Dumolyn Speecke Ryckbosch Cycles of urban revolt in medieval Flanders (original) (raw)
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The medieval county of Flanders experienced an extraordinary number of rebellions and revolts, opposing the count, the patricians and the urban middle classes, in various combinations. If the fluctuating balance of power inclined too sharply to one group, or if specific demands of privileged citizens were not fulfilled because they lacked access to power, political challengers rebelled. Representative organs could solve socio-political and economic problems, but a rebellion usually ended in a struggle between social groups and networks within the towns and a war between rebel regimes and prince. These two struggles continuously intermingled and created a rebellious dynamic, ending in victory or defeat and in repression and, in turn, inspiring the next rebellion. This remarkable pattern of rebellion started in the phase of 'communal emancipation', in the twelfth century, a period in which the counts granted privileges to the Flemish towns, as social and political contradictions developed within the city. From the 1280s until the end of the fourteenth century, craft guilds constructed alliances with other challengers, such as noblemen, and fought for political representation and control over fiscal and economic policies. As state power became more and more important after the arrival of the centralising Burgundian dynasty in Flanders, this pattern changed significantly. The urban elites gradually sided with the dukes and urban rebellions became less successful. This did not mean, however, that the Flemish rebellious tradition was exhausted. The end of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth century would witness new challenges to princely power. In this article we will consider the role of alliances and leadership, ideology, mobilisation and rebellious 'repertoires' in medieval Flemish towns.
Patterns of urban rebellion in medieval Flanders
Journal of Medieval History, 2005
The medieval county of Flanders experienced an extraordinary number of rebellions and revolts, opposing the count, the patricians and the urban middle classes, in various combinations. If the fluctuating balance of power inclined too sharply to one group, or if specific demands of privileged citizens were not fulfilled because they lacked access to power, political challengers rebelled. Representative organs could solve socio-political and economic problems, but a rebellion usually ended in a struggle between social groups and networks within the towns and a war between rebel regimes and prince. These two struggles continuously intermingled and created a rebellious dynamic, ending in victory or defeat and in repression and, in turn, inspiring the next rebellion. This remarkable pattern of rebellion started in the phase of 'communal emancipation', in the twelfth century, a period in which the counts granted privileges to the Flemish towns, as social and political contradictions developed within the city. From the 1280s until the end of the fourteenth century, craft guilds constructed alliances with other challengers, such as noblemen, and fought for political representation and control over fiscal and economic policies. As state power became more and more important after the arrival of the centralising Burgundian dynasty in Flanders, this pattern changed significantly. The urban elites gradually sided with the dukes and urban rebellions became less successful. This did not mean, however, that the Flemish rebellious tradition was exhausted. The end of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth century would witness new challenges to princely power. In this article we will consider the role of alliances and leadership, ideology, mobilisation and rebellious 'repertoires' in medieval Flemish towns.
In th is contribution I want to consider elite discourses on late medieval Flemish urban rebels who tried to speak out politically. Following theoretica I perspectives like John L. Austin's 'speech act theory', Pierre Bourdieu's insights in language and symbolic power and Norman Fairclough's 'critical discourse analysis', I consider discourse a form of sodal practice.! The sodal cannot be reduced to the discursive, as radical postmodernist historians would claim, but discourse is fundamental in constituting sodal relations. lt has by now become a cliché that since the so-called linguistic turn in historical practice, the dividing lines between sodal history and cultural or intellectual history have been blurred. The combination of these points of view can provide new insights on medieval collective actions as the innovative approach of Peter Arnade, who studied the ritualized forms of mobilization in Flemish revolts, has shown. 2 The discursive aspects of these collective actions in late medieval Flanders have hitherto been neglected in sodal history. I will focus both on sodal and political structures in Flemish urban rebellion and also on the sodal struggle for legitimate speech. lt is my intention to show that the ruling elites, and the chronicles in which their views were represented, used sodal classification as a form of sodal power, while marginalized rebels looked for political space to express their own utterances.
Historical Research 85, 2012
Twentieth-century scholarship gave birth to two distinct and antagonistic traditions regarding the feuds that frequently occurred in the urbanized society of late medieval Flanders: that factionalism was rooted in the clashes within urban elites; or that it rose from the tensions that existed between different socio-economic layers of society. This article develops a perspective that integrates those older traditions through a synthetic discussion of the discourse on factionalism in late medieval sources and a reassessment of the distribution of wealth, power and honour in late medieval Flanders. It also connects the debate on urban factionalism to recent scholarship on the genesis of the 'princely state' in the medieval Low Countries. The growing political influence of the Burgundian dynasty in urban factional conflict in Flanders is unmistakable, but the growth of state power probably did not lead directly to a decrease in 'private violence'.
Factional conflict in late medieval Flanders
Twentieth-century scholarship gave birth to two distinct and antagonistic traditions regarding the feuds that frequently occurred in the urbanized society of late medieval Flanders: that factionalism was rooted in the clashes within urban elites; or that it rose from the tensions that existed between different socio-economic layers of society. This article develops a perspective that integrates those older traditions through a synthetic discussion of the discourse on factionalism in late medieval sources and a reassessment of the distribution of wealth, power and honour in late medieval Flanders. It also connects the debate on urban factionalism to recent scholarship on the genesis of the 'princely state' in the medieval Low Countries. The growing political influence of the Burgundian dynasty in urban factional conflict in Flanders is unmistakable, but the growth of state power probably did not lead directly to a decrease in 'private violence'.
The identity of the commoners in thirteenth-century Flanders
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.
Urban History, 2016
The absence of a ‘real’ urban chronicle tradition in fifteenth-century Flanders similar to the Italian or German models has raised questions among scholars. However, there is also no satisfactory consensus on the exact meaning or contents of medieval ‘urban historiography’. Some were ‘official’ city chronicles, while others lauded patrician lineages or took the viewpoint of specific social groups or corporate organizations and reinforced construction of the groups’ collective memories. Some seem to express the literary aspirations of individual city officials or clerics with strong connections to their towns.We propose an analytical framework to identify and measure the ‘urbanity’ of late medieval chronicles, taking into account the authorship and thematic emphasis of historiographical texts, but focusing on the social environment of their circulation and the ideological strategies at work.
Urban Space and Political Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1162 002219502317345538, 2006
editors' introduction This essay investigates political claims over space in Ghent, urban Flanders' largest city during the late Middle Ages. Distancing itself from the long tradition in which the Low Countries' urban history deciphered city life principally through market relations, it argues for the independent importance of political culture. Political contests were enacted through rituals of rulership and authority performed, ªrst, by members of the commune in the high Middle Ages and then by the politically enfranchised urban members and the Burgundian princes. Ritual space-iconic spaces-were not just the site of the contests but also the prizes. The goal was possession of these spaces and the symbols of power they bequeathed. The late medieval period was a key crucible for the formation of urban space. As important as economic life was to Low Country cities like Ghent, the market did not determine spatial arrangements so much as intersect with a set of political valences forged out of political contests between urban factions and the emerging composite state of the Burgundian Netherlands. URBAN SPACE IN LATE MEDIEVAL FLANDERS When considering urban history in medieval Flanders, just as in adjoining areas such as the Duchy of Brabant and the Bishopric of Liège, it is tempting to paraphrase the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the word, and the word was Pirenne. Indeed, Henri Pirenne's scholarship on urban history has long dominated urban historiography throughout the Low Countries, and inspired a strong body of work in economic and political history. Pirenne was fascinated with questions of state formation, national identity, and the urban locus of early capitalism. Markets and the urban economy, he argued, were the engine behind urban development