Intuitu fidelis servitii sui

In October 2012, Thérèse de Hemptinne retired after a successful academic career at the department of (medieval) History at Ghent University. Carrying on and strengthening the internationally recognized Ghent tradition of Auxiliary Sciences for the study of the Middle Ages, Thérèse de Hemptinne taught for many years the Bachelor’s and Master’s courses of Diplomatics and Palaeography. Following her research interests, which from the 1990s onward gradually expanded to focus on the position and role of women in a medieval man’s world, Thérèse de Hemptinne also integrated gender as a methodological tool of analysis into the Master’s courses ‘Historical Criticism’ and the ‘Gender Research Seminar’, and acted as a supervisor of many Master’s theses produced in the field of women and gender studies. The critical edition of the charters of the counts of Flanders Thierry and Philip of Alsace (1128-1191) can be considered one of the most important scholarly achievements of Thérèse de Hemptinne. Yet, her academic bibliography also testifies to her many other interests in medieval studies, among which political and institutional, social and cultural history of the Middle Ages, and particularly to her original gender-based approach to the discourse of medieval sources related to these areas. This volume is offered to Thérèse de Hemptinne by two of her students as a token of respect and gratitude for her services rendered and for her lifetime commitment to the department of (medieval) History as a teacher, as a senior researcher and scholar, as a mentor, as a colleague and as a friend. It contains the republication of a selection of Thérèse de Hemptinne’s most important and acclaimed articles and book chapters published during her academic career at Ghent University. The twenty one selected essays of Thérèse de Hemptinne are gathered around three themes: ‘Charters and Chanceries’, ‘Gender and Politics’, and ‘Women and Literacy’. Each chapter is introduced by an expert of international prominence

Political ideology and the rewriting of history in fifteenth-century Flanders

Medieval views on rulers from the past were often politically instrumentalised in the service of contemporary interests. In the recent historiography on medieval Flanders, the reconstruction of how 'historical truth' changed over time to cater for topical needs has primarily been examined from the perspective of 'social' or 'communicative' memories, which were orally transmitted over a short period of time. This line of research followed the dominant 'communicative memory' paradigm. However, historians have paid far less systematic attention to the question how urban elites and state officials used histories that went farther back in time and dealt with the 'high politics' of princes and rulers to assert (rebellious) political ideologies of the moment. In this vast topic of research, historians are dealing with histories that were transmitted through manuscripts and not through oral communication. Instead of relying on the 'communicative memory' - paradigm, which allows historians to consider how the recent past has been ideologically reconstructed, this article examines how late fifteenth-century Flemish urban elites rewrote, interpolated, deformed and manipulated histories from a more distant past to shape a functional 'cultural memory' (in the sense of Jan Assmann's definition) that influenced a society's ideological vision on history. Taking the political speech of Willem Zoete (1488) and the late fifteenth-century popular and widespread Flemish historiographical Middle Dutch corpus, the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen, as a starting point, this article shows how rulers from the past served as a vehicle to express contemporary rebellious ideas against the regency of Maximilian of Austria, and how ideological motives and discursive strategies were deployed to advocate the ideology of the 'political contract' between the prince and his subjects, as well as the idea of the 'natural prince'