Low Countries (c. 500-1500)
More general subjects:
La voix de son maître
Les hérauts d’armes au service des ducs de Bourgogne (1363-1519)
Le héraut d’armes est un personnage incontournable du Moyen Âge occidental. Spécialiste des tournois présent au côté du prince lors des grandes cérémonies constamment sur les routes pour porter des lettres aux différents souverains il est aussi l’un des meilleurs connaisseurs de la noblesse occidentale.
L’émergence de ces officiers dans la société de cour est fulgurante. Apparus à la fin du XIIe siècle au sein du groupe des jongleurs et des ménestrels ils se mettent dès la fin du XIVe siècle au service des grands seigneurs des villes et des princes pour devenir au dernier siècle du Moyen Âge une véritable institution en France en Angleterre ou en Bourgogne.
Les Pays-Bas bourguignons offrent sans aucun doute un des meilleurs exemples de l’épanouissement de l’office d’armes au sein d’une cour médiévale. Véritables porte-voix du duc chargés de prononcer les déclarations de guerre et de publier la paix les hérauts sont omniprésents dans la conduite de la guerre ou dans la diplomatie de Philippe le Bon et de Charles le Téméraire. Baptisés du nom de provinces bourguignonnes vêtus de leur cotte d’armes ils représentent l’État bourguignon autant que le duc lui même jusqu’à en devenir son avatar.
Diplomatics in the Netherlands
The Use, Editing, and Study of Charters by Dutch Historians from the Middle Ages to the Present
Charters and other administrative texts have long had the full attention of medievalists as primary sources in their historiographical work. This also applies to scholars from the Netherlands. Ever since the late Middle Ages they recognised the value of these sources included them as testimony in their historiography and gradually began to realise that charters and other documents required a specific form of textual criticism and a special way of editing. In this Dutch historians usually followed developments abroad. Sometimes as in the early seventeenth century they were ahead methodologically but for long periods they depended for new insights on developments elsewhere. This was especially true in the nineteenth century when scientific diplomatic methods and editing techniques emerged which would only be introduced and applied in the Netherlands in the next century. In the twenty-first century Dutch scholars are fully participating in the ‘digital turn’ that is creating new research tools in diplomatics.
Ultimately the history of diplomatics in the Netherlands is part of the broad development of historiography in the country and therefore a valuable aspect of the history of scholarship in general.
Kartulare
Ordnen der Archive und Ordnung der Welt (9.-13. Jahrhundert)
Ce recueil d’actes est le résultat d’un atelier de recherche dans le cadre d’un partenariat entre l’université franco-allemande l’université Goethe de Francfort-sur-le-Main et l’Institut français d’Histoire en Allemagne (désormais IFRA-SHS). Cette rencontre a réuni des chercheurs français allemands et néerlandais autour de la question des mises en ordre opérées par et dans les cartulaires ecclésiastiques. Le parti pris fut de considérer cette dimension dans un temps long (IXe-XIIIe siècle) et dans un vaste espace géographique allant de la Souabe au diocèse de Quimper. Huit études de cas présentent différentes mises en ordres observées au sein d’un unique cartulaire ou d’un corpus. Elles considèrent entre autres la cartularisation comme une mise en ordre des archives par un classement des actes sur un support nouveau ; mais aussi comme un moment où l’établissement cartulariste ordonne de son patrimoine et se définit par rapport à ses voisins laïcs et/ou ecclésiastiques.
The Sisterbook of Master Geert’s House, Deventer
The Lives and Spirituality of the Sisters, c. 1390‑c. 1460
The Sisterbook of Master Geert’s House contains the lives of sixty-four Sisters of the Common Life who died between 1398 and 1456. Founded as an alms-house for destitute women in 1374 by the end of the fourteenth century Master Geert’s House had become a home for women desiring to live a life of humility and penitence as well as in community of goods without vows. The Sisterbook was likely written sometime between 1460 and 1470 at a time when the religious fervour that had characterized the earlier Sisters had begun to wane. It was to incite the readers and hearers of the Sisterbook which would have been read in the refectory during mealtimes to imitate the earlier Sisters who are portrayed as outstanding examples of godliness and Sisters of the Common Life. The opening sentence of the Sisterbook succinctly sums up the author’s reason for writing it: ‘Here begin some edifying points about our earlier Sisters whose lives it behoves us to have before our eyes at all times for in their ways they were truly like a candle on a candlestick’ and who by implication could still illumine the way for her own generation of Sisters. The first foundation of Sisters of the Common Life Master Geert’s House became the ‘mother’ house of numerous other houses in the Low Countries and Germany directly as well as indirectly and served as an inspiration for others.
This book provides a study of the Sisterbook and its significance in the Devotio Moderna and late medieval female religiosity while the accompanying translation introduces this important source to an English audience.
Judith of West Francia, Carolingian Princess and First Countess of Flanders
Biographical Elements and Legacy
Judith of West Francia is one of the most enigmatic of Charlemagne’s early descendants. The daughter of the king of West Francia and future emperor Charles the Bald and his wife Ermentrude she was one of only a handful of Carolingian princesses who were destined for marriage. Over the course of her teenage years she married two successive kings of Wessex became the first consecrated queen of England was widowed twice returned to Francia with an immense dowry and sparked a major diplomatic incident when she eloped with a nobleman from Flanders called Baldwin. Eventually she married Baldwin in early 864 and together they established the dynasty of the counts of Flanders. In doing so the couple laid the groundwork for what would become one of the mightiest and most prestigious territorial principalities in north-western Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries. But even in the tenth century exceedingly few written memories of Judith’s life survived. This explains why she was never the subject of a biography in the medieval or early modern eras and why scholarship’s understanding of her life and legacy remains highly fragmented. This volume sets the record straight offering an accessible and interdisciplinary discussion of all relevant and documented aspects of Judith’s life and legacy.
The Rise of Cities Revisited
Reflections on Adriaan Verhulst's Vision of Urban Genesis and Developments in the Medieval Low Countries
Adriaan Verhulst's The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (1999) is the last comprehensive work written by a single author on the urban genesis and spatial developments of cities in the medieval Low Countries. Since then monographs specialised studies and articles have been published on various cities and towns while urban archaeologists have carried out numerous excavations. Much new knowledge has been gained yet many gaps and the need for comparative overviews remain.Twenty-five years after Verhulst’s synthesis The Rise of Cities Revisited takes a fresh look at the origins and developments of cities and towns in the Low Countries between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries critically assesses progress made in scholarship and outlines future directions for research. The chapters of the book are written by senior and junior specialists from various fields including medieval history historical geography economic history archaeology and building history. The Rise of Cities Revisited presents a state of the art and provides scholars with tools to study this complex subject in future.
Saints of the Low Countries in Scandinavia: Manuscript evidence from twelfth-century Lund and Nidaros
The Christianisation of Scandinavia generally viewed as having been conducted from England and Germany has formed the context in which evidence of saints’ cults has been interpreted in Denmark and Norway not only during the early days of organised Christendom but also during the High Middle Ages. Consequently saints associated with the Low Countries and appearing in Danish and Norwegian manuscripts has been partly overlooked in the scholarship partly assigned to other categories such as ‘French’ and ‘German’. This article examines the inclusion of such saints in twelfth-century manuscripts with a provenance from the archsees of Lund and Nidaros bringing nuance to the standard narrative and shedding new light on connections that have so far been little studied.
The Dane saga of Breda: A Late Medieval Account of Viking Endeavour and Vernacular Devotion
Found in the municipal archives of Breda (present-day North Brabant Netherlands) is a conspicuous but ill-studied late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century codex whose contents are deemed to have been composed within the late medieval town. Although characterised as a local cross legend the Middle Dutch work is customarily referred to by its modern moniker of Denensage (i.e. Dane saga) due to the presence and pursuits of ‘viking’ mariners over the course of its verse narrative. By imparting how a group of Danes found their way to Breda and established a stronghold there – refashioning a prominent local tree into a cross in the process – the work occupies a distinct confluence of historiographical devotional and literary authorship. Situating the Dane saga in its sociocultural context this article explores the wide-ranging narrative influences underpinning it whilst determining its potential authorship and intended audience(s). Lastly as well as furnishing a new edition of the manuscript it offers the first English translation of this important idiosyncratic text.
The Legend of Marie of Oignies and its Early Dissemination in the North
Marie of Oignies (Maria Oigniacensis) was a mulier religiosa who lived in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in the southern Low Countries. Upon her death she was immortalised by the cleric Jacques of Vitry who wrote the Vita beatae Mariae Oigniacensis in c. 1215. Her Vita became rather well known and would also reach the North where manuscripts containing abridged Old Norse translations of the text can be found. The oldest of these is believed to be the fourteenth-century fragment AM 240 fol. IV which can be traced back to Iceland. This study places the vernacular vita of Marie of Oignies within a tradition of Maríu sögur and the practices of the North Icelandic Benedictine school during the golden age of manuscript production. For the first time it identifies Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale as a source for the Old Norse translation of Marie’s life. Thus the article furthers our understanding of both the dissemination of Marie of Oignies’s life and the religious literary milieu of fourteenth-century Iceland.