Suchergebnisse

Abstract: This contribution shows that women played influential roles in medieval warfare not as soldiers on the battlefield but as key figures in communication networks. Two crucial aspects in times of military crisis are gathering information about the enemy and communication between allies. Existing historiography of medieval espionage usually attributes such tasks to men. This article demonstrates, however, that cities systematically used the services of women carrying letters around the front lines and gathering intelligence services about the enemy army. The case study of this article is the war the Flemish cities waged against Emperor Frederick III and his son Maximilian of Austria in 1488–1489, a conflict in which dozens of women as spies and messengers tried to influence the course of the war.

This article explores the social background and material culture of an understudied medieval brothel, the private 'stew', the most common type of brothel in the Southern Low Countries, where public brothels were rare. The fifteenth-century lease contracts of private stews contain information about the stew's size, economic value, and ambiance, suggesting the advantageous social position of some of the women who sold sex and providing inspiration to English brothel keepers. The absence of public brothels in the Low Countries reflected both a tolerance for prostitution and the relative freedom enjoyed by women in this region.

This article studies the social protest of the 1280s in the main cities of the county of Flanders. The protestors were a very heterogeneous group, because wealthy tradesmen, craftsmen and middle class artisans united forces to fight their common enemy, the established families that had governed the cities for many decades. The protesters had a shared, distinct and insistent identity. They presented themselves as the meentucht, a vernacular translation (or better: a contemporary interpretation) of the Latin communitas. The use of this term as a basis for their self-definition justified their protest because the rebels saw themselves as the true commoners of the city.

The historiography of medieval cities in the Low Countries has long been influenced by the legacy of Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) and his pupils. The Belgian historian and his followers used new (positivist) methods to study history, such as critical source analysis and teaching in seminars, which had a great impact on contemporary scholars in Belgium and elsewhere. Furthermore, Pirenne's selection of original research topics drastically changed the study of medieval history on the Continent. Influenced by research trends in France and Germany, Pirenne did ground-breaking new research, for instance, in the field of urban history. His publications on the origins of towns, on the 'early democracies' in the Low Countries, and on the socio-economic background of urban growth and decline inspired many colleagues and his students. His research on particular topics in the field of urban history has, until the present day, been a fruitful starting point for many Ph.D. students. Three of these topics constitute the subject of this review article: first, the origins of towns; secondly, the social history of urban politics and thirdly, the economy and finances of cities. This review of recent Ph.D. theses on the urban history of the Low Countries will demonstrate the importance of Pirenne's legacy, paying close attention to the valuable refinements that have been made to his findings in the last decade. Moreover, the actual research trends and the fresh perspectives of young scholars on the Low Countries' history can be of great use for scholars of the history of cities in other regions in late medieval Europe.