Edelen in de Vlaamse stedelijke samenleving. Een kwantitatieve benadering van de elite van het laatmiddeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Brugge

Nobles in the Flemish Urban Network. A Quantitative Analysis of the Urban Nobility of Late Medieval and Early Modern Bruges - In this contribution, a series of lists of Flemish nobles, compiled by the princely administration for military and political purposes, is used to measure the presence of nobles in the Flemish city of Bruges and the surrounding countryside. Diachronological analysis shows that noble involvement increased considerably since the middle of fourteenth century. Next to the presence of several families from the high nobility, the state formation process offered chances to bureaucrats to join the ranks of the local nobility. From the fifteenth century onwards, a growing part of the Bruges urban patriciate also succeeded to attain noble rank. The overlap between those different groups was modest, but the intense cultural life of Bruges provided the high nobility, state officials and urban elites with ample opportunity for social and cultural interaction. While the growing involvement of the late medieval and early modern nobility in urban networks deserves further attention, the concept of ‘urban nobility’ does not do justice to the important differences between various noble groups in Bruges, nor to the intricate interlinking of urban and rural interests of noble families

Record keeping and status performance in the early modern Low Countries

status: publishe

Memory, social mobility and historiography: shaping noble identity in the Bruges chronicle of Nicholas Despars (dagger 1597)

This article focuses on the issue of nobility as a memorial practice in the premodern era. It challenges the popular assumption that the nobility was largely defined by a shared social memory, that is, the collective remembering of which lineages were considered to have noble blood and who had supposedly mastered the noble lifestyle since time immemorial. In this contribution, we argue that there was a structural field of tension between this noble culture of remembrance and the considerable rate of renewal in the social composition of the nobility. Noble ranks were constantly being replenished by newcomers, who had to inscribe themselves in collective consciousness as a noble lineage. The case-study of Nicholas Despars, a sixteenth-century chronicler who belonged to a recently ennobled family of Bruges spice merchants, shows that historiographical writings were often used to influence the public perception of such families. Because this functional approach of premodern elites towards their own past often included the manipulation of archival records, the memorial practices of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nobility have led to a distorted view of important aspects of late medieval society in recent historiography

City portrait, civic body, and commercial printing in sixteenth-century Ghent

This article discusses a woodcut series with an elaborate iconographic representation of the Flemish city of Ghent, printed in 1524 by Pieter de Keysere. The three-sheet composition consists of a city view, an image of the allegorical Maiden of Ghent, and an extensive heraldic program with the coat of arms of prominent Ghent families and of the Ghent craft guilds. The print series’ production and consumption are unraveled and framed within the wider debate on civic religion in Renaissance Europe. The main argument is that while in this region of Northern Europe civic ideology was equally strong as in Italy, it was not the exclusive playground of the ruling elites. Pieter de Keysere’s woodcut series was aimed at a socially broad, local audience, most particularly Ghent’s corporate middle groups