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AbstractThis article explores the social history of the political elites of Mechelen, a town that evolved from a seigneurial enclave within the duchy of Brabant to the de facto capital of the Burgundian–Habsburg Low Countries between the 1470s and 1530. Proceeding from a quantitative analysis of lists of aldermen, fiscal registers and epitaphs, the article argues that the short-lived functioning of Mechelen as a capital city had great impact on its ruling classes. Mechelen was traditionally ruled by a coalition of craft guilds and prominent citizens, but the latter reoriented their social networks to the court elite, as the latter's presence supercharged pre-existing trends towards ennoblement among the urban elite.

AbstractProceeding from an in-depth analysis of the Liberty of Bruges, an important rural district in the late medieval Low Countries, this contribution frames rural elite formation by means of two debates which are seldom used in combination, namely, the debates on state building and on the commercialisation of rural society. We challenge the thesis, inspired by modernisation theory, that socio-economic transformation engendered political change in pre-modern Europe as newly emerging rural bourgeoisies are alleged to have become an important political factor, shifting their allegiances between lords and peasants as they saw fit. The evidence discussed shows instead a trend towards oligarchy from the fifteenth century onwards, in which an increasingly exclusive social network came to combine hitherto separated forms of political power, largely at the expense of the growing number of wealthy rural bourgeois. It is argued that this transformation of the rural political elites is closely tied to changes in the established relations between the central government and the regional elites of the Low Countries.

The birth of the Low Countries is a thorny issue since the rise of history as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, and the problem is likely to haunt historians for some time to come. From the eleventh century onwards, the patchwork of principalities that had emerged between France and the German Empire acquired a distinct cachet as most of these principalities became exceptionally urbanized. As Flanders, Brabant, Guelders, Holland, and so on were all fiercely independent, scholars all agree that the increasingly structural socio-economic integration of these urbanised regions did not automatically lead to political integration, even if the ruling dynasties of these principalities were prone to intermarry. Yet, this political integration did take shape in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when a series of contingent factors – ranging from bankrupt princes to accidental deaths – allowed a collateral branch of the royal house of Valois to inherit, to purchase, or to conquer a lengthy string of principalities that eventually stretched from Frisia to the Franche-Comté. This article is part of the discussion forum 'Constructing and Deconstructing the 'State': the Case of the Low Countries'.

Front Matter -- Marc Boone, Man and Historian -- Bibliography of Marc Boone (1977-2021) -- Triumphant Private Initiative versus Hesitant Government Action? -- Gifts and Bribes, Aspects of Urban Sociability in the Late Middle Ages -- Fiscal and Financial strategies of the Urban Elites and the Nascent Burgundian State in the Ancient County of Flanders -- In Defence of a Medieval Banker -- Rulers, Patricians and Burghers -- Destroying and Reconstructing the City -- Cities in Late Medieval Europe -- Urban Space and Political Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders -- The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie in Ghent around the Mid-Fifteenth Century -- State Power and Illicit Sexuality -- Back Matter.

AbstractThis article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries betweenc. 1350 andc. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.

One of the great interpretive arcs of history as an academic discipline is the opposition between pre-modern and modern societies. Stimulated by post-modern theory, historians have done much in the past decades to expunge the ideological baggage of history as a 'great march of civilization', but they continue to imagine the industrial revolution as a great hinge between two distinct epochs. For all its merits, this perspective also creates problems. Burdened by hindsight, medievalists and modernists are often inclined to understand a case-study as either a prefiguration of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century development, or as its foil. Some of the most important publications on the history of medieval European towns published in 2019 were about destroying such assumptions.

From an empirical perspective, archaeologists and historians face a somewhat peculiar challenge, that is, to understand a past that is no longer with us through the discussion of wide range of objects – buildings, texts, textiles and so on – that are mere relics of that past. This challenge is complicated by what the anthropologist Arjun Appaduraj has famously called 'the social life of things'. The material remnants of past societies do not survive in a vacuum: instead, these objects are used and re-used in new contexts in which they acquire new meanings, be it as cherished family heirlooms, as stuffy museum objects or as irritating obstacles for project developers. Consequently, these objects are suspended between the past and the present, in the sense that – as Joseph Morsel mordantly put it – 'a restored castle is essentially a trophy of a new social system, whose might is expressed through the ruins of another social system'. Proceeding from the insight that the original meaning of objects is often clouded by the current context in which they function, historians and archaeologists are increasingly attentive to the question why – and if so, how – some material remnants of the past are re-used whereas others are not.