Low Countries (c. 1501-1800)
More general subjects:
La Réforme aux Pays‑Bas,1500-1620
Cette étude générale de la Réforme aux Pays-Bas retrace les développements clés du processus de réforme - à la fois auprès de la population protestante et catholique - pendant le XVIe siècle. Synthétisant cinquante ans de littérature scientifique Christine Kooi se concentre particulièrement sur le contexte politique de l'époque : comment le changement religieux a été procédé au milieu de l'intégration et la désintégration de l'État dynastique des Habsbourg aux Pays-Bas. Une attention particulière est accordée au rôle de la Réforme dans la fomentation et l'alimentation de la révolte contre le régime des Habsbourg à la fin du XVIe siècle ainsi qu'à sa contribution à la formation des deux états successeurs de la région la République néerlandaise et la Pays-Bas du Sud (Belgique). La Réforme aux Pays-Bas 1500-1620 est un outil de travail essentiel pour les universitaires et les étudiants de l'histoire européenne moderne réunissant en un seul volume des recherches spécialisées sur les Pays-Bas.
Pacification and Reconciliation in the Spanish Habsburg Worlds
This is the first volume to analyze pacification strategies within the Spanish Monarchy on a global level. It deals with the development and aftermath of the many early modern revolts on the Iberian and Italian Peninsula the Sicilian and Sardinian islands the cities along the North Sea and the Spanish Americas. These comparative studies uncover the different ways in which the Spanish Monarchy dealt with rebellion from cities and constituencies ranging from military responses and repression to offers for negotiation and reconciliation. They also point out common characteristics of these pacification processes such as the promises of pardon the granting of grace and the instruction of peace envoys. The different chapters each accompanied by an edition of sources show how the reconciliation and reincorporation into the Spanish Habsburg orbit proved to be a painstaking process with an unpredictable outcome.
Contending Representations I: The Dutch Republic and the Lure of Monarchy
This volume is the first book-length study to thematise the representation of power in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Bringing together scholars from different backgrounds the volume aims to stimulate a cross-disciplinary dialogue about representations in art literature ritual and other media. Within the Dutch Republic different state actors - the city the provincial states the States General the stadtholders and individual power-holders - vied for the supremacy of power. A vital aspect of this persistent struggle was its representative dimension. In making representative claims about their place in the balance of power these institutions all faced the challenge of developing a republican language that was both distinctive enough and universally understood. In the cultural repertoires available to political figures artists and intellectuals republican models contended with monarchical ones. In visual and literary depictions public ritual and diplomatic encounters alike the temptation to stand up to the grandeur of powerful European monarchies by borrowing from their representative traditions was not always easy to resist.
Private Life and Privacy in the Early Modern Low Countries
This volume investigates the origins of one of the most important notions of contemporary society: privacy. Based on case studies from the early modern Low Countries privacy is tackled from various historical perspectives: social and cultural history and the history of art and architecture.The Dutch Republic is well known for its financial success which went hand in hand with the development of a distinguished bourgeois culture and religious toleration. The accumulation of wealth among the urban population led to changes in various spheres from daily life to art. Privacy as a concept started to develop in this period. Indeed new ideas about housing with the invention of corridors separate rooms that could be locked and the separation of the ‘common’ and the ‘private’ space all illustrate the growing importance of privacy in this geographical area. This volume traces perspectives on early modern privacy and private life based on primary sources in several domains: letters diaries and poems; genre painting in art; communal life as illustrated by the Jewish community; and finally the homes of the Dutch elite.The essays in this volume make a key contribution to the emergence of early modern privacy studies as a research field and to the ongoing discussion of privacy in the Low Countries. Equally these case studies can serve as models for the analysis of privacy in other European contexts.
Message in a Bottle
Merchants' letters, merchants' marks and conflict management in 1533-34. A source edition
In 1533 a batch of merchant letters was to be delivered from Antwerp to London. They never reached their destination and were only opened in a Hanseatic archive almost 500 years later. Like a message in a bottle the letters unfold unknown individual stories and large-scale drama. They offer a fascinating glimpse into the world of the early 16th century from hard-nosed business and prices in code sent to a wife to the fond greetings of an English father to his three young sons or a secretive message of a grandmother from Antwerp. At the backdrop war was looming: the letters were part of a booty taken in the English Channel in August of 1533. Lübeck privateers plundered six neutral ships carting the goods of English Dutch Spanish Venetian and Hanseatic merchants off to Lübeck and Hamburg. As a result Henry VIII of England exploded with rage and restitution claims were made. Soon after Lübeck realized the potential political cost of the action and an administrative machinery for the return of the booty was set in motion. Extensive documentation was produced under the eye of notaries providing an overview of properties of the involved parties including many merchant marks.
The combination of unique letters and administrative documents offers new openings into the study of economic political and social history of pre-modern northern Europe. Highlights are the migration of people and goods resourceful conflict management and the voice of ordinary people captured in their letters.
Noblesses transrégionales
Les Croÿ et les frontières pendant les guerres de religion (France, Lorraine et Pays-Bas, xvi e et xvii e siècle)
Le caractère pan-européen des guerres de religion suscite des questions sur l’incidence des frontières et le rôle des acteurs qui les franchissent ou les transgressent. Cet ouvrage retrace les parcours transrégionaux et confessionnels des Croÿ une puissante maison nobiliaire établie de part et d’autre des frontières séparant la France et les Pays-Bas habsbourgeois à travers la reconstitution des engagements politiques et religieux de ses membres (Porcien Aarschot Chimay Havré et leurs épouses ou mères Amboise Lorraine Clèves Brimeu Dommartin).
Ce volume montre comment ces noblesses transrégionales bâtissent leur influence à l’ombre des rivalités internationales entre rois de France et d’Espagne empereurs et ducs de Lorraine et du choix de la religion au temps des Réformes; comment elles assemblent stratégiquement leurs domaines patronnent une clientèle locale et se font reconnaître comme souverains de micro-principautés; et comment elles mobilisent ce capital politique en rivalisant avec d’autres lignages catholiques (Guise Clèves) ou protestants (Condé Bouillon) en désobéissant à leur prince ou en négociant leur réconciliation avec lui.
Ont contribué à ce volume Anne Mieke Backer Aurélien Behr Olivia Carpi Nette Claeys Gustaaf Janssens Alain Joblin Odile Jurbert Tomaso Pascucci Sanne Maekelberg Pieter Martens Jonathan Spangler et Sylvia van Zanen.
Charles V, Prince Philip, and the Politics of Succession
Imperial Festivities in Mons and Hainault, 1549
This book is based on an international conference held in the capital of Hainault to celebrate the city of Mons as European Capital of Culture (2015). For the first time through a range of interdisciplinary studies the magnificent festivals created to honour Prince Philip of Spain as he journeyed across Europe to receive his sovereignty of the Low Countries are brought to life. The splendour of entries in the cities of Northern Italy (such as Genoa and Milan) was challenged by the civic allegories of triumph displayed throughout the Low Countries in Ghent Antwerp and Amsterdam. Outpacing all that magnificence were the entertainments prepared by Mary of Hungary at Binche: triumphal arches martial feats of arms balls masquerades and castle-stormings entertained Emperor Charles V and his son Prince Philip.The essays in this volume reconstitute the political and social context of these extraordinary celebrations and focus on the purpose and role of festival in the changing political strategies of Charles V. They are illustrated with a total of 36 b&w and 36 colour images.Contributors: Sydney Anglo Francesca Bortoletti Stijn Bussels Tobias Capwell José Eloy Hortal Muñoz Félix Labrador Arroyo Margaret M. McGowan R. L. M. Morris Jessie Park Yves Pauwels M. J. Rodríguez-Salgado Margaret Shewring Hugo Soly Lisa Wiersma.
Capital at Work in Antwerp’s Golden Age
Erasmus Schetz Gaspar Ducci and Gilbert van Schoonbeke. Contemporaries made it indisputably clear that these three moneymakers were exceptional from different perspectives and for different reasons but all commentators implicitly or explicitly referred to their unique economic achievements and they were right to do so. The exceptional careers of the three protagonists shed light on the potential of the most dynamic economic centre of Europe - and the world - during early globalization. Precisely because their economic initiatives were far more ambitious than what other businessmen in Antwerp could or would consider or achieve their careers are ideal vantage points for observing and analysing ‘capital at work’. They also provide an opportunity to examine how commercial capitalism changed and/or was transformed and in what measure the three protagonists extended the frontiers of capitalism.
Woven into the Urban Fabric
Cloth Manufacture and Economic Development in the Flemish West-Quarter (1300-1600)
This regional study focuses on the socio-economic development of the so-called West-Quarter of the county of Flanders during the period 1300-1600. Through the expansion of potent textile industries in the countryside from the fourteenth century onwards this region gradually attained distinctly ‘urban’ characteristics in terms of production scale specialisation product quality and the aim for external markets. By the middle of the sixteenth century the West-Quarter had even become one of Flanders’s main production regions of woolen cloth. This book assesses how and why this economic expansion took place why it happened at that particular moment and why in this region. The broader aims of the research are twofold: first to offer a contribution to the debate on Europe’s transition from a ‘feudal’ to a ‘capitalist’ or market economy by looking at the influence of specific social structures and institutional frameworks on the economic development of pre-industrial societies. Secondly this book contributes to the debate about the divide between town and countryside in pre-industrial Europe combining the outlooks and methods of both urban and rural historians in order to qualify this supposed dichotomy.
Des migrants invisibles ?
Les Français dans les espaces frontaliers des Pays-Bas habsbourgeois, xvi e-xvii e siècle (Artois, Hainaut, Flandre Wallonne)
During the Modern Period the condition of the French migrant is fragile. He comes from a suspicious community that does not exist in substance that of the "French" and is a part of an evolving category the one of people without "rights". His foreign origin can also be an advantage and he can make it work in his favour. He cannot be defined as being from a State yet his condition is inseparable from the international conjuncture and the construction of evolving modern States. Actually to question the stakes in the reception of the French migrants is an open window to a better understanding of the social and political culture of the Spanish Low Countries. Indeed this work probes the mechanisms of self-definition in border provinces within a catholic global empire the Spanish Monarchy in front of France. The exercise of power and the capacity for action appear there as the result of an equilibrium in which all social actors are negotiating their position. Most of all it is the result of a dialogue fueled by the protagonists of History themselves.
De canonicis qui seculares dicuntur
Treize siècles de chapitres séculiers dans les anciens Pays-Bas/Thirteen Centuries of Chapters of Secular Canons in the Low Countries
À la veille de la révolution française le territoire de l’actuelle Belgique comptait près de quatre-vingt communautés de chanoines séculiers dont cinq communautés féminines. En dépit de cette densité extrêmement élevée par rapport aux autres pays et malgré la richesse de leurs archives les chapitres de chanoines séculiers sont jusqu’à présent éclipsés dans l’historiographie par les établissements monastiques et les communautés de chanoines réguliers. Comparés à ces formes de vie religieuse mieux connues les collèges de chanoines séculiers dont la principale mission était l’office choral souffrent d’une méconnaissance prolongée jusqu’à nos jours. Il s’agissait pourtant d’institutions complexes et très diverses. La flexibilité avec laquelle les chapitres séculiers se sont adaptés aux évolutions sociétales pendant le Moyen Âge et l’époque moderne est surprenante et explique la diversification de ces établissements qui présentent de nombreuses spécificités locales. Le présent recueil veut contribuer à une meilleure connaissance et compréhension de ces oubliés de l'histoire en présentant un aperçu des recherches récentes en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas. Les contributions offrent des aperçus synthétiques des évolutions dans une région et durant une période données mais aussi des études de cas avec des analyses plus détaillées de l’histoire d’un établissement ou d’une certaine thématique. La diversité des approches permet de présenter un panorama très large allant du Haut Moyen Âge jusqu’au XXe siècle qui reflète l’hétérogénéité et la flexibilité de la vie des chanoines et chanoinesses séculiers.
Transregional Territories
Crossing Borders in the Early Modern Low Countries and Beyond
The early modern world was one of movement contact and exchange. Yet this does not mean that it was borderless. On the contrary connection existed only when people moved along and across the separations between polities religions and mentalities. So in order to understand early modern connections one also needs to analyse the boundaries that accompanied them.In Transregional Territories the early modern Low Countries are chosen as a ‘laboratory’ for studying border formation and border management through the lens of transregional history. Eight different cases highlight the impact of boundaries on the actions and strategies of individuals and governments. Crossing borders in early modern times was not merely an act of negating a territorial division but rather a moment of intimate interaction with the separation itself. As such this volume illustrates how borders forced historical actors to adapt their behaviour and how historians can use a transregional vantage point to better understand these changes.The cases are presented by leading border specialists and scholars of the early modern Low Countries: Fernando Chavarría Múgica Victor Enthoven Raingard Esser Yves Junot Marie Kervyn Christel Annemieke Romein and Patricia Subirade.Bram De Ridder Violet Soen Werner Thomas and Sophie Verreyken are all members of the Early Modern History Research Group of the KU Leuven. Together they have published extensively on transregional history and the history of the early modern Low Countries grouped under the label of transregionalhistory.eu.
Antwerp in the Renaissance
This book engages with Antwerp in the Renaissance. Bringing together several specialists of sixteenth-century Antwerp it offers new research results and fresh perspectives on the economic cultural and social history of the metropolis in the sixteenth century. Recurrent themes are the creative ways in which the Italian renaissance was translated in the Antwerp context. Imperfect imitation often resulted from the specific social context in which the renaissance was translated: Antwerp was a metropolis marked by a strong commercial ideology a high level affluence and social inequality but also by the presence of large and strong middling layers which contributed to the city’s ‘bourgeois’ character. The growth of the Antwerp market was remarkable: in no time the city gained metropolitan status. This book does a good job in showing how quite a few of the Antwerp ‘achievements’ did result from the absence of ‘existing structures’ and ‘examples’. Moreover the city and its culture were given shape by the many frictions and uncertainties that came along with rapid urban growth and religious turmoil.
Inequality and the City in the Low Countries (1200-2020)
Social inequality is one of the most pressing global challenges at the start of the 21st century. Meanwhile across the globe at least half of the world’s population lives in urban agglomerations and urbanisation is still expanding. This book engages with the complex interplay between urbanisation and inequality. In doing so it concentrates on the Low Countries one of the oldest and most urbanised societies of Europe. It questions whether the historic poly-nuclear and decentralised urban system of the Low Countries contributed to specific outcomes in social inequality. In doing so the authors look beyond the most commonly used perspective of economic inequality. They instead expand our knowledge by exploring social inequality from a multidimensional perspective. This book includes essays and case-studies on cultural inequalities the relationship between social and consumption inequality the politics of (in)equality the impact of shocks and crises as well as the complex social relationships across the urban network and between town and countryside.
Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century
Urban Perspectives
The authors of this volume examine various fields of cultural discourse in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century: the political commercial religious artistic and sensory domains and less obviously metaphysical properties like time and space. What defined the Low Countries were not its borders and its territories but its cities and their economies dominated political relations. A dense network of large cities and small towns developed hand in hand with a broad range of textile and luxury industries. In Antwerp culture was commerce: its art and printing industries catered to much of the Western world and at the same time carved a confident self-image celebrating the liberal arts as a means of social and self-improvement. Antwerp is omnipresent in this book with essays on its painting printing politics and public festivals. But other cities such as Bruges Leuven and Leiden also figure prominently. It was precisely the interconnectedness of urban centers large middle and small rather than their autonomous character that defined civic culture in the Low Countries. Among the topics treated are differing notions of urban topography the dialogue between city and court issues of censorship and the sensory and psychological response to texts and images.
Church, Censorship and Reform in the Early Modern Habsburg Netherlands
In recent years historiography has come to rethink the traditional account of a state-backed Counter-Reformation in the early modern Habsburg Netherlands. Hence this volume takes a refreshing perspective on the themes of church and reform in this region from the late fifteenth century onwards. The first part interrogates the dynamics of repression and censorship in matters of religion. Six chapters underline that this censorship was not only state- or church-driven but performed by a multitude of actors ranging from professional organisations to university theologians. Throughout the Ancient Regime this resulted in an institutionally and regionally fragmented policy opening margins of manoeuver for those concerned. A second part focuses on more internal impulses for Catholic Reform in the sixteenth century especially those created by the Council of Trent. As such this volume helps to contextualise the Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth century in a long-term perspective identifying the myriad of actors and motives behind this Catholic revival.
Village Elites and Social Structures in the Late Medieval Campine Region
The economy of the late medieval Low Countries is often portrayed in terms of dynamism and economic growth. However several regions within this larger entity followed an alternate path of development. One example of this is the Campine (Kempen) a communal peasant region situated to the northeast of the sixteenth-century ‘metropolis’ of Antwerp. By contrast with other regions in the Low Countries this area was characterised by a remarkable stability.
By focusing on ‘independent’ peasant elites this study explores the social structures and the characteristics of inequality of this region showing how these factors led to a different more stable mode of economic development. Looking past standard societal measurements such as property distribution this work combines a wide variety of sources to grasp the nuances of inequality in a communal society. It therefore takes into account other economic factors such as control over the commons and market integration. It also focuses on political and social inequality shedding light on aspects of inequality in village politics social life and poor relief.
Thus in contrast to dominant depictions of pre-modern societies on the road to capitalism this book provides a comprehensive portrayal of inequality and elite groups in a communal peasant society.
La souveraineté monétaire dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux XVIe-XIXe siècle
L’idée d’un retour à une souveraineté monétaire « nationale » exploite une fibre identitaire qui joue la nation contre l’Europe. Elle relève d’une conception figée de la souveraineté qui serait irréductiblement incarnée par l’Etat. L’histoire montre pourtant que la monnaie ne peut exister en dehors d’un consensus liant l’autorité souveraine aux acteurs du change négociants et banquiers. L’étude des Pays-Bas méridionaux révèle qu’entre le règne de Charles Quint et la création de la banque nationale de Belgique en 1850 rares furent les périodes où les monnaies belges s’imposèrent dans le concert des nations européennes. Il faut attendre la grande réforme de 1749 pour voir fonctionner un système monétaire efficace. Encore l’impératrice Marie-Thérèse dut elle pour y parvenir « se relâcher de ses droits régaux en faveur de ses sujets ». La mise en œuvre d’un régime monétaire suppose une porosité de l’autorité politique qui doit composer sans cesse avec les corps constitués de la société mais aussi avec les autorités voisines et les acteurs du marché des métaux et du marché des changes sur lesquels elle n’a pas la main.
Lectures italiennes dans les pays wallons à la première modernité (1500 – 1630)
avec des appendices sur les livres en langue italienne et sur les traductions de l'italien en français
Inscrite dans un programme de recherche sur la diffusion du livre italien en langue vulgaire - tant en langue originale qu'en traduction française - dans l'espace francophone. depuis le début du XVIe siècle jusqu'aux premières années du XVIIe siècle cette étude entend explorer cette terre encore incognita à cet égard que sont les pays wallons c'est-à-dire les territoires de la langue romane situés au nord de la Franc et inclus à l'époque dans diverses entités politiques (anciens Pays-Bas Cambrésis et principauté de Liège). Trois catégories de sources ont été retenues pour cette approche : la production imprimée les inventaires de librairies et les catalogues de bibliothèques privées.
Quels auteurs italiens ont été imprimés vendus et lus dans les pays wallons à la première modernité? Dans quelle langue ont-ils été le plus appréciés en langue originale ou par le truchement du français? D'où proviennent les livres imprimés? Étaient-ils importés ou produits sur place et dans quelle mesure? Quels ont été les centres d'imprimerie wallons qui ont assuré la diffusion du livre italien? Quel a été le poids de cette production dans la production globale? Quels ont été les principaux acteurs de cette diffusion (imprimeurs libraires traducteurs élites locales ordres religieux) et leur apport respectif? La contre-réforme a-t-elle eu un impact sur les politiques éditoriales et le choix des lectures? Les goûts du lectorat ont-ils évolué avec le temps?
Voilà les questions qui ont guidé l'enquête et qui ont permis un premier balisage de ce tout nouveau domaine de recherche riche en développements futurs.
Trois annexes viennent clore cette monographie. Elles fournissent une liste déjà ample des livres italiens en circulation dans les pays wallons au XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle qu'il s'agisse des livres imprimés dans ces territoires ou des livres proposés à la vente ou enore de ceux présents dans des bibliothèques privées.
The Seven Sorrows Confraternity of Brussels
Drama, Ceremony, and Art Patronage (16th-17th Centuries)
Devotion to the Virgin of Seven Sorrows flourished in the Low Countries in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries under the auspices of the court of Philip the Fair. Quickly becoming a widespread phenomenon the Seven Sorrows devotion generated dramatic plays artistic works music and numerous miracles. Underlying the popularity of the devotion was the network of confraternity chapters dedicated to the Virgin of Sorrows. Of these chapters the Seven Sorrows confraternity of Brussels was singled out receiving the special patronage of Philip the Fair Maximilian I and Margaret of Austria. Taking the confraternity of Brussels as a focal point this volume examines the Seven Sorrows devotion in its urban context. The essays of this collection explore the artistic musical and dramatic products of the Seven Sorrows devotion as created in and by the civic networks and artistic channels of Brussels. The structure of the confraternity and its historical importance for the city are also demonstrated. As an important counterpoint to work in Italian confraternity studies this volume is the first interdisciplinary study of a confraternity in the Low Countries in English.
Emily S. Thelen is a musicologist specialising in music and liturgy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Low Countries. She received her PhD from Princeton University and most recently has held a post-doctoral fellowship at KU Leuven.