Urban chronicle writing in late medieval Flanders: the case of Bruges during the Flemish Revolt of 1482-1490

Medieval urban historiography

There is no consensus on the exact meaning of the commonly used phrase 'medieval urban historiography'.¹Although strict dichotomies between 'urban' and 'court' or 'noble culture', or between 'lay' and 'clerical' culture are now generally dismissed, the question of whether there was a specifically 'urban' form of historical writing is of considerable importance. We propose an integrated analytical framework to identify and measure the 'urbanity' of late medieval chronicles, taking into account the authorship and thematic emphasis of historiographical texts, but focusing on the social environment of their circulation and the ideological strategies at work.

Although cities were dominant in medieval Flemish society, there are few early texts which can be described as 'urban chronicles', especially in comparison to the ubiquitous texts surviving in the German and Italian cities.²The two oldest narrative sources that focus on urban events are isolated and atypical. Both were written by well-educated clerics who lived in towns. The chronicle of Galbert of Bruges, a cleric of the collegiate church of St Donatian, about the political struggle in Flanders after the murder of Count Charles the Good in 1127, is one of the most well-known and fascinating historiographical documents of the twelfth century.³The Annales Gandenses, written by an anonymous Greyfriar in Ghent, has received less international scholarly attention, but offers an equally interesting analysis of the political events in the county between 1296 and 1310, a period of French occupation, urban revolts and liberation in 1302.⁴Both texts show a thorough familiarity with urban society and politics, thus demonstrating that clerical authors were not always 'outsiders' hostile to the worldview, actions and aspirations of city-dwellers. However, neither of these two chronicles circulated widely, because there are few surviving manuscripts, and neither had appreciable influence on other historical narratives. They are exceptions to the Flemish historiographical tradition of monastic annals and chronicles and 'national' narratives organized around the genealogies of the counts.⁵It initially seems difficult to locate a specifically 'urban character', or 'urban point of view' in historical writing before the fifteenth century. The same is true for the neighbouring principalities of Brabant, Holland and Hainaut.⁶

Authorship, worldviews and interpretative communities

There are a number of criteria competing to...