Southern Low Countries have long been considered a no man’s land, as a result of the continuous import of exotic flavors and foreign texts. But is a no man’s land also a wasteland? What if we looked at it differently and started focusing on the literary culture that was slowly taking shape, already during this long-neglected period, through cultural transfer and translation? This article focuses on the cultural agency and discursive self-shaping of three French journalists who took an interest in the literary culture of this somewhat obscure region – of Brussels more particularly – and contributed to its cultural scene by publishing literary periodicals: the Littérateur Belgique (1755) by Alexandre Des Essarts (1728–1803), the Journal de Bruxelles, ou Le Penseur (1766) by Jean-François Bastide (1724–1798) and finally the Journal de Bruxelles and Alexandre Robineau (1746–1823) as one of its driving forces. Beyond the micro-level of individual agency, these periodicals helped create a productive intertwinement between a focus on local literary culture on the one hand and a continuous search for inspiration in foreign models on the other.

Indoor public spaces and the mobility of religious knowledge in late medieval Deventer and Amiens

Abstract This article will address the transfer of religious knowledge in two north-western European cities from a spatial perspective. Our starting point will be the thesis that immobile knowledge in closed places of knowledge (lieux de savoir) does not exist: (religious) knowledge only becomes functional in the dynamic encounter with users and it is disseminated through social networks. This approach, which involves the movement from closed spaces to processes and practices, also entails a questioning of outdoor and indoor spaces; of private and public spaces. The article will take its start from several case-studies of indoor public spaces, the transmission of religious knowledge and social networks, based on documentation from Deventer in the northern Low Countries and Amiens on the border of the southern Low Countries and France.

Industrial energy consumption in the urban Low Countries: Ghent and Leiden compared (c. 1650–1850)

AbstractThis article presents a comparative study of the industrial energy consumption in Ghent and Leiden, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It asks whether or not industrial development depended on the availability of coal. Whereas the Southern Low Countries had recourse to cheap coal from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, the Northern Low Countries remained trapped in its ‘proto-fossil’ trajectory based on peat, lacking a full fossil-fuel transition. By using production data to estimate the fuel consumption by industry, it is argued that energy divergences did not matter for industrialization. Both in Ghent and in Leiden, industries such as brewing, sugar refining, glass making and textile production had already largely switched to coal by the end of the seventeenth century. Explanations for these early coal-burning trajectories should be found, not in the ‘lucky’ location of coal supplies, but in the demand and organization of coal-specific industry itself.

Single and Double-entry Bookkeeping in Public and Private Accounts of the Southern Low Countries (1300–1800)

This article explores the differences that existed between public and private accounts of the Southern Low Countries by focusing on the bookkeeping method. Late medieval and early modern accounts originating from central and urban public authorities, as well as those from private merchants and companies, will be used. The paper argues that private accounts adopted double-entry bookkeeping in the 16th century and that Italian influence proved to be of great importance for its dissemination. Public accounts were less influenced by Italian models and did not introduce double-entry bookkeeping during the Ancien Régime. While this delay reflects a certain degree of conservatism, it is more indicative of the specific finality of public accounts that was very different from private accounts.

Migrants’ Multilingual Coping Mechanisms

In the sixteenth century, thousands of migrants moved away from the Southern Low Countries, the region most affected by the upheavals related to the Dutch Revolt. As their area of origin was marked by multilingualism, many of these migrants were used to navigating between Latin, Dutch, and French, and were bi- or multilingual themselves. A new project investigates how they exploited their linguistic capacities as a commodity, a form of immaterial starting capital in their new places of residence: while some left everything behind, they brought their language skills with them. The project concentrates on the three regions that welcomed the most migrants from the Southern Low Countries: the British Isles, Germany, and the Northern Low Countries. Each of these regions had its own linguistic marketplace, in which certain languages were valued more than others. Especially the French tongue, that was spoken as a second language by many migrants whose mother tongue was Dutch, could be useful for its professional and social value. By analysing the strategic language choices of a selection of migrants, this project aims to reveal how multilingualism was part of their coping mechanism, helping to rebuild their lives abroad.

The Black Death: window of opportunity or disaster? Demographic growth, stagnation and decline in the County of Hainaut (1349-1541)

Historians have observed a strong degree of divergence in population trends after the Black Death across Europe. A comprehensive explanation for this divergence is still missing and previous scholarship has cited the importance of either endogenous or exogenous factors. The most prominent exogenous factor cited in the literature is regional variation in the impact of the Black Death and repeat plague outbreaks, while explanations referring to the effect of endogenous factors have pointed to the role of fertility as a prime mover in long-term demographic developments instead. This article will use the County of Hainaut in the southern Low Countries as a case study to analyze the effect of endogenous socio-institutional factors on diverging regional population developments. However, by using data from a single (nearly) continuous source of mortmain accounts, this analysis will also take into account long-term mortality trends. This article concludes that diverging regional population trends after the Black Death in the County of Hainaut are mostly due to endogenous societal factors and not differentials in exogenous mortality trends in the long-run.

Fuelling the urban economy: A comparative study of energy in the Low Countries, 1600–1850

AbstractWhat was the role of energy in shaping modern economies and fuelling the transition to sustained economic growth? In the historiography on the industrial revolution, the transition to fossil energy carriers plays a central role. Despite recent efforts to gather new empirical evidence, long‐term comparative studies on energy transitions and their economic impact before and during the first industrial revolution remain rare. As a contribution to this literature, this article presents new quantitative data on energy consumption from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in the Low Countries. To explore differences in the chronology and impact of energy transitions, we compare the total levels of energy consumption, the energy mix, and the prices of fuels between two cities in the northern and southern Low Countries: Leiden and Ghent. This analysis enables us to explore more clearly which factors played a key role in the interaction between energy, economic growth, and industrialisation. The transition towards a cheap‐energy economy in Holland was associated with economic growth, but not with mechanisation. On the other hand, the rapid mechanisation process in Ghent was associated not with a cheap‐energy economy (relative to that of Leiden), but more specifically with a cheap‐coal economy.

Three Alba Amicorum from the Habsburg Netherlands

This article uses the alba collected by three travellers from the Habsburg Netherlands to Constantinople in the 1570s and 1580s to explore the purposes of collecting and what they reveal about being part of an integrated imperial mission that represented Habsburg territory abroad. The first album was gathered by the imperial ambassador’s physician Arnold Manlius between May 1571 and November 1574. Manlius’s humanist project is filled with over ninety signatures from his fellow housemates and local notables, accompanied by explanatory annotations in Latin. The article contrasts this large collection with the alba of Lambert Wijts of Mechlin and Johann Huenich of Antwerp, both of whom spent two months in Constantinople as members of tribute-carrying delegations. Wijts (who was in Constantinople between July and August 1572) and Huenich (January through March 1586) gathered eclectic collections of signatures alongside sets of costume album images. Taken together, the three alba reveal a range of collecting practices and purposes – intellectual, documentary, and personal – of men from the Southern Low Countries working in the service of Habsburg emperors in Ottoman Constantinople.

Jurisdiction and its attribution in the works of Diodorus Tuldenus (1594-1645)

Summary Diodorus Tuldenus (1594-1645) as a professor of the Digest at the University of Leuven is one of the most representative figures for legal academia in the Southern Low Countries in this period. After a brief biography, this article deals with a classic subject in the field of public law as discussed by Tuldenus in his works: jurisdiction and its attribution. In chapter one, the genealogy of the terms iurisdictio and imperium is traced until Tuldenus’ treatment of the subject, situating his position vis-à-vis the state of the art. In the second chapter the same is done for the conditions under which this jurisdiction can be attributed. In the conclusion, a tentative link is drawn between Tuldenus’ positions and their broader political ramifications.

Life-writing on Lead: Burial Plaques and Their Obituaries, c.950-1200

This article concerns lead burial plaques and their engraved Latin obituaries in France, England, and the southern Low Countries. Lead plaques and their inscriptions were buried with the dead in their shroud or coffin from the seventh century onwards but they became popular in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Originally, they contained brief inscriptions with the name of the dead person accompanied by some penitential prayers. From the tenth century onwards the biographical information increased to the extent that the prayers were cast aside and the texts developed into obituaries. This article will set the obituaries in the context of the concept of life-writing which offers a fresh and nuanced approach to biographical writing. It seems that only very specific information was included in obituaries on the lead plaques, such as important events in someone’s life or career. The texts were not meant to be full narratives from birth to death. The lead plaques and their obituaries are found with elite or near-elite men (mostly high-status clergy) and women and also some children. Several cases studies for women and children are included to illustrate the type of information given in the Latin obituaries. Although lead burial plaques and their inscriptions have been studied by medieval archaeologists, epigraphers and liturgists, this article argues that historians can learn a great deal from the objects and their inscriptions especially as testimony to the Latin life-writing on individual men and women in the Middle Ages.

Vernacular Multilingualism. The use of French in Medieval Dutch Literature

Recently new attention has been paid to the presence and use of French outside of France in multilingual regions, one of them being the Southern Low Countries. Scholarship focusing on this area has emphasized the presence of French within the Dutch literary culture as well as studied the language attitude of Dutch authors towards French. This article adds a third focus to this scholarship, namely that of the use of French found within multilingual texts from the Southern Low Countries. Through an analysis of a selection of bilingual and trilingual texts, it is determined how French is incorporated in these texts, what functionality it serves and to what extent this function reflects or contradicts findings from the other two views on French in medieval Dutch literary culture.

Women and Stews: the Social and Material History of Prostitution in the late medieval Southern Low Countries

Abstract This article explores the social background and material culture of an understudied medieval brothel, the private ‘stew’, the most common type of brothel in the Southern Low Countries, where public brothels were rare. The fifteenth-century lease contracts of private stews contain information about the stew's size, economic value, and ambiance, suggesting the advantageous social position of some of the women who sold sex and providing inspiration to English brothel keepers. The absence of public brothels in the Low Countries reflected both a tolerance for prostitution and the relative freedom enjoyed by women in this region.

Making space for resistance: the spatiality of popular protest in the late medieval Southern Low Countries

AbstractUsing several cities in the late medieval Southern Low Countries as a case-study, this article deals with the relation between urban space and different forms of political protest. Urban commoners were aware of the powerful symbolism of certain places in the late medieval city and used that to their advantage during large-scale revolts. Yet the use of space was not limited to the dramatic occupations during these revolts. This article uncovers a wide range of strategies and tactics that common people used to act within given spaces to make their resistance possible. A spatial analysis of several instances of large- and smaller-scale resistance shows that space was intrinsically connected with how and when any form of resistance developed in late medieval cities. As such, the article aims to contribute to the literature on the importance of space in late medieval urban politics, in which attention to smaller-scale practices has been very limited.

Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health by Sara Ritchey

Reviewed by: Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health by Sara Ritchey Giulia Giamboni Sara Ritchey, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), xiv + 310 pp. Sara Ritchey's book Acts of Care explores women's everyday practices in the southern Low Countries during the thirteenth century. Ritchey argues that feminine caregiving was not just a manifestation of religious fervor, devotion, and piousness, as it has been commonly framed. Rather, these practices constituted an important yet understudied component of the broader field of medieval medicine. Exploring diverse practices such as healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential observations reveals that women were highly knowledgeable about health and the body, and active participants in premodern European medicine. Women's medical engagement is a history made of "fragile traces" excluded from university-trained medical treatises (4). Instead, we find traces in liturgy, miracles, poetry, meditations, sacred objects, and the testaments and endowments from hospitals and leprosaria populated by Cistercian nuns and beguines. Ritchey builds on the methodologies of performance studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, the history of enslaved communities in North America and the Caribbean, and from medical anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa in order to recover the therapeutic epistemologies of medieval European women. These methodologies offer new tools "for making visible voices and presences" silenced by technologies of power (28–29). [End Page 283] Acts of Care is divided into three sections that mirror Ritchey's research questions and sources. Part 1 presents hagiographic sources from the thirteenth-century liégeois corpus whose protagonists were "new" saints, that is, those saints still not officially canonized by the church. This body of saints' lives illuminates the ways in which holy people developed cults and attracted communities of faithful while they were still alive. Because miracle stories taking place at tombs, relics from women saints, and stories about miraculous posthumous healing were told and performed by women, these sources show how manifesting sanctity was gendered feminine. The liégeois corpus is also revealing about care and authority. Ritchey indicates that feminized forms of care were integral yet excluded from the European health care system. Women's affective labor performed through prayers and through the recitation of psalms and dramatic poetry for the sick was highly valued in the healing of wounds, performing obstetric services, and caring for people with diverse afflictions. Part 2 turns to masculine constructions and conceptualizations of therapeutic discourse and knowledge by using a matrix of authoritative discourse, theological, medical, and hagiographic texts. Premodern medical theory conceived of the internal body as made of humors and qualities. The balance or imbalance of them determined a patient's sickness or health. Other elements corresponded to the comportment of the body—the so-called non-naturals. These elements referred to the six factors external to the body—air, food and drink, diet and rest, sleeping and waking, evacuation and retention, and the passions of the soul—and were understood to influence bodily health in humoral medicine. The presence of the non-naturals in medical terminology and texts indicates that emotional care was as vital as other therapeutic remedies to bodily health. Further, their presence reveals that there was a certain degree of anxiety among authoritative discourses, particularly in relation to the passions of the souls and to verbal forms of medicine—charms, incantations, and prayers. Instead of denying the efficacity of these widespread and popular remedies, university-trained male authorities sought to regulate the circumstances in which verbal medicine could work—only trained male physicians could properly use and harness these words. Theologians and hagiographers also expressed anxieties about the place of the soul in scientific medicine. Ritchey argues that religious authors challenged Scholastic medical authors' rationalization as it could erode the place of God in bodily health. Part 3 interrogates women's actual knowledge of the body and its care. Ritchey explores modes of knowledge transmission in women's religious communities, such as beguinages and their affiliated hospitals. Prayers, liturgies, images, and poetry—interpreted through the lens of performative studies—reveal women's "therapeutic technology" made of psalters, charms, blessings, relics, meditations, and prayers in addition to...

Erycius Puteanus’ Elogia project, Balduinus Horickius and Chicago, Newberry Library, Wing MS ZW 6465 .H782

This article proposes a study of Chicago, Newberry Library, Wing ms ZW 6465 .H782 and analyses its significance for Erycius Puteanus’ Elogia project to which the author refers often in his rich correspondence, especially in his letters to Guilliam Blitterswyck. The study also links the ms. to two of Puteanus’ minor publications in print, the Podium Philippicum and the Orchestra Burgundica. Lastly, it discusses the lineographic drawings on the background of the calli-graphic tradition in the first half of the seventeenth century and more specifically at the court of the governors of the Southern Low Countries.

Des clercs qui se mesleront de faire lettres et obligations

Summary During the late Middle Ages, the organisation of voluntary jurisdiction in the customary regions of the Southern Low Countries was strongly determined by local developments. While it thrived in the major bishoprics of Liège and Tournai as well as in the commercial centers of Flanders and Brabant, historiography long assumed that the notary public failed to integrate into society in the rural county of Hainaut. Competition with the more dominant aldermen and comital vassals or hommes de fief supposedly prevented notaries from institutionalising their role as private legal intermediaries. Yet, the long-held top-down perspective disregarded interactions between, and the mutual competition among these different ‘agents’, thus creating a unilateral view that emphasised the importance of existing or indigenous alternatives. This contribution aims to better comprehend the organisation of late-medieval voluntary jurisdiction in Hainaut, taking the co-existence of public notaries and hommes de fief into consideration. From a bottom-up approach, relying on contemporary documentary writing practices, it will demonstrate how they both employed pragmatic literacy to gain authority, claim fides publica, and consolidate their own institutional position as such. This paradigm shift offers a framework that nuances previous insights regarding the reception of and developments within the notarial office in late-medieval Hainaut.

Krijg je nog rente voor een lied?

Abstract This article presents the first diachronic overview of the economic, social and symbolic profits of ‘city poets’ (‘stadsdichters’) in the Low Countries. From the early fifteenth century onwards, there have been many (more or less) official relationships between city councils and poets. The prominence and the form of these relationships, however, diverged greatly in different periods: whereas official appointments were the standard in the fifteenth, sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries, the period in between saw a much more diverse landscape of informal appointments and relationships. After presenting a historical overview of the role of city poets throughout the centuries, this article focuses on two well-documented periods in which formal agreements were made between town governments and poets: the late Middle Ages and the start of the 21st century. We analyze political and financial agreements explicitly in relationship to the complexities surrounding the production of city poetry. City poetry, paid by public money, is bound to be controversial: in general because its status is subject to changes and political discussions, but also because this form of commissioned poetry is sometimes seen as a form of propaganda. Official city poetry seems to flourish most in societies with a stable political-religious climate (as in the Southern Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth century) and/or with a keen interest in city marketing (as in Flanders and the Netherlands in the twenty-first century).

'Acciò Le Anime Dei Fedeli Non Morissero Disperate': Capuchin Friars, the Plague and Plague Treatises in the Early Modern Period

'Acciò Le Anime Dei Fedeli Non Morissero Disperate':Capuchin Friars, the Plague and Plague Treatises in the Early Modern Period1 Bert Roest (bio) Francis of Assisi's embrace of a leper,2 and the initial identification of the Friars Minor with the outcasts of society, was echoed in the renown of a number of Franciscan saints and beati as miraculous healers and patron saints for those suffering from certain illnesses.3 Some of them were also [End Page 237] known for hospital service during epidemics.4 All this has created a long-standing association between the Franciscan order family and the care for the sick. Yet despite significant involvement of individual friars, and some Franciscan friaries, Clarissan convents and associated confraternities with hospitals and comparable institutions during the medieval period and after,5 there was no systemic Franciscan engagement with caring for the sick beyond the convent walls.6 The main exception were different [End Page 238] groups of Grey Sisters (Sœurs grises) in the Southern Low Countries, Northern France and Scotland that followed the tertiary rule and provided hospital care. Yet it is not always clear to what extent such groups can be assigned to the Franciscan order family.7 At the same time, as a wide-ranging recent essay by Ottó Gecser has pointed out, the care for the sick, incurables and other sufferers, as well as illnesses like leprosy and the plague played a significant role in the medieval Franciscan hagiographic self-image, and as a polyvalent metaphor in Franciscan preaching and related treatises on societal reform, notably during the Observant period.8 The Capuchins, the new Franciscan branch established during the early sixteenth century, never took on the character of a designated hospital order (unlike the Crociferi, the Camilliani and the Compagnia del Divino Amore). Yet in comparison with other members of the Franciscan order family, the Capuchins were more habitually involved with the care for victims of sudden epidemics and those suffering from a variety of incurable illnesses (including syphilis). At the same time, the Capuchin religious mission included more systemic initiatives for organizing social care for a variety of marginal groups (such as urban poor, orphans, fallen women, prisoners, and 'incurabili'). This started early, with the 'mixed' apostolate of Matteo of Bascio and Ludovico of Fossombrone, and its [End Page 239] importance persisted in subsequent centuries, often in collaboration with local authorities and other institutions.9 Throughout Europe, Capuchin friars repeatedly distinguished themselves during outbreaks of the plague and other contagious diseases, and many individual friars were renowned for their service to patients, often at great personal risk. These include well-documented Capuchin authors, whose biographies are detailed in various catalogues and national dictionaries, such as Bartolomeo Cordoni of Città di Castello (1471-1535), Franciscus Titelmans (1502-1537), Girolamo Finucci of Pistoia (d. 1570), Bernardino of Alhalma (d. 1593), Pierre Besson of Dreux (d. 1598), Apollinarius of Sigmaringen (1584-1629), Archangel of Aberdeen (Georg Leslie, d. 1637), Francesco of Vicenza (Francesco de'Mironi di Barbarano, d. 1656), Tiburtius of Brussels (Frans van den Berge, d. 1669), Bonaventura of Arezzo, (1648-1708), and Felice of Nicosia (1715-1787).10 Yet these friars only form the tip of the iceberg. Many additional Capuchin friars who distinguished themselves and often died within the context of caring for the physical and spiritual needs of plague victims and 'incurati' are mentioned in Capuchin chronicles and old collective biographies. Hence the anonymous Saggio della vita de'cappuccini liguri illustri in virtù, dottrina e santità mentions dozens of friars who died in this type of service in the Liguria region alone, among whom no less than 31 friars who died in action during the plague epidemic of Genoa in 1656.11 The role of Capuchin friars is particularly well-documented with regard to the large, in part European-wide pandemic resurgences of the [End Page 240] plague in the later sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These include wide-spread outbreaks in 1564, 1574/77, 1580/87, 1595/99, 1603/1606, 1625/36 (esp. 1629/36), 1656 (predominantly in Italy), 1664/70, and 1720/1722 (especially in Southern France), and a much larger number of more regional outbreaks in...