Les Pêcheries néerlandaises face à la menace corsaire et militaire (original) (raw)

Les marines des écrivains belges

Mondes humains, mondes non humains. Formes et coexistences (XXe et XXIe siècles), 2022

Is nowadays every narrative an ecofiction? From now on, the ecological concern seems to have become a true stereotype in western contemporary literature, reflecting global emergency and its inherent feeling of imminent catastrophe. This paper aims at showing how this concern emerges in what appears to be anecdotal descriptions of the sea in Belgian literature, through three different literary works: André-Marcel Adamek, François Emmanuel and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. The paper will thus try to analyse why seascapes carry such a strong ecological concern as well as they seem to be essential to the narrative structure of each one of those authors' works.

La défense des Pays-Bas et l’architecture militaire pendant la régence de Marie de Hongrie, 1531-1555 [2008]

2008

The Defence of the Low Countries and Military Architecture during the Regency of Mary of Hungary, 1531-1555 Mary of Hungary’s regency of the Low Countries, from 1531 to 1555, coincides perfectly with a key period in the history of military architecture. As a corollary of the chronic wars with France, these years saw the development of both a new border defence strategy and a new manner of fortification. Along the southern border of the Low Countries gradually arose a chain of border fortresses, built according to the new principles of bastioned fortification and designed not by local architects but by Italian engineers. This article offers a fresh synthesis of these developments. It reviews the major fortification campaigns in response to the successive military conflicts and discusses the genesis of the new fortification method, from the appearance of the first bastions in the 1530s to the implementation of the first fully-fledged bastioned systems in the 1550s. It also argues that Mary of Hungary personally played a central role in these developments, as is evident from her frequent tours of inspection of the border fortresses, from her close contacts with local master builders and with Italian engineers, and from the contents of her library. It is only fitting that she gave her name to Mariembourg, the first newly created fortress-town of the Low Countries and one of the very first towns in Europe to combine a bastioned enceinte with a radio-concentric street pattern.