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City, State, and Public Ritual in the Late-Medieval Burgundian Netherlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2012

Peter Arnade
Peter Arnade
Affiliation:
California State University, San Marcos
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Extract

At the end of a distinguished career as chronicler of the Burgundian court, Georges Chastellain (1404–75) penned a quick sketch of the outstanding accomplishments of his duke, Charles the Bold. Accustomed to expositions awash in chivalric pomp, Chastellain employed a different tack to commemorate this sovereign: He sketched eleven “magnificences” performed by the duke of Burgundy, all reconstructed images of this prince's engagement with ceremony. Foremost among this snapshot collection of state ritual was neither a tournament, nor a wedding ceremony, nor even a processional entry. What stood out, in Chastellain's estimation, as Charles' greatest deed was something more riveting and more powerful than any of these spectacles so beloved by the fifteenth-century Burgundian court:

The first [magnificence] was at Brussels, where, seated on his throne, his sword unsheathed and held by his Marshall, he gathered the men of Ghent arranged kneeling before him and at his pleasure and in their presence cut and tore up the political charters they bore. Done for permanent record, this action was without parallel.

For Chastellain, the supreme magnificence of Charles the Bold was a lesson in exemplary punishment, the public abasement of the aldermen and guild deans of the Flemish city of Ghent in January 1469, a year and a half after a city revolt of rank-and-file guildsmen had unsettled celebrations in honor of his accession to the countship of Flanders.

Type
Ritual Power
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , April 1997 , pp. 300 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1997

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References

1 Chastellain's eleven “magnificences” can be found in Georges Chastellain. Oeuvres, H. Kervyn de Lettenhove. ed. 8 vols. (Brussels. 1863–66). 5:505–6. The official chronicler of the Burgundian court under Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. Chastellain was a Gentenar by birth. See Small, Graeme and Lievois, Daniel. “Les origines gantoises du chroniqueur George Chastelain (ca. 1414–ca. 1441).” Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, (n.r.), 48 (1994), 121–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25 I take this quote from the so-called Kerelslied from Nicholas. Medieval Flanders. (New York. 1992). 253Google Scholar.

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29 I am indebted to the assessment of ritual as strategies of action in Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York, 1992)Google Scholar. See also Kertzer, David, Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven, 1988), especially 8–14Google Scholar. on definition of ritual. The model of ritual as enactments of collective solidarity was most powerfully articulated by Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915; reprint, New York. 1965)Google Scholar; theories of social control, in which conflict is diffused through the ritual process, have, in different and sophisticated ways, been advanced by Gluckman, Max, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (Glencoe, 1963)Google Scholar, and Turner, Victor, particularly, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago. 1966)Google Scholar.

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32 Vaughan. Philip the Good, 86–92.

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38 For the 1438 settlement, see the full transcription in Gilliodts-Van Severen, L., Inventaire des archives de la ville de Bruges. Section Première: Inventaire des chartes, 6 vols. (Bruges, 1871–1876), 5:134–58Google Scholar. For a succinct summary of events, see Vaughan. Philip the Good, 86–92. On ritual submission in early medieval France, see Koziol, Geoffery. Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca. 1992)Google Scholar.

39 Blommaert, and Serrure, , Kronyk van Vlaenderen, 2:105–11Google Scholar: Despars, . Cronijcke van den lande and graefscepe van Vlaenderen, 3:429–45Google Scholar; see also Douët-d'Arcq, L.. La Chronique d'Enguerrand de Monstrelet, 6 vols. (1857–1862), 5:445–9Google Scholar.

40 For a general consideration of the urban networks in Flanders in particular, see Stabel, Peter, “The Urban Network in the County of Flanders during the later Middle Ages and the Sixteenth Century,” in Clark, P., ed., Towns and Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leicester. 1990). 8–29Google Scholar.

41 There is a summary consideration of the economic life of the Burgundian Netherlands in Blockmans and Prevenier, In de Ban van Bourgondië. On the monetary and economic changes, see also Munro, John, “Monetary Contraction and Industrial Change in the Late-Medieval Low Countries, 1335–1500.” in Mayhew, N. J., ed.. Coinage in the Low Countries (880–1500), (Oxford: BAR International Series. 54, 1979). 54–68Google Scholar.

42 There has been little attention to this distinct feature of Low Country ceremony, though, for religious matters, it is hinted at in J. Toussaert's now classic Le sentiment religieux en Flandre à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 1963)Google Scholar.

43 Fouret, Claude, “La violence en fete: la course de l'Epinette à Lille à la fin du Moyen Age,” Revue du Nord, 63 (1981), 377–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Bruges, see the evidence amassed by Severen, Gilliodts-Van, ed., Inventaire des chartes, 4:471–82Google Scholar.

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45 For Bruges. Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaire des chartes, 4:477; for Lille, Fouret, “la violence en fête,” 385.

46 In large measure, these behaviors were part of the general practice of inversion so much a part of carnival. See Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York. 1978), 178–204Google Scholar, who summarizes a large literature on the subject. See also Natalie Zemon Davis's pathbreaking “The Reasons for Misrule.” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1965), 97–123Google Scholar.

47 On the entries, see Fouret, “La violence en fête,” 384, and Severen, Gilliodts-Van, Inventaire des chartes, 4:476Google Scholar.

48 The notion of framing, both in public and private rituals, has been fruitfully employed by Trexler, Richard C., Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, especially 91–96.

49 Reintges, Theo, Ursprung und Wesen der spätmittelalterlichen Schützengilden (Bonn, 1963)Google Scholar; Delauny, L. A., Etude sur les anciennes compagnies d'archers, d'arbalétriers et d'arquebusiers (Paris, 1879)Google Scholar; van Wijck, A. M. C. van Asch, De schut of schultengilden in Nederlanden (Utrecht, 1849, 1851Google Scholar).

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55 On the Saint George crossbowmen in Ghent, see Moulin-Coppens, Josée, De geschiedenis van het Oude Sint-Jorisgilde te Gent (vanaf de vroegste tijden tot 1887) (Ghent, 1982)Google Scholar and de Potter, Frans, Jaarboeken der Sint-Jorisgilde van Gent (Ghent, n.d.)Google Scholar. On the guild's governing structure, see Stadsarchief te Gent 300/27, fol. 82v. On the 1440 competition, see Universiteit bibliotheek Gent G. 6112, Dit es den bouc vander scutterie toebehoorende Pieter Polet ende zijnder hoerrie ende dot vanden voetboghe van mijnen heere den edelen rudder Sint Jorijs int gulden te Gent.

56 Bouc vander scutterie, fols. 8r–9r.

57 Moulin-Coppens, Geschiedenis, 34–39; de Potter, Jaarboeken, 24.

58 Bouc vander scutterie. fol. 5v.

59 Ibid., fol. 7v.

60 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chapter one.

61 On the Feast of the Pheasant, see Lafortune-Martel, A., Fête noble en Bourgogne an XVe siècle: la banquet de Faisan (1454) (Montreal, 1984)Google Scholar.

62 Charles Tilly. Coercion, Capital, and European States, 41. The literature on Renaissance civic culture is vast, but for an important appraisal of the public world of its two largest city states, see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence; Muir, Edward, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981)Google Scholar; and Muir, Edward and Weissman, Ronald F. E.. “Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Florence and Venice,” in Andrew, J. and Duncan, James, eds.. The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations (Boston, 1989), 81–103Google Scholar.