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Communes and Conflict: Urban Rebellion in Late Medieval Flanders

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Published Sep 2023

Jelle Haemers and Jan Dumolyn

Authors: Jelle Haemers and Jan Dumolyn
Editors: Andrew Murray and Joannes van de Maagdenberg
In Communes and Conflict, Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers explore the urban rebellions that regularly erupted in Flanders between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. They analyse not only how these rebellions were sparked and repressed, but also how they shaped the culture and identity of Flemish townspeople. Drawing from a wide range of theoretical methods and concepts, including those of discourse analysis, semiotics, speech acts, collective memory and material cultural studies, the authors return to key Marxist questions on ideology, labour and class interest to map the perspectives of the rebels, the urban patriciate and the Flemish and Burgundian nobility.

Biographical Note

Jan Dumolyn is a professor of history at Ghent University. He has published extensively on late medieval labour history, urban rebellion, politics, material culture and law, as well as more widely on Marxist theory and contemporary class struggle. This includes books on the Bruges uprising of 1436–1438, on Burgundian local governance, court societies and state-formation and on struggles from “the bottom-up” against globalizing neoliberalism.

Jelle Haemers is a professor of medieval history at KU Leuven. He has written three books on urban revolts in the county of Flanders. In recent years his research interests have widened to encompass the social history of the late medieval town, notably in the Low Countries (1100–1600). He has also published on the use of social theory in history, the late medieval nobility, and women’s history.

Readership

University libraries, academics and students in history and sociology, a general readership interested in medieval history and Flemish culture.

Table of Contents

Authors’ Preface: Fifteen Years of Systematic Research on Communes
and Conflict in the Towns of Late Medieval Flanders vii
Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers
Acknowledgements xv
1 Editorial Introduction 1
Andrew Murray
part 1
Urban Rebellion
2 Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders 11
Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers
3 Guild Politics and Political Guilds in Fourteenth-Century
Flanders 40
Jan Dumolyn
4 Factionalism and State Power in the Flemish Revolt (1482–92) 81
Jelle Haemers
5 A Moody Community? Emotion and Ritual in Late Medieval Urban
Revolts 114
Jelle Haemers
part 2
Assembling the Commune
6 The Vengeance of the Commune: Sign Systems of Popular Politics in
Medieval Bruges 133
Jan Dumolyn
7 Social Memory and Rebellion in Fifteenth-Century Ghent 170
Jelle Haemers

8 Urban Spaces and Places as a Concern of Communal Politics in
Medieval Flanders 194
Jan Dumolyn (translated by Andrew Murray)
part 3
Oration and Whispers
9 Political Poems and Subversive Songs: The Circulation of ‘Public
Poetry’ in the Late Medieval Low Countries 213
Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers
10 ‘Let Each Man Carry on with His Trade and Remain Silent’: MiddleClass Ideology in the Urban Literature of the Late Medieval Low
Countries 229
Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers
11 ‘A Bad Chicken Was Brooding’: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval
Flanders 250
Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers
part 4
Law and Authority
12 The Legal Repression of Revolts in Late Medieval Flanders 287
Jan Dumolyn
13 The ‘Terrible Wednesday’ of Pentecost: Confronting Urban and
Princely Discourses in the Bruges Rebellion of 1436–8 335
Jan Dumolyn
14 ‘The Good Causes of the People to Rise Up’: Urban Freedoms and
Power Struggles in the Southern Netherlands (1488) 354
Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers (translated by Andrew Murray)
Bibliography 373
Index 452