Dynastic Legitimacy

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
European History ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Religious Denomination ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Swiss Confederation ◽  
United Provinces

In this essay Wight clarified the importance of dynastic legitimacy—that is, hereditary monarchy—in European history. In the Middle Ages and subsequent centuries, rulers were mainly princes who inherited their crowns. The principal exceptions were the leaders of republics, including Venice, Ragusa, Genoa, and Lucca in Italy; the Swiss confederation; and the United Provinces of the Low Countries. Dynastic principles included the theory that the ruler was chosen by God through hereditary succession, and that the monarch represented his or her subjects, notably with regard to the official religious denomination of the country. Such principles made dynastic marriages valuable means to provide heirs to the crown, to clarify succession to the throne, to consolidate alliances, to gain influence and wealth, and to legitimize territorial gains. Despite imprudent and egocentric behaviour by some royal leaders, monarchs were increasingly expected to pursue national rather than personal dynastic interests. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna reaffirmed dynastic principles of legitimacy, including in Venice and the Netherlands; the Swiss confederation was a conspicuous exception. Dynastic rulers have, however, tended to become symbols and instruments of national unity and self-determination. Popular support for dynastic houses has in many cases led to popular legitimacy for constitutional monarchies.

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.

Nationalism in the Low Countries

1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Kohn
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
European History ◽  
National Character ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The West ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Border Regions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Emancipation

The age of nationalism offers us many examples which prove that affinities in descent or language have no influence on the formation of modern nations or on their political ideas. Switzerland is only one of several Germanic lands which developed a nationalism resembling much more closely that of England rather than that of Germany. The case of the Low Countries is similar. Both were until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries politically and historically a part of the German Empire. Both grew into separate nations in border regions where Germanic and Latin civilizations have met since the beginning of European history. Both gained their national character by a process of intellectual and political emancipation from Germany. The Dutch historian, Jan Huizinga, affirmed in Berlin at the beginning of 1933 in a lecture on the Netherlands as mediator between Western and Central Europe that “Our whole history as a people and a state is, with a few exceptions, Western European history. Our relations with the West have conditioned our independence as a people and as a state. Be it as friends, be it as enemies, France and England were our teachers. The Netherlands have significance and a meaningful place only as a territory oriented toward the West.”

Management of the Dutch Waddensea

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 485-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
D Vreugdenhil
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Nature Reserve ◽  
The Other ◽  
Hydrological Processes ◽  
Dutch Government ◽  
Shallow Sea ◽  
Management Objectives ◽  
Late Middle Ages

It was not until the late Middle Ages that the sea penetrated far into the interior of The Netherlands, thus flooding three quarters of a million hectares of land. Since then half a million hectares have been reclaimed from the sea. The Dutch Government chose to preserve the remaining quarter of a million hectares of shallow sea with mudflats of the Waddensea as a nature reserve. The management objectives are at one hand to preserve all characteristic habitats and species with a minimal interference by human activities in geomorphological and hydrological processes, and at the other hand to guarantee the safety against the sea of the inhabitants of the adjacent mainland and islands and to facilitate certain economic and recreational uses of the Waddensea without jeopardizing the natural qualities. These objectives are being elaborated in managementplans.

Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth van Houts
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Married Couple ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Married Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This book contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe c. 900–1300. The focus will be on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage. The book consists of three parts: the first part (Getting Married) is devoted to the process of getting married and wedding celebrations, the second part (Married Life) discusses the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage, while the third part (Alternative Living) explores concubinage and polygyny as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions. Four main themes are central to the book. First, the tension between patriarchal family strategies and the individual family member’s freedom of choice to marry and, if so, to what partner; second, the role played by the married priesthood in their quest to have individual agency and self-determination accepted in their own lives in the face of the growing imposition of clerical celibacy; third, the role played by women in helping society accept some degree of gender equality and self-determination to marry and in shaping the norms for married life incorporating these principles; fourth, the role played by emotion in the establishment of marriage and in married life at a time when sexual and spiritual love feature prominently in medieval literature.

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.

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