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Summary
Antwerp's response to the outbreak of plague in the 1570s offers new insights into the effects of epidemics on urban communities in relation to their religious, economic, and spatial fabric. Antwerp's transition from a Catholic to Calvinist government in 1577, and back to Catholicism in 1585, allows us to study its reaction to and the effects of plague across religious boundaries within a short time span. Using GIS, we have compared various rich datasets concerning plague: the register of houses locked in quarantine; the health certificates issued by authorities; plague fatalities recorded in St. Jacob's parish; a wide range of urban regulations; and information about the size of households, their composition, rents and real estate values in Antwerp. Combined analysis shows that Catholics and Protestants, whose houses were concentrated in different city districts and who had distinct professional and economic profiles, experienced plague quite differently, both physically and spiritually.

This colloquium focuses on urban and princely space in the Duchy of Brabant in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. The focus is on how territorial developments were perceived in different social milieus. After all, urban elites, the monarch and his entourage had different - but sometimes similar - opinions about what Brabant actually was and used various media to communicate their ideas about it. Administrative, narrative and cartographic sources, architecture, literature and art bear witness to this. The Belgian-Dutch "Stichting Colloquium De Brabantse Stad" organizes an international meeting every three years at which various aspects of the history of the cities and of urban life in the old Duchy of Brabant are examined. The colloquium is organized alternately in the provinces of Antwerp, Flemish Brabant, Walloon Brabant, North Brabant and in the Brussels Capital Region. The XIXth colloquium, taking place in Brussels at the Université Saint-Louis, is being organized in cooperation with the NWO research project Imagining a territory.