A Useful Synthesis on Medieval Flanders
The Flanders of the Middle Ages has been a source of fascination to international scholars for many decades. The reasons for this are legion: a strong tradition of urbanisation as early as the eleventh century, comparable only with northern Italy, which reflects an economic success story achieved through a technological edge (luxury textiles) and creative exploitation of the available transport opportunities; the permanent coupling of economic power and artistic creativity, culminating in the Maasland art and Van Eyck's
ars nova in the fifteenth century; the early experiments, following those in England, with modern political institutions and parliamentary representation. This urban dynamic led, very early on, to polarisation, spilling over into
Jan van Eyck, The Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin. c. 1435. Panel, 66 × 62 cm. Musée National du Louvre, Paris.
thirteenth-century popular revolts and strikes against the feudal aristocracy.
The recent book by David Nicholas (Clemson University, South Carolina) entitled Medieval Flanders, is a product of the current high level of interest in this historical topic in the United States. Until the Second World War, Flanders was the subject of intensive study by German and French scholars, though in truth this had less to do with erudition than with polities. The two groups competed with each other to present the Flanders of the Middle Ages as a part of their own past - despite the fact that the feudal dependence of Flanders on the two superpowers was more a theoretical exercise than a social reality. Researchers in England and America have stayed largely aloof from these oldfashioned and somewhat unrealistic ideas; they have remained neutral, simply fascinated by an interesting and early economic and political model. I find it significant that, in the preface of his book, Nicholas distances himself from every ideological perspective. I also note that of Nicholas' excellent bibliography, which gives the essence of what is still important today, 95% consists of studies from the Ghent school and from English-language publications. Since the 1920s, when the eminent historian Pirenne ‘tempted’ large numbers of American and English scholars to Ghent, this flow of researchers has never let up.
Nicholas' book is a useful work in many respects. In anticipation of the soon to be published New Cambridge Medieval History, this is the only recent synthesis in English, written by a single author, and covering the whole of Medieval Flanders in all its facets. An English or American perspective on the Flemish past, as we can see in the unique publications of Patricia Carson, offers the advantage of intellectual detachment, unhindered by professional traditions and prejudices. In Nicholas' case, this originality is reinforced by the fact that, over the last twenty-five years, this author has published no less than five books on Flanders in the Middle Ages - all based on primary sources.
And yet this book offers less of a new vision of Medieval Flanders than one might expect; it is a well-worked, excellently documented synthesis of what has been achieved in recent times by dozens of researchers, including the author himself. Where he does venture to say something new or different (for example, about the earliest urban development) I fear that, as a result of understandable handicaps in his otherwise first-class information and technique, he has to bow to the superiority of a historian such as Adriaan Verhulst.
Nicholas' work lays clear emphasis on certain aspects: on landscape and agriculture during the earliest centuries. Socio-economic aspects receive wide attention in comparison to politics; culture and religion, with a meagre 42 out of the 460 pages, are very much the neglected children. This undoubtedly has to do with personal interest and experience.