Flemish Nobility

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This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of significant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. The essays that comprise it focus attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800 and place the process by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes and analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, alongside the role of textual, pictorial, material and financial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical definitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the quotidian circumstances and politics of everyday life. They also illuminate some of the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to permanent oblivion.

This article analyses the use of memoria with respect to the Carthusian monastery of Scheut, a few miles to the west of Brussels. The construction of this monastery around 1455 was first intended to preserve the memory of the battle of Scheut of 1356 and of those who had died there, many of them citizens of Brussels. The establishment of the monastery as a monument to the battle is the central theme of the first part of this article, and the importance of chroniclers in the process of commemoration will receive a special focus. Moreover, we will disentangle the trilateral relationship between the town, the court and the monastery.
This relationship is further explored in the second part. We explain how a second memorial layer was created by courtiers and patricians, who wished to be remembered by the local monks and devout visitors. Especially the officers of the Burgundian and (later Habsburg) state were eager to become associated with the monastery, through a personalised memorial. Some of these officers were instrumental in establishing links between the monastery and its high-ranking, noble patrons, most of whom had feudal possessions in the duchy of Brabant. They played a crucial role during the three periods in which stained glass windows needed to be financed for the decoration of the new buildings, for the chapel, cloister and the new church respectively.

This edited volume examines how transregional elites were pivotal actors during the Wars of Religion. It centers around the figure of Antoine de Croÿ, the Prince of Porcien, serving Condé and the Calvinist cause, but stemming from a transregional house with landed patrimony on the French-Habsburg border with the Low Countries. Hence, the volume brings an entangled history of the French and Dutch Wars of Religion

The long nineteenth and early twentieth century is often considered a period of socially widening collecting practices. Besides the boom of public museums, the general understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collecting is dominated by the rise of the bourgeois collectioneur as new social type. Within the broader historiography much attention has been paid to the new industrial tycoons and businessmen, as well as the (higher) middling sort of collectors, all eager to tap into a growing ‘collection mania’. Less well studied for this period, however, remain the blue-blooded collectors or collectioneurs nobles. This comes as quite a surprise since the practice of collecting itself has deep and long running roots, intimately tied to endeavours of early-modern royal houses and noblemen, amassing Wunderkammern full of Fine and Decorative Arts, precious manuscripts and books, naturalia, and myriad other collectables. While some, less fortunate noblemen, were forced to sell their prized family collections during the age of political, industrial, and cultural revolutions, others retained their titles and fortunes, and continued to collect for economic reasons (as investment), or for reasons tied to their specific, albeit changing, social and cultural status in modern societies.

In spite of the recent upsurge in books and articles on collectors and collecting practices in Belgium and the Netherlands, research on this blue blood collecting in the Low Countries after 1750 remains thin on the ground. Who were these highborn collectors? What did they collect? And why? In this special issue we aim to draw a detailed portrait of these  collectioneurs nobles, their changing social profile, and their motivations. How different were their motives and aims from their emerging bourgeois counterparts? What were the norms and values that fuelled aristocratic collecting? Did they, for instance, pay more attention to noble pedigree and patina in the selection of objects? And in what way were older, Humanist and Enlightenment values carried over in modern times with these collectors? Tying in with a recent strand, we also want to pay attention to the links between gender and collecting. To what extent were the collection profile and practices of noble ladies and lords different? We also aim to shed more light on the presentation, musealisation, and afterlife of these noble collections. To what extent became noble collections more accessible for a wider public in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how were they received by noble, bourgeois or lower class visitors? How were these aristocratic ensembles eventually integrated into public museums? Last but not least, we also try to identify local, regional or even national differences between well-bred collectors in Belgium and the Netherlands, in the industrial cities and in the countryside, and so on.

We aim to provide some answers to these questions by sampling the latest research on noble collectors and collections in the Low Countries. The special issue will be published in Virtus: Journal of Nobility Studies. [WoS A1- journal] Abstracts – ca. 350 words, including a short bio-sketch – should be send to [email protected] before 1 February 2022. Full chapters (5000 words, including footnotes) should be submitted in the same way before 1 October 2022.