Table Of ContentUrban History Writing in North-Western Europe (15th–16th centuries)
SEUH
StUdiES in EUropEan Urban HiStory (1100–1800)
Volume 47
Series Editors
Marc Boone
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene
Ghent University
Urban History Writing in
North-Western Europe
(15th–16th centuries)
Edited by
Bram Caers, Lisa Demets and
Tineke Van Gassen
F
Cover illustration: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
Cgm 213, fol.12v (Sigismund Meisterlin: Augsburger Chronik)
© 2019, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the
publisher.
D/2019/0095/124
ISBN 978-2-503-58376-1
eISBN 978-2-503-58377-8
DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.116703
ISSN 1780-3241
eISSN 2294-8368
Printed on acid-free paper.
Content
Introduction. Urban Historiography in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Europe
Jan Dumolyn and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene 7
Questioning Genre and Typologies
Constructing Urban Historiography. The Edition Basler
Chroniken and the Beinheim Manuscript
Marco Tomaszewski 27
Urban Chronicles – Urban Consciousness? On the Chronicle of
Jakob Twinger von Königshofen in New Codicological Contexts
Ina Serif 47
It’s not just about Chronicles. The Variety of Forms of Historical
Writing in Late Medieval Towns in England and the Southern
Low Countries
Jenine de Vries 63
Ypres as a Historiographical Breeding Ground in Late Medieval
Flanders. Origin and Interconnectedness of Urban and Regional
Historiography
Paul Trio 81
The memory of conflict:
the social and political context of urban historiography
Records and Rumours from Tournai. Jehan Nicolay’s Account of
a Town at War and the Construction of Memory
Laura Crombie 97
The Diary of Ghent. Between Urban Politics and Late Medieval
Historiography
Tineke Van Gassen 115
6 content
Opposing Reports on Loyalty and Rebellion. Urban History
Writing in Late Medieval Bruges and Mechelen
Bram Caers and Lisa Demets 137
Materiality and Mixed Media
Heraldry, Historiography and Urban Identity in Late Medieval
Augsburg. The Cronographia Augustensium and the Gossembrot Armorial
Marcus Meer 159
The Origin and Purpose of the Town Chronicles of Kampen
Peter Bakker 187
Printed Almanacs. A Popular Medium for Urban Historiography
and Religious Dissent?
Louise Vermeersch 205
Index of places, proper names and titles 225
Jan Dumolyn anD
anne-laure Van Bruaene
Introduction
Urban Historiography in Late Medieval and
Early Modern Europe
Since the somewhat self-congratulatory success of the historical disciplinary
field known as ‘memory studies’, an increasing number of scholarly analyses
of medieval and early modern historiographical sources have seen the light.1
Although the focus on this ‘new’ concept of memory – which is arguably just
another form of ‘ideology’2 – has reoriented the study of annals, chronicles
and related types of historical texts and ego-documents, it builds on a very
long tradition. The geographical, chronological and social ubiquity of annals,
chronicles, diaries and similar historiographical documents in pre-industrial
societies, and the fact that these sources and their critical study have been vital to
professional history writing since the epoch of antiquarianism has always ensured
a steady attention to them. Yet, for the past few decades the purely ‘typological’
approach and old-fashioned historical criticism – the creation of a distinction
between ‘genres’ such as ‘universal chronicles’, ‘local chronicles’, ‘monastic
historiography’, ‘genealogies’ or ‘memoirs’, the study of textual transmission in
the classical Lachmannian manner, or the traditional descriptive codicology of
manuscripts – are no longer dominant.
1 For medieval historiography see notably Patrick J. Geary, ‘History as Memory’, in Writing History:
Identity, Conflict, and Memory in the Middle Ages, ed. by Patrick J. Geary, Florin Curta, and Cristina
Spinei (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 2012), pp. 230–67; Id., Phantoms of Remembrance.
Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). A
number of agenda-setting contributions for the early modern period include Daniel Woolf, The Social
Circulation of the Past. English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Memory before Modernity. Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Erika Kuijpers, Judith
Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen (Leiden: Brill, 2013); ‘Forum: Memory before
Modernity: Cultures and Practices in Early Modern Germany’, German History, 33 (2015), 1, 100–22.
2 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003). A useful critique of the concepts
of (collective) memory in James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory: New Perspectives on
the Past (Oxford/Cambridge [MA]: Blackwell, 1992).
Urban History Writing in North-Western Europe (15th–16th centuries), ed. by Bram Caers, Lisa Demets and
Tineke Van Gassen, SEUH 47 (Turnhout, 2019), pp. 7–24.
© FHG DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.117865
8 jan dumolyn and anne-laure van bruaene
While during the 1970s and 1980s the studies of ‘self-representations’ and
‘mentalities’ also used historiographical sources,3 at present the study of chronicles
often addresses their social and political contexts and functions, by considering
questions of patronage, reception of texts by intended audiences, their horizons of
expectation, and personal and collective identity constructions. At the same time,
under the influence of narrativism, poststructuralism and the loose, heterogeneous
phenomenon in historical studies generally denoted as the ‘linguistic turn’, there
has been discussion of issues surrounding the ambiguous distinctions between
historiographical texts and fictional or autobiographical writing, and between
reading practices and ‘aurality’.4 And most recently – as historians always seem
to be turning – the ‘material turn’ and ‘pictorial turn’ have led to the reappraisal
of the materiality of chronicles and the interplay of text and image.5
While scholars have applied these approaches to specifically ‘urban’ forms
of history writing in pre-industrial Western Europe in a steady but fragmented
stream of literature, clear and thoughtful overviews on the European scale are,
to our mind, still lacking.6 Introducing the present volume presents us with the
opportunity to discuss the conceptual and methodological problems inherent
in the urban historiographical phenomenon of the central Middle Ages through
the early modern period. Geographically, this volume centers on the large and
smaller towns of one of the pre-industrial urbanized regions par excellence, the
Low Countries (including studies of Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Mechelen, Tournai
and Kampen). Outside the Netherlands, it considers certain classic German-Swiss
3 For instance Reinhard Barth, Argumentation und Selbstverständnis der Bürgeropposition in städtischen
Auseinandersetzungen des Spätmittelalters: Lübeck 1403–1408, Braunschweig 1374–1376, Mainz
1444–1446, Köln 1396–1400 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1976).
4 Among many other titles, see Janet Coleman, English Literature in History 1350–1400: Medieval Readers
and Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1981); Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: the Theory and Practice
of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
5 An example for the early modern period (focusing on prints) is Philip Benedict, Graphic History: The
Wars, Massacres and Troubles of Tortorel and Perrissin (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2007).
6 Medieval historians have defined ‘urban chronicles’ on a primary but rather unsatisfactory level.
Elisabeth M. C. Van Houts, Local and Regional Chronicles. Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge
occidentale, fasc. 74 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), pp. 42–49 includes a very brief paragraph, which
is useful for the Central Middle Ages but hardly deals with the Late Middle Ages, when urban
historiography became more prominent. The characterization of the urban chronicle by Regula
Schmid, ‘Town Chronicles’, in Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. by Graeme Dunphy and
others (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2010), II, pp. 1432–38, is too restrictive and too narrowly based on
German scholarship, as it only includes ‘official’ writings of authors who ‘served the community’ and
wrote ‘for the honour and benefit of communal leaders’. Another fairly recent attempt at a synthesis,
Augusto Vasina, ‘Medieval Urban Historiography in Western Europe (1100–1500)’, in Historiography
in the Middle Ages, ed. by Deborah Mauskopf Delyannis (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 317–52
is generally incoherent and uninformed. Notably, the author uses a rather absurd definition of
the medieval city as confined to seats of bishoprics. Even Ghent, with its 65,000 inhabitants, is
not a real city according to Vasina. Günther Lottes, ‘Stadtchronistik und städtische Identität. Zur
Erinnerungskultur der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt
Nürnberg, 87 (2000), 47–58 only considers the German tradition. The most interesting attempt
at a synthesis, but again almost exclusively dealing with German urban chronicles, is surely Peter
Johanek, ‘Das Gedächtnis der Stadt. Stadtchronistik im Mittelalter’, in Handbuch Chroniken des
Mittelalters, ed. by Gerhard Wolf and Norbert H. Ott (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 337–98.
introduction 9
town chronicles (notably Strasbourg, Augsburg, Konstanz and Basel). There are
only two cases for England, from London and Bristol, and this volume does not
examine urban historical writing in other heavily urban regions such as Italy or
the Mediterranean in general.7 In this overview, we discuss late medieval and
early modern urban historiography from three distinct but related angles: first,
the formal aspects, by problematizing the idea of the urban chronicle as a specific
genre; second, the social and political context, by analysing the components of
what is now often called ‘urban memory’; and third, the material features, by
advocating for an object-oriented approach to historiographical manuscripts.
Urban Historiography as a Specific Genre?
Does an archetypical ‘urban chronicle’ exist? The superficial scholarly consensus
is that there was an archetype in the free towns of Germany and Switzerland, in
Northern and Central Italy, perhaps also in London although not in the rest of
the British Isles. Traditionally, the ‘prehistory’ of urban historiography includes
the genre of the gesta of local bishops, prominent from the eleventh century
onwards, which on occasion paid attention to the urban life of their civitates, as
well as the genre of the laus civitatis (‘praise of a city’), for instance written in early
medieval Milan and Bologna.8 Given their precocious urban development, it is
not surprising that specifically ‘urban’ types of historical writing developed first
in the northern and central regions of the Italian Peninsula. During the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, Italian annals and chronicles dealt with heroic deeds
but also with internal social conflicts, family feuds and partisan strife among the
inhabitants of the city-states. A classic example is Caffaro’s early twelfth-century
Annales Ianuenses, a text typically followed by several continuations, by the thir-
teenth-century patrician Iacopo Doria and others. Although most Italian chronicle
writers of this period remained anonymous, it is clear that they were generally
notaries or clerks, brothers from the mendicant orders, or sometimes merchants.9
7 See a recent synthesis on Italian urban or ‘local’ chronicles in Cristian Bratu, ‘Chroniken im
mittelalterlichen Italien. Ein Überblick’, in Handbuch Chroniken des Mittelalters, pp. 721–33. Other
overviews are provided by Chronicling History. Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance
Italy, ed. by Sharon Dale, Alison Williams Lewin, and Duane J. Osheim (Pennsylvania: the
Pensylvania State University Press, 2007) and Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the
Italian Renaissance (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1981). Also very useful is Giovanna Petti
Balbi, ‘La mémoire dans les cités italiennes à la fin du Moyen Âge: quelques exemples’, in Villes de
Flandre et d’Italie (XIIIe–XVIe siècle). Les enseignement d’une comparaison, ed. by Elisabeth Crouzet-
Pavan and Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 131–46, and Renato Bordono,
‘La mémoire des villes’, Villes de Flandre et d’Italie, pp. 165–72. This volume compares Italians and
Flemish towns, the latter dealt with by Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘L’écriture de la mémoire urbaine
en Flandre et en Brabant (XIVe–XVIe siècle)’, Villes de Flandre et d’Italie, pp. 149–64.
8 Reinhold Kaiser, ‘Die Gesta episcoporum als Genus der Gechichtsschreibung im frühen Mittelalter’,
in Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. by Anton Scharer and Georg Schreibelreiter (Vienna/
Munich: Böhlau, 1984), pp. 459–80.
9 Bratu, ‘Chroniken’, pp. 721–25; Giovanna Petti Balbi, Caffaro e la cronachistica genovese (Genova:
Tilgher, 1970).
10 jan dumolyn and anne-laure van bruaene
However, Italy was not the site of the oldest urban chronicle written in
a vernacular language, namely the official consular history of Montpellier
begun in the early thirteenth century, the so-called Petit Thalamus. The early
development of vernacular literature in the Occitan-speaking area makes this less
surprising. The towns of southern France, culturally close to Italy, maintained
a very lively tradition of urban historiography, usually based on official lists of
consuls, but there has been little systematic work on these texts. Beginning in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, forms of urban historical writing appeared
in northern, French-speaking towns as well, but these have not yet received
much scholarly attention.10 In North-Western European regions with Germanic
language speakers, proper urban chronicles came into being later than in Italy
or the south of France. London developed a relatively early tradition of urban
historical writing, inserted into a list of city officials and originally in Latin.11
At the same time Mendicant chroniclers were active outside Italy, for instance
in Flanders, where the early fourteenth-century Annales Gandenses, written by
a Ghent Grey Friar, should surely be considered ‘urban’.12
Vernacular urban chronicles in German debuted in some locations in the late
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but scholars generally consider the fifteenth
century – when Italian historians were already writing humanist histories of their
towns – to be the real starting point of urban historiography in Northern Europe,
produced particularly in the cities of the Holy Roman Empire. The fifteenth
century also witnessed the transition from composing chronicles in verse to
writing in prose and from Latin to the vernacular. From this period onwards,
German towns have dominated medieval urban historiography. It is generally
acknowledged that urban chronicles comprise the bulk of the historiography
about the late medieval Holy Roman Empire (including the Swiss Confederation),
and scholars have studied them extensively since the nineteenth century.13
Remarkably, with regard to the Low Countries, home to some of the largest cities
north of the Alps and a majority population of Middle Dutch speakers linguistically
10 The main exception is the recent work of Challet on the Montpellier chronicles: Vincent Challet,
‘The Petit Thalamus of Montpellier. Moving Mirror of an Urban Political Identity’, Imago Temporis
Medium Aevum, 10 (2016), pp. 215–29; Aysso es lo comessamen. Écritures et mémoires du Montpellier
médiéval, ed. by Vincent Challet (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2010). In
Agde, Vienne, Nîmes, Béziers and other towns of the Midi, there were similar chroniques consulaires,
but less so in the rest of France, such as La Rochelle; see André Chédeville, Histoire de la France
Urbaine. 2: la ville médiévale des Carolingiens à la Renaissance (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 583–88; Juliane
Kümmel, ‘Alltagsweltliche Erfahrung und Formen volkssprachlicher Historiographie in den
spätmittelalterliche Städten Frankreichs’, in La littérature historiographique des origines à 1500. Tome 1
(partie historique) (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987), pp. 735–54.
11 See for London and other developments in England: Antonia Gramsden, Historical Writing in England,
c. 550–c. 1307 (London: Routledge, 1982).
12 Annals of Ghent, ed. by Hilda Johnstone (London: Nelson, 1951).
13 Johanek, ‘Das Gedächtnis’, p. 372; Klaus Wriedt, ‘Bürgerliche Geschichtsschreibung im 15. und 16.
Jahrhundert. Ansätze und Formen’, in Städtische Geschichtsschreibung im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen
Neuzeit, ed. by Peter Johanek (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), p. 21. See also F. R. H. du Boulay, ‘The German
Town Chroniclers’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages, ed. by Ralph Davis and J. M. Wallace-
Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 445–69 and the other contributions in this volume.
