Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Central Section ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Southern Netherlands

During the Late Middle Ages a unique type of ‘mixed media’ recycled and remnant art arose in houses of religious women in the Low Countries: enclosed gardens. They date from the time of Emperor Charles V and are unique examples of ‘anonymous’ female art, devotion and spirituality. A hortus conclusus (or enclosed garden) represents an ideal, paradisiacal world. Enclosed Gardens are retables, sometimes with painted side panels, the central section filled not only with narrative sculpture, but also with all sorts of trinkets and hand-worked textiles.Adornments include relics, wax medallions, gemstones set in silver, pilgrimage souvenirs, parchment banderoles, flowers made from textiles with silk thread, semi-precious stones, pearls and quilling (a decorative technique using rolled paper). The ensemble is an impressive and one-of-a-kind display and presents as an intoxicating garden. The sixteenth-century horti conclusi of the Mechelen Hospital sisters are recognized Masterpieces and are extremely rare, not alone at a Belgian but even at a global level. They are of international significance as they provide evidence of devotion and spirituality in convent communities in the Southern Netherlands in the sixteenth century. They are an extraordinary tangible expression of a devotional tradition. The highly individual visual language of the enclosed gardens contributes to our understanding of what life was like in cloistered communities. They testify to a cultural identity closely linked with mystical traditions allowing us to enter a lost world very much part of the culture of the Southern Netherlands. This book is the first full survey of the enclosed gardens and is the result of year-long academic research.

II. The Low Countries

1956 ◽  
Vol 12 (03) ◽  
pp. 234-245
Author(s):  
Gordon Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Unique Outcome ◽  
The Middle Ages

The contest between monarchy and representative institutions had a unique outcome in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century as a result of several factors. The most obvious of these is the fact that their rulers had inherited a royal title in Castile and Aragon. The financial and administrative institutions of the modern state which the monarchs attempted to introduce into their possessions in the Low Countries were therefore bound to be regarded as foreign importations. They conflicted with the representative institutions which had grown up in the Netherlands as elsewhere in Europe during the Middle Ages. The chief of these, the Estates-General, continued to flourish in the Low Countries long after they had entered upon hopeless decline in France and Spain. Moreover, the wealth of the Low Countries, industrially, commercially, and financially the most advanced region of sixteenth-century Europe, made them an attractive target for the Hapsburg bureaucracy, harried as it was by the gargantuan task of financing the wars of Charles V and Philip II.

Dance in the Late Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
pp. 207-232
Author(s):  
Kathryn Dickason
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western World ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Dance Of Death ◽  
Self Transcendence ◽  
Sacred Dance ◽  
The Middle Ages

The final chapter documents the demise of sacred dance at the end of the Middle Ages, c.1350–1450. Focusing on dance mania and the dance of death, it shows how dance gradually became associated with decadent and morbid, rather than religious and heavenly, motifs. The first section demonstrates how the choreomania (dance mania) epidemics of France, the Low Countries, and the Rhineland befuddled clerics and tested the limits of legitimate dance. The second section focuses on the danse macabre, or the dance of death, which was seemingly related to the plague. With its penchant for self-transcendence, dance probed the realm of the unknown. By the sixteenth century, the religious tenor of the dance of death movement began to erode. This shift coincided with the professionalization and secularization of courtly dance in the Western world.

Krijg je nog rente voor een lied? : Stadsdichterschap als eer en verdienste sinds de middeleeuwen1

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-131
Author(s):  
Laurens Ham ◽  
Nina Geerdink ◽  
Johan Oosterman ◽  
Remco Sleiderink ◽  
Sander Bax
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
First Century ◽  
City Marketing ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
City Councils ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Public Money

Abstract This article presents the first diachronic overview of the economic, social and symbolic profits of ‘city poets’ (‘stadsdichters’) in the Low Countries. From the early fifteenth century onwards, there have been many (more or less) official relationships between city councils and poets. The prominence and the form of these relationships, however, diverged greatly in different periods: whereas official appointments were the standard in the fifteenth, sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries, the period in between saw a much more diverse landscape of informal appointments and relationships. After presenting a historical overview of the role of city poets throughout the centuries, this article focuses on two well-documented periods in which formal agreements were made between town governments and poets: the late Middle Ages and the start of the 21st century. We analyze political and financial agreements explicitly in relationship to the complexities surrounding the production of city poetry. City poetry, paid by public money, is bound to be controversial: in general because its status is subject to changes and political discussions, but also because this form of commissioned poetry is sometimes seen as a form of propaganda. Official city poetry seems to flourish most in societies with a stable political-religious climate (as in the Southern Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth century) and/or with a keen interest in city marketing (as in Flanders and the Netherlands in the twenty-first century).

England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257
Author(s):  
Joel T. Rosenthal ◽  
Caroline Barron ◽  
Nigel Saul
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Middle Ages

France, Prussia, or Germany? The Napoleonic Wars and Shifting Allegiances in the Rhineland

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-640
Author(s):  
Michael Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
First Republic ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
City States

The following article focuses on the Rhineland, and more specifically, the region on the left (or west) bank of the Rhine bounded in the north and west by the Low Countries and France. This German-speaking region was occupied by the armies of revolutionary France after 1792. De jure annexation followed the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), and French rule lasted until 1814. Most of the Rhineland was awarded in 1815 to Prussia and remained a constituent part until after the Second World War. The Rhineland experienced Napoleonic rule first hand. Its four departments—the Roër, Rhin-et-Moselle, Sarre, and Mont-Tonnerre—were treated like the others in metropolitan France, and it is this status that makes the region distinct in German-speaking Europe. This had consequences both in the Napoleonic period and in the century that followed the departure of the last French soldier. This alone would constitute sufficient reason for studying the region. More broadly, however, the Rhenish experience in the French period sheds light on the much broader phenomena of state formation and nation building. Before 1792, the Rhenish political order appeared in many respects a throwback to the late Middle Ages. Extreme territorial fragmentation, city states, church states, and mini states distinguished its landscape. These survived the early-modern period thanks in part to Great Power rivalry and the protective mantle provided by the Holy Roman Empire. Then, suddenly, came rule by France which, in the form of the First Republic and Napoleon's First Empire, represented the most demanding state the world had seen up to that point. This state imposed itself on a region unused to big government. It might be thought that bitter confrontation would have resulted. Yet, and here is a paradox this article wishes to address, many aspects of French rule gained acceptance in the region, and defense of the Napoleonic legacy formed a component of the “Rhenish” identity that came into being in the nineteenth century.

THE CAPITÃES MORES OF THE JAPAN VOYAGE: A GROUP PORTRAIT

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reinier H. Hesselink
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Representative Sample ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Japanese Islands

Starting from the premise that all empire building involves ideological constructs justifying the violence that accompanies such efforts, this article concentrates on elucidating the case of the Portuguese in Asia, specifically in Japan. Although well beyond the formal Portuguese thalassocracy in Asia, the Japanese islands were exposed for about a century, between 1543 and 1640, to the informal presence of Portuguese traders and missionaries. The symbiotic relationship between these two groups was based on the experience that, in Japan, the trade was difficult to conduct, for violence was always lurking beneath the surface of the trading relationship. We know of several instances when such violence actually exploded into major armed clashes, and many other times violence was narrowly averted through the mediation of the missionaries.Based on original research in the archives of Portugal and Spain, this article analyzes the records that the leaders of the Portuguese who came to Japan in the sixteenth century, the so-called capitães mores, have left behind. Finding that a significant number of these men were or later became members of the Order of Christ or were closely related to such members, it then explores their mindset through a survey of the function of this military order in Portuguese society of the late Middle Ages. The result is a group portrait of thirty-seven men who may be considered a representative sample of the Portuguese leading both the formal and informal empires in Asia. This portrait will clarify why both Japanese and Portuguese authorities agreed, at least during the second half of the sixteenth century, that the Jesuit missionaries were an indispensable presence in Japan.

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