Leydis, Pauli, and Berchen Revisited. Collective History Writing in the Low Countries in the Late Fifteenth Century

This article focuses on a generation of chroniclers from the Low Countries operating at the intersection of urban and clerical environments and how they worked together to produce new historiographical texts. At the heart are the writings of three of the most productive and well-known historiographers of this generation: Johannes a Leydis, Theodericus Pauli and Willem van Berchen. The interdependency of a specific part of their body of work, namely their Chronicles of Holland, will be studied closely. This will lead to a new proposal for the complex relationship between these and other related contemporary texts. From this the contours emerge of a community of writers, reaching much further than these three alone, which shared a common interest in historiography and exchanged texts, ideas and manuscripts. In each of their texts, the influence of this exchange is tangible, exhibiting the collaborative nature of their historical writings, rarely detected in the Middle Ages.