Urban History Writing in Northwest Europe (15th-16th Centuries)

About this book

In the densely populised Low Countries, with their powerful and self-conscious cities, historical consciousness was expressed in various ways. Cases of regional historiography have been well-studied, but more local instances of historiographical production have remained more or less unnoticed. In ten articles with an extensive introduction, this volume places the local historiography in this region in a European perspective. It brings to the attention new material from a wide variety of cities and sets the standard for future research.This volume aims at taking the first steps towards a revaluation of urban historiography in Northwest Europe, including rather than excluding texts that do not fit common definitions. It confronts examples from the Low Countries to well-studied cases abroad, in order to develop new approaches to urban historiography in general. In the authors' view, there are no fixed textual formats, social or political categories, or material forms that exclusively define ‘the urban chronicle’. Urban historiography in pre-modern Western Europe came in many guises, from the dry and modest historical notes in a guild register, to the elaborate heraldic images in a luxury manuscript made on commission for a patrician family, to the legally founded political narrative of a professional scribe in an official town chronicle. The contributions in this volume attest to the diversity of the ‘genre’ and look more closely at these texts from a broader, comparative perspective, unrestrained by typologies and genre definitions. It is mainly because of these hybrid guises, that many examples of urban historiography from the Low Countries for instance succeeded in going unnoticed for a considerable amount of time.-- Information provided by publisher.