Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent 9781501720673

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Realms of Ritual

Realms of Ritual Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent

PETER ARNADE

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 1996 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review; this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1996 by Cornell University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arnade, Peter J. Realms of ritual : Burgundian ceremony and civic life in late medieval Ghent I by Peter Arnade. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8or4-3098-4 (alk. paper) r. Ghent (Belgium)-Sociallife and customs. 2. Rites and ceremonies-Belgium-Ghent. 3· Cities and towns, Medieval-BelgiumGhent. 4· Belgium-History-To 1555. I. Title. DH8rr.G46A93 1996 949·3'I4201-dC20 96·15632

Printed in the United States of America @> The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1984.

For Betsy "Porque el fuego no muere" -Pablo Neruda

Contents

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List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations

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3 4 5

6 7

Introduction: Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands Court, State, and Ceremony The Civic World of Ghent Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige The Public World of Revolt and Submission Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians The New Public Order Conclusion: The Historical City Notes Bibliography Index

xi xv I

9 36 65 95 I27 I 59 I89 2IO 215

26 5 291

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Illustrations

MAP

Ghent in the fifteenth century

43

FIGURES

Jean Wauquelin presents the Chroniques de Hainault to Philip the Good 2. Thomas of Savoy and Joanna of Constantinople present a Charter of Privileges to the men of Waas 3· Louis de Male and a delegation of Gentenars 4· Countess Margaret of Constantinople issues a navigation ordinance 5· Ten Walle in Ghent 6. Archduchess Isabella shoots the popinjay with the Saint George Confraternity The crossbowmen and Ghent's militia 7· 8. The honorable amend 9· Philip the Fair at the crossbowmen's festival I.

20 2! 23 25 46 66 69 123 !83

ix

Acknowledgments

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For a book so committed to the historical importance of local urban culture, it is distinctly ironic that I did much of the writing of it in a variety of locales, snatching time where and when I could. I have incurred a number of debts along the way. For financial support without which this book would never have been completed, I thank the Belgian-American Educational Foundation; the Commission for the Educational Exchange between the United States, Belgium, and Luxembourg, which administered a Fulbright-Hayes grant; the American Association for Netherlandic Studies; and California State University, San Marcos, where I received a Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Grant for a final summer in the archives. My colleagues in the history program there also permitted me some flexible scheduling so I could make time to write. A Faculty Development Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences covered reproduction fees for the photographs and map. An American Historical Association guide to grants, fellowships, and prizes features on its cover a picture of a monk at his computer, a less than subtle salute to the clerical origins of historical memory in Western European history. Although at times I felt a residual kinship to some distant scribal culture, at no stage was my labor solitary. From the outset of my research to the final revisions, I have profited from dynamic and inspiring academic communities. One of my greatest debts is to the departments of history at New York University and the State University of New York at Binghamton, where I underwent my graduate training, and to Richard C. Trexler in partiexi

xii

Acknowled:;ments ular, whose rich scholarship, superb training, and infectious intellectual goodwill made learning both a challenge and a pleasure. I also owe a strong thank you to my friends in the Vakgroep Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis at the Universiteit Gent, who treated me with amazing hospitality and generosity, teaching me, each in his or her own way, an ongoing lesson in international intellectual exchange and friendship. Walter Prevenier first convinced me that my research interests could indeed translate practically into a larger project; he also helped make my time in Ghent possible and introduced me to the rich history of the Burgundian Netherlands. Ludo Milis challenged me to master the local sources yet think deeply and broadly and matched his keen interest in my work with crucial help at every stage. Walter Simons shared his important research with me, and in the process, he helped shape mine and became a good friend. Upon my arrival, Marc Boone handed me a set of citations on public life in Ghent. That act of generosity was only the beginning of his constant help and encouragement. He has made learning the history of Ghent a delightful task. My thanks to all of them also for introducing me to such Flemish delights as Vooruit, Mokabon, Caffe Wolff, and the Hopduvel! The colleagues, friends, and other scholars who have assisted me in one way or another, both in my small corner of the academic world and beyond, are too numerous for me to thank them all here. For their focused comments and help, I must, however, thank in particular Wim Blockmans, Therese de Hemptinne, Jesse Hurlbut, Ellen E. Kittell, Geoffrey Koziol, Veronique Lambert, Werner Paravicini, Hugo Soly, and Joanna Ziegler. At CSU San Marcos, Renee Curry, Patricia Seleski, and Jill Watts all offered their help and critical readings, while buoying me with their friendship. David Nicholas lent the expertise of his fundamental and rich scholarship on Ghent and Flanders; I greatly profited in particular from his incisive comments on my original manuscript. Martha Howell enthusiastically helped me refocus parts of my book, taking time away from her own myriad responsibilities to share her deep historical knowledge with me. I also owe a special debt to Edith Cooper, a graduate student whom I never met but whose offprints on Low Country shooting confraternities and rhetoricians came my way after her death, thanks to her husband Lawrence Cooper. I wish she could have known how her research inspired part of this book. The two anonymous readers for Cornell University Press saved me from several gaffes and, more important, spelled out how to rework my manuscript. For his practical

Acknowledgments help and sage advice as editor, I thank John G. Ackerman, the director of Cornell University Press. I extend a fond thanks to the staffs of the Bibliotheque Royale Albert r/Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert r; the archives of Ghent's Bijlokemuseum; the Universiteit Bibliotheek in Ghent, especially for the ebullient help of Greta Milis-Proost; the Rijksarchief te Gent and the Stadsarchief te Gent, especially to its director, Dr. Johan Decavele and its staff member, Carlos Hourez; and the Archives Departementales du Nord in Lille, France. All made easy the thrilling job of uncovering pieces of the past from historical documents. Goodhumored and talented, Curt Cochran and Jeff Henson at CSU San Marcos's Computer Help Desk walked me through several software and computer problems I encountered along the way. Bill Bradbury in the Visual and Performing Arts program prepared the final map for this book, making use of one of his many talents. To Elizabeth Colwill I owe the most special gratitude. She has followed this project from the beginning. After receiving a hard-earned grant, she even packed up her research notes to join me for part of the time in Ghent, where, I hope, our passion for good chocolate and fresh waffles made up for whatever logistical inconveniences came her way. Her committed scholarship on race and gender in Revolutionary France and the Caribbean, and her zeal for making history matter, have been constant sources of inspiration to me. Beyond our own corner of the historical profession, she has created a rich life of partnership, love, and family, full of the best gestures and occasions.

P. A.

xiii

Abbreviations

ADN

Archives Departementales du Nord (Departmental Archives of the North), Lille ARA Algemeen Rijksarchief (General Archive of the Realm), Brussels BM Bijlokemuseum BMGOG Bulletijn van de Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent BUG Bibliotheek Universiteit Gent DB Victor Fris, ed., Dagboek van Gent van I477 tot I470. 2 vols. Maatschappij der Vlaamsche Bibliophilen, 4th ser., no. 12. Ghent, 1901-4. HMGOG Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent KV Philippe Blommaert and C. P. Serrure, eds. Kronyk van Vlaenderen van 380 tot I467. 2 vols. Maatschappij der Vlaamsche Bibliophilen, 1st ser., no. 3· Ghent, 1939-40. MB P. C. van der Meersch, ed. Memorieboek der stadt Ghendt van 't jaar IJOI tot I793· 2 vols. Maatschappij der Vlaamsche Bibliophilen, 2d ser., no. 15. Ghent, 1859-61. RAG Rijksarchief te Gent (State Archive of Ghent)

XV

xvi

Abbreviations SAG

VKAL

Stadsarchief te Gent (Municipal Archive of Ghent) Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Klasse der Letteren

Realms of Ritual

INTRODUCTION

Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands

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The scene is well known in the history of the fifteenth-century Burgundian Netherlands: in 1456, at the height of Burgundian power in northwestern Europe, the French dauphin enters Brussels in splendid political retreat, fleeing dynastic turmoil in Paris. Upon reaching this capital city of Brabant, the dauphin triggers an embarrassing tussle over etiquette. The future Louis XI is greeted by the duchess Isabella of Portugal and her ladies-in-waiting at the gate of the Burgundian court, where polite disagreements ensue over who should follow behind the other in entering the residence. Matters grow more complicated when the duke of Burgundy himself arrives. Philip the Good, hastily returning from a military campaign in Friesland, reaches Brussels and flings himself on his knees before his royal relative, provoking the exasperated dauphin to beg his older host to rise. The mood is one of high melodrama: the dauphin expresses disbelief at the obsequiousness displayedi the duke and duchess fret over the dauphin's breach of their fabled protocol.1 This episode in mid-fifteenth-century Brussels is just one of many stories about ritual related by the chroniclers of the famed late-medie{al court of Burgundy. The dukes and duchesses of the Burgundian court ruled a mighty swath of territory in the dense and ever-shifting political world of northwestern Europe through a deft combination of military muscle, shrewd dynastic maneuvers, and-in the eyes of admirers and detractors alike-sheer aristocratic indulgence. A political giant in an age of great territorial sovereigns and enorI

2

Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands mous cities, the Burgundian court reveled in Gargantuan celebrations of pomp and pleasure of such proportions that even contemporaries gauged them excessive. But as revealed by the minor tiff over etiquette between the dauphin and his hosts, the Burgundians also insisted that even routine social interaction follow ritual prescriptions. Although the portrait of Burgundian court as a ceremonial beacon took shape in the fifteenth century in the writings of court chroniclers, its single most important champion was the twentieth-century historian Johan Huizinga, whose Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) brilliantly indexed the court of Burgundy as the cultural arbiter of late-medieval northern Europe. 2 Huizinga found a ritual formalism at the center of the Burgundian experience, in part owing to his ethnographic eye, and no doubt also because he hewed so closely to the narrative sources. He dug deeply into the public ceremonies, prescriptive literature, and artistic canon of the Burgundian Netherlands to present a society riven by cultural and political disarray, cluttered by symbolic conventions such as chivalry, loosened from their original meanings yet powerful enough as "forms" to structure fundamental psychological and cultural patterns. The Burgundian Netherlands, to Huizinga's sensitive mind, was a society equal in importance to the Renaissance city-states of Italy; yet unlike the Italian cultural terrain, the Low Countries glittered with a gilded nothingness, trapped in a web of atrophied ideas and symbols of a bygone medieval era. 3 Like many students of the late-medieval and early-modern period, I read Huizinga's work with mixed enthusiasm. Here was a historian whose work, while clearly showing its age in both style and argumentation, seemed also in its cross-disciplinary attention to cultural forms and their political resonance to anticipate a later generation of ethnographically informed historians. 4 Although Huizinga's work drew fire on the grounds that he saw cultural decay in a land where others, like his contemporary Henri Pirenne, found an urban world at the heart of the commercial ascendancy of northwestern Europe, few challenged his vision of a society choking in free-floating symbols.5 Questions arose about the deadening meaning he ascribed to late-medieval chivalry, to choose one example; but Huizinga's overall vision of a society trafficking in ritual to satisfy a broad array of unmet social needs carried terrific weight. Huizinga's panoramic vision of the Burgundian Netherlands has proven tenacious. Historians have highlighted the economic and cui-

Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands tural vitality of the densely urban late-medieval Low Countries; none has advanced the Burgundian period as a watershed in courtly culture. Huizinga's portrait still looks familiar to contemporary scholars: a society thick with meaning, yet thin in ideas. Renowned for its political, cultural, and military power, the court of Burgundy is hardly known for path-breaking advances in court culture, save its leaders' important patronage of art, music, and literature. 6 The court of Burgundy's cultural frame, however rich and imposing, was mainly derivative, gleaned from the chivalric, aristocratic world of northern European kingdoms. It is exactly the mixed legacy of Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages that serves as my point of departure in exploring the public world of the Burgundian Netherlands, specifically its largest city, Ghent. After the plentiful harvest of cultural theory drawn from fields as diverse as symbolic anthropology and social history, few can now accept Huizinga's portrait of a society where symbols are but empty ciphers, even if the priority he granted to symbolic action strikes us as a remarkable achievement. Nor can we endorse his evolutionary argument that the historical actors felt meaning more deeply'because their social development was "half a thousand years younger" and hence "child-like." 7 Representations are, of course, "social facts"; symbols, as carriers of meaning, are critical deposits of a broad field of social relations, an essential part of a system of power relations whose meanings, though historically specific, do not adhere to a developmental trajectory. 8 I became convinced that by making court ritual a touchstone of power in the Burgundian Netherlands, Huizinga grasped one of the central pillars of the Burgundian state. Yet his reading of symbolic action as emptied of primary meaning, and keyed to an evolutionary process, ultimately hindered his attempt to unlock the cultural significance of Burgundian ceremony. In an important sense, Huizinga undermined the very point he was trying to make, much as did other early students of the Burgundian period such as Otto Cartellieri, whose The Court of Burgundy (1929) sits as a companion piece to The Waning of the Middle Ages. 9 Huizinga and Cartellieri both uncover a household and state governed by one set of important public enactments after another. Tournaments, banquets, entry ceremonies, weddings, funerals-year

after year Burgundian officials orchestrated a crowded agenda of

large-scale spectacles. Yet neither author assigns ultimate significance to these highly choreographed rituals, which appear either as

3

4

Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands the dead skein of an era long gone or as the sybaritic appetites of a pampered aristocracy. Although Huizinga and Cartellieri endorse the primary importance of ceremony, they fall short of situating these important spectacles horizontally within their broader social and cultural field. Research in anthropology and history from the r98os pushed me to revisit the ceremony of the Burgundian Netherlands, this time from the perspective of its rich public world of powerful cities, where Burgundian ritual takes on a whole new set of meanings. Huizinga in particular, though conversant with the functionalist anthropology of his day, did not fully draw on the tradition in anthropology of studying sacred kingship and royal ritual in teasing out the importance of Burgundian symbols. 10 Not surprisingly, historians of the Burgundian Netherlands have become more willing to engage cross-disciplinary studies of court life and royal ritual to seek new answers to Burgundian spectacle. Indeed, Walter Prevenier and Wim Blockmans argue that the Burgundian lords ruled this expanse of territory as a fifteenth-century "theater state," with an interplay on all fronts between civic and state culture-a political configuration that encouraged performance and ceremony. 11 If Burgundian pomp as political dramaturgy has finally caught the historian's eye, much of the appeal of such a turn-including the term theater state itself-comes from Clifford Geertz's Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980), which invites scholars to reevaluate the symbolic idioms of state power. 12 With Balinese conceptions of political order fronting status and ceremony as the very essence of statecraft, the so-called political dramaturgy of their regional courts, or negaras, served as choreographed paradigms for social order and hierarchy. Accustomed to theorizing about the rawer "command-and-obedience" nature of power, political scientists, historians, and even some schools of anthropology have relegated symbols and rituals to icing on the cake-the gilded stuff of material power. 13 Geertz does not so much deny these mechanisms of governance as add to them a poetics in which "symbology" is not a manipulative means to an end but the end itsel£. 14 So important was performance to fashioning the state as the locus of legitimacy that, in Geertz's clever reformulation of a shopworn maxim, "power served pomp, not pomp power." 15 Geertz, by dissolving the traditional political boundaries between the "real" and the symbolic, repositions the relationship of symbol to power to open new ways of understanding why ceremony stood at

Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands the center of the Burgundian experience. While this work probes political ritual less as semiotic master text than as pluralistic social action, the theater state model is fundamental because it makes dramaturgy an essential category of political analysis. 16 At the same time, its theoretical scheme, if used comparatively; would miss the indebtedness of Low Country idioms of lordship and subjecthood to an urban terrain. Low Country civic life, I argue, knitted the fabric and patterned the texture of Burgundian ritual. The urban public constituted the central political and cultural pillar of the Burgundian Netherlands. The giant cities of Brabant, Flanders, and other regions, with dense civic networks marked by fierce social and political cleavages, were the sinews of the Burgundian state and its brilliant court. In fact, cities and the court were culturally contiguous insofar as Burgundian residences were urban based. Whereas Huizinga and Cartellieri confronted Burgundian ritual from the court household out, I became convinced that the best way to get behind the thicket of Burgundian symbols and behaviors was to read them from the ground up, or more precisely; from their urban location. 17 As I began to dissect the social world of Burgundian pomp, my interest shifted from reconsidering Burgundian court ritual as rites of power to investigating the civic realm. Behind the smooth, almost static surface of Burgundian ceremony was a turbulent urban landscape teeming with townspeople's opposition to Burgundian state centralization. At the heart of the Burgundian public world, then, were town-state antagonisms, a bundle of shifting relationships that fundamentally shaped Burgundian life. A central dynamic behind Burgundian ritual was the fractious encounter between an ambitious ducal household and a world of townspeople. Behind ducal power in the fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Burgundian Netherlands was an urban core; towering over the powerful cities of the Low Countries was Burgundian sovereignty. To test the degree to which town-state relations patterned Burgundian public life I devoted my attention to Ghent, the Burgundian Netherland's largest city and the state's greatest urban adversary. Because the famous city of the van Arteveldes was not a favorite of the Burgundian court, its choice might seem puzzling; but it is exactly because the Burgundian leaders feared Ghent's obstreperous patricians and guildsmen that its public history piqued my interest. What might seem a cool distance between the court as the engine of the Burgundian state and Ghent as the center of the Low Countries'

5

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Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands richest province, Flanders, actually reveals subtle channels of exchange. Essential to both the public life of Ghent and the Burgun· dian court was their many-sided and hostile relationship. Under· standing the precise ways in which this climate of adversity shaped the nature of the public ceremonies of both court and city-and embedded them in each other-provided me with a compass with which to map the exchanges between Ghent's townspeople and Burgundian officials. The focus of this book is the critical century between 1440 and 1540, when Ghent's townsfolk fought bitterly-yet in the end un· successfully-against the encroachment of the Burgundian state. I have organized the book around case studies of particular urban disturbances. Although I am aware that such a structure risks fastening onto the exceptional, I am also convinced that these historical episodes illuminate Ghent's public codes as intensified enactments of the city's basic social and symbolic profile. This book first uncovers the symbolic repertoire of Burgundian state ritual, then explores how Ghent's urban makeup shaped its public exchanges with the court of Burgundy. Chapter r lays out the centrality of ritual to fashioning the Burgundian court as the political core of a fledgling state in the process of creation and argues that an urban audience was critical to the architecture of state ritual. Chapter 2 surveys the public world of Ghent and specifically addresses how the city's festive calendar encoded its tangle of social and political divisions. Most striking is that neither city nor court ritual flourished within clearly demarcated spaces. In fact the Burgundians played out their public ritual in several cities. Likewise, Ghent maintained a close association of ritual with other urban regimes, helping to fuel an economy of symbolic exchange between the cities of the Burgundian Netherlands. A complicated ritual geometry linked cities and Burgundian au· thorities together in a complex set of interactions. Chapter 3 explores Ghent's prominent shooting confraternities of archers and crossbowmen to understand how one of Ghent's most important social organizations provided a flexible site for public encounters between Burgundians and Gentenars. The shooting confraternities straddled the world between city and state as recipients of Burgundian patronage and as the elite representatives of the city militia. Off the battlefield, archers and crossbowmen staged sizable ritual competitions among fellow confraternities from other cities. Shooting festivals provided city elites and Burgundian princes with oppor-

Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands tunities to appraise one another's political universe and test the symbolic boundaries between ruler and ruled. Brought together in celebrations, archers, crossbowmen, and Burgundians fostered a ceremonial world of burgher princes and princely burghers. If Chapter 3 studies how elite Gentenars and their Burgundian dukes peacefully trafficked and traded in symbols of power and prestige, Chapter 4 continues that same investigation during a heightened moment of urban rebellion and war. As political tensions built in 145 r between Ghent's regime and Duke Philip the Good, Ghent's townsfolk-and its guildsmen above all-asserted their defiance through dramatic public rallies grounded in claims to customary rights. Burgundian victory in 145 3, however, demanded an equally theatrical affirmation of lordship, with a series of punishments aimed at systematically undoing the public rites of Ghent's defiance. Ghent lost much of its civic autonomy after the defeat of its patricians and guild leaders in 145 3, and the next two chapters chart the impact of the Burgundian victory on the city's public life. In chapter 5, a case study of two celebrated Burgundian entries into Ghent un· covers the fragile coalition of urban groups on which the success of Burgundian ceremony rested. A comparison of the peaceful entry of Philip the Good in 145 8 with the troublesome entry of Charles the Bold in 1467 suggests that even the most cherished of Burgundian rituals rested on the urban scaffolding at its center and that this unstable center could itself splinter the ritual consensus that choreographers of entries aimed to achieve. Despite the topsy-turvy political universe inhabited by Burgundian authorities and Gentenars alike, the strengthening of Burgundian power in the Low Countries in the second half of the fifteenth century did affect the nature of Ghent's ritual priorities. Just as the city's political autonomy began to slip, a new set of lay confraternities featuring poets and dramatists rose to prominence, nudging aside the archers and crossbowmen (Chapter 6). These so-called rhetorician confraternities avoided the symbolic softening of boundaries between prince and townsmen characteristic of shooting festivals and, as a consequence, strengthened the ceremonial distinction between Burgundian dignitaries and urban elites. While continuing the tradition of intercity competitions, the new confraternities shifted attention away from any shared military ethos between elite townsmen and prince. The embodiment of civic pride and accompiishment, Ghent's rhetoricians also serviced Burgundian statecraft, praising court officials in street theater during princely visits. At the

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Ritual and Representation in the Burgundian Netherlands end of the fifteenth century, this new type of ritual associationliterate, elite, and peaceful-assured the Habsburg Burgundians who came to power of new urban cultural clients. Throughout the fifteenth century, Ghent's importance to the Burgundian state dominated the world of late-medieval Flanders. A political culture that cultivated public communication between state officials and select groupings of townsfolk permitted Burgundian officials and the leading Ghent politicians to maintain civic rights alongside princely power. The political flexibility that allowed the Valois Burgundians to locate much of their ceremony in urban space without fundamentally erasing civic traditions was sharply revised by their Habsburg successors, who sought a more secure integration of urban structures into their state. Chapter 7 examines the sea change in town-state relations that would ultimately end the premodern public world of the great cities of the Burgundian Netherlands. A rhetorician ceremony and a political revolt in Ghent in 1539 serve as examples of a shift in the public codes that formerly governed the relationship between Ghent and the Burgundian state. Both events were at once exercises in old rituals and harbingers of things to come. As Ghent's power declined precipitously, the city's public life grew increasingly supervised. As the Burgundian and other European courts consolidated their international power, they gradually left behind the world of the city for more secure terrain. Neither Ghent nor the Burgundian court survived the sixteenthcentury religious wars with the same measure of prominence and wealth they had previously enjoyed. But the historical importance of both political bodies far outstrips their periods of greatness in the late middle ages. The monarchies of seventeenth-century western Europe drew on the traditions of Burgundian court ritual; the public life of Ghent resonated in powerful cities such as Antwerp and Amsterdam, which stood at the center of early-modern Europe's international empire. 18 Because city and court relations in the late-medieval Low Countries provided a model for the kind of municipal and state culture to emerge later in northwestern Europe, the urban underpinning of the Burgundian theater state merits scrutiny. Constructed in the crucible of political turmoil, Burgundian ceremony bore many of the inflections of town-state antagonisms, but political ritual compelled an important degree of interaction. Neither hollow symbols nor propaganda, these important rites orchestrated legitimacy and imparted definition to their public world.

I

Court, State, and Ceremony

~Toward

the end of his life Georges Chastellain (141575 ), the official historian of the Burgundian court, paused to record in his chronicle the most significant achievements of the last duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, during part of his ten-year rule over Burgundian territories in northwestern Europe (1467-77). Instead of a treatise full of classical bombast and chivalric pretense, Chastellain departed from his usual idiom to write a series of memorable images, all of which joined politics to public ceremony. To stress the duke's renowned military prowess, Chastellain spoke of Charles arrayed magnificently on his throne, sword unsheathed, shredding the privileges that his prostrated subjects of Ghent had surrendered to him in January 1469 in atonement for a political revolt nearly a year and a half earlier. This "humiliation of Ghent" was a "great magnificence," performed with ritual solemnity. But Chastellain also praised Charles for other accomplishments, including the splendor of a ducal hat the prince wore at the Parlement of Mechelen; the jewel-bedecked robe he sported at a festival of his chivalric order, the Knights of the Golden Fleece; and the wonder of his golden throne. 1 Chastellain did not immortalize the duke of Burgundy's greatness with a theory of statecraft. Rather, this court apologist legitimated Charles's authority with those striking images of him, significantly located at key junctures: punishing city offenders, decked out in jewels and robes, elevated on his throne. These snapshot images emphasize the vigorous intersection in Burgundian political life of rit9

ro

Court, State, and Ceremony ual, display, and urban clients, all three elements playing their roles in the construction of a Burgundian ceremony whose hallmark was a close association with its urban world. Within the aristocratic idiom of public display, showing off the ducal family became a core ingredient of Burgundian celebrations both private and public. A calculated policy of court spectacle that centered all action around the duke or duchess as a charismatic center shaped a public profile of appropriate lordship. But in important instances, the success of this strategy depended on an urban audience. In this region of northern Europe, late-medieval court culture intermingled to an astonishing degree with the civic world of the powerful cities of the southern Low Countries. This syncretism inspired a body of court literature whose rhetoric praised urban strength as central to the welfare of the state but mocked city life as inferior. These contradictory impulses-the need for an urban milieu and a disdain for its character and traditions-found strong resonance in the ritual strategies of Burgundian leaders as they enacted their fledgling power.

The Burgundian State and Flanders: Historical Background Stretched across northwestern. Europe, a Burgundian state emerged out of the chaos of late-fourteenth-century northern European dynastic politics and grew rapidly in power, size, and reputation. The first critical foothold was gained by the French Valois in the southern Netherlands during the Hundred Years' War when the royal family successfully married Philip, duke of Burgundy, to Margaret de Male in 1369, thus assuring Philip's inheritance of the counties of Flanders, Rethel, Nevers, and the barony of Danzy upon the death of Margaret's father, Louis de Male, in January 1384. The boundaries of Burgundian rule then multiplied dramatically in the early fifteenth century. By the time Philip the Good died in 1467, Burgundian territories stretched from Holland, in the north, to the county of Burgundy in central France and Franche-Comte across the Saone in the Holy Roman Empire. Here was a patchwork of lands of varying size, population, and culture, from the densely urban and commercial southern Low Count~'ies to the more pastoral lands of northeastern France. Nor was the foundling state physically united; in fact, the French county of Champagne and the German duchy of Lorraine horizontally bisected Burgundy's northern and southern territories. The dukes ruled by no single political title but by a welter of

Court, State, and Ceremony different ones. They governed not by the grace of God but by dynastic conquest and alliance, though the dukes were, in principle at least, vassals of both the French king and the German emperor. 2 Yet so successful ·was Burgundian rule, and so strong were its financial, administrative, and legal institutions, that both Philip the Good and Charles the Bold embarked on a concerted attempt to revive the old Frankish kingdom of Lotharingia to create a new Burgundian empire out of what was in essence a set of linked principalities. Charles the Bold's sudden death at the hands of the Swiss in I477 put a brake on such dreams and fragmented Burgundian possessions, but his defeat did not end the Burgundian period. The rich northern territories passed into the hands of Habsburg successors, who absorbed the Burgundian inheritance into their international empire. 3 Burgundian territories varied considerably, but it was the southern Low Countries, and the county of Flanders in specific, which became central to Burgundian rule. Fueled by the revenues generated by northern Europe's most densely urbanized landscape, the southern Low Countries enjoyed a rich economic life of commerce, trade, and production. Flanders, in particular, was wealthy, thanks to the economic vitality of cities like Bruges and Ghent. In I445, for instance, Flanders provided the Burgundian central administration with a net income of 32 percent of revenues collected in the northern territories. Although the economic fortunes of Flanders shifted unevenly during much of the fifteenth century, a second economic boom in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries generated considerable wealth for the Habsburg successors. 4 Flanders was central to Burgundian interests from the onset of Valois rule. Philip the Bold chose to marry Margaret de Male in Ghent in I369, and the success of his early reign depended on ending urban tensions and a bitter war between Ghent and Bruges which soon sparked anti-comital hostilities. And though Philip spent little time there-and most of that taken up by military campaigns to end political unrest and violence-the Burgundian dynasty clearly regarded Flanders as crucial to its power. By the end of I4IO, Duke John the Fearless had installed his own son Philip at Ghent as his personal representative, answering a demand by political leaders of Flanders that the Burgundians spend more time in the county and devote attention to Flemish political and economic interests. 5 Burgundy's richest province, Flanders was easily its most problematic as well. The Flemish confronted their new Burgundian counts with a tradition of hostility to strong central rule and a political

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Court, State, and Ceremony organ-the Three Cities-that gave an effective voice to this antagonism. The social and political landscape of late-medieval Flanders, with its distaste for princely power and a diminished feudal nobility, had allowed the guild and patrician leaders of the powerful commercial and textile cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres to assume much of the political initiative. By I 300 these three cities began to meet in parlementen to confer on political and economic matters and to advise the count of Flanders. Meanwhile, the patrician families that had ruled these cities lost their political monopoly in the wake of the Battle of the Golden Spurs near Kortrijk in I 302, when Flemish guildsmen vanquished French forces. For the rest of the century the political map reflected conflicts between the ambitious counts and influential Flemish merchants and guildsmen. This wrestling for power was echoed within the cities themselves, with social tensions pitting guilds, unincorporated workers, and prominent families against one another. 6 By I338, Flanders's three largest cities had all but officially divided the county into "quarters" over which they exercised influence. Ghent rapidly gained preeminence, especially after a regime of five captains rose to power on January 3, I338. Led by the broker Jacob van Artevelde, the Ghent regime aspired to become an independent city-state. Disgruntled weavers murdered Artevelde in July 1345, and the complete hegemony of the Three Cities eroded swiftly thereafter, with the count of Flanders regaining ascendancy in 1349. 7 Still, Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent remained prominent, and despite political turmoil within the cities brought about by a contraction of textile manufacturing, by bitter feuding among the urban regimes, and by the war that erupted among Ghent, Bruges, and Count Louis de Male, their authority was decisive in the first years of Burgundian rule. In their political meetings, the Three Cities even included the rural Franc of Bruges (het Brugse Vrije) in 1386 (made official only in I437), and delegates from the four political units met on the average of thirty times a year during the reign of Philip the Bold. Hence Burgundian ambitions came up against an established tradition of civic political and economic strength in Flanders. 8

Ritual Life at Court Power struggles between the Flemish cities and the Burgundian leaders were played out on public turf, often heatedly, sometimes

Court, State, and Ceremony violently. Despite the intensity of these clashes, it is easy to forget that the rich public world elaborated by the core of the Burgundian state, its court, was in essence an urban matrix. As far apart as public spectacle .and the gritty realities of town .and state political antagonisms might seem, both took root and throve in an urban location. Traditional scholarly distinctions between Low Country political life and Burgundian court culture thus collapse. 9 Regardless of social perspective, the importance of court life is a given in this critical period in European history. Social theorists as diverse as Norbert Elias and Jiirgen Habermas have interpreted the court as an institution that worked as both arena and buffer zone in the late-medieval and early-modern period: less office-centered than person-centered as in Max Weber's distinction, the court obscured clear lines between "private" and "public"; for the two were conHated in a way that made private life the .arena where court officials vaunted their power through public display. 10 Following such leads, historians now understand European courts less as mere households than as political, cultural, and social networks animated by the distribution of patronage and moored to a strong institutional base whose principal beneficiaries profited from the public right to display their authority. 11 Situated in a dense urban world, the Burgundian court was both itinerant and public, thanks to the mobility of its princes, courtiers, and staff. All urban terrain, because it carried its own political and cultural traditions, was to some degree antagonistic to ducal authority. Yet it was precisely because of the very significance of urban difference that the leaders of the Burgundian court circulated within its public eye, their very presence a statement of the ubiquity and far-reaching grasp of ducal power. Without the traditional assurances of monarchical legitimacy; and with lordship over a conglomerate of territories, the Burgundians had to stake out and earn their sovereignty repeatedly; a process predicated on continual rites of public display. Although by the mid-fifteenth century a pattern of fixed residences prevailed, with Brussels, Bruges, and Lille among the favorites, the court and its household never retreated from either inhabiting or visiting other cities as part of their broad political agenda of crafting central authority. 12 Bruges became in many ways a court city; with a magnificent palace (the Prinsenhof), but the politically hostile terrain of Flanders was never a particular favorite for prolonged stays. Still, recent research has demonstrated that even such openly hostile cities as

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Court, State, and Ceremony Ghent witnessed a small yet steady presence of Burgundian sympathizers and officials throughout the fifteenth century. No impenetrable physical or sociologic chasm separated court and city. 13 The Ghent patrician and career Burgundian official Lauwereins de Maech, for example, chose to stay in his city of birth and even returned in 145 5 after a four-year exile prompted by the first stirrings of the Ghent War (r 4 52-53) to build an imposing residence across from the central church of Sint-Jan. 14 The receiver-general of Flanders and Burgundian official Gautier Poulain, a stranger to Flanders, bought a fine stone residence in Ghent's central district on the Onderstraat in 1435, this despite increasing hostility in this unruly city toward Burgundian officialdom. 15 The court was a powerful center that accommodated nobles and nonnobles alike, drawing in such regional elites as de Maech and Poulain as the Burgundian rulers expanded their territory. The mere size of the Burgundian household-there were 234 officeholders on the payroll in 1426, a number that shot up to 1,030 by 1474-and its members' scrupulous attention to public ceremony assured it prominence. 16 As Werner Paravicini has made clear, the rapid proliferation of officeholders was in large part due to the introduction of a serviceby-term system of patronage in which court officials rotated staff and courtiers quarterly or semiannually. 17 This rotational system applied to all but the highest court offices, and helped both to discourage the development of permanent sinecures and to provide positions to more clients. Those well-to-do and noble families brought into the court circle did not, however, evenly reflect the geographic range of Burgundian expansion. Prosopographical work for the period of great territorial gains, 1426-58, reveals that despite the growing importance of Dutchspeaking areas, the court remained predominantly Francophone. Although Dutch-speaking nobles from Brabant, including patricians from such important cities as Brussels, Louvain, and Antwerp, did gain a significant proportion (15-22 percent) of the major offices at Philip's court, the numbers of nobles from other regions, and Flanders in particular, scarcely matched the scores of French-speaking Burgundian and Picardian nobles who found positions at court. Most telling of all, between 1428 and 1458, the proportion of Flemish courtiers fluctuated between a weak 3 percent and 6 percent of major court officeholders. 18 The state's capstone territory, Flanders, because of its political problems, was obviously shunned as a recruit-

Court, State, and Ceremony ment source, and men like de Maech were the exception rather than the rule. Senior court positions, moreover, were traditionally limited in number. Throughout the fifteenth century, the first chamberlain of the duke was the highest office of service at the Burgundian court. According to Olivier de LaMarche, to whom we owe a treatise written on the court under Charles the Bold in 1473, the duties of this key appointment included sleeping near the person of the duke, holding the keys to his chamber, and carrying his banner into battle. A grand master of the ducal residence was charged with the reception of foreigners and with serving the duke at the four major religious feasts of the year; the first master of the hotel, a different office altogether, arranged the specifics of court ceremony. The duke also had a magnificent personal staff, which included four housekeepers, six doctors, and sixteen courtiers, who cared for his daily needs. Other categories of court titles included pantry workers (pannetiers), vintners (eschansons), carvers (ecuyers trachants), and equerries (ecuyers d'ecurie), each staffed with many aids and assistants who peformed the duties of these offices. 19 Honor at the court was affirmed not only by official appointments but by proximity to the duke. Hence the court served as a revolving door for clients and friends whose success was measured in spatial and relational terms. "The more intimate the service performed for the prince," wrote de La Marche, "the greater the honor."w Moreover, etiquette provided Burgundian courtiers with a set of rituals to measure status. Alienor de Poitiers, a lady-in-waiting to Isabella of Portugal and author of the only known treatise on Burgundian court ritual, addressed the crucial importance of "honneur" generated by degrees of precedence and signs of submission. Her careful juxtaposition of birth to funeral rites in one section of her treatise captures nicely the way in which the rules of etiquette encompassed the life cycle of the court itsel£.2 1 All social interaction at court functioned in accordance with strict rules of precedence, rank, and hierarchy. It was during Charles the Bold's reign, in particular, that court officials most fully implemented rituals of honor, hierarchy, and submission, all centered around the public body of the duke himself. Two routine practices in particular, the weekly public audience and the daily meal, capture what the duke of Milan's ambassador to Charles's predecessor characterized as the "religion, sublimity, and magnificence" of Burgundian ceremony. 22 The former brought to-

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Court, State, and Ceremony gether those seeking to adjudicate personal grievances before the prince; the latter heightened the prestige of the duke as the hub around which consecrated behavior revolved in the eyes of his courtiers. Charles the Bold introduced regular public audiences in 1468, principally for the "poor and humble" who could not otherwise seek justice; at first, they convened three times a week in a special audience chamber. Accompanied by his household companions, the duke sat elevated upon a gold-embroidered throne, his feet on a special stool covered with tapestry. The public audiences were promoted as important occasions that "no noble dare to miss. 1123 Also routinely present were foreign dignitaries, ambassadors, knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and other onlookers. Two magistrates and an auditor knelt before the duke, while a secretary, also on his knees, recorded the proceedings. De La Marche carefully detailed the spatial position of all involved. Chastellain had written earlier that each "sat according to his order without daring not to be there. " 24 But it was the duke's physical rather than his judicial appetite that set in motion one of the court's most cultic affairs: the ceremonial meal. Olivier de La Marche's lengthy description of the process of serving the prince's meal stresses the order of presentation, the covering and uncovering of the dishes (along with poison testing), and the ceremonial kissing of dishes and implements as they are passed on from servant to servant. These detailed .instructions strike the reader as less a compendium of manners than a liturgical handbook, replete with descriptions of genuflecting courtiers and eucharistic metaphors that vaunt the essential religious nature of serving the prince his meaJ.2 5 De LaMarche's account of the meal is tedious exactly because it brims with detail, purposefully overfreighted ~o avoid gaps that would deflate the ceremony. At mealtime, nothing was left to spontaneity. After having been officially informed that the duke was prepared to eat, an attendant (sommelier) of the pantry kissed a napkin and then gave it to the keeper of the pantry, who placed it carefully over his left shoulder. The keeper of the pantry then took a covered saltshaker and walked silently into the dining area followed by his attendant with silver plates and cutlery. The meal was served after an elaborate and ritual washing of the duke's hands, which involved both the master of the house and the first chamberlain. This procedure was followed by the uncovering of the food and a check for poison. The squire of the kitchen silently offered the prince his food, kneeling after the meat was served. The master of the hotel sat si-

Court, State, and Ceremony lently across from the duke until the meal was finished, carefully watching him. After the meal, the keeper of the pantry received a white napkin from his assistant, and after both kissed it, the keeper placed it in front of Charles, who cleaned his hands. Carvers and cupbearers served bread and wine separately during the meal. Those who offered the prince bread were careful to kiss the handles of the knives before carving the loaves; the cupbearer knelt before serving the duke his wine. 26 Submission and reverence before the duke received their highest expression at this ritual. The meal sacralized what was, after all, a routine affair. The raising of dishes, their covering and uncovering, and the crucially timed kissing and kneeling made the prince something of a priest, the table akin to an altar. De La Marche's discussion of the meal emphasizes its serious, indeed silent, nature; what matters is its liturgical enactment. In de La Marche's estimation, because the duke ate with courtiers present, under constant scrutiny, he was a mirror of virtue for allY This medieval metaphor might strike us as shopworn, but it captures well how the duke served as the brilliant center of a system of etiquette. The prince's person, masculine and authoritative, anchored the ritual life of the Burgundian court.

City and State: The Dynamics of Display If Burgundian ritual patterned internal hierarchies at court, ducal officials employed its very syntax to mediate their close dealings with often hostile urban subjects. That court life sometimes appeared a world apart belies how Burgundian ceremony broached issues of power, authority, and social ordering with the cities in which court officials resided. Carefully prepared spectacles deployed a recognizable if contested set of cultural props whose meanings measured differences and distances between townfolk and Burgundian dignitaries. 28 Key court representations, though in an immediate sense directed to a group of privileged nobles, were at the same time publicly directed, with urban locations doubling as stages. But no matter where the enactment, the display of the princely person, exemplified in Chastellain's images of Duke Charles the Bold, was one of the Burgundians most cherished representational devices. Because corporal metaphors abounded in medieval political theory, the physical person of the prince or princess fundamentally

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Court, State, and Ceremony encoded political authority, the body invested with the right to represent sovereign authority. Aware of this relationship, court leaders promoted the centrality of the princely personage in two ways: first by concentrating attention on the magnificence of the duke's and duchess's posture and, second, on the personal adornments he or she wore. The physical and material qualities of the ducal family, their bodies, gestures, clothing, and public behavior, thus became the line of demarcation between duke and ducal prerogatives and citizens and their duties. 29 Ritual life at the court itself focused on the duke and the duchess; likewise, all public spectacles placed the ducal family in the center. Court officials arranged banquets with the duke and his family sitting or standing in the middle, as at the famous Feast of the Pheasant in 1454 in Lille, where an audience of nobles assembled in bleachers looked down at the ducal family. Burgundian tournaments drew upon many competitors but also could include a member of the ducal family in the joust. Public entries into cities, where the whole procession focused on the passage of the Burgundian dignitary through the walls and down the streets of the welcoming city, linked political significance to the visible yet mobile princely visitor. 30 Chroniclers of court events dwelt obsessively on aristocratic posture and gesture and less so on speech. If the ducal family was often in public, its members spoke sparingly at ceremonial events, and then often in formal invocations, such as the oath to undertake a crusade, sworn at the Feast of the Pheasant, or the promise to confirm civic privileges and uphold just lordship, expected in a ducal entry. The ceremonial events of the court were couched in the blaze of flags, pennants, and waving spectators, in the blare of street trumpets and court music. But Burgundians themselves remained eerily quiet amid the ceremonial tumult. The Burgundians' reticence during public spectacle implied that they expressed authority at such events more readily through their physical stance than through speech. Within the rich artistic world of the late-medieval Low Countries, painted depictions of court life helped to underscore this attention to posture. Burgundian miniatures, created for a select elite of the court, regularly portrayed the dignity and authority of the masculine self. The space around the male body suggests independence: nothing crowds the duke as the central figure, and other characters serve to enhance rather than delimit his stature. Kneeling to duke and duchess was a favorite motif in Burgundian

Court, State, and Ceremony miniatures, reflecting an artistic topos rooted in the reality of court etiquette. Illuminated manuscripts, reflecting a presentation motif favored for centuries in French royal images, provide many examples of court artists genuflecting before the ducal couple when presenting their works to them. 31 The most celebrated, that of Jean Wauquelin offering his Chronicles of Hainault to Philip the Good in 1448, depicts the duke erect, encircled by his retinue at a safe distance. Singular and supreme, Philip looks down on the artist in submission before him (Figure r ). Yet such depictions were not confined to the charmed circle of court patrons and clients. One manuscript in particular, the socalled Privileges of Ghent and Flanders, holds special significance because it was executed in Ghent by local artists and illustrates the ritual interaction between urban subjects and regional authorities. It contains thirteen historical illustrations of townspeople kneeling to receive important city charters from the medieval and Burgundian counts of Flanders. In all likelihood, authorities in Ghent, in an effort to coax Philip the Good to restore urban rights he had earlier revoked, commissioned the manuscript as a gift for the duke in 1458 when he visited the city. 32 By placing the texts of urban privileges next to selective illustrations of their historical reception by city authorities at the feet of regional authorities, the Privileges of Ghent and Flanders promotes the idea that a key historical relationship between the rulers and their cities is the physical manifestation of submission and fidelty of townspeople to count and countess. In the first illustration Count Thomas of Savoy and Joanna of Constantinople hand a charter of privileges to the burghers of the land of Waas in 1241. The couple is richly outfitted and surrounded by admiring aides both male and female, arms outstretched to greet the men of Waas. The illustration shows us the Waas men only from the back, hands clasped in a gesture of reverence as they kneel, dwarfed by the ruling couple, who sit, hand in hand, beside their courtiers (Figure 2 ). Subsequent illustrations show the resolution of urban strife between Kortrijk and Ghent in I 372 by Louis de Male, and Flemish citizens kneeling before the first Burgundian rulers of Flanders, Philip the Bold and Margaret de Male, to receive the 1385 Peace of Tournai. Such images carry weight exactly because they are historically specific. They retell the early history of the Burgundian

period in Flanders by focusing on an important relationship between acts of fealty to the count and countess, the harmony among cities, and the blossoming of peace.

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Figure r. Tean Wauquelin presents the Chroniques de Hainault to Philip the Good, 1448. Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert r, MS 9242. Copyright IRPA-KIK-Brussels.

Figure

2.

Thomas of Savoy and Joanna of Constantinople present a Charter of Privileges to

the Men of Waas, 1241. Boek van de Priviligien van Gent en van Vlaanderen, MS 2583, fol. I

3r. Courtesy of 6 sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Court, State, and Ceremony The motifs in visual illustrations of Low Country rulers in the presence of dependents, clients, and subjects were, more often than not, masculine-hence the overwhelming preference for images of the count instead of the countess-and undeniably sexual in the clever association often struck between political credibility and corporal stature. One powerful illustration from a manuscript of Froissart's Chronicles depicts a diplomatic exchange between Louis de Male and a delegation from Ghent in I 3 8 I (Figure 3 ). The city ambassadors, hats tipped and with the front two men on their knees, meet Philip the Bold's predecessor, the first extending his hand to the count and his men, the second with his left hand over his heart. Louis sports a fashionable short frock and bright red tights, buttocks prominent, with a sword, thrust upward between his legs, which he grasps firmly. The Ghent party is dressed in equally rich garb but wholly without the explicitly sexual posturing of the count. The front right Gentenar displays a bright blue money pouch hanging from his belt. The count's authority in the scene is located, therefore, in the sexual and physical stance he assumes, whereas the city folk are characterized by the lucre they carry and by the submission they evoke. What makes the count legitimate as a political leader is his powerful physique; what gives legitimacy to the citizens with whom he parlays is their money and deference. The link between the male physique and political power even permitted at times the public presentation of the naked body. An anonymous Flemish chronicle written during Maximilian of Austria's rule in Flanders tells us that after the baptism of the infant Philip the Fair in Bruges on June 22, I478, the dowager princess Margaret of York displayed the future ruler in the marketplace to a large crowd: "She took his testicles in her hands and she spoke: 'Children see here your newly born lord Philip from the Emperor's side.' The crowd seeing that it was a son was overwhelming happy, thanking and praising our beloved God that he had granted them a young prince."33 Still, the presentation of the unclothed or semiclothed body was rare indeed, and it is small surprise that our chronicler relates the public presentation of a new-born infant. By contrast, the Flemish pastor Anthony Stalin recounts with embarrassment how the same Margaret of York and her husband Charles the Bold in I472 escaped semiclothed one night from a castle outside Bruges as a fire raged. "It was very sorrowful to see," the pastor wrote, "that he fled with his wife in such a shameful way. " 34

Figure J. Louis de Male and a delegation of Gentenars, 1381. Les chroniques de Froissart, MS 2644, fol. Srv. © cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.

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Court, State, and Ceremony The concerted emphasis on the masculine figure and the male lineage left the female body without the same symbols of public authority, but women still figured prominently in Burgundian ritual. The painted images so laden with political messages about appropriate behavior also included court women. Indeed, the "Privileges of Ghent and Flanders" manuscript dedicates a separate miniature to Margaret of Constantinople, countess of Flanders, decreeing an ordinance in 1271 for the navigation of certain commercial waterways to the burghers of Douai, Rupelmonde, and Valenciennes, who kneel in familiar deference before her and her male advisors and ladies-inwaiting (Figure 4). Women, in fact, were easily visible at the Burgundian court, but the above example does not mean they evaded gender-specific roles in the hyperorchestrated world of Burgundian ceremony and etiquette. Duchesses entered cities, just like dukes, and were greeted with much of the same celebration. Yet Burgundian chronicles commented seldom on such entriesi their interest riveted instead on the military deeds of men of action. Out in public, court women earned the attention of Burgundian writers when their behavior affected the politics of men. For instance, two of the most extended descriptions of court women's public ritual are of marriage ceremonies: the entry trains of the brides Isabella of Portugal and Margaret of York from the coast of Flanders to the city of Bruges, Isabella in January 1430, Margaret in July 1468. In both instances, official delegations at the coast welcomed the two future duchesses and ushered them into the city on splendidly bedecked palanquins fully elevated throughout the entry itsel£. 35 Women participated in most court activities, even falconry and hunting, and yet gender roles at court were far from blurred. 36 Present at banquets, processions, entries, and other court spectacles, women still found their domain at court tied to the world of feminine experience. Alienor de Poitiers, for example, devoted an important section of her treatise on court ceremony to the ritual of giving birth. She described in detail the color, curtain sizes, and bedding of the natal chamber and the appropriate rituals for the various social ranks of court women. 37 When male commentators wrote of women, they typically addressed their role in the life cycle of the court: they married and consolidated alliancesi they gave birth and perpetuated the ruling family. And though it is true that the first duke of Burgundy set up a "court of love" at Paris in 1401 to "the honor, praise, recommenda-

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Figure 4· Countess Margaret of Constantinople issues a navigation ordinance, 1271. Boek van de Priviligii!n van Gent en van Vlaanderen, MS 2583, fol. 64v. Courtesy of Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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Court, State, and Ceremony tion, and service of all ladies and maidens," a powerful contemporary ideology denounced aristocratic women who exercised, in the words of the French poet Eustache Deschamps (1346-ca. 1406), too powerful an "empire" over men. 38 Olivier de LaMarche, court poet and chronicler, urged women to desist from "writing, work, and school" and to direct their attention instead to "good deportment" and "good breeding."39 Female sexuality and behavior evoked a complicated amalgam of praise and fear distinct from masculine values and codes. While the Burgundians linked political power to the gendered world of public posture, their scrupulous attention to luxurious clothing, to dressing up, only heightened the prestige of dukes' and duchesses' bodies. What the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt so aptly describes as the "frantic passion for dressing up" during the late Middle Ages was basic to Burgundian court life and public culture.40 The sheer mass of attention Burgundian writers gave to adornment is staggering; descriptions of public entries, jousts, and banquets bristle with passages on colors, fabrics, jewels, shoes, cuts of sleeves, and headgear. Dressed a_nd redressed in public, constantly attuned to sartorial lavishness, the Burgundians often seemed akin to political mannequins, regularly sporting new and different outfits. 41 Burgundian styles were notorious in an age that tolerated and endorsed aristocratic splendor. Embroidered velvet; long-pointed shoes; ceremonial gowns sewn with pearls, sapphires, rubies, and gold bells; hats bedecked with peacock feathers, gold spangles, and the state jewels; ermine-trimmed brocades; sleeves that slit open all the way to the ground-the Burgundian dukes paraded these sumptuous fashions when they moved in the public eye. Like their male counterparts, Burgundian women wore equally colorful garb, fancying cornet-shaped coifs, long trains, low-cut dresses, and the celebrated hennin, a steeple-pointed headdress befitted with silk veils. 42 All this might strike us as wasteful dalliance, if not downright bizarre, but Burgundian clothing stylized a· prestige economy for court figures. Chroniclers used such displays of fashion to emphasize the blinding power of material wealth. At the Feast of the Pheasant in Lille, where the duke was outfitted in black velvet and a jewel necklace, Olivier de La Marche commented that so rich were Philip the Good's precious stones that "I do not know how to characterize it, except to say that it was the dress of a powerful prince." 43 When the same duke accompanied Louis XI into Paris after Louis's coronation at Reims in 1461, he showed off an outfit of golden cloth, vel-

Court, State, and Ceremony vet, golden chains, and a hat embroidered with no less than nine rubies, five diamonds, and sixty-seven pearls. Georges Chastellain wrote that the Parisians "could scarcely articulate what their eyes could readily comprehend." The visual richness of the duke's appearance, Chastellain wanted to believe, moved the crowd beyond words. 44 The fanciful events of court life attracted as much attention ·as dress and posture. As elsewhere, the natural and political life cycles of the Burgundian court became much-valued symbols in the affirmation of state power. Births, marriages, illnesses, and deaths were all acclaimed and celebrated as public events in ducal accessions, military victories, festive banquets, and elaborate tournaments. Such activity occurred semiregularly in the public squares of big Flemish cities, but even events held in a more secluded setting never fully obscured the lines between public and private. The Feast of the Pheasant in Lille in 1454 may have been indoors, but there were bleachers for visiting nobles, which helped to retain a division between stage and audience. 45 Many meetings of the Burgundian chivalric order, the Golden Fleece, were withheld from the public eye; yet Olivier de La Marche awkwardly mentioned the presence of a select group of city elites at Golden Fleece banquets with the explanation that "it must be kept in mind that those from the cities regularly give gifts and gratuities to support these feasts." 46 No celebration, it seems, was ever fully free of public scrutiny or wholly independent of public support. Although fearful of large and hostile urban centers, the Burgundians were in the ironic position of needing those same communities' acclamation for their celebrations, though they selected direct contact with townspeople very carefully. The Burgundian lords staged many of their critical rites of passage in Flemish cities, with Bruges and Ghent hosting the biggest events. Even while urban magistrates struggled to prevent Burgundian political supremacy, their public squares throughout the Burgundian period served as select forums for court conceits. 47 Bruges witnessed two of the largest ceremonies in fifteenth-century Burgundy: jousts and banquets to honor the marriage of Philip the Good to Isabella of Portugal during the second week of January 1430, and the even more sumptuous wedding celebration of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York, which began on July 3, 1468, with a week-long cycle of banquets, processions, and tournaments. •s Ghent was the site of perhaps the most elaborate entry ceremony in the fifteenth-century Low Countries. On April23, 1458, Philip the Good

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Court, State, and Ceremony paid a visit to the city for the purpose of formally reconciling differences resulting from a war that had ended nearly five years earlier. 49 The city also hosted an important chapter meeting of the Golden Fleece which opened on December II, I445, and concluded on December I 5 with a large tournament. A second and more elaborate tournament, named the "Wild Woman/' began on January I7, I470, and also concluded with a banquet. 50 Most court ceremonies of this duration were fashioned as public narratives, financed and framed by townspeople, who crowded around at the borders to watch. At entry ceremonies, marriage celebrations, and tournaments the Burgundians evoked a world of aristocratic imagination, but it was the citizens who did most of the work, staging street theater, holding banquets, and decorating private houses and public monuments. In striking contrast to the cities' commercial culture, workers, patricians, and religious leaders transformed their landscape into a play world of chivalry, acting as gracious hosts to their Burgundian dignitaries. Such festive acclaim even led Georges Chastellain to fantasize that Philip the Good's greatness was built on "the love of the people toward him ... showing him honor, service, reverence, full courtesy, and good disposition." 51 The unequal ratio in status such public ceremonies encouragedhonor for the duke, accommodation for the citizens-was generally subsumed under an idealized rubric of mutual respect. Burgundian spectacles within cities usually included ritualized moments of social exchange and gift giving. It was common at ducal entries for an urban delegation to offer presents to either duke or duchess, and banquets that concluded entry processions united duke, prominent citizens, and even "femmes de base condicion/' as chronicler Philippe de Commynes (I447-I5II) admitted. 52 Yet although urban audiences could easily swell into the hundreds, those townspeople who gained direct contact with the visiting duke or duchess were select in number and likely to be city magistrates, guild deans, representatives from the urban religious orders, and town bailiffs. The reception of a welcoming party, however, could vary tremendously; Lille, for example, might invite all those who could ride a horse to greet the entering guest, whereas Douai in I439 explicitly forbade all "people of low estate" from meeting the countess of Charolais as she entered. 53 However varied, these urban spectacles had as their common goal the enacting of the proper relationship of ruler to subject; they typically offered a cycle of representations that framed a point of idealized contact between townspeople and court dignitaries. Of course

Court, State, and Ceremony there were distinctions among those who actually greeted the visiting Burgundian party, those who were allowed to help design and participate in the spectacle, and those who simply lined the streets and marketplaces to watch; still, the message was directed at all urban inhabitants who chose to watch and to listen. In turn, civic narratives of Burgundian spectacle often attempted a panurban appeal. "The Welcoming of the Duke in the City of Ghent," a poem by the contemporary Brabantine writer Jan Smeken which commemorated Philip the Fair's entry into Ghent on March ro, 1497, extolled the sweet cries of acclamation uttered by the "community, old and young." So brilliant was the reception, added Smeken, that forgotten were the political squabbles and turmoil of the preceding years which had brought the parties war; for the concluding banquet inspired accord and reconciliation. 54 Such were the wishes and fictions; and yet as both civic and state leaders easily recognized, it was impossible to elide social fissures and conflict through what was in its very essence a political and social enactment. Because Burgundian ceremony that transpired in urban settings engaged both vertical relations between townspeople and state officials and horizontal relations among different social constituencies within the city itself, its value and meaning as a representation was as complicated as the variety of people it involved.

Court Ritual and the Eternal Past For the Burgundian court, then, ritual was basic to its private and public faces, emphasizing state leaders as the source of appropriate behavior. Ritual made the duke, the duchess, and their retinue of fawning aristocrats and courtiers politically supreme yet eminently malleable: it constantly fashioned them from one thing into another. Cultural pacesetters and political luminaries, Burgundian leaders drew on the urban landscape and townspeople's deference to define their political terrain. The space around the ducal family was theirs to manipulate. Even history and time were at their disposal. Court festivals were constantly shifting the boundaries of historical time and context, using the past as an infinite resource for recrafting the present. Public entries, jousts, and banquets drew freely

on classical and biblical events, joining them together in an unset-

tling variety of cultural miscegenation. 55 Hercules, Jason, Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah and Ezekiel, and pietistic images of

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Court, State, and Ceremony Christ met in street pageantry and banquet tableaux. Artists depicted the duke as a conquering Alexander in one tapestry, city guildsmen greeted him as a savior during an entry, and courtiers decked him out in satorialluxury at a joust that recalled a mythical world of medieval romance. 56 Court members constantly reconfigured time and reality, allowing themselves to be dressed, redressed, defined, a:nd redefined to trumpet the many dimensions of state power. For such events, the dukes and duchesses of Burgundy even carried with them, to deploy during ceremonies, portable tapestries such as Philip the Good's set depicting the history of Gideon and the history of Alexander the Great. The tapestries functioned like discrete historical frames to be invoked at opportune moments, making visual connections between present events and the greatness of past deeds. 57 Historical fictions were the staple of much of late-medieval court life and received their ultimate expression for the Burgundians in extended jousting cycles. These so-called pas d'armes, in which court officials and their knights acted out chivalric motifs for days · on end, took place, as often as not, on the public squares of cities. The pas evoked a past rooted in the mythical: a world of giants, dwarfs, savage lands, and noble knights, all packaged for the consumption of both courtiers and townspeople who gathered to watch. 58 To one English observer, the Burgundian court resembled nothing less than the Arthurian world itself. "As for the dwykys coort, as of lords, ladys and gentylwomen, squwyers and gentylmen," John Paston wrote, "I hert never of non lyek to it, save king Artour's cart. " 59 The largest jousting cycles, such as the Joust of the Golden Tree that Bruges hosted in July r468 and the Joust of the Wild Woman hosted by Ghent in January 1470, in which city folk watched the Burgundians act out chivalric ideals of love and honor, burdened townspeople with their costs. City accounts from Ghent record payments in 1470 for provisions of the banquet and for the renting of houses for guests and city aldermen to watch the show. 60 But it was more the duke and his party than the local aldermen who controlled these theaters of artifice, although imperfectly. Like the trick rooms Philip the Good refurbished at the ducal residence of Hesdin in Artois, which contained trapdoors, twisted mirrors, artificial rain, secret conduits for spraying water, and hidden voices barking commands, public ceremonies often demonstrated that reality, history, and time were all at the prince's magical command. 61 Such play was at once purposeful and laden with political mean-

Court, State, and Ceremony ing. The duke figured as master narrator who actively controlled and manipulated the boundaries of historical time and contemporary affairs. Burgundian ritual was less about leisure than a complicated political theatrics of power and clientage; for it typically depended on the full participation of others and was intended for public consumption. For state leaders, this investment was not without complications because much of this public world was civic terrain, where urban regimes had established their own political and cultural claims. Understanding the dynamics of court ritual, then, requires attention to the problems and opportunities the urban world presented to Burgundian authority. Urban Communities By and large the Burgundian state's most important social constituency were the townspeople who broadly supported its ritual. Still, the Burgundians' public strategies exercised a sort of cautious engagement with Low Country cities. State dignitaries were careful to maintain that distinctions were vital and distance a necessary thing. 62 This caution is not surprising given the decided ambivalence expressed among court elites of northern Europe about the worth and status of those urban regimes that funded their authority. In the first instance, reflections on rulership from court circles mirrored the social reality of aristocratic ritual: townspeople provided both an important audience and a public frame for the display and cultivation of power, but all interaction with them had to be studied, careful, and engaging without expressing any hint of dependence. This set of guidelines provoked the Eustache Deschamps to argue in his poem "How Kings and Princes Ought Not to Act Ordinary and Familiar with Their Subjects, and the Reasons Why" that royalty should appear magnificent for "commoners, nobles, and burghers." He urges kings and princes to make the most out of public appearances yet avoid using public spectacle to bridge any real gap between rulers and governed. Familiarit~ he argues, breeds disrespect; the purpose of the public interaction is more to emphasize the power and privilege of monarch or prince than to create bonds of affinity. 63 A Burgundian treatise on rulership, written by the diplomat and author Ghillebert de Lannoy for Philip the Good sometime between 1439 and 1442 at the height of Burgundian territorial expansion, endorses Deschamps's sentiments but, in spite of its formulaic alle-

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Court, State, and Ceremony giance to the mirror of the prince genre, displays a subtle acknowledgment of the urban world. 64 De Lannoy's Instructions for a Young Prince promotes princely behavior and justice as a salve that ensures stability among social estates and prosperity for the realm. Reason teaches us, de Lannoy opines, that because "princes who govern people are of so fine manners and so honest and tempered lives, they serve as examples for all. " 65 To de Lannoy; the four most important virtues of the model prince are "prudence, justice, chastity, and strength," but it is justice in particular which "by its authority nurtures princes, realms, lands, and men of all estates in peace, wealth, work, and merchandise. " 66 Hence the just prince and his behavior inspire prosperity; social harmony; and a land in general free of political and economic tumult. De Lannoy imagines the perfect prince as guided by wise council, bodily discipline, the prudence of age, and the privilege of nobility. The prince ought to avoid intemperate youth and those of low estate; for they upset the proper balance between economic and political harmony by unruly behavior. Men over twenty-six, however, "can see clearly; and are in control of their senses, their behavior, their governance, and their virtues and vices. " 67 But, importantly; this imagined world of princely justice and political prosperity cannot function unsupervised because the linchpin of the whole system is fear and awe. Society functions best when the prince fears God, and officers, servants, and subjects awe and fear princes. 68 Furthermore, de Lannoy leavens his picture of ideal rulership with the caveat that such a happy formula works only if the "privileges, uses, and past customs" of cities are firmly maintained. There are two things, in the end, that de Lannoy argues are essential, both of which relate to the urban clients of the prince: "First, the prince must honestly uphold the privileges, uses, and past customs of his good cities and lands, as he swore at his coronation or joyous entry. Second, he must punish rigorously his officials if they ill-treat his subjects, especially if they violate the oaths of their office." 69 De Lannoy's Burgundian treatise hints at the importance of the urban sphere to Burgundian rule. His work points out that Burgundian princely success rested on the wealth of its realm-a realm densely populated by large urban centers-but to make this association palatable, de Lannoy steers clear of any hint of dependence on social inferiors. He asserts that a prince inspires harmony and wealth by his judicious and disciplined rule, not because of any civic

Court, State, and Ceremony advantages or initiatives. Still, de Lannoy departs from Deschamps's simple formulation of the public interplay of· ruler and subjects because, it seems, he was writing for a different social and economic terrain. The French Deschamps urges: let the common people see, but do not let them touch. The Burgundian de Lannoy remains more sensitive to the complexity of these political relations: the prince might be a mirror to the world, but that mirror's reflection depends on the steady flow of wealth and merchandise, both in large measure generated by urban life. Happy subjects are productive onesi hence the need to respect their political domain while retaining ultimate authority. All Burgundian writers are riddled with such ambiguities about the relationship of the city to the state, in large measure because traditional aristocratic disdain for the third estate played off against a hard recognition of the entrenched power of the urban world of the Low Countries. Court writers offer few compliments on the rare occasions when they do mention city dwellers. Georges Chastellain states firmly that the third estate merits no praisei his successor, Olivier de LaMarche, distinguishes categories of the elite but simply casts aside anybody else as non-noble. Jean Molinet (I435-I507), the last of the Burgundian chroniclers, follows suit and lambastes city burghers as men who give themselves over to "Lady Idle, to games, to intrigues, to leisure, and all worldly offenses." All adhere to the medieval social classification of estates rooted in the static divisions of labor and culture, casting the broad majority of society into an undifferentiated mass of subjects. 70 Although writers like Chastellain speak of the love of the prince for citizens, they more frequently mock burgher habits. 71 The Hundred New Stories, a cycle of vernacular tales modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron, was composed around 1459, based on stories exchanged between Philip the Good and his courtiers and founded in part on real incidents confirmed by contemporary legal records-the socalled letters of pardon. The ribald tales skewer the urban world as fertile ground for duped husbands, unruly wives, lascivious clerics, and topsy-turvy social codes. 72 Almost inevitably, however, this species of disdain is balanced by a level-headed acknowledgment of civic power. To take an important example, most court writers recognize the economic and urban might of Flemish cities and praise Flanders as rich and powerful, this despite their real contempt for townsfolk. The result is a divided message: on the one hand, the Flemings are provincials, certainly

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Court, State, and Ceremony useful but ultimately unimportant, and on the other hand, they are "dangerous people. 1173 Christine de Pisan (1365-1429) notes that "the county of Flanders is the most noble, rich, and great in Christianity;" but others saw it as populated with inelegant arrivistes whom French-language chroniclers had little scruples about mocking. The Herald of Berry; Gilles le Bouvier, lambasted the Flemish as "great consumers of flesh, fish, milk, and butter," a slur close to "butter-eaters," "chicken-eaters," and "sheep-heads," also applied to these Low Country folk. Even so dignified a figure as Jean Germain, bishop of Chalons and first chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece, spoofed the Flemish by dismissing their war cries as "wappe, wappe, gawe, gawe." 74 These insults aside, no late-medieval observer doubted Flanders's economic might nor its overwhelming prominence in political affairs. Molinet calls Flanders "a worldly paradise" and notes that the court's power resided in "Flanders and Brabant, in Bruges, in Ghent and in Holland, in Zeeland and in Namur, and is Flemish rather than Walloon. 1175 De Commynes adds that Flanders is a "land of promise," and Chastellain, who could excuse himself as "a Flemish man, a man of savage marsh . . . ignorant, blundering in language, heavy of speech and palate, and all mired with other bodily shortcomings typical of the nature of the land," nevertheless elevates his home turf as "the most populated lands of the west, the best fortified with powerful cities, the most provided and stable in law, the most provided with justice, the most skilled and handy with merchandise . . . the wisest and most expert in all subtle ideas, the richest and most abundant in goods, the best governed by the greatest princes, and the most secure and free in rule. 1176 Chastellain's exercise in self-deprecation, tied to his boastful statements about urban Flanders, is more than just the anxious ruminations of the provincial as court aristocrat. More meaningfully; it touches on the complex and often contradictory urban-state relations spawned by the growth of Burgundian power. Crafting state power in the Burgundian Netherlands involved a world of representation often, but not exclusively; anchored on city streets, squares, and marketplaces. Although it is hardly surprising that these should count among the spaces that nutured state ritual-for they were also the venues that fed the court's economic might-Burgundian authors and dignitaries were anxious to downplay their indebtedness to an urban world they found inferior. What they failed to discuss, but what is ultimately even more telling, is how the cultural and politi-

Court, State, and Ceremony cal traditions of the Low Country cities allowed for a public space whose boundaries were contested. Any sovereign ritual in a city ultimately came up against deeply embedded cultural patterns rooted in social conflict and urban corporate traditions. Nowhere was this truer than in Ghent, the Burgundians' largest city and most stubborn urban foe. A knowledge of its civic culture will yield a better sense of the public world of the Burgundian Netherlands as a site for multiple political claims shifting with the changes in city and state relations.

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The Civic World of Ghent

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Late-medieval Ghent's rich urban makeup no doubt prompted the mixed sentiments that led Burgundian writers to spoof, insult, and admire civic life. At once the dukes' most important city and their most intractable problem, Ghent threatened the cultural and political prerogatives of their Low Country state. The city's own public culture bore the stamp of a dynamic merchant and artisanal community little prepared to accommodate Burgundian aspirations, and yet from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, Ghent underwent a sizable transition under the press of Burgundian expansion. The corporate framework that accommodated a distinct public space for both townspeople and court officers and beneficiaries slowly yielded under fierce political pressure over the course of the fifteenth century to a more polarized set of social and political relations with firmer cultural demarcations between rulers and subjects. In what follows, I trace the civic space of fifteenth-century Ghent, exploring its political traditions, its physical layout, its social networks, and its public world. Such a foray points out how Ghent's political community, with its elite corporatism, directed a civic life marked by strong social cleavages and a near monopoly of public ritual by the town's middling- and well-to-do guildsmen and patricians. With an official culture zealously guarded by these enfranchised men, Ghent presented to the Burgundians a highly structured civic world within which state power was tolerated, but only to a degree. Sizing up the boundaries of this grey zone between city and state became critical to Ghent's public life as polit-

The Civic World of Ghent ical relations between its rulers and the Burgundian dukes worsened after the mid-fifteenth century.

The Tradition of Defiance Ghent was problematic for the Burgundians from the outset of the rule of Philip the Bold, the first Burgundian duke. His accession as count of Flanders in January 1385 involved laying to rest the uprising waged by the city against Louis de Male, who had forcefully ousted Ghent's weavers from political rule in 1 349· Although Louis restored the weavers to power in 1361, his action did not repair the economic damage done by the forced exile and emigration of such an important part of Ghent's labor force. What is more, the count had also threatened Ghent's cherished grain staple on the Leie and Scheidt rivers-now central to Ghent's prosperity as its economy shifted toward river trade and shipping-by allowing Bruges in 1361 to dig a channel that diverted river traffic south of the city. 1 The duke of Burgundy inherited in 1385 a city weakened by war, plague, and economic reverses but still powerful enough to profit from its considerable resources. Although Ghent suffered acute economic problems and population decline from its six-year uprising, its political liberties guaranteed the city its authority, including virtual hegemony over all of east Flanders in legal and economic affairs. Ghent also profited from a structural vitality in its economy that allowed the rich guildsmen and the descendants of the patriciate who formerly dominated civic political life to recover from the devastation of war by clinging to their profitable grain staple. In addition, they also renewed their production of cloth by manufacturing a cheaper variety for regional and local markets, a rebound that kept the textile industry afloat in the fifteenth century. 2 Ghent had built its prestige and economic strength on the production of varieties of cloth in the thirteenth century, relying on raw English wool and enjoying the profits from exports that stretched from Italy to Poland. A narrow oligarchy of merchant aristocrats ruled the city throughout this period. Local elites fundamentally restructured this Board of Thirty-Nine in 1297 after being challenged by a coalition of rich guildsmen and rank-and-file workers in the textile industries. Two new benches of thirteen aldermen replaced the Board of Thirty-Nine in 1301; electors drew the aldermen from the weavers and the fullers; the lesser guilds involved in textile man-

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The Civic World of Ghent ufacturing, trade, and local consumption; and the patriciate.3 The displacement of the Board of Thirty-Nine ushered in a period of domination of the city by enterprising merchants and rich guildsmen. In a sense, this political development paralleled a similar movement among cities in northern Italy in which a broader-based coalition of corporations replaced small groups of prominent families as political leaders. Ghent's guild revolution occurred at the very time the city was involved in the complicated political alliances that later resulted in the Hundred Years' War, and because Ghent depended both on English wool and on grain from northern France, its political situation was delicate. In the years 1356-58, the city had some 55,ooo-64,ooo inhabitants, with 6o percent involved in the textile trades, making it the largest city after Paris in late-medieval northwestern Europe and the Low Countries' most powerful member.4 In 1314, Ghent prohibited the production of woolen cloth within a radius of five comital miles (30 kilometers), with some allowances for towns already producing textiles. This measure secured Ghent's tight-fisted control over rural industry, supplementing a 1297 decree that prohibited the sale, in Ghent's cloth hall, of material made outside the city. 5 Despite these advantages, Ghent's political and economic life pitted occupational corporations against one another, and by 1338, the beginning of Jacob van J\rtevelde's reign, different "members" emerged among its guilds as. distinct political factions. Weavers and fullers were among the most powerful contenders for political power, and together they pushed the smaller textile and service guilds into a third, yet equally powerful, political block. The patriciate remained very active, with families often dominating city affairs. But Ghent's patricians also complicated the picture of social divisions in the city because they figured both as prominent merchants and as members of some smaller guilds. 6 Van Artevelde's ascendancy in 1338 began Ghent's political bid for leadership in the county, but van Artevelde's early success did not lay to rest internal divisions in Ghent itself. Van Artevelde fell from power in 1345, and Ghent's fullers emerged victorious over the weavers four years later. After the weavers emerged from defeat to vanquish the fullers in 1360, there developed the political alliance that ruled Ghent throughout the fifteenth century: a coalition of patricians, weavers, and representatives from the lesser guilds which locked the important fullers out of any meaningful politicallife. 7 Because of the internal rivalries among fullers, weavers, and the

The Civic World of Ghent patriciate and the frequent violence such conflict provoked, Ghent had, at the outset of Burgundian rule, assured itself a reputation as a dangerous and rebellious city. Eustache Deschamps, who had participated in the war between Ghent and the count of Flanders which raged from 1379 to 1385, targeted the city for particular vituperation: Proud Tree, Spoiled Plant, and Root of all treason, Limbs of all falsehood, Leaves, flowers, and fruit of contradiction, The cause of great rebellion .... You will be tom out great and small, As a rebel you will be strewn with salt, And your name wiped out: Take care, false city of Ghent.'

The regime of Jacob van Artevelde, and that of his son Philip (1381-82), created even in their peers' minds a legacy of rebellion

whose meaning is still debated. 9 Although scholars find the van Arteveldes either local heroes or men of greedy and violent ambitions, the most important of their contemporaries depicted them as powerful symbols of Ghent's spirit of independence. Jean Froissart, the famous chronicler of the Hundred Years' War, portrayed Philip van Artevelde's rule as one based on rebellious charisma and a refusal to compromise-a quality none of his detractors disputed. Philip decided to reject the peace treaty that Louis de Male offered Gentenars at Tournai in April 1382 because he would not submit all townsmen between fifteen and sixty years old before the count and his party as the latter demanded. Back at Ghent, van Artevelde harangued a captive crowd, insisting that submission bareheaded in white penitential garb before Louis was too high a price for peace. 10 Philip van Artevelde rejected ceremonial humiliation for political autonomy, a moment made vivid by Froissart's dramatic account. Before the battle of Westrozebeke on November 27, 1382, Froissart depicts van Artevelde stirring the captains of the city's militia with a take-no-prisoners speech that urged the pugnacious citizens to bring the French king back to Ghent and teach him how to speak Dutch! 11 Froissart cast Gentenars as dangerous rogues in his political drama, and indeed, the powerful guildsmen who dominated this city were known popularly in the Dutch vernacular as "lords." 12 The beginning of the Burgundian period saw Ghent's reputation for trouble intact. But the city itself emerged from its bloody inter-

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The Civic World of Ghent nal power struggles worn and economically damaged, plague and a contraction of the textile industry apparently having cut the population in half between 1350 and 1400Y Despite this setback, a regime of patricians, weavers, and lesser guildsmen managed to pacify internal turmoil and impose its authority to a remarkable extent throughout much of the fifteenth century. The new ruling alliance, known as the Three Members, divided the aldermen's seats among themselves: three seats of each bench reserved for patricians; fives seats of each bench for the lesser guilds, with the butchers, the bakers, the brewers, the leather trades, and the construction trades each guaranteed one reserved position, and the shippers two; and five seats of each beach for the all-important weavers, who selected delegates from a bank of twelve electors chosen from their twenty-three neighborhood associations (wijken ). 14 As Marc Boone has proven, Ghent's regime of lesser guildsmen, weavers, and patricians had established a measure of public order by the end of the fourteenth century and had secured a masterful control over urban economic and political structures through a combination of patronage and graft. Power remained predictably in the hands of the city's leading patricians, tradesmen, and cloth manufacturers. Especially significant were those elite guilds, along with the weavers and patricians, that had gained reserved seats on the benches of the aldermen. Of these six, by far the most privileged were the butchers, shippers, and brewers because, as Boone notes, since the end of the fourteenth century they, along with the fishmongers, had enjoyed closer links to Burgundian officials than any other local corporations.15 Moreover, the predominance of trade, marketing, and manufacturing guilds scarely represented an accurate reflection of the city's world of work, as there were statistically more crafts without the right of incorporation than official guilds. 16 By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Ghent enjoyed a prestige based on wealth, a secure and efficient ruling coalition, and a reputation for urban defiance. And yet the dominant cultural emblems of authority for this society of third-estate merchants and workers often came from outside this proud burgher culture. The city's magistrates and ruling families guarded their political autonomy to an extent equaled by no other Flemish city, but the beacon of the courtly milieu remained strong. The city's leading patrician families fancied princely escutcheons, aristocratic tournaments, and, in general, all the domestic and cultural refinements of "vivre noblement.m 7 A celebrated poem by the Gentenar Boudewijn vander Luere, which aile-

The Civic World of Ghent gorized the late-fourteenth-century war against Louis de Male, depicted Ghent as a vulnerable young virgin protected by an array of local saints, kneeling before the father figure of the count, arrayed magnificently in knightly garb and depicted as the real repository of authority and power. '8 Even so fierce a civic patriot as Philip van Artevelde predictably appropriated princely behavior to lend legitimacy to his enterprise. Froissart relates that after Ghent assaulted Bruges on May 2, 1382, Philip conducted himself during the occupation like a prince holding court: "As soon as he was in Bruges, he held princely court and every day he had his ministers sound and announce his meals and suppers before his court, and had himself served with silver-covered dishes, as if he were count of Flanders, and he was able to act thus because he had all the count of Flanders's golden and silver plates and all his jewels, weapons, and treasure boxes which were found at the count's court in Bruges since he had left everything behind."' 9 Then Froissart showed that upon returning to Ghent, Philip made a triumphal entry, "with a procession of such great joy that never was there a count of Flanders so honorably received as he." Once in his city, van Artevelde conducted himself "like a great prince," indulging in material pleasures. 20 Although Froissart's account of Philip's aristocratic yearnings smacks of hyperbole, it is not surprising that the son of a well-to-do landowner, broker, and former political captain would appropriate such cultural baggage. Philip's father, Jacob, had put a Brabantine knight to death in r 340 for alleging that van Artevelde was but a mere commoner. 21 Ghent's greatest civic heroes shunned their modest background and grounded their authority on aristocratic pretensions-an important reminder that neither the size nor power of a city automatically guaranteed social prestige. Because officeholding in Ghent had long been associated with patrician status-and continued to be so, although no longer exclusively, throughout much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries-those eligible for the city magistracy always held fast to the historical link between wealth and power, and cultural elitism. 22 This is especially true inasmuch as throughout the late-medieval period in Ghent the First Alderman of the Law-the city's top official-was always a patrician. 23 It is noteworthy, however, that even these urban cultural and political elites never really managed to bridge the important language divide between city and state, which is attested by the fact that though chivalric epics found a civic audience as early as the

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The Civic World of Ghent thirteenth century, they were translated into Dutch. 24 The use of Dutch as an administrative and diplomatic language, moreover, was a central issue during the Burgundian period, with the magistrates of the large Flemish cities insisting on the validity of their own language as a diplomatic and political instrument. 25 The constant quarrels over language rendered explicit the whole knotty question of deep cultural difference between the Burgundian princes and their Dutch-speaking cities, which not even the ambition of the urban social elites could overcome.

Civic Boundaries If symbols of prestige and legitimacy leaned heavily in favor of the court aristocracy, and if certain elite behavior in Ghent expressed ambivalence about the cultural status of the civic world, citizens of this late-medieval city nonetheless had their own local resources to direct political and social relations and present a distinct civic image to outsiders. Ghent's public life shaped, expressed, and gave a suitable forum to the rival claims of its competing social groups. Gentenars used key spaces, special times, and value-ladened symbols in a double sense; first, to negotiate their social roles and to mold a civic image; second, to test whatever normative boundaries such a cultural and political frame imposed. 26 The physical layout of late-medieval Ghent revealed a community of diverse social and political groups with competing yet overlapping identities. The center consisted of the area between the Leie and Scheidt rivers which lay somewhat southeast of the Leie. Workers' neighborhoods, quite poor, constituted Ghent's outer rings. The city had annexed significant territory outside its gates by the fourteenth century, but it remained flanked by two large Benedictine abbeys and their seigneuries to its south and east. The Abbey of Sint-Baafs lay east of the city's boundaries, and though its village was brought inside Ghent's walls by the late-fourteenth century, its seigneury remained separate, with its own bailiff and aldermen. The Abbey of Sint-Pieter, south of Ghent, likewise had its own jurisdiction, though its village had also been included within the city's walls. Ghent itself was divided into four central parishes located at or near the core of the city: the parish of Sint-Jan in the heart of the original city slightly west of the Scheidt river, the parish of Sint-Niklaas to its west, the parish of Sint-

Ghent in the fifteenth century. Adapted from Marc Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, ca. r384-ca. I453· Een sociaal-politieke studie van een staatsvormingsproces. Courtesy of the author.

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The Civic World of Ghent Michie! across the Leie, and the parish of Sint-Jacob, to the northeast of all three, which included the important Vrijdagmarkt (Friday Market). There was, in addition, the smaller parish of Sint-Veerle, located on the Vismarkt up the Leie from Sint-Michiel, which had developed a separate identity by the late-thirteenth century. 27 Although work patterns, guild memberships, and voluntary associations were not necessarily parish bound, parish churches, their festive calendars, and their parochial boundaries often framed city events. Parishes also served as basic administrative, legal, financial, and military divisions; each had legal officials who settled levies on goods and debt disputes. The parishes were likewise divided up into military units (koninkstavelrijen) and further subdivided into diverse neighborhoods and neighborhood organizations that served financial as well as military purposes. The four large parish churches also housed the chapels of several guilds and numerous religious confraternities. Clearly, then, parishes were central to shaping social identities. 28 Ghent's social layout, however, failed to adhere neatly to parish boundaries. The city's wealthiest regions centered around financial and market centers. The Koornmarkt (Grain Market) and Vismarkt (Fish Market), adjacent to the Leie, were Ghent's centers for foreign trade and finance; their occupants included a well-to-do mix of moneychangers, brokers, nobles, and clothing merchants. The Vrijdagmarkt to the northeast handled most of the city's marketing and was also an area of considerable wealth. The neighborhood of the Belfry and town hall, inhabited by rich magistrates and financiers in its northern part, was a third important region for capital concentration. The Overschelde, Ghent's poorest area from the fourteenth century throughout the Burgundian period, lay to the east; it housed textile frames and the residences of textile workers. Textile workers and poor day laborers also inhabited the areas west of Sint-Michiel's church and to the north of the city's center. 29 The textile zones ranged from the Overschelde to the area around the Vrijdagmarkt itself, but the most concentrated number of weavers was in Sint-Pieter's Village just southeast of the canal known as the Ketelgracht, which linked the Scheidt to the Leie. This area housed the Weavers' Hall and Weavers' Chapel. The weavers' own political organization of twenty-three neighborhoods (wijken), though associated with city parishes, formed a powerful and separate political and social network. Yet despite the political power of their guild

The Civic World of Ghent deans, most weavers were hardly wealthier than their rival fullers, and few could afford to buy their own houses. 30 Ghent's public squares and architecture reflected the fact that this was a city of guildsmen, merchants, and patricians who, as we shall see, clearly dominated public life. 3 ' But strikingly, the most impressive city dwellings in Ghent belonged to the counts of Flanders and their Burgundian successors: Ten Walle, the Burgundian palace, and the Gravensteen, north of the Koornmarkt. Actively used by the counts since the early Middle Ages, the Gravensteen was a huge fortified citadel. In fact, it was all but abandoned as a residence when Louis de Male purchased Ten Walle, a thirteenth-century private estate to the north, which the Burgundian dukes developed into an imposing court complex with private houses, an important menagerie, and three gates of entry (Figure 5 ), twice remodeled and elaborated during the fifteenth century. Ten Walle, decorated with the eschuteons of the Burgundian princes, and boasting a zoo full of lions that served as stunning totemic reminders of ducal prowess, assured the Burgundian family and their retinue a private claim over the heart of Ghent's civic space, boasting aristocratic pleasures, ducal symbols, and sheer physical grandeur. 32 Two supreme civic symbols that rivaled the castle and court for public attention were the aldermen's town hall on the Hoogpoort north of Sint-Jan's church and the Belfry across from it. The area where both stood was a wealthy region inhabited by financiers and aldermen, making it an appropriate place for such important urban monuments. 33 Of the two, the Belfry was the most visually striking; begun in the late thirteenth century, and crowned with a wooden spire in 1380, this tower came to house not only the city's clock but also Ghent's archives, which guarded the city's most important privileges and charters. The architectural magnificence of the Belfry was a fitting tribute to the importance of the documents it protected; no wonder, then, that statues of four armed militiamen were carefully placed around the tower's corners, signaling the important relationship between the city militia and the historical liberties its men guarded. 34 This juxtaposition was far from casual. Both the tower's archives and work clock assumed special importance as symbols of legitimate authority during confusing moments of political turmoil and crisis, when guildsmen held public rallies called into order by the sounding of the Belfry and driven by their conviction that the archives' civic documents codified a special right to assemble in protest. 35

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Figures. Ten Walle in Ghent. A. Sanderus, Flandria Illustrata, I, r64r. Courtesy of the Stadsarchief te Gent.

Other public and private buildings of significance stood out in the city's skyline: the Lakenhalle (Cloth Hall) beneath the Belfry, the elongated Vleeshuis (Meat Hall) constructed in 1407, and numerous ecclesiastical structures.3 6 Religious orders crowded the city landscape. The Carmelites and Augustinian Friars were located to the northwest of Ghent's center, not far apart. The Dominicans and Franciscans enjoyed closer proximity to the centers of economic and political power; both orders had friaries located south of the Koornmarkt along the Leie. The numerous female orders, particularly the Beguines, remained a step removed from Ghent's commercial and political core.37 Ghent was a city laced with canals, bridges, and gates, giving it a patchwork look of narrow, crisscrossing streets, waterways, and

The Civic World of Ghent houses. But it had three main public squares to accommodate huge crowds during public rallies, political assemblies, processions, and other festive events; together, they served conjointly as the city's public hubs. Although these· squares were most immediately connected to economic activity, the fact that they served as special arenas for all sorts of public activity made them a fluid yet essential marker of Ghent's local culture. The first, the Kouter, a square fit snugly between the Scheidt and Leie along the Ketelgracht that connected the two, flanked residences of modest means and occasionally served during the fourteenth century as a spot for political rallies. The second, the Koornmarkt, hosted a few tournaments throughout the medieval period, with the most significant occurring in the years r376, I377, I4I4, and I445- 38 In contrast, the Vrijdagmarkt, located in the parish of Sint-Jacob, never lacked a busy agenda of public activity. Significantly, this city of guildsmen, workers, and merchants chose its primary center of local marketing as the site of its most important public assemblies. City leaders staged all significant political rallies there-no doubt because since at least the fouteenth century disputes among family clans, social rivals, and political groups were routinely played out and resolved on the Vrijdagmarkt. In the fourteenth century, this marketplace had gained a dangerous reputation after witnessing more than a few bloody vendettas; weavers and fullers likewise used the Vrijdagmarkt to pursue violent feuds. What is more, aldermen read public decrees from buildings overlooking the square and sponsored jousts in its center. All major religious processions passed through the Vrijdagmarkt; so too did criminals condemned to die, as the marketplace was a popular spot for public executions. Finally, it was there that new counts of Flanders swore oaths of fidelity and leadership during their public entries into Ghent. 39 The Vrijdagmarkt was at once the location for legitimate exchange-the buying and selling of goods; the reading of public decrees; communication among laborers, guildsmen, and city fathers; and the ritual swearing of oaths between count and citizens-and the arena of illicit activity where assemblies gone awry shook the city with revolt. One reason the Vrijdagmarkt gained such importance was its strong association with Ghent's military tradition, on the one hand, and its political tradition, on the other, both of which

since at least the fourteenth century had allowed guildsmen the right of wapeninge, or armed public assemblies. 40 Ghent's civic mili-

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The Civic World of Ghent tia, conscripted from its guilds and drawn from the parish koninkstavelrijen, traditionally gathered in arms upon the Vrijdagmarkt at the sounding of the Belfry. 41 Such assemblies gained added meaning in Ghent from I 3 r 9 on, when the tradition began of publicly selecting "captains" from the five central parishes to rule Ghent whenever acute political crisis racked the city. 42 Ghent's most celebrated captains, Jacob and Philip van Artevelde, for instance, both were selected for their positions during Vrijdagmarkt gatherings of guildsmen grouped under their militia banners. 43 An anonymous chronicler from Ghent offers a particularly absorbing account of Jacob's election on January 3, 1338, during a heated square-off between "the common folk" under van Artevelde banners and the embattled aldermen, who opposed this audacious infringement on their power. 44 Once in power, both van Arteveldes made select use of Ghent's largest marketplace to issue proclamations and hold rallies of support, a tradition other captains continued well into the fifteenth century, as I later explore. 45 The guildsmen who dominated Vrijdagmarkt assemblies were those who had their hand in politics, who controlled the city's economy, and who served as members of the leading confraternities. To a remarkable extent, these men shaped Ghent's official culture by imbuing it with a tradition bound up with political rights, artisanal and merchant independence, and a strong civic-military thrust. In no small measure owing to the clear lock on economic life enjoyed by the powerful weavers and the fifty-three lesser guilds in textile production, transportation, and local merchandising, no new guilds were allowed to incorporate during the whole late medieval period in Ghent. Among the excluded majority were the fullers, once so powerful in the fourteenth century but now all but officially absent from formal political life. What is more, during the fifteenth century some of Ghent's most important guilds even displayed a tendency toward tightening restrictions on membership, the all-important butchers and fishmongers coming close to entrance by heredity. 46 No doubt because of the guilds' economic and political monopolies, their deans, minor officials, and journeymen were the main force behind Ghent's local festivals. Divided according to rank, guildsmen, recognizable by the color of their uniforms and the flags emblazoned with their emblem of work, dominated public assemblies. During troubled periods like the 1452-53 war against Philip the Good, political rallies manifested a precise equation between the right to open assembly and guild membership, because guildsmen

The Civic World of Ghent dominated crowd activity. 47 It was also the guildsmen who, either through their guild itself or through a related confraternity, set up street performances during processional entries of visiting dignitaries. The guildsmen's daily work schedule even determined the division of time within Ghent. As early as 1328, city authorities had hung a work clock up in the parish church oi'Sint-Niklaas to match the city clock hung a few years earlier in the Belfry. As the guild statutes of the goldsmiths and tapestry weavers make clear, the regulation of work hours followed shortly thereafter. That city time and work time were to mingle later is evident by 1442 when the Belfry was equipped with one clock to serve as "day clock, work clock, and evening clock. " 48 The public rights enjoyed by Ghent's tradesmen, guildsmen, and patricians fostered a gendered world of work and fraternization of more rigidly expressed sexual boundaries than that of the Burgundian court. Although the charter of 1297 granted citizenship to inhabitants of either sex who remained in Ghent for more than a day and a year, the ascendancy of guildsmen to public power appears to have adversely affected the political and social life of urban women. 49 As Martha Howell has argued, the displacement in late-medieval northern European cities of kin-based political blocs by a civic ideology and a set of institutions rooted in brotherhoods and corporations, not families, established a new political order that offered little public status to women. In Bruges, for example, where citizen registers survive, this period witnessed a decline in the number of women receiving citizenship. 50 Even without political rights, women in Ghent were certainly active in public life. They were prominent in the marketplace and worked in certain stages of the textile industry, particularly dyeing. Although they could not become master weavers, some owned looms; widows often exercised influence over their husbands' former business. Women also controlled a sizable amount of Ghent's wealth in lands and real estate. They owned shares in properties whose principal owner was a male, and, as widows, they retained half the property they owned in common with their husbands and life usufruct over the other half. 51 Yet no woman could become an official of any guild, though some were apparently members of such guilds as barbers and fruitmongers through inheritance. As was common in most late-medieval cities, many women found work as domestic servants under harsh conditions and for meager pay. 52

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The Civic World of Ghent Although women, usually widows, served as members of religious confraternities and festive organizations, they joined the rank-andfile rather than assumed official positions. Ghent's festive life certainly did not preclude women's participation, even if their presence was overshadowed by prominent aldermen, guildsmen, and male clergy. Women took part in city processions and celebrations, often playing roles that aesthetized more than empowered them. They appeared as biblical and classical figures or physically embodied abstract virtues, as was the case in the entry of Philip the Good into Ghent in 1458. They also played certain mythical personages in joust cycles, banquets, and street tableaux, as in the joust of 1470 featuring the tale of the "Wild Woman," her naked body covered by brilliant blond hair. 53 Despite women's urban presence, a growing body of Low Country literature advised that the public arena belonged to guildsmen, merchants, and male patricians. The explosion of writing in Dutch paralleled the success of richer townsfolk in the late Middle Ages. In both the southern and northern Low Countries a new genre of tendentious urban literature emerged which validated the concerns and priorities of the male city elite and waged a moral battle against improper behavior, marginal groups, and unacceptable ethics. This city literature, replete with a vocabulary of buying and selling, fostered what Herman Pleij terms a "burgher ethic," whose outlook underscored economic probity and the moral authority of men of commerce. 54 The shortcomings of women and youth were easy targets for writers, who embedded sharp messages about gender and age distinctions in their work. The fourteenth-century Yprian Jan de Weert, author of the New Doctrinal, sets the boundaries for proper burgher behavior by contrasting it to anything threatening. Among his targets he points to women as particularly suspect because by their very nature they challenge the divine and domestic order. Ill-instructed in theology, women worship local images rather than the heavens. Sexually malevolent when older, they allow young men to pursue them for their own pleasure by virtue of the economic security they might offer. Worst of all, their constant vanity leads them to parade in public in clothing that makes them look like "horned beasts. " 55 Such sentiments found clear echoes outside the texts. Ghent's criminal records for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show that one of the most common ways for one man to insult another was to

The Civic World of Ghent sexually slander his opponent's wife and by extension his opponent. And even if Burgundians acclaimed certain members of their household with the accolade "the great bastard," accusations of illegitimacy and cuckoldry were considered deep insults in an urban culture invested in patriarchal order. 56 That sex-specific order also abounded in generational distinctions, none more important in the realm of governance than that between young boys and mature men. Writers and city leaders routinely categorized adolescent boys and young men as problematic and threatening. In 1360 the aldermen rebuked two parents for not controlling their children during carnival.S7 Some of the first regulations of public behavior in Ghent concerned the activity of male youth groups during local celebrations, although decrees concerning the conduct of minors did not appear regularly until the late fifteenth century. In February 1485, city fathers forbade all children over the age of twelve to run amuck in the city's streets and regularly thereafter enacted ordinances to protect townspeople from youth gangs. 58 Low Country writers also emphasized that virtues in adult men were a clear result of age. The poet Willem van Hildegaersberch (d. 1408) wrote in his Of the Elderly and of Youth that twenty was the dawn of reason and thirty the beginning of wisdom and power. 59 City regimes certainly lauded the good governance of townsmen, but such acclamation was at the expense of women and children. The public culture of the Flemish cities thus emphasized that propertied adult men were the moral compass of political and economic life.

The Festive Cycle Ghent shared with many other late-medieval cities a guild and patrician elite that shaped and directed its public life, expressing priorities that validated commerce, work, and civic autonomy. Because the stress in ritual was routinely placed on local power, Ghent cautiously, though readily, hosted Burgundian life; among their many duties, the aldermen tended to ducal marriages, entries, banquets, funerals, and tournaments, events made important by both the presence of a sprawling court complex in town and the supreme position of Ghent as Flander's most important city. But no matter what the size or importance of the domain, many of the Burgundian court ceremonies were played out on civic terrain with long-standing public traditions. The extent to which Burgundian ceremony thrived in

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The Civic World of Ghent Low Country cities is the extent to which Burgundian officials skillfully maneuvered through a rich urban cultural and political life, with Ghent in the political forefront. For Ghent, public ritual encoded all the social and political fissures of its complicated civic life, while at the same time it also played to the strong grip over urban institutions achieved by theregime of the Three Members. In a more general sense, however, Ghent's public world was crowded with festive activity directed by the religious calendar of the church; more specifically, it revolved around the processional cycle of the two great abbeys and the parish churches under their dominion. In addition, Ghent had festive groups such as archers, crossbowmen, and rhetorician confraternities with their own festive agendas of such import that they require separate chapters. 60 What tied these different ritual strands together in Ghent was both a common social location-namely, the city's elite guilds and small core of patricians-and the way each event drew on the most visible features of Ghent's public world: its guild affiliations, its elite corporatism, its jingoist boosterism, and its important investment in merchandising and marketplaces. But surprising is the extent to which the city's public ritual consolidated a domestic cultural arena conjoined in part to broader regional networks of social interaction. Despite its variety of festivals, the City was above all without precise distinctions between sacred and profane activity. On the one hand, religious processions involved city affairs. So-called secular activity, on the other hand, often manipulated sacred relics and sacred times. Religious behavior and objects routinely helped to solemnize the profane world of politics and society. The city's aldermen, for instance, had mendicant orders sing masses at the town hall's chapel, and newly elected aldermen swore oaths on the relics of Saint Blasius in the central parish church of Sint-Jan to initiate their term of office. The city's clergy, in particular the abbots of the two Benedictine abbeys, served as important mediators between city and state, making up the welcoming party of any processional entry of a foreign dignitary and working as ambassadors in times of conflict such as the Ghent War of 1452-53. Town fathers hung sacred images of Our Dear Lady (Onze Lieve Vrouw) on city gates and bridges to consecrate these areas as places of important exchange and commerce; they also marshaled the holy relics of popular saints for processions in times of crisis and celebration. 61 Even given this syncretism, the abbeys of Sint-Pieter and Sint-

The_ Civic World of Ghent Baafs, and the central parish churches of Ghent under their care, firmly determined Ghent's religious festivals with a cycle of processional activity that involved confraternities and local relics. Paul Trio has recently shown that the two large abbeys and their seigneuries which flanked Ghent had an impact on the city's identity underestimated by most historians. 62 Their affiliation with the city's parish churches was solidified beyond the level of administration by virtue of the so-called public cross days (kruisdagen), when clerics sponsored processions from Ghent's abbeys to the city churches under their jurisdiction. For Sint-Pieter's abbey, this entailed separate processions to the churches of Sint-Jacob, Sint-Niklaas, and Sint-Jan on the three days preceding Ascension Day; the visit to Sint-Jan, Ghent's most important church, culminated in the procession of one of the abbey's most sacred relics, that of Saint Amalberga. For SintBaafs' abbey, the greater quantity of surviving evidence suggests that the "cross days" involving the parishes of Sint-Veerle and Sint-Michiel entailed a two-way exchange of processions and visits between parish church and abbey, celebrated with sacred relics and high masses. 63 Apart from these demonstrations of interdependence, each abbey possessed relics of such significance to Ghent that urban confraternities were established for their care and devotion, a task that included parading them through the streets of both the abbeys' seigneuries and the city's main thoroughfares. The relics of Saint Amalberga and Saint Godewale in the possession of Sint-Pieter's abbey are such a case. The two saints' vitae were written during the height of the eleventh-century struggle between Ghent's abbeys for prestige and prominence. The devotion to each saint involved yearly processions (June 6 for Saint Godewale and July IO for Saint Amalberga) conducted by a local religious brotherhood. Members of this confraternity included prominent guildsmen from Ghent (e.g., brewers, bakers, and shoemakers) who, during the Saint Amalberga procession for instance, imbued the feast day celebrations with their own significance by venturing with the reliquary onto the Vrijdagmarkttheir most significant public space-where they paused to hear a sermon. 64 But it is Ghent's procession with the holy relics of the seventhcentury missionary Saint Lieven, housed at Sint-Baafs's abbey, which most dramatically captured the interplay among urban religious celebrations, the two abbeys' relics, and Ghent's often unmanagable social world. 65 The procession of Lieven's relics took place between

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The Civic World of Ghent June 28 and 29 and coincided with an important regional fair held annually in Sint-Lievens-Houtem. 66 The celebration commemorated the abbey's acquisition of Lieven's relics (martyred, according to his vita, in the Land of Aalst in 658) in roo7, not long after the abbey took possession of the village of Sint-Lievens-Houtem in 976Y Attended each year by city pilgrims and members of the confraternity of Saint Lieven (divided like the confraternity of Amalberga into "inside" and "outside" chapters of persons of established means), the Lieven procession, because it invited the participation of a broad range of Gentenars, quickly became the city's largest religious festival. The procession's general inclusiveness often meant it doubled as a tinderbox of Ghent's social and political antagonisms-this despite the fact that it was organized and centered in the seigneury of SintBaafs. Although its reputation for boisterousness and political problems prompted the city fathers in 1337 to send two magistrates with the procession "in order to assure that no unrest might result," Ghent contributed virtually no money to defray the costs of these celebrations. 68 Accompanied by flags, musicians, and even some unidentified theater troupes, persons of all ages and various social backgrounds passed with the procession through the heart of Ghent on its way to Houtem. 69 Always eager to monitor the progess of this tumultuous procession, Ghent's bailiff and a delegation of aldermen greeted pilgrims at the Lievenspoort on their return to Ghent with the saint's relics after an overnight stay in Houtem. 70 Yet despite this supervision, the procession proved troublesome/ 1 In 1301, for example, pilgrims had come to blows with "rural men and others" on their way to Houtem. 72 By 1412, the aldermen of Ghent had experienced so many problems that they issued a decree commanding all pilgrims to proceed "peacefully and in an orderly manner without provoking any fights or disputes," ensure that no one was thrown "in garbage," and refrain from altering any customary practices so as to "provoke rumors and unrest inside the city of Ghent, both coming and going with the aforenamed saint. 1173 In November 1414, Ghent's ordinary, the bishop of Tournai, purified the church of Sint-Baafs's abbey, complaining that the unruliness of pilgrims during the Lieven procession had contributed to "the spilling of blood and of seed. 1174 His complaint appears to have had little effect; for by 1442 a sermon preached under the bishop's orders in the parish church of Sint-Jacob "in the vernacular tongue" denied rumors that pilgrims had been excommunicated for improper behavior

The Civic World of Ghent during the procession/5 In 1541 an anonymous author from Lille described the procession as "a pilgrimage and journey more of malediction than devotion," and indeed the Lieven procession did become entangled in political affairs, most notably in 1467 when returning pilgrims upset the entry of Charles the Bold into Ghent. 76 The holy charisma of the saint could become a powerful weapon in the hands of protesters, particularly when they traversed the streets and squares of the central city during periods of political unrest. Public devotion in Ghent's central parish churches involved a similar annual cycle of feast days and saints' processions, none of which matched either the popularity or notoriety of the Saint Lieven celebrations. Perhaps the most important devotion, involving city guildsmen, confraternities, and other worshipers, was the Corpus Christi procession (Heilige Sacramentsprocessie) held on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday and popular throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages. Although complete information is lacking, it seems that this procession, organized and conducted within the boundaries of individual parishes, was not city-wide before 1570 in Ghent. With the participation of local guildsmen, city officials, and parishioners, worshipers processed before the sacred host with wax candles and torches. 77 Many guilds ordered their officials to participate in the Corpus Christi procession, and even more clearly than in the Saint Lieven procession, guildsmen monopolized this celebration. The 1456 statute of the mercers reveals that those who carried chalices and candles received gifts of wine and money for new clothing, at least for the procession in the parish of Sint-Niklaas. 78 As with any sacred activity in Ghent, the character of devotion encapsulated social relations. Proximity to the sacred host conveyed much about social and political honor among the worshipers, and as a result, there was no lack of contention. In nearby Lille, such a dispute between the mercers and the weavers in 1420 highlighted the connection between guild prestige and religious reverence: the aldermen reasoned that the fight to determine each guild's proper place in the procession concerned "proximity to the reliquary and honor. 1179 In 1430, church and guild officials resolved a similar dispute that had erupted a year earlier in Ghent's parish of Sint-Niklaas among the mercers, cheese merchants, fishmongers, fruitmongers, spicers, wine measurers, and grain measurers by spelling out the order of participants: the fruitmongers were to be directly in front of the host, preceded by the wine measurers, the spicers, the cheese mer-

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The Civic World of Ghent chants, the mercers, the fishmongers, and the grain measurers. 80 Order in processions generally mirrored the position of the corporation in local socioeconomic life. In r 5 yo, when the Corpus Christi procession was definitely a city-wide event, the aldermen explicitly ranked all participating guilds. The prominent bakers and brewers assumed the front positionsi other guilds, ones that generally reflected their political importance and economic clout. 81 Ghent's sacred ritual, however, was not so simply parish or city bound that it merely offered the Three Members yet another vehicle by which to extend their power. Quite remarkably, Ghent's processions displayed a significant and compelling interaction with other Low Country cities and villages. The movement of confraternities and celebrants back and forth among cities in regular festive interactions is a striking feature of Flemish ritual life, a phenomemon that owed much to the area's highly developed urban landscape and networks of commercial exchange. The fluidity of Flemish ritual-its shared exchange among cities and villages-sets it quite apart from the well-known world of urban ceremony in the equally populated cities of northern Italy, where cities maintained festive cycles whose boundaries rarely overlapped. 82 One of the geographic consequences of a high urban-to-rural ratio in late-medieval Flanders was that villages and cities of varying sizes were within easy reach of one another by rivers and land. Just as merchants, their goods, and travelers often moved from city to city with considerable ease, so too did Flemish sacred objects and their urban worshipers. It was not uncommon for Flemish communes to visit and participate in each other's sacred activity as part of an effort by each town to appraise its relationship to other urban locales. The west Flemish city of Veurne, for instance, actually solicited other villages and cities to participate and compete in its May procession of the True Cross in 1459. Yet such interaction involved not simply the visit of guest cities to another's domestic ritual but also the collaboration of several communes in a collective ritual enterprise.83 In fact, the one event that consumed 65-70 percent of the urban revenues that Ghent in the fifteenth century devoted to public festivals perfectly illustrates this collaboration. 84 The procession of the Flemish communes to the cathedral of Tournai every September 14 encompassed practically all Flemish cities subject to Tournai's bishop. It had its roots in an eleventh-century commemoration of the end of a plague. By 1284, and again in 1330, secular authorities

The Civic World of Ghent issued passes of safe-conduct to attract pilgrims; extant letters of invitation reveal that by the fifteenth century the major Flemish cities participated, especially given that a fair was held there during the celebrations. Nor was participation by urban communities in neighboring Artois, Hainault, and Brabant uncommon. 85 The procession paid homage to the Virgin of Tournai; a local confraternity named in her honor directed the festivities.H 6 Although the foreign delegations traditionally did not transport the Virgin in the central procession, their participation was not negligible, as each brought something to adorn her. Ghent, like Bruges, contributed a richly embroidered canopy bearing the city's arms. En route to Tournai, an official Ghent delegation of some seventy persons transported the canopy to Tournai during the fifteenth century, but the total number of participants was usually much higher; for pilgrims who accompanied the delegation could swell the crowd to hundreds. Among the many civic delegations in Tournai, Ghent's party stood out: they were allowed the important right to carry the saint's reliquary through the local countryside during a early-morning procession on September I 4· 87 Along with the civic worshipers, the duke of Burgundy himself, in his capacity as count of Flanders, annually joined in presenting a new frock to the Virgin, cleverly aware of the status it would garner for him. What is more, for this occasion all Ghent's aldermen and other city officials received splendid new outfits dubbed "the clothes of Our Lady of Tournai" (Onser Vrouwen cleedinghe van Doornicke), an expensive indulgence for the city, even though only two aldermen on the average actually processed to Tournai. That the presents offered by visiting cities to the Tournai Virgin were of some consequence is clear from the lament of a certain Tournai poet in 1477 when the Ghent delegation failed to attend the celebration. "The Virgin may remain naked," he intoned. "This year she will not have her Ghent outfit." 88 Like the local "cross days" in Ghent which celebrated the relationship between abbeys and city parishes, the Tournai procession publicly a~firmed the relationship between an administrative seat and its dependents. It involved the construction of a ritual of broad regional significance-it took Ghent's party four days to process to Tournai and back-necessitating the collaboration of a host of towns

and the count of Flanders. Without a doubt, clothing the Virgin af-

firmed and celebrated her sacrality, but this was accomplished both by cities and the count in a collective act that said something not

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The Civic World of Ghent only about their common devotion but also about their relation to one another. The Virgin's status as devotional object depended on the clothes she wore and the devotees who adorned her. Without them, she was naked and unworthyi and without each other, the devotees' reverence was diminished. But the honor of devotion was just as readily reflected at home by the expensive new outfits Ghent's aldermen received. An enterprise shared among host city, visiting urban representatives, and even the count, the Tournai procession captures how the sacred ritual of any given community could happen outside its city walls and still have a significant impact on those who lived within. But if city pilgrims and official delegations sometimes ventured out to worship, Flemish ritual networks also allowed for the inverse: itinerant religious confraternities brought foreign relics on tour to the cities themselves. Ghent's city records include contracts of confraternities that passed through city territory carrying the relics of a church or chapel from abroad for public adoration. The best example is the popular worship throughout the southern Low Countries, but particularly in Flanders, of the relics of Saint Anthony housed at a hospice in Belle in west Flanders. A confraternity devoted to the saint, whose relics Flemings venerated for the prevention of plague and other serious illness, transported Anthony's relics regularly throughout the county, passing several days in any given city. The relics stayed in Ghent beginning Easter Monday for five to six days in individual parishesi the visit inspired a major procession involving city clergy and civic dignitaries as the relics both entered and exited the city, marking their circulatory path. 89 Although Ghent's sacred activity was enmeshed in its structural relation to the Benedictine abbeys of Sint-Pieter and Sint-Baafs, centered in the city's central parishes, and related to the concerns of other urban communities, the city also had a cycle of public festivals that expressed more distinctly the political and social grounding of its privileged social groups. Ghent, like other European cities of the age, had a winter and early spring set of celebrations related not only to the Christian calendar but also to the city's unique social composition. Two celebrations in particular, carnival during the last three days before Lent (Vastenavondviering) and the guild procession of the Night Watch (Auweet) in March, were especially dramatic and depict a city whose leaders at times tolerated a ritual slackening of public boundaries but always kept power firmly tied to the military and political prerogatives of the Three Members. As Ghent's most

The Civic World of Ghent vivid secular celebrations, carnival and the Night Watch procession were purposely at odds. The first playfully proclaimed a social romance of regal titles, lordly behavior, and inverted occupational and social boundaries; the second sternly asserted the tenacious reality of the normative world of work and commerce, centered on aldermanic authority, the guild workshop, and the civic militia. Both, however, recognized-in fact, celebrated-the right of preselected groups of Gentenars to make public claim to streets and marketplaces, armed with their distinct insignias of social status, be they masks, guild or neighborhood banners, or sumptuous liveries and military weapons. Carnival in Ghent immediately preceded the rigors of Lent and served as the culmination of a series of winter celebrations of frolic and inversion. This repertoire began with Holy Innocents' Day (Allekinderendaghe) on December 28, on which novices of the two abbeys chose a mock child-bishop to reign. These abbey inversion rituals ushered in the public and citywide New Year's Day celebrations during which musicians feted the aldermen with music and public performances; then Epiphany, or Three Kings' Day (Driekoningendag), on January 6, characterized by street merriment, maskings, and public mockery of the city's leading political and ecclesiastical authorities; and finally, Faithless Monday (Verzworen Maandag), held the first Monday thereafter, during which Ghent's guildsmen held large banquets to the accompaniment of further street celebrations. General evidence about these celebrations is scarce throughout much of the fifteenth century, but later public ordinances, particularly those from the sixteenth century, show that street celebrations and slogans of disorder were central throughout. Weapons, disguises, and insults toward authorities particularly concerned the town fathers, who had to police the January revelry. As early as I 337, aldermen passed an ordinance for Epiphany prohibiting "gambling, the wearing of masks, dancing, and running about upon the penalty of I o lbs. 1190 The three-day carnival celebration crowned this time of permitted revelry. 91 Legal decrees reveal that carnival in Ghent played out its traditional role of mocking, reworking, and ultimately restoring basic social and political structures and suggest a very wide social involvement, without the guildsmen and patricians necessarily in the forefront. Townspeople converted the city neighborhoods, from the well-to-do central domains to the impoverished textile quarters to the north and east, into a splendid series of fictive kingdoms ruled by

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The Civic World of Ghent kings, deans, provosts, ladies, cardinals, and patriarchs. In r 52 7, an elected "emperor" of this recreated land of royalty, tellingly from the poor textile neighborhood of the Overschelde, marshaled all other festive leaders together to join him in a joyous entry. This procession entered Ghent from the Waalpoort in the northwest and looped around its center up toward the impoverished neighborhood of the Grauwpoort just north of the Leie from the Vrijdagmarkt. 92 The paupers, workers, and burghers, men and women alike, led in procession by an emperor from one of the city's poorest quarters, celebrated their temporary authority, stopping to salute both the city's bailiff and the aldermen along the way. All entered in a "princely manner" and proceeded with a central banquet before breaking up into a series of neighborhood celebrations for local plays and street revelry. Celebrants performed masked dances in front of the homes of prominent Gentenars and entered forcibly to beg food and drink. 93 Although it is unclear how participants chose the central emperor of carnival, city officials apparently assisted the celebrations. By the late fifteenth century, they even paid the carnival lord of the Nederpolder a subsidy for renting Ghent's town hall as part of his temporary "kingdom," thereby symbolically lending their credibility and power to his rule. 94 Carnival in Ghent was a time of ordered disorder working under the fiction that the emperor and his band of local lords, ladies, and kings had authority and control over city affairs. Although a fictive monarch reigned from his "triumphal court" (triumphelic hof), and though celebrants ran wild with masks, songs, and unfurled banners, the boundaries of such romp and play were clearly circumscribed and openly policed, especially by the late fifteenth century. 95 The unusual band of carnival leaders might divide the city into small kingdoms and march solemnly through the city's street in front of the town hall and across the Vrijdagmarkt saluting aldermen and other high officials in a clear parody of standard entry ceremonies. But it was the aldermen themselves and not the lords and kings who oversaw such frolic. The emperor's decree of 1527, after all, was but a legal ordinance-a city official had penned his reign. A "prince of the pigmarket" might indeed be prince for a day or two, but the irony of his title of honor was the obvious chasm between regal claims and the reality of his domain. 96 Carnival spoofed political hierarchy in its playful reconfiguring of social relations, only in the end to affirm basic norms-this is the lesson anthropologists have driven home for decades. 97 But even if

The Civic World of Ghent carnival in Ghent was surprisingly free of open political tumult throughout the Burgundian period, it should not be dismissed as socially conservative or politically innocent. Carnival, after all, involved lessons in power-lessons that might be invoked at times of political unrest, the parodies translated into direct street action, as in the 1467 political revolt that shook the city. Carnival also demonstrated that all social groups in Ghent, not just the elite, conceptualized symbols of absolute power as aristocratic and monarchical. Carnival revelers chose titles of nobility and royalty to decree their temporary superiority over the reigning aldermen and local patricians and parodied the ceremonies of royal and ducal processional entries so as to publicize their festive license. Carnival symbols and behavior inverted urban relations by acquiring in part the ceremonial props of royalty. In their efforts to control carnival behavior, Ghent's aldermen, like most European civic magistrates, betrayed a deep concern for the political implications of this unruliness. The perfect and necessary antidote to Ghent's midwinter celebrations was the somber militarism with which the city sponsored its other significant celebration of the year: the Night Watch procession, an annual festival that best captures the defining connections in Ghent between social order, political power, and public rituaU 8 Held over the course of three nights during Ghent's annual Mid-Lent Fair (Halfvastenfoor) in late March, this armed procession of guildsmen and patricians demonstrated both the economic resiliency of Ghent as a community and the prominence of the leading guilds within it. The Night Watch procession, unlike carnival, affirmed rather than mocked the social order, and it did so in a way that stated the irrevocable authority of those in charge. Beautifully outfitted guildsmen bedecked, as the extant ordinance of the carpenters suggests, in helmets, cuirasses, coats of mail, and iron gauntlets, paraded by the light of torches through the cities' principal streets, neatly and vividly replicating Ghent's political and economic order. 99 One eyewitness thought the guildsmen so full of bombast and pomp that they fancied themselves "the lords of all other cities of the county of Flanders, the count unable to accomplish anything well without them." 100 The Night Watch procession had its origins in the policing of the international fair, held around the Vleeshuis north of the Koornmarkt. City accounts first mention the involvement of the guilds in the fourteenth century, though the fair certainly had earlier beginnings. By the early fifteenth century, accounts show that what was

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The Civic World of Ghent once a large affair drawing an international crowd of merchants and tradesmen now involved various festive activities, including the participation of "minstrels, singers, and poets" among others. 101 Aldermen held the guildsmen responsible for keeping order during the bustle. This role inspired a midnight procession during the three nights of the fair. Nearly one third of the city's guildsmen, their deans, and lesser officials marched through the heart of Ghent, beginning and ending at the town hall on the Hoogpoort. Earlier in the evening, before the procession, each guild held a banquet at its guild house and then marched with torches, lanterns, trumpets, and tambourines to the town hall, where city officials greeted them with wine and sweets. The procession itself, which typically lasted about two hours, proceeded with the top city aldermen, both bailiffs, and lesser officials marching alongside. Alight with a blaze of torches and lanterns, hundreds of guildsmen and select patricians packed the streets, peacefully brandishing their arms. 102 Both the weavers of the twenty-three wijken and the fifty-three other guilds participated, but permission to do so was considered such an honor that these guildsmen could bring only those servants authorized to help carry the torches and lamps, as clarified by a I4I9 ordinance. All were cautioned against provoking "disputes or fights" as part of an effort to ensure a measure of public decorum. A related ordinance passed in I433 mandated that guildsmen chosen to march in the parade were obliged to do so and could not abandon that duty. 103 Hence, participation was part privilege and part obligation, and disobedience was not tolerated. In I459 the "king's children," who performed menial tasks for city officials including, it seems, accompanying the aldermen in the procession with torches, were warned against their "intolerable and dishonorable behavior." 104 So impressive was this display of armed prowess and guild might that Philip the Good observed the Night Watch procession in I43 I and I444, as did Philip the Fair and Margaret of York in I 500. 105 Charles the Bold also realized its importance and suppressed the procession as part of his general punishment of Ghent after a revolt in I467 .106

Ghent's Night Watch procession affirmed the importance of city markets. It also reminded observers and participants alike that Ghent's guildsmen and its city fathers, marching together, were the ultimate arbiters of local politics. The aldermen and guildsmen dramatized that alliance with their public display of armed solidarity in the two hours they paraded together on the public streets. Of all

The Civic World of Ghent Ghent's rituals, the Night Watch procession best expressed the mastery of a majority of guildsmen and a minority of patricians over the city's public life. Those without full, legal political and economic status-including the once powerful fullers-were barred from participation, relegated to the role of silent spectators. the regulation of public behavior in late-medieval Ghent, and in Flanders at large, seems to have been at a minimum for much of the Burgundian period, there were still boundaries for social and political expression. During the fifteenth century, the regime of the Three Members directed Ghent's political life and mastered most of its important social and political networks. Civic culture, in turn, captured the grip the Three Members so completely held over local politics. Urban festivals promoted the same power of the elite as did the authors of Low Country urban literature. Such boosterism meant that Ghent's sacred ritual was in the hands of the prominent guildsmen and landowners who staffed its urban administration. These men's confraternities negotiated the relations between the parish churches in which they worshiped and the Benedictine abbeys under whose shadows they lived. The local elites consecrated ruling authority through the manipulation of sacred objects, marshaling holy relics and processing with them through the same thoroughfares in which they conducted daily business. They equipped themselves with whatever symbols affirmed their prominence: relics demonstrated their command of the sacred; weapons pointed out that behind commerce, trade, and local production stood ample military power. Often these messages were issued within the city's gates, but as the Tournai procession shows, social and political identities could be confirmed through interaction with other urban centers and their leaders. Street celebrations, for example, the Saint Lieven procession, sometimes disturbed social order; but such frolic never completely unraveled Ghent's political world. Festive groups, neighborhood societies, and working men and women mobilized both play and reverence, festive mask and holy relic, to lay claim to the space usually controlled by the elite. Yet revolt and direct challenges to public authority were the exception rather than the rule. Still, these sacred and profane behaviors opened up an alternative world in which the ALTHOUGH

worker could play boss, holding the sacred or secular reins of power.

As Natalie Zeman Davis has suggested, a temporary realization of this other domain, no niatter how circumscribed, is nevertheless a

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The Civic World of Ghent realization, whose meanings and whose forms found their way during other times into the political life of late-medieval and early-modern Europe. 107 Select festivals in Ghent had a broad social base, but none was simply "popular." Carnival was as much the work of the city council that regulated it and wrote its ordinances as it was of those who celebrated their "kingdoms" on the streets. True, Saint Lieven received the acclaim of thousands of ecstatic worshipers, but his reliquary was in the hands of the elite confraternity that transported it and the abbey that possessed it. Women of all ages were active in the city's economic life, but they were allowed no positions of prominence in public ritual save their mute representation as mythical creatures and abstract virtues during street theater. Youths were everywhere, but their public indiscretions were the source of much concern, their political rights nonexistent. Ghent's public life was in the control of the rich townsmen who ran the city and mobilized spiritual and political symbols to confirm their rule. Outside the walls that defined Ghent's boundaries, its guildsmen, traders, and rich landholders regularly met, negotiated, and, in general, did business with other Low Country urban elites. Though political and economic disputes often strained these urban relations, much more serious to Gentenars were the expansionist ambitions of their Burgundian lords. The Burgundians inhabited part of central Ghent and on occasion prompted its citizens to turn their celebrations toward them. Still, Ghent's civic world seemed distant from the cultural and political tempo of the Burgundian state. If, as I have argued, Burgundians regularly enacted power within the public sphere of Low Country cities and if they drew on that public to center their authority, what was the process by which these two worlds played off one another? Returning to Chastellain's eleven "magnificences," recall that the humiliation of the citizens of Ghent stood at the top of the list. If nothing else, this image alone suggests some measure of interconnectedness between Ghent and its Burgundian counts. But why would humiliating political adversaries earn such accolades? Having sketched the ritual contours of these two rivals, our exploration shifts to the ways city and state shaped a public world of often divisive exchanges.

3

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige

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The civic majesty and baroque pomp conveyed in the I 6 I 8 depiction of Archduchess Isabella participating in a local shooting festival upon Ghent's Kouter speaks loudly about the public and political weight accorded to carefully choreographed festivals that featured urban military confraternities and regional elites (Figure 6 ). 1 Eager spectators, townsfolk, and members of the prestigious Saint George crossbowmen's confraternity clamor around the magnificently poised archduchess, all to watch her take aim at the wooden popinjay atop a pole. Perhaps it is less surprising, then, that of all the urban confraternities that populated the ritual landscape of the southern Netherlands in the late Middle Ages, it was the archers and crossbowmen who made the strongest mark on Flemish public life in the early years of Burgundian rule. 2 The Saint George crossbowmen and the Saint Sebastian archers, Ghent's two shooting confraternities, played a fundamental role in the city's public culture; for their ritual activity encouraged a subtle yet essential patronage network between elite townsmen and Burgundian officials. Ghent's archers and crossbowmen enjoyed the support from both urban and court sources, which was typical of shooting confraternities throughout northwestern Europe. Double patronage, however, burdened these confraternities with a Janus-faced orientation that conjoined state and urban interests in an uneasy military, political, and ritual

alliance. Despite the terrific ubiquity of court ceremony, archer and crossbowmen confraternities hosted some of the most important festivals

Figure 6. Archduchess Isabella shoots the popinjay with the Saint George Confraternity, 1618. Bijlokemuseum, anonymous. Coovrimt IRPA-KIK-Brussels.

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige in the Burgundian Netherlands in the first half of the fifteenth century. Their celebrations regularly took the form of shooting competitions, enormous get-togethers that featured the crossbowmen or archers of scores of cities and earned the staunch support of city regimes and Burgundian officials. These shooting matches, held under the auspices of city and state authorities, contributed to a civic culture deeply involved in creating a web of urban competition and exchange. By linking the public realm of cities through ceremonial rites dependent on an economy of exchange networks, archers and crossbowmen trafficked in symbols of military might and right rule skillfully maneuvered by citizens playing princes, and by princes courting burghers. 3 Origins and Rise to Power Shooting confraternities in northwestern Europe arose along with the political power of guildsmen in late-medieval citiesi from their inception, they were voluntary associations for townsmen with political and military responsibilities. 4 Little is known of the early history of crossbowmen and archer confraternities, but their eventual prominence was a result of the need for urban defenses and local militias. 5 Throughout this part of northern Europe, the crossbowmen were commonly linked by devotion to the warrior Saint George, whereas the archers generally clustered around devotion to the mar- · tyr Saint Sebastian. Legal incorporation began only in the fourteenth century, when scores of these shooting confraternities spread across northwestern Europe, with the southern Netherlands and Flanders their epicenter. 6 City regimes in Flanders recognized these confraternities through formal statutes of incorporation during their most active period as fighting forces. The struggles of the Flemish cities against both the French crown and the local count throughout the fourteenth century pitted archers and crossbowmen as part of large urban militias against regional authorities and occasionally against one another. the first instance, Flemish militias incurred the obligation of landwere, or the protection of border territories, while the count warred with adversaries. City guilds formed the core of any urban militia,

In

and in Ghent the division of the city parishes into military units

obliged all male citizens under sixty to serve when called. Guildsmen marched under their guild banners/ Archers and crossbowmen

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige as citizens and as the elite of the urban defenses were expected to participate, and the earliest charters of their confraternities specify their fighting duty. After the militias of Bruges and Ghent abandoned Philip the Good at the siege of Calais in early July 1436, however, the Burgundians drew very selectively on the Flemish archers and crossbowmen, though they never completely severed these military ties. 8 , This obligation to both local and regional political leaders placed the shooting confraternities squarely between the urban sphere that nurtured them and the state that sanctioned their existence, this despite the fact that they served the Burgundians in a direct military capacity only occasionally after 1436. Indeed the privileges allowed the archers and crossbowmen reveal their dual source of prestige. True, many of the crossbowmen's and archers' perquisites followed those of other urban confraternities: the right to wear special uniforms, the right to appear in public processions and celebrations, care for the indigent, and the right to have chapels of devotion in the most significant parish churches, among the most important. But apart from these provisions, the shooting confraternities earned several particular benefits, none more notable than the right to carry and shoot their bows in public, legal immunity in case of the accidental death of another member, and regular gifts of beer and wine. The Burgundian dukes were behind many of these unique privileges that, while simple, also secured the kind of high public profile for these citizen-soldiers so readily apparent in the 1618 illustration of the shooting match in Ghent. 9 Ghent, as a major urban center, had two especially prominent military confraternities throughout the late-medieval period and even added a third, the arquebusiers, in 1489. 10 The crossbowmen were first chartered in 1364; the archers received a charter at an unknown date from count Louis de Male during his rule (1346-84), though their formal incorporation was even earlier, as the count's privilege mentions that it replaced a previous charter granted by Louis de Nevers (1322-46).1l Apart from their basic provisions for governance, these charters suggest an attention among confraternity brothers to the world of aristocratic chivalry so familiar to their Burgundian lords, because essential to their language is a stress on fine behavior and armed grace. 12 This mimicking of the aristocratic world found its strongest expression in the shooters' festive competitions. The crossbowmen's 1364 charter is basic and stipulates a governing body of eight officers and one dean, elected each April 23, the

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige feast day of Saint George. The charter reveals almost nothing about the confraternity's social life, though it summons all members to the weekly mass held at the group's chapel in the parish church of Sint-Niklaas and has provisions for good behavior. 13 Fuller legal charters do not appear for this confraternity until the early Burgundian period. Still, the crossbowmen had a secure footing before Philip the Bold gained the countship of Flanders in 1384. Unlike the archers, Ghent's crossbowmen evidently possessed a house and chapel at this time in Ghent's Overschelde region, though city records reveal little about the complex. 14 Ghent's city accounts first mention the Saint George confraternity in I 3 I 5, when the aldermen offered the cross bowmen a gift of wine. 15 A wall mural painted about this time in a city hospital offers some clues about the confraternity's prominence. It depicts Ghent's militia on campaign, led by an official of the cross bowmen (Figure 7 ). He is followed by archers and crossbowmen, aided by other guildsmen, splendidly outfitted with weapons, armor, trumpets, and pennants. A contemporary military ordinance detailing the position of various communities' banners in Ghent's Quarter confirms the confraternity's early prominence. "No one, noble or commoner," it states, "may march or camp in front of the Saint George banner, the banners of Flanders, or Ghent's banners." 16 In I330 the confraternity cinched its importance when it hosted a banquet in Ghent attended not only by city officials, including the aldermen, but also by the count of Flanders himsel£. 17

Figure 7· The crossbowmen and Ghent's Militia. Reproduction of a fourteenth-cen-

tury fresco, Chapel of Sint-Jan and Sint-Paul. Courtesy of the Stadsarchief te Gent.

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige Ghent's archers did not achieve the same level of prominence in the fourteenth century, though their earliest charter, issued by Louis de Male, is ironically more elaborate than that of the Saint George crossbowmen. The first explicit mention of a shooting site for the archers at the Koepoort in Ghent's Overschelde region is not until 1422i yet Louis de Male's charter suggests the confraternity was prominent long before. 18 According to it, a similar core of eight officers, all elected from the city's parishes, oversaw the confraternity's affairs. Their duties included the annual election of a dean and the supervision of a weekly religious gathering in the crypt of the parish church of Sint-Jan, where the archers had an altar. 19 Typical responsibilities for qualified members were fees for matriculation, marriage, and death. 20 To ensure an elite orientation, the confraternity restricted membership to those citizens "of good reputation and good name" and warned against insulting either officials of the confraternity or "other brothers." The archers' code of ethics, like that of the crossbowmen, prohibited "bad words" and outright "lies." 21 Once a year (date not specified) the confraternity had to sponsor a shooting contest in which a wooden popinjay served as a target. The archer who successfully shot the bird down received the annual title of "king" and was rewarded with a fine new outfit. 22 As was customary in most shooting confraternities, any member who shot the target successfully for three consecutive years earned the honorary title of "emperor," a term that, without a doubt, highlights the fascination with aristocratic, military culture so much a part of these urban exercises. Evidence from the mid-fifteenth century points out that during the "king's" annual "reign" in Ghent he bore a bejeweled necldace. 23 Furthermore, this shooting contest involved both civic and confraternal emblems. Before the annual contest, the archers hung their banner from Ghent's town hall, and if the popinjay was successfully shot down, the banner was transferred to the Saint Sebastian house to convey the archers' sense of accomplishment and to indicate the aldermen's support. 24 The Burgundian lords' select patronage of the archers and crossbowmen indicates the extent to which their confraternities were social bodies of privileged patricians, rich guildsmen, and merchantsi the confraternities' registers of matriculation underscore that social composition leaned heavily toward these urban elites. A 1366 list of officials of the crossbowmen, found by David Nicholas, shows that a prominent hosteler and a shipper served respectively as the society's dean and assistant dean, while its lesser officials included a weaver, a

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige carpenter, a former director of the fullers, and a city sergeant_25 By 1381, the crossbowmen had rented out their meeting place in the poorer Overschelde region and moved directly to the center of town adjacent to both the central parish church of Sint-Jan and the Belfry; demonstrating their social prominence. 26 But perhaps the event that best illustrates their chivalric elitism is Philip the Bold's entry into the confraternity in 1369 during the Ghent celebrations honoring his marriage to Margaret de Male. 27 The duke continued to cultivate the city's crossbowmen after becoming a member, participating in a shooting match in Ghent two years later. 28 In fact, as the latefifteenth-century register of matriculation for Ghent's crossbowmen demonstrates, all subsequent Burgundian dukes and their Habsburg successors maintained membership in the Saint George confraternity.29 A shared military ethic offered a cultural code as a point of contact between two worlds that were otherwise fractured by sharp social, political, and economic differences. Matriculation registers for Ghent's shooting confraternities are uneven throughout the Burgundian period. A register for the Saint George confraternity begins in 1468, but it rarely reveals the occupations of the persons it lists, though it places members under such general categories as "clerics," "patricians," and "dukes, counts, knights, and nobles." 30 The archers' matriculation register, begun in 1452, indicates a similar elite tendency, though without the stature of consistent princely and aristocratic patronage. An ongoing tally of deceased members and their replacements, this register eludes statistical precision because it lists occupations only unevenly and is without dates. Still, an examination of its first twelve columns of deceased and new matriculants yields some idea of the confraternity's social world. For those names where occupations are given, the following membership portrait emerges: twelve brewers (two of whom were simultaneously shippers), eleven shippers, five butchers, two weavers, two wool weavers, two tapestry weavers, four bakers, three goldsmiths, three fishmongers, two furriers, two carpenters, two cheesemongers, two embroiderers, two joiners, five priests, three parish clerks, two patricians, and a bailiff of Ghenti in addition, there are a city clerk, a hosier, a belt maker, a lawyer, a hatter, a wine measurer, a smith, a boat maker, a broker, a vintner, a miller, a boilermaker,

and a shearer. 31

The archers and crossbowmen were obviously men's clubs, ones that displayed the military ambitions of the guild elites, and, for the

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige crossbowmen, their very real cultivation by Burgundian lords. Nevertheless-and somewhat surprising-these masculine pursuits did not preclude the presence of "guild sisters." Although the shooting confraternities' rules and regulations are confined almost exclusively to the activity of "guild brothers," legal records for Ghent's two confraternities refer on occasion to the mixed-sex composition of both archers and crossbowmen. 32 The late-fourteenth-century charter granted by Louis de Male to Ghent's archers specifies the membership of both "guild brothers and guild sisters," and an undated part of their register gives thirty-three female names. 33 Mentions of "guild sisters" are scattered as well throughout the records of the crossbowmen. For instance, Pieter Gheerds commissioned a mass in 1468 for his soul and that of "his brothers, and all of the confraternity brothers and confraternity sisters. " 34 By 1482, the sizable enterprise of staffing the confraternity's charitable hospital became the responsibility of a religious association of "Saint George sisters," who cared for the sick and indigent under the rule of Saint Augustine. 35 Although both confraternities made room for female members, direct evidence of their sphere of activity is very narrow. That the Saint George sisters were assigned charitable work is not unusual, but it does reveal an emphatically gendered and fixed division of social labor: the men marshal their military prowess and tend to the confraternities' administration; the female members act as guardians to the poor and sickly. In contrast to their male counterparts, females members remained out of the public eye, neither participating in shooting exercises nor in ritual competitions. Because the military confraternities based their prestige on public displays of male virility and martial craft, women members were denied public access to bows and crossbows.

Youth If the crossbowmen and archers cultivated any group in particular, it was young men they deemed fit to inherit their social and political prominence. 36 Almost all military confraternities in northwestern Europe had youth groups, yet the social meaning of these associations of younger archers and crossbowmen governed by their elders has been neglected. 37 And though information on either youth group in Ghent is scattered, their very existence underscores an im-

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige portant task of the adult archers and crossbowmen: instructing young men in lessons about civic power and their own brand of military decorum in order to ensure that the favors of privilege and patronage pass smoothly from one generation to the next. 38 In 1438, the crossbowmen issued a charter for their younger brethren which gave the junior association legal standing as a confraternity and assigned "a wise and discrete person" from the adult confraternity to oversee its affairs, including the matriculation of three senior youths in the parent confraternity every year. 39 As neophyte experts at arms, young crossbowmen were closely bound to their senior confraternity in every aspect of their social life. In fact they appear to have accompanied the adult confraternity to some of the most important regional shooting competitions; in 145 5, for instance, six youths joined Ghent's Saint George confraternity at Tournai.40 A legal record from March 1468 reveals that by this time the young cross bowmen possessed their own "archer's court" directly in front of the town hall, further highlighting their geographic and social proximity to the centers of authority. 41 The junior archers of Saint Sebastian were equally associated with their fraternal elders. The city's aldermen recognized the youths in 1438 when they granted them the right to collect confraternity fees from fellow members. A piece of land in the parish of Ekkergem just outside town, rented by the local knight Hendrik van der Cameren to the senior confraternity in that same year, evidently served as a practice site for the junior archers. 42 The young archers also had their own chapel in the parish church of Sint-Jacob and celebrated mass there every Sunday and on special feast days. 43 Like the Saint George youth, the junior archers accompanied their seniors during certain regional shooting matches, and their annual "king" earned the right, confirmed by the city's aldermen in 1468, to wear a precious necklace throughout the period of his temporary reign. 44 In 1449 the city's aldermen decided that Ghent's young archers should be ruled by a dean selected, as was Saint George's, from the senior confraternity, serving alongside other confraternity officials for the term of a year. 45 If both youth groups were closely associated with their paternal organizations, serving in all probability as recruiting grounds, occasional disputes between the generations indicate the relationship was

not free of friction. Throughout the Burgundian period, squabbles

arose over questions of precedence and deference pitting junior and senior fighters against one another. In one rancorous outburst in De-

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige cember r467, Ghent's aldermen reproached the young crossbowmen for callously assuming a position in front of their senior confraternity when the two joined the company of Saint Sebastian at the archer's annual shooting competition in Ghent. 46 The youths were reprimanded for their "disobedience" and admonished to "obey their aforesaid and appointed dean." 47 Despite this ruling, such disputes continued. In April I493 the city fathers felt compelled to mandate that guest "kings," both senior and junior, attending the host confraternity's shooting match in Ghent, enter on foot, while allowing the host society's "kings" the privilege of riding on hor~eback: "Following the old custom, whenever the crossbowmen shoot, both its kings will go on horseback, and the archers' kings on foot, and whenever the archers shoot, then both its kings shall go on horseback, and the cross bowmen's kings on foot. " 48 Shooting confraternities in other cities also routinely complained not only about one another but also about their junior brothers. The charter of incorporation for the young crossbowmen of Bruges, issued in I435, recommended good behavior, as it did to their elders, but cautioned married youth specifically about adultery and levied fines for members who wore their liveries to brothels. 49 In the city of Arras in r469, the local archers advised the Burgundian officials that "archers of pleasure," an unincorporated youth group, illegally sported their bows and arrows in public. Notwithstanding the fact that Arras already had an official junior association of archers, the duke of Burgundy supported the "archers of pleasure" over the complaints of the elders and allowed them periodic assemblies to hone their shooting skills "as long as they neither cause nor bring harm to others. " 50 By and large, though, the junior associations worked smoothly with the senior ones. In contrast to the youth gangs, whom the aldermen in Ghent policed assiduously; the city's young archers and crossbowmen were showered with respect. By rs67, the Saint George seniors had actually incorporated the young crossbowmen into their confraternity's administrative structure and sociallife. 51 The weekly shooting practices, the admonitions about good behavior and deference, and a general confraternal ethic served to socialize these young archers and crossbowmen in managing power. As these confraternities prepared youth for future careers that might involve political and martial affairs, they also put these armed young men at the disposal of their adult mentors, ready when needed. The very fact that unlike religious confraternities, the archers and crossbowmen main-

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige tained youth associations suggests that youth were of no small value in a society in which armed retinues helped clans and poltical blocs to govern. 52 Even though most youths were deemed ungovernable, the select few were instructed in the arts of fraternity, authority, and warfare. 53

City Regulations Although the Saint Sebastian and the Saint George confraternities rivaled one another for social and political prominence, it was clear by the first quarter of the fifteenth century that Ghent's crossbowmen, with their honorary Burgundian members, would assume the greater importance. Already installed next to the city's Belfry toward the end of the fourteenth century, the crossbowmen acquired in r435, the large inner court of the old Cloth Hall, behind which they had been practicing since at least 1416. They secured this location on the highly prominent Hoogpoort in exchange for a piece of their property next to the Belfry, on which the city fathers planned to build a new hall. Stretching from this street up to the city Belfry, the inner court of the former Cloth Hall would provide ample space for shooting practice and competitions. By 1477 the Saint George crossbowmen had completed building a magnificent confraternity house next to this shooting site. 54 The prestige of the crossbowmen's new location lent the confraternity a measure of respect which only enhanced the status already garnered from their Burgundian patronage. Not surprisingly, Ghent's aldermen embarked on efforts to control the confraternity at exactly the time the crossbowmen were acquiring their new property. Between 1413 and 1424 the aldermen approved four decrees in which they clearly defined the rules and regulations that the crossbowmen were expected to maintain. These laws helped to determine the scope of the confraternity's social life while providing mechanisms for the aldermen's complete mastery of the crossbowmen's governance. In 1413 a dispute between Saint George officials and regular members over the selection of a dean and an assistant dean gave the aldermen an opportunity to intervene. That August they decreed that the

confraternity should be governed by a head dean and an assistant dean, aided by lesser officials chosen among the city's three political wings: four patricians, two weavers, and two men from the lesser

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige guilds. The selection of the head dean devolved on those four officials of the confraternity from the city's patricians; the four other officials from the weavers and lesser guilds selected the assistant dean, an office that was to rotate between these two factions. Henceforth, the governance of the confraternity was schematized according to the division of political power among the aldermen themselves.55 Three years later, the aldermen passed a series of measures designed to underwrite the crossbowmen's considerable expenses and require scheduled annual elections and weekly masses for the confraternity at their chapel and hospital. 56 In I4I9 the aldermen upgraded this support to reverse what they saw as So few people from the confraternity handling the bow and so seldom gathering. " 57 But much more important, the aldermen ordered the crossbowmen to serve them with annual public competitions on the Sunday after Easter, the second Sunday in July; and the first Sunday in September. At these competitions, officials would award the best shooters prizes emblazoned with both the city's and confraternity's arms. 58 The upshot of this decree was to make civic games a prerequisite for the municipal support the crossbowmen now enjoyed, thus ensuring that this private association had a very real public function. In I 42 3. Ghent's aldermen achieved final mastery of the crossbowmen with a new decree that detailed the confraternity's expenses and expenditures and specifically determined that the First Alderman of the Law should henceforth serve as the confraternity's dean, while the second alderman, alternately a weaver and a representative of the lesser guilds, should assume the position of assistant dean. So close became the senior aldermen's association with the confraternity that if not already members they were to be immediately enrolled, and if business with the crossbowmen took them out of town, they were to find someone to attend to city affairs in their stead. 59 The two aldermen's term as confraternity officials began on August I5, immediately after the election of the two benches of the city fathers. Henceforth the crossbowmen's eight lesser officials chose successors the Sunday before August I 5, pending official approval by the aldermen themselves. 60 The new decree scheduled the crossbowmen's annual shooting of the popinjay for the Sunday before Pentecost, and it specified gifts of wine at any time during the year 11 if foreign crossbowmen should come to shoot with the confraternity." Further, the crossbowmen promised four jugs of wine to each of the 11 kings" of the city's youth 11

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige groups of archers and crossbowmen on the day of their annual popinjay shootings. To help defray expenditures, the aldermen awarded the senior crossbowmen the hefty sum of forty pounds parisian a year and did away with the confraternity's obligatory gifts of clothing to themselves and Ghent's bailiff. The aldermen, not forgetting the confraternity's fighting obligation, requested the crossbowmen to form military units of ten, although no limit was set on the confraternity's size. 61 Finally, in order to ensure better uniformity and recognition, the decree required the crossbowmen to wear a white lily on their confraternity uniforms and forbade them to alter this symbol in any significant way. 62 These decrees are less indicative of the alderman's support for the crossbowmen's activity-support typical for shooting confraternities throughout the Low Countries-than of their appropriation of the confraternity itself. With the top officials of the Saint George crossbowmen the political leaders of the city, and with its members among the politically eligible, the confraternity became a voluntary association that neatly mirrored Ghent's power structures. And although the Saint Sebastian archers also received the support of Ghent's leaders, their lack of this direct link with town government made their social status secondary. The charters of Ghent's shooting confraternities differ from those regulating such confraternities elsewhere in northwestern Europe by not specifying military duties owed to the Burgundian princes. Clearly the obligation was there, as occasional service to the dukes throughout the fifteenth century reveals; but unlike their Bruges brethren, neither Ghent's crossbowmen nor its archers called themselves "our lord's archers." 63 Assistance to both Ghent and the count of Flanders might be expected, but it was never explicitly incorporated in either of the confraternities' legal records. At the heart of the archers' and crossbowmen's charters was a basic commitment to Ghent's public life. Municipal funds both supported and encouraged weekly shooting practices and annual shooting contests. Just as the 1419 crossbowmen's decree required three public demonstrations a year, so a 1464 decree for Ghent's archers reveals that the Saint Sebastian confraternity also had three annual public events: its popinjay shooting, celebrations on the feast day of Saint Sebastian, and participation in Ghent's Corpus Christi parade. 64 Finally, though different, Ghent's two shooting confraternities, along with their junior associations, did not inhabit separate niches. The festive calendar, shooting celebrations, and pool of members

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige were distinct, but the two confraternities encouraged recognition and exchange between themselves. By 1423, as I noted, the senior crossbowmen offered gifts of wine to junior archers as well as junior crossbowmen during their shooting competitions. 65 A fifteenth-century entry in the register of the Saint Sebastian confraternity reveals that the archers did the same for both junior confraternities and also promised four jugs of wine to the senior crossbowmen during their popinjay festivities. Furthermore, the archers required both their senior and junior confraternities to escort the Saint George brothers to their popinjay exercises. 66 Even as unequal elites, the two shooting confraternities recognized their brotherhood and intertwined purposes.

Ritual Solidarities As Ghent's military and civic elite, the Saint George and Saint Sebastian shooting confraternities participated in the city's public life not only through public displays of archery skills but through involvement in select civic festivals. Given their social standing and links to Burgundian power, Ghent's crossbowmen, and to a lesser extent its archers too, must have earned tremendous local acclaim from such public activity. It is all the more interesting, then, that the confraternities' most spectacular public ritual occurred more often than not outside Ghent and involved not simply acknowledging a fellow confraternity but actively commingling with dozens of confraternities from rival cities. Low Country and northern French shooting confraternities promoted some of the most spectacular urban ceremonies of late-medieval northwestern Europe by elaborating a regular series of regional shooting competitions. These festive exercises involved scores of Low Country cities, all actively engaged in days of target shooting, group processions, music, drama, and even dance. 67 The intercity competitions were of stunning complexity and dwarfed the annual popinjay competitions on local soil. Because they attracted hundreds to thousands of archers or crossbowmen and some of the largest lasted up to a month, the shooting festivals placed enormous demands on the resources of city governments and regional authorities. Scores of Flemish, Brabantine, and other regional confraternities regularly crisscrossed each other's territories to pay tribute to the confraternal ethic and to military skills. 68 Fundamental to these

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige shooting competitions was the mobility and exchange of guild and patrician elites whose confraternities at once mimicked and shared in an aristocratic, military ethos. As the example of Ghent reveals, townspeople in the Low Countries conducted parts of their public ritual in cooperation and competition with other towns. The circulation of holy objects and those who revered them was common enough and seems comprehensible as part of the general exchange of commodities and capital that was so much a part of the market structures of this area's economy. Religious confraternities circulated sacred objects throughout the Low Countries, and city elites participated together in the common devotion to such images as Our Lady of Tournai. The shooting confraternities were a part of these regional networks and contributed to them in a way more fundamental than almost any other urban lay association. Societies have always mobilized certain social groups to negotiate political relations and political boundaries. Social anthropologists have suggested that cultures might at various times draw upon groups of distinct age, status, or gender-young men, women, political officials, the elderly-to mediate both conflict and peace, and the use of such groups has a long tradition in the history of diplomacy. 69 Shooting confr~ternities were powerful microcosms of the urban elites that staffed the administrations of Flemish and other cities of the Low Countries, and their presence in any intercity competition carried enormous political importance. Here were social groups of tremendous prestige which served as fighting units for both regional authorities and city governments. The ceremonial use of crossbowmen and archers, colorfully bedecked in confraternity liveries, ritualized their essential military purpose: through playful competition they encouraged exchanges of peace. As men of public power and political responsibility, the archers and crossbowmen also used play to flaunt their power. By large festive rallies among related brethren, shooting confraternities urged solidarity and exchange in a world that affirmed the latter in order to muster a fiction of the former. As the earlier example of the circulation of holy objects suggested, one urban regime's prestige and power rested on its interaction with others. City fathers and the dukesI of Burgundy both agreed that shooting competitions merited support. But the political utility of such play

for both city and state lay not far below the festive surface. The study of play has long demonstrated the political messages embedded in the simplest of ludic behavior. Games and play are compe-

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige titian and as such routinely serve as codes of socialization and legitimation for specific social groups and age cohorts/0 In the fractious and violent world of Low Country politics, shooting competitions mixed domestic boosterism with invocations of cross-urban solidarity in a complex attempt both to publicize local pride and to paper over urban rivalries by joint military and ceremonial exercises. The presence of youth groups in the archers' and crossbowmen's confraternities underscores the military and instructional elements at work during their festivals. But it was in the realm of political exchange and social solidarity that the shooting competitions excelled. At such events the elite of the city's militia, and the elite of the city itself, temporarily suspended conflict and skirted around the barriers of language (French and Dutch speakers routinely intermingled) to fete one another's prestige. The irony of this kind of prestige enhancement, however, was that it was rooted in competition and hence retained conflict as its central driving force. Furthermore, at the same time that these shooting rites showed off the richness of city culture, the state and its officials had a role in choreographing the ceremonies. In fact, the shooting ceremonies grew in tandem with the maturation of the Burgundian state, occurring more routinely and frequently in the first half of the fifteenth century. Although one of the first recorded competitions took place at Bapaume in Arras in r 326, festive competitions that involved a large number of cities occurred regularly right after the accession of Philip the Bold as count of Flanders. 71 Competitions also took place in territory not yet Burgundian, an important reminder that these celebrations did not hinge on the Burgundian ruling family alone, though they would later become their most important patrons. In 1387, for example, the city of Mons in Hainault sponsored a shooting match among crossbowmen in which at least forty-three urban confraternities participated. An invitation letter for the ceremony to "good enclosed cities" in Brabant, Zeeland, and Holland is the first good glimpse of the kinds of activity that occurred during shooting competitions. 72 Apart from the appeal to walled communities, Mons's letter requested that each confraternity send two to six crossbowmen to shoot. Furthermore, the host confraternity made it clear that the competition had the sponsorship not just of the local magistrates but also of "our esteemed and mighty prince Duke Albert," who happened to be a Bavarian ally of Philip the Bold. 73 Mons awarded prizes for target practice, for the confraternity that traveled the farthest to

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige participate, and for the confraternity that comported itself "the noblest and best dressed." Hence, in addition to shooting skills, the competition emphasized urban identity, good demeanor, and appearance as fundamental-exactly the qualities deemed important in Ghent's charters of incorporation. 74 A much larger and better documented crossbowmen's celebration held in Tournai during July 1394 and attended by confraternities from forty-nine cities offers one of the earliest descriptions of a competition itself/5 Its size attested to Tournai's aggressive pitch to attract participants: its Saint George confraternity, under the full authority of the ruling magistrates, appointed four messengers to carry letters of invitation throughout Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, and even into German territory/ 6 The Tournai messengers sought the participation of four to ten crossbowmen from each major city in the southern Netherlands and even from some farther north, including Delft, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. City leaders offered bejeweled goblets as shooting prizes, but there was also an award for chivalric behavior. Tournai's letter of invitation, like Mons's, offered a silver goblet bearing both the city's and the king of France's arms to the confraternity that conducts itself most magnificently. 77 Tournai also promised silver bowls engraved with the same arms to confraternities that come farthest "either by land or water. " 78 The letter instructs groups to make their entries into the city no later than sunset on July 5. During the month, Tournai's crossbowmen feted two confraternities each morning and brought them to the public square. Although the target practice remained focal, the costly decorations, the ceremonial entries, the morning processions of crossbowmen to the central square drew inspiration from the world of chivalry, with its carefully staged admixture of fine manners and martial skill. To highlight this theatrical quality, Tournai offered prizes to the confraternity that staged "the best games and stagings without villainy, performing pleasing and delightful amusements." 79 This is one of the earliest indications that theater and tableaux vivants were consequential at these shooting celebrations and that either the crossbowmen themselves or a related drama group performed them. 80 Competitions continued with regularity throughout the southern Netherlands after the Tournai affair, especially from the outset of

the fifteenth century. 8 ' These shooting competitions needed the ap-

proval of reigning princes, but it remains unclear exactly how city regimes secured it. The dukes of Burgundy were both patrons and

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige members of confraternities, but they only occasionally appeared in shooting festivals. Such appearances carried enormous political weight exactly because they were of great ritual significance. While urban guildsmen paraded themselves as deans, kings, constables, and warriors, drawing on festive devices such as processional entries which were the usual preserve of the court aristocracy, their elevation was matched by the duke's transformation, as he appeared as one of them. The duke's role as an archer or crossbowmen was an act neither of abasement nor inversion; for it stressed his magnificence and never questioned his superior status. Still, the very fact that the Burgundian princes participated as fellow confraternity members reversed the usual ceremonial order between state and city. Guildsmen feted one another by employing princely pretensions, thereby dominating the shooting festival. The duke and his retinue, typically the center of the public rituals they attended, either became one among many or shot as a separate confraternity. Duke John the Fearless participated in one of the first competitions in which Ghent's crossbowmen appeared outside of their city. In 1404, Oudenaarde, some twenty-seven kilometers south of Ghent within its Quarter, hosted a large shooting match that involved confraternities from forty-four cities. 82 Ghent's crossbowmen captured first prize in this well-attended competition, scarcely surprising given their reputation. 83 Yet despite Ghent's predominance, Duke John the Fearless, in attendance with his wife, chose to shoot with Oudenaarde's crossbowmen. A local chronicler reports that "Count John had even to carry his own bow around his neck," obviously trying to emphasize the duke's camaraderie with his urban fighters. Nonetheless, he added that "many nobles" were regular members of Oudenaarde's crossbowmen, so that the prince's patronage of the local confraternity would not be deemed beneath him. 84 Despite the chronicler's words, the presence of this prince among his urban subjects, relishing his role as confraternity brother and crossbowman, did reverse usual status distinctions in Burgundian ceremony, and though evidence is regrettably spotty, all indications are that the Burgundian nobility continued to cultivate the local archers and crossbowmen at these events. At each of the major regional centers of Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels, and Mechelen, Burgundian dukes and other princes attended and participated in shooting matches at some point in the fifteenth century. 85 Furthermore, the awards of specific rights and privileges to local confraternities became associated with princely attendance. At Oudenaarde

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige in 1408, for example, the Burgundian duke granted the city crossbowmen the right to wear their livery to all competitions that occurred within his territory. 86 And even when not in attendance, the Burgundians still promoted the constant movement of archers and crossbowmen from city to city by regularly issuing letters of free passage for the semiannual competitions. The dukes of Burgundy steadily courted urban shooting confraternities throughout the fifteenth century and into the Habsburg period. There was an almost architectonic quality to the movement back and forth of these confraternities. Shooting matches enacted and mapped the allegiances and networks of exchange that drew communities of the Low Countries together. As Philip the Good and Charles the Bold patched together territories as diverse as Brabant, Flanders, Hainault, Holland, and Zeeland, the shooting competitions gained in importance, luster, and regularity. With the Burgundian state expanded and centralized, the archers and crossbowmen profited from a more unified political space within which to play out their panregional rituals. By the second decade of the fifteenth century, shooting matches occurred almost every year; still, large regional competitions were the exception. The most spectacular were in major cities and took place directly after periods of political turmoil and unrest. A strong connection emerged between these urban ceremonies and the quarrelsome politics of city and state. Of the three most celebrated competitions, Ghent hosted two: one in 1440, the other in 1498. Tournai held the third most superb in 145 5, only two years after the devastating war waged by Ghent's political establishment against Philip the Good. 87 The two sponsored by Ghent's crossbowmen also capped a period of tumult. Both Bruges and Ghent had sustained waves of rebellion against ducal policies between 1436 and 1440, with revolts, riots, and dissension. The 1490s were no less noisy, especially in Ghent, where a war against the Habsburg rulers had animated city and state relations in the previous years. "8 The coupling of the celebrations of fellowship, in which a ducal party attended, with periods closing serious unrest underscores the shooting competitions' political usefulness. With war concluded, these elaborate rites of conviviality, military in nature, turned the means of violence into a method of peace. The shooting competitions invoked symbols of chivalric behavior and brotherhood to harmonize political relations that had been strained and fractured.

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The Ghent Competition of 1440 There exists no better illustration of the way in which diplomacy; urban ceremony; state patronage, and ritual exchange could shape the Burgundian public world than the splendid shooting competition hosted by Ghent's crossbowmen in the summer of 1440. In one of the largest civic festivals of the first half of the Burgundian period, Ghent's aldermen, in concert with the powerful Saint George confraternity; transformed their city into a land of regal splendor, surpassing in size and scope the aristocratic role-playing of its annual carnival celebration. Ghent welcomed more than fifty-six crossbowmen confraternities from throughout the Low Countries for the largest shooting festival sponsored by a Flemish city. What happened in Ghent in the summer of 1440 captures all the nuances and implications of the shooting confraternities' rites of power. And though the competition encoded the ritual strategies of both city and state, it also foreshadowed a significant shift in the kinds of political and ceremonial encounters between Ghent and the Burgundians. Because the 1440 competition is well documented, it offers a superb look at the complicated workings of a Low Country shooting competition. 89 A careful examination of its preparation and staging teases out the competition's ritual complexities, none more striking than a certain elasticity in the symbolic roles participants assumed. The preceding years had been turbulent. Riots by weavers and other laborers in August 1432 had broken out over opposition to Burgundian monetary policy; and though Philip the Good later pardoned the Gentenars, further unrest erupted in May 1433 and again in 1434.90 Matters soon became more serious when the militias of both Ghent and Bruges abandoned Philip at the siege of Calais in July 1436 during a critical encounter with English enemies. The situation worsened with political unrest among Ghent guildsmen in September over the economic squeeze in part the consequence of the war against England. 91 Discontent continued sporadically into the next year, when riots and revolts wracked both Bruges and Ghent in April and May. 92 Ghent's competition could not have come at a more propitious time, given the need for a peaceful respite between the Flemish cities and the duke of Burgundy; who was determined in his capacity as count of Flanders to end any autonomy still enjoyed by Bruges and Ghent. First abandoned by his urban militias, then alternately

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige reproached and humiliated by political factions in Ghent and Bruges, Philip the Good sought both to appease his subjects and to assert his commanding authority when he authorized the same crossbowmen who had abandoned him to hold Flanders' largest festive competition in June 1440.93 He issued a letter of permission for the summer festival on February 22, 1440, to allow ample time for organization. 94 In the letter, Philip cited recent political tumult and natural disaster (Flanders had been hit hard by famine and disease during the winter of 1438/39) as the reason for his sponsorship of the shooting match; he expected the celebration to usher in peace and prosperity: "Let it be known, considering the aforesaid condition, the great poverty and want the common folk of our city have endured for a long time due to war, costliness of provisions, and plague, and in order to raise spirits after the aforesaid afflictions and to maintain good peace and unity together, that I do herefore permit our city of Ghent to stage and set up this summer, as deemed useful and good, the game and amusements of the crossbowmen." 95 The duke's approval allowed the free passage of confraternities throughout his territory to attend the shooting match and protected crossbowmen and those in their train from arbitrary arrests for the collection of any obligations or debts due. 96 Philip's permission also set preparations in motion. With their spacious shooting gallery at their prestigious location on the elite Hoogpoort, the crossbowmen were well equipped to accommodate the flood of fellow confraternities. City authorities charged twelve aldermen to oversee the arrangement of the competition, the conditions of the game, and the awards offered; ten came from the upper bench, two from the lower, including Gijselbrecht Uutenhove, a leading patrician. 97 Jan van Sycleers then occupied the powerful position of head dean of the lesser guilds and served the Saint George confraternity as its "king." 98 His authority among the city's guildsmen undoubtedly helped to secure approval for certain taxes to fund the festivities, and within no time, the city's weavers and lesser guilds consented to these levies in separate meetings. 99 City officials consequently imposed special taxes on the weavers, the lesser guilds, wine, beer, the passage of goods through the city gates, the fish market, watermills, and even the unloading of ships along the Leie, netting ryo schilling groat for the upcoming competition. 100 The Saint George confraternity allowed eighteen city officials to wear the confraternity's liveries; its top crossbowmen led these privileged men to the shooting targets and allowed them to participate.

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige Furthermore, crossbowmen promised liveries to lesser officeholders and participants, including six actors who performed theater pieces during the celebration. 101 Ghent's aldermen and their assistants each received two ells of fine green cloth. 102 Officials promised gifts of cloth to a cross-section of the confraternity itself: thirteen brothers from the patricians, ten from the lesser guilds, and ten from the weavers. Included among the patrician crossbowmen were not only the prestigious family names of Triest and Uutenhove but also Daneel Sersanders, whose election in I 44 7 as head dean of the lesser guilds helped start .the devastating war waged by Ghent against Philip the Good. 103 Without a doubt, the most powerful political groups in Ghent supported the celebration; for they were sure to benefit with status displayed and prestige earned. Months before the competition, those in charge began constructing a podium in the city's center to accommodate confraternity officials and jurors. They also set up a canopy between two target spots to create a long overhead tent, with two stakes, one adjacent to the Belfry, the other directly in front of city hal1. 104 Workers painted the canopy and tent green and emblazoned them with the confraternity's arms and its emblem, the white lily. The political center of the city tellingly doubled as the heart of the competition. But those in charge of organization also arranged other targets in various parts of Ghent, including the Kouter, one of the central public squares. They even placed two targets outside the Burgundian court in Ghent. 105 Finally, the Saint George crossbowmen placed the competition's array of costly silver prizes on central display at the town hall like so many holy relics under constant guard. Wrapped in fine cloth and brightly illuminated by some ten candles, the bejeweled prizes alerted spectators to the richness of the impending ceremony. 106 The twelve aldermen selected to oversee the competition helped draft the lengthy letter of invitation drawn up in both Dutch and French. Four Ghent messengers carried it to more than 107 "good, privileged, and free" cities throughout the Low Countries. 107 The appeal drew on rhetorical invocations to peace and friendship typical of invitations to shooting competitions, promising a match of "harmony and brotherly communion," where all crossbowmen could celebrate the "purity and artful skills," basic to their game, with the full support of both Ghent's aldermen and Duke Philip the Good. 108 After opening the letter with assurances of regional and local sponsorship, the crossbowmen promised the right of free passage throughout the duke's territories to and from the Ghent competi-

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige tion, and then they spelled out the specifics of the shooting match. 109 The competition would open with two days of processional entries, a mimicking of court entry ceremonies and tournaments which had been standard to shooting competitions since the 1394 match in Tournai. The crossbowmen specified that all confraternities traveling by land would make their ceremonial entry on June 5 no later than sunset, with equally splendid entries by water reserved for the following day. The entering retinue of kings, constables, and fellow crossbowmen, sporting their town's liveries, would be directed to Ghent's center, where delegates would formally greet the confraternity officials hosting the competition. After the conclusion of all entries, the crossbowmen would return to the central podium to register and draw lots for the order of competition. The rules allowed each confraternity eight to ten crossbowmen, with individual crossbowmen permitted twelve shots. At least five from each confraternity had to shoot. 110 The invitation promised a host of costly silver goblets (patten) as prizes, each emblazoned with the city's arms and the confraternity's emblem but variable in size and weight. Categories other than military skills received special prominence. 111 Ghent's officials offered silver goblets to the Flemish confraternity that performed the "most beautiful and glorious" processional entry and to any non-Flemish confraternity coming from elsewhere by land that did the same. They offered similar prizes to those crossbowmen entering by water, with goblets of lesser weight as awards. Officials also reserved two separate prizes for those confraternities coming both from farthest away, by water and by land. The competition would begin, then, with a shower of dazzling entries, like so many societies of lords and kings blessing the city with their presence. 112 Ghent's invitation letter offered seven goblets as prizes for target shooting but also awarded the same to the confraternity that staged "the most beautiful and glorious fire displays" during the period of celebration. The emphasis was both on demeanor and drama; for officials promised awards to "societies" staging the best comic pieces in both French and Dutch "without calumny expressed toward our king or his society." These thespian companies must have accompanied each confraternity, as they were required to perform a play every evening during the competition, the text of which they submitted to Ghent's authorities.m The invitation letter, rich in content, cast a wide net in its appeal to military prowess, theater, and ceremony. And the shooting compe-

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige tition, though a game, was less an exercise in leisure than an urban affirmation of domestic splendor. Indeed Ghent's crossbowmen were careful to point out the noble nature of the competition and specifically demanded cooperation, harmony, and good behavior. In addition, the competition's rules proscribed all such games as gambling, dicing, and so forth for the duration of the celebration. 114 As a festival directed toward "noble, good, and notable men," the match's legitimacy rested on it being distinguished from street games and tavern behavior. 115 The four messengers, carrying the letter, dated March 13, 1440, in multiple copies in both French and Dutch, and colorfully outfitted in the green livery of Ghent's Saint George confraternity, ambitiously crisscrossed all the provinces of the Low Countries. In what amounted to a series of formal receptions, crossbowmen from many cities welcomed the messengers with gifts of money, jewels, clothing, and weapons. The notebooks of the messengers point out that whereas some cities, for instance, Amsterdam and Amersfoort, donated nothing, others greeted the letter bearers not merely with gifts but more significantly with an elaborate ceremony worthy of a visiting dignitary. Such was the fraternal reception accorded to Gentenar Jan Mayaert by the city of Liege: I was richly welcomed there by nineteen crossbowmen who feted me during three meals with trumpet players and pipers and who ushered me out of my accommodations and accompanied me back too, and then led me out of the city accompanied by a hundred crossbowmen on foot, and forty others who were not crossbowmen, and ceremonially offered me wine. Twenty crossbowmen rode with me a mile further, and once again I drank, and was awarded a silver-gilded lyre decorated with Liege's arms, and they took me out of the area. 116

Mayaert received similar receptions in other cities, including Ciney, Dinant, Namur, and Liedekerke. Cities, however, were not the only bodies to welcome the messengers. The first entry in Martin van Eerdbuer's notebook reveals that none less than the duke of Burgundy himself contributed a scale as a gift.m From the more than 107 cities visited, the Ghent messengers secured the participation of fifty-six confraternities. The participating crossbowmen opened the competition during June 5 and 6 with a blinding display of processional entries by land and water. The Saint George confraternities of Lille and Antwerp entered first: twenty-five men on horseback accompanied the party from Lille; the Antwerp

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige brothers marched with three pipers, two bassoon players, and fiftythree fellow members who rode atop a wagon. The very messengers who had covered hundreds of miles of territory carrying the letters of invitation escorted each confraternity into the city. The messengers· first exchanged greetings with the entering confraternity and then led the crossbowmen to the central podium in front of the town hall to meet local officials. Then they paraded each confraternity down the thoroughfares of the city via the Vismarkt and along the Belfry until they reached the hostel reserved for the delegations. 118 The two full days of processions transformed this textile center into a colorful land of flags, pennants, trumpeters, and festooned wagons. Splendidly attired crossbowmen led by their respective "kings" and "emperors," exchanged greetings with the local crossbowmen's king, city fathers, and confraternity officials. Some confraternities entered on horseback in a simple enough fashion, parading their ten crossbowmen; others from wealthier centers bedazzled Gentenars with their elaborate entry rites. Brussels's confraternity, which won the prize for best land entry outside of Flanders, lodged in the Three Kings hostel, a fitting name for a group whose procession rivaled regal ceremonies. Its ten crossbowmen entered Ghent on "high saddles" on "dressed-up horses," accompanied by men on foot bearing burning candles with double wicks, a wagon carrying seven men, two trumpeters, and one flag bearer. A man on horseback led 300 other men all outfitted in blueand-red liveries, with an additional 348 more unadorned, marching in the same retinue. 119 Bruges was a fitting rival, its ten crossbowmen followed by a retinue of 224 with liveries and I72 without special outfits, but riding on horseback directly behind the confraternity's king. 120 Equally daunting was the contingent from Oudenaarde, with the crossbowmen followed by fifty-eight on foot, 365 with weapons, and 339 on horseback, among others. 121 Other confraternities came with special features: Deinze brought its "emperor," Bethune its "Moorish dance group"; Arras featured musicians with six ivory-carved bass horns. 122 The following day, five more confraternities entered Ghent by water, sailing along the Scheidt and Leie rivers. Mechelen staged the most extravagant aquatic procession. Its confraternity entered in two ships outfitted with rowers; a barge followed alongside, splendidly

decorated in the form of a dragon, featuring tableaux vivants of both

Saint George and the Virgin Mary. Two other barges sailed close behind, the first full of people, the second featuring a unicorn and tow-

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige ing a floating model of a castle complete with seven gates holding seven virgins, each carrying letters that together read the name of the city. 123 Breda, Zoutleeuw, Douai, and Tournai could hardly match Mechelen's stylish spectacle. On the next day when awards were determined, Mechelen secured first place for best water entry, Oudenaarde won best land entry for a Flemish confraternity, and Brussels won the same for the best nonFlemish confraternity. Ghent's jury chose the awards in apparent concert with all the "kings" of the visiting confraternities, each accompanied by two crossbowmen. 124 The selection was not without dispute. Amiens and Liege argued over which confraternity had traveled the farthest, with the Liegois, in hopes of disqualifying those from Amiens, accusing them of arriving without their king or liveries.125 Furthermore, the crossbowmen of Liedekerke issued a complaint to the officials of Ghent's crossbowmen against the Liege company, which had taunted the small Liedekerke delegation as hailing from a "country village." 126 Such an accusation of provincialism could only puncture the inflated sense of chivalry with which each confraternity competed. Any pursuit of chivalric glory was greatly aided by the presence of no less than the duke of Burgundy himself, Philip the Good. The prince appeared in the competition as the head of a separate confraternity, thereby conforming to the practice of the first two Burgundian dukes. The invitation for the competition had sought the duke's participation, allowing him to shoot when and with whom he wanted, without drawing lots to determine order of appearance. 127 It also freed Philip from the necessity of making a processional entry, and indeed there is no record that his confraternity of ten courtiers ever entered Ghent. Astonishingly, crossbowman Pieter Polet's account of the competition says little about the presence of the duke and his men, his attention having been fixed instead on the doings of the urban confraternities. Here was a real reversal of custom: a city filled with regal entries of urban burghers and a court-based confraternity led by the prince himself without a procession or entry to mount. Although Philip practiced the bow with his own court group, he also shot as a member of Kortrijk's confraternity, even though he was also a member of Ghent's. 128 Tapping into his multiple allegiances at the match, the duke cleverly circulated his prestige and connections. Ghent's city accounts reveal that the prince's party was indeed rewarded for its appearance, greeted with wine, meats, and other gratuities. 129 The aldermen and confraternity officials also

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige awarded the duke a mantle embroidered with the white lily, a gift that strengthened the patron-client relationship. 130 With more than 560 crossbowmen in attendance, and retinues that reached into the hundreds, the competition swelled Ghent's population for the few days that it occupied the city's attention. Ghent's festival had no rival in size and splendor, even if the 1394 Tournai competition had lasted longer; more important, it reflected both the city's might and the prominence of its senior confraternity. The 1440 Ghent match, representing the apogee of the early Burgundian urban celebrations, was the equal of any court fete. It capped a period of serious unrest and drew together cities from the whole of Philip's ever-expanding domain, including the newly acquired territories of Holland, Brabant, and Hainault. The ceremony seemed a tribute both to the vitality and exchange networks of Low Country urban culture and to the political mastery of Philip the Good over his cities and territories. Its timing could not have been more favorable. Within less than a decade, the bonds of allegiances that had drawn these diverse political communities together would become strained and untenable, as Ghent squared off against this powerful prince in a political dispute that would result in war and the virtual isolation of the city. In the calm before the storm, the celebration was a display of bravado and confraternal amity that skillfully manipulated symbols of urban and noble power to relate cities to one another and townsmen to the prince. WHAT, ultimately, can we make of Ghent's 1440 competition and all

those that preceded and followed it? Typically cast as essentially recreational, the shooting festivals actually encompassed many cultural and political meanings. Part of their complexity lies in their obligations to patrons often at odds with one another: the urban communities they protected and the regional princes who sanctioned their existence. Given these two political worlds the crossbowmen and archers serviced, it is small wonder that the early history of their confraternities was tied up both with the rise of guild-based civic regimes in the late Middle Ages and with the integration of regional principalities and territories under Burgundian rule. Still less surprising, the shooting matches invoked symbols at once civic and aristocratic, ones that promoted the power of the urban military

world but also betrayed chivalric ambitions.

The archers and crossbowmen were privileged men and skilled fighters with both cultural and political significance in their cities.

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige The shooters represented this elitism in part by appropriating the cultural baggage of their aristocratic superiors. As in the cycle of midwinter festivals, townsfolk used the shooting competition as an opportunity to assume regal titles, cross status boundaries, and gar; ner symbolic and actual repute. This practice was not, however, simply a matter of changing rank and dress but also of harnessing aristocratic behaviors to urban needs. Crossbowmen used processions, formal entry ceremonies, and chivalric ethos to fete one another as if they were royalty. To resort to aristocratic demeanor and courtly standards had clear precedents among late-medieval townspeople, as the example of Philip van Artevelde playing the prince demonstrates, but this ritual appropriation had never occurred in the Low Countries on such a scale and with such frequency until the semiannual shooting competitions. Public ceremonies in which the military confraternities participated only advanced the archers' and crossbowmen's claims to prestige. Large competitions of scores of city crossbowmen and archers revealed vividly how power was shared across the urban landscape by those of similar economic and political interests, who confirmed through ceremonial demonstrations their public might with appeals to brotherhood and shared civic values. The ceremonial rites of the shooting competitions followed the cultural cues set by Burgundian ritual and aristocratic ceremony generally. The postures of the body, the pretenses of titles, and the importance of fine behavior all functioned to embellish the status of the townsfolk, many of whom were guildsmen. Participation and fraternization by the very princes they sought to emulate assured the archers and crossbowmen that their rulers shared in this pretense, endowing the whole operation with moral and political validation. The shooting competitions featured a constant, almost relentless, circulation of groups of townsmeu. well-to-do or of middling prosperity, suggesting that symbols of prestige and power were not fixed entities. This process of circulation moved important social actors across an urban terrain, allowing cities to traffic in symbols of prestige just as surely as they did in goods and commodities. This kind of ceremony, molded by slippery political and social factors, simul. taneously etched each community's ritual regime and helped keep it active and ever changing. Although the city was their stage, these military festivals were not simply about townsmen and their world. The whole checkerboard of competitions was bound up with the sponsorship and patronage of

Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige regional powers greater than the political elite of Low Country cities. Kings, dukes, and princes were active players in the maintenance of this urban ceremony and invested their status in both confraternity membership and the encouragement of shooting matches. The competitions thus encapsulated power relations both vertical and horizontal: among social and political groups within the city, among political adversaries and allies of similar occupation and estate from a host of urban communities, and between competitors and the princes who reigned over them in common. The duke of Burgundy obviously boosted his status in his festive roles of prince and confraternity brother at the shooting competitions he attended. By setting cities in peaceful competition with one another, the duke also encouraged claims to fraternity while assurihg his place as the first among equals. During such moments, members of urban shooting confraternities functioned both as the duke's servants and as his brothers. Burgundian princes could and did manipulate that double role to promote solidarity under their political mastery, thus strengthening the success of their territorial consolidation. But though shooting matches tugged at and even reworked the re· lationship between prince and citizens, they did not reverse it. Hence the schema proposed by cultural anthropologists and historians that explains the world-turned-upside-down as confirming the opposite of its inverted frolic is without application here. 131 Competitions involved reversals of a sort but certainly were not times of triumphant plebs and abased aristocrats. A rebalance of a different order took place, one that maintained the priorities of the civic ritual world but at the same time introduced very important symbols of the state, and even state leaders, without granting them senior status. No matter how strong a sense of urban autonomy these festivals invoked, the duke never ceased to have the upper hand; he both held a monopoly over the approval of shooting matches and freely chose whether or not to participate himself. To join a shooting match allowed him to reinforce his urban networks by entering into them as one among many, as confraternity brother and lord. It was less his ceremony and his procession than it was the confraternities', but the prince circulated his symbolic prestige as assuredly as did the archers and crossbowmen. He could play several roles at once: duke and political leader, member of the host city's local confraternity, and guest participant with another city's crossbowmen. Thus he telescoped the ties that drew archers and crossbowmen to his politi-

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Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige cal person, allowing for a mixed sense of fraternization and difference in which he never relinquished his ultimate authority. As examples of urban cross-interests, military power, and elite behavior, the military confraternities served in particular as cultural arbiters of the urban public. The presence of a substructure of youth associations indicates that the confraternities helped to socialize young men, but the impact of the shooters' behavior was even wider. These military confraternities paraded themselves visibly in the public life of the city not only during the usual cycle of urban festivals but more significantly during their own special times. The shooting competitions exemplified the confraternities' separate ritual activity and implied too that their ceremonial forms were aggressively public. It was not just their junior brethren but the whole of the urban community that watched and learned from the behavior of archers and crossbowmen. Their ceremonies were lessons in poweruseful messages about what differentiated nobility from ignobility; proper play from sloth and indulgence. Shooting competitions promoted the idea that urban strength and power depended largely on armed might, the display of riches, and the athletic prowess of men of political means. Behavior and social status, in turn, became associated with the peaceful exchange of social equals among cities and towns that increasingly shared a common political leader. Ultimately; the shooting confraternities' ritual life and Burgundian spectacle were not simply parallel events but deeply enmeshed. The shooting competition provided a ritual format and an arsenal of actions and symbols for the enactment and circulation of both Burgundian and civic social and political prestige.

4

The Public World of Revolt and Submission

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Although the urban public space was the most important site for the Burgundian court, its members chose their appearances selectively, aware that no matter the occasion, each foray expended significant political and symbolic capital. It was somewhat of a surprise, then, that Philip the Good himself came to Ghent without a large ceremonial retinue in early January 1447 for a decidedly ungilded yet crucial political affair: he was to address the Collatie, a great council regularly convened to deliberate pressing political issues in Ghent. 1 Philip's appearance in Ghent contrasted dramatically with his previous major one more than a year earlier, when he had more characteristically presided over a magnificent meeting of his chivalric order, the Knights of the Golden Fleece, in the city's center. Reentering Ghent in the first days of the new year with urban financial and political affairs on his mind, the duke made an entrance that seemed far removed from the brilliant festival that, in the recollection of Olivier de La Marche, had so dazzled Ghent's townspeople. 2 Yet while it lacked the lavishness of the Golden Fleece celebration, Philip's arrival was hardly without purpose. With the urban turmoil· of the previous decade behind them, and with a more secure international peace, Philip and his administrators had turned their energies toward tightening their grip on urban regimes in the Low Countries. State leaders rightly considered imposing changes on Ghent as the key to this plan, with a proposed salt tax for the Flemish territories the wedge of a campaign against urban autonomy. 3 Philip had even 95

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission bribed several deans of Ghent's guilds at his residence in Bruges in hopes of securing their votes: Sure that he had Ghent's men in his pocket, he confidently proposed his tax before the Collatie on January 12, 1447.5 Burgundian dukes typically reserved public speech for near-sacrosanct moments, and as we have seen, state ritual drew more on the theatrics of bodily display than on direct address. Thus the long appeal read in Dutch on Philip's behalf by the sovereign bailiff of Flanders Colaert van den Clyte, father of the chronicler Philippe de Commynes, carried particular meaning because it marked this occasion as one of real solemnity. 6 As a measure of the importance of his appearance, Philip peppered his speech with rhetoric that insisted on his special regard for his largest city. On Ghent's home turf, Philip couched his ambitions in domestic terms, pleading that his tax request was just and right, not the least because he bore an almost fraternal relationship with the city. Like so many of the duke's ap- · pearances, the appeal was a staged presentation, its every word crafted for a purpose, calibrated like the gestures in a Burgundian ceremony. And typical of Burgundian rhetoric, Philip's speech trumpeted the supposed bonds that bound the prince to his urban clients. In fact, Philip emphasized the benefits of a commitment between himself and Ghent's citizens. However calculated his speech, the duke had van den Clyte deliver it as an appeal: a request from an impecunious prince for help in a time of need. "My good and true friends," it began, "you all know that I was raised and brought up here in my good city, so that I have and hold more favor, love, and friendship toward all of you here than in any of my other cities. I have proven this often by most willingly and favorably granting my town all its requests. And to that end, I have particularly trusted that you in my city would always stand by me in my need, and never abandon me, as you never have, and as I trust never will. 117 With such a decisive appearance by himself and his sovereign bailiff before Ghent's Collatie, and with the speech delivered in Dutch, the prince clearly tried to hammer home the notion that Ghent and his state shared not only common interests but also a personal relationship, as this was the city of the duke's youth. But though Philip's visit was an obvious ploy to push through his revenue agenda, it unwittingly affirmed an important part of his rhetoric: without the financial might of his cities, that is, without an important aspect of their power, the prince was but a pauper. The upshot of this princely intervention, then, was to bare a kernel of truth in the bombast;

The Public World of Revolt and Submission despite the prince's apparent antipathy toward Ghent, this urban agglomerate mattered to his state, both because of its size and because of its wealth. Given the imbalance of power between city and state, and given the plain fact that the duke had bought off several guild deans in advance of his appearance, Philip obviously expected swift acquiescence. Hence his real sense of betrayal when he learned that all his effort was unavailing because Ghent's leaders rejected his plea. As the Diary of Ghent reveals, Philip left the city hurriedly and in a fit of anger. 8 Philip the Good's special pitch had failed in large measure, no doubt, because townsfolk guessed the ruse and rejected the stiff demand for revenue couched in the duke's personal appeal. Although political strife was endemic to the relationship between Ghent's guild-based government and the Burgundian state, the hostilities that erupted shortly after Philip's futile appearance before the Collatie were a turning point in the delicate relations between them. The dukes of Burgundy had squared off against intractable urban foes since the beginning of their rise to power in the Low Countries, but not until the conflict with Ghent which began in 1447 were their energies and resources so resolutely tested. The dispute also assumed an unprecedented gravity for Ghent, not least because it challenged the city's social and political fabric in ways so fundamental that its bedrock liberties seemed dangerously vulnerable. As conflict turned to war in 1452, townspeople tapped into a rich culture of defiance drawn from urban corporate traditions to give foundation to their course of action. The city's important guildsmen seized on a repertoire of symbols and legal privileges that validated their right to rebellion according both to written and unwritten custom.9 In what follows, I explore the public world of this political culture and ask how rallies and armed gatherings on the city's Vrijdagmarkt, often accompanied by the display of guild banners, validated the guildsmen's fight to maintain the historical liberties basic to their rights of citizenship. 10 But though tenacious in their defiance, Ghent's leaders were also cautious in their political rhetoric, never denying their ultimate fealty to their Burgundian count of Flanders. Ultimately, this mattered little to Philip the Good; his answer to Ghent's rebellion was to im-

pose a crushing punishment, the purpose of which, I argue, was a full public recuperation of princely authority. As pa;rt of his terms for peace, the duke demanded that Gentenars undergo a dazzling cer-

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission emony of humiliation which, with a host of other ritual punishments, was meant to belittle the defeated townsmen through a drama of collective punishment. The legal and symbolic punishments were intimately related; for both were part of the Burgundian state's effort to delimit the civic realm. Philip the Good and the Gentenars waged their fight from start to finish through well-honed political rites that, while fixing adversaries in positions of opposition, ultimately afforded them a way to realign their political relationship.

Rights of Citizenship Philip the Good had amassed significant new territory since his accession to Burgundian power in 1419, consolidating an impressive cluster of principalities that included Namur, Holland, Zeeland, Hainault, Brabant, Limburg, and Luxembourg, among others. Despite this success, urban hostilities remained a thorn in Philip's side. In the decade preceding the duke's quarrel with Ghent, important cities such as Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Leiden, Bruges, and Besanc;on had experienced internal unrest, and urban factions within these communes had contested Burgundian policies. But if the challenge to Philip's ambitions presented by urban strife was real enough, a successful state policy of neutralizing or buying off opposition movements had effectively contained it.ll Ghent was different, not only because of its preeminence but also because of the considerable political privileges city leaders enjoyed, including hegemony over eastern Flanders and secure control over the city's political institutions. The refusal of Ghent's leaders to approve Philip's salt tax stifled the duke's ambitions and convinced him that the key to mastering Flanders as its count was once and for all to break Ghent's autonomy. As a consequence, from 1447, Philip readied himself to challenge directly the broad array of political rights enjoyed by the city's elite, and he found his first real opportunity in August 1449 when the renewal of the two benches of Ghent's aldermen caused serious friction between ducal and civic commissioners charged with the selection process. 12 In fact, it was the election as aldermen of two of the duke's adversaries that aroused Philip's anger. Lieven Sneevoet, a dean of the spicer's guild, and Daneel Sersanders, head dean of the lesser guilds since r 44 7, were vociferous opponents of Burgundian policy, and

The Public World of Revolt and Submission both were instrumental in defeating the proposal for a salt tax. Their selection as aldermen signaled clear trouble for the duke. Aware of Sneevoet's and Sersanders's politics, Philip quickly decided to contest their election by complaining that the ducal commissioners had been temporarily absent when the aldermen were selected, and he promptly withdrew Ghent's two bailiffs and other ducal officers as retribution, an action that took until March 1450 to resolve. 13 Although the process by which aldermen were selected loomed large in the dispute, the issue of citizenship and its privileges raised the greatest ire of the duke and his men. Although there were many contentious issues, the Burgundians seized on citizenship rights to symbolize their general mistrust of Ghent and decided to attack, head on, all that this civic tradition implied. What was perhaps less obvious to Philip was what this choice of tactics would ultimately do to his public interactions with the Burgundian Netherlands' largest city. For apart from questions of legal jurisdiction and political rights, the definition of citizenship in Ghent was deeply embedded in the city's public life. All the advantages in this civic identity created the economic and political strength on which urban culture rested. Citizenship was not just a set of legal rights but a cluster of essential political and cultural behaviors that together structured much of Ghent's urban culture, determining political rights, gender boundaries, and the rules of social interaction. 14 At stake were the broad prerogatives of local citizenship as practiced by Ghent's inhabitants-most obviously those men in incorporated guilds who, along with male patricians, alone enjoyed the fruits of full legal and political power. To question civic categories of citizenship, even on the pretext of correcting abuse, not only threw into question Ghent's heritage of autonomy; it also implied that Ghent's town elites should somehow accommodate their civic customs and freedoms to subjecthood by acknowledging a much-expanded Burgundian lordship.15 A debate between city representatives and Burgundian officials, held in Ghent's Collatie on July 28, 1450, reveals the duke's specific grievances over citizenship and demonstrates just how important the issue was to the early stages of the conflict. 16 The Burgundian party, led by Jean Chevrot, the bishop of Tournai, opened the meeting with three immediate complaints, all of which focused on Ghent's alleged abuses of its citizenship rights. 17 Chevrot charged that city officials routinely ignored the 1297 charter that required a

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission period of one year and one day to attain residency; that they failed to require sufficient proof of residency; and that the powerful weavers' guild gave membership to workers who had not yet fulfilled an obligatory six-year apprenticeship. 18 By making a priority of these complaints, the Burgundian delegation put aside the whole issue of the salt tax to press instead on the political and legal freedoms associated with citizenship. 19 Ghent's political leaders had tried to control the registration of new citizens before, particularly in 1431. 20 Their effort was sporadic, however, so the aldermen's answer to the Burgundian complaints in July 1450 promised a more stringent system of enforcement to correct abuses. 21 And although Flemish cities granted citizenship to both men and women on the condition of residency, this did not prevent Ghent's officials, in the course of their summer dispute with the Burgundian ambassadors, from assigning a gender-specific definition to the term citizen. In the July debate, both Burgundian officials and town leaders linked active citizenship with the political and legal life of men by referring more than once to the "citizen" as distinct from "his wife and children." 22 This is more than just incidental. Crucial to the debate was the degree to which guildsmen along with male patricians shaped general assumptions about civic identity and its legal rights. This important link between political rights and the prerogatives of guildsmen and their male patrician superiors put these Gentenars front and center in the civic response to Philip; for it is they who felt their liberties imperiled, and it is they who risked the greatest loss of prestige and power. In fact, because guild labor and citizenship were particularly closely associated, Ghent's aldermen also promised Burgundian officials that workers in the city would not earn local rights unless they qualified as citizens. City officials emphasized that no guild or trade, including the powerful weavers, would be allowed to accept members without official documentation proving citizenship. 23 Citizenship in general terms was closely tied to work, but this measure is further proof that it was more specifically identified with guild life. 24 The early stage of the conflict between Ghent's political elite and the Burgundian state reveals a contradictory dynamic that informed the controversy as it widened. On the one hand, the urban communities of the Low Countries formed the backbone of the Burgundian state, and thus a robust civic sphere was critical to Burgundian rule, as Philip's 1447 speech acknowledged. On the other hand, the Bur-

The Public World of Revolt and Submission gundians' success rested on containing the political privileges of those large urban cities on which that success depended. In the dispute between Ghent and Philip the Good, the issue of citizenship encapsulated this tension between dependence and power, with the guildsmen and patricians the most seriously affected. As the gap widened between the city and state, and when political insurrection within Ghent transformed the conflict, the contest moved beyond a debate over legal privileges into the domain of civic behavior, in part because to affront the legal dimensions of citizenship was to affront the tangle of public traditions long associated with urban rights. Rites of Citizenship The initial phase of the conflict, though contentious enough, had a limited social impact because it provoked only the city's propertied political elite. In fact, the legal and political debates that animated the controversy over citizenship hardly seemed to affect most of Ghent's populace. The total social costs of the war at its height will never be known, especially for those ordinary men and women for whom the historical record is silent, but a year after the debate in the Collatie there were intimations of a broader discontent among rank-and-file workers in the guilds. By the fall of 145 r, that political unrest clouded the city's political scene and threatened to broaden. The rather limited, but significant, controversy over citizenship soon spilled over into public action as guildsmen took their discontent to the streets. After the heated summer debates of 1450, Ghent's leaders and Burgundian officials had reached an impasse in their disagreements. The duke's men had still not gained full ascendancy over Ghent's aldermen, and Philip the Good continued to focus his energy on those civic leaders who had challenged him in 1447. To advance his agenda, Philip concentrated all his political grievances on purported misdoings of Daneel Sersanders, Lieven Sneevoet, and Lieven de Pottere, who served as head dean of the lesser guilds between 1449 and 1451. On June 4,. 1451, Philip even sent a letter to Ghent's aldermen bitterly denouncing the "great crimes, shame, untrustworthiness, perjury; and disobedience" the trio had committed and calling for their dismissal from public office, in as much as they arrogantly deemed themselves "the lords of Ghent. 1125 Whether Philip intended

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission to provoke an armed conflict or not, the upshot was to rouse a broad coalition of workers in Ghent, thereby widening the social dimension of the confrontation. To make his acrimony against them fully known, Philip the Good insisted that city officials read his letter in Ghent's political and guild assembliesY But Philip's efforts involved more than written accusations. Earlier in Ma~ he had tacitly approved a plot hatched by two ducal secretaries from Ghent, Pieter Baudins and Joris de Bul, to encourage a city revolt to eliminate Sersanders, Sneevoet, and de Pottere, thereby creating the conditions for a more compliant elite. The insurrection failed miserably and only exacerbated tensions. 27 Ghent's aldermen refused to reprimand Sersanders, Sneevoet, and de Pottere. The Diary of Ghent suggests the "common people" were so angered by Philip the Good's letter that they pressured city officials to jail Pieter Tyncke and the three others who had delivered the duke's demands.28 But to complicate matters, the aldermen, rightly nervous, sought accommodation, attempting to assuage the duke's anger in hopes of preserving their grip on power. 29 The social dynamic in Ghent responded to a growing set of tensions: Philip the Good's political and legal challenge jeopardized all townspeople, above all, the guildsmen, but the aldermen nonetheless feared an outright break with the duke. Rank-and-file guildsmen grew unhappy both with the Burgundian demands and with the accommodating manner in which their aldermen handled them. On August 7, 1451, in an effort at compromise, Ghent's leaders sent Sersanders, Sneevoet, and de Pottere in the company of several guild deans and city aldermen to meet Philip in Dendermonde. 30 Going back on his earlier promise of reconciliation, Philip immediately banished them from his territories: Sersanders for twenty years, Sneevoet for ten, and de Pottere for fifteen. Ironically, the three had knelt before Philip to acknowledge his lordship, a strong gesture given their political differences with him. More than just routine etiquette, their submission, barefoot and bareheaded, powerfully signaled fidelity, countering the accusations that these Gentenars had inverted the proper relation of subjects to princeY Deploying one of the many conventions of Burgundian ritual, these three men beseeched the duke's approval. No matter what their true feelings were, Sersanders, Sneevoet, and de Pottere played to the duke's theater of power in an act whose meaning was fixed by the state as part contrition and part gesture of loyalty. Back in Ghent, the townspeople grasped the political import of the

The Public World of Revolt and Submission Dendermonde meeting. Riots erupted upon news that the prince had banished the three guild leaders, and rumors flew that they had been murdered. In part, Gentenars responded to the prince's refusal to grant the pardon upon which the submission was predicated, but they also felt betrayed by the attempt at compromise by their leaders. On August 9, guildsmen refused to go to work. Only the appearance of Sersanders', Sneevoet's, and de Pottere's wives, bearing letters from their husbands, prevented outright revolt. 32 Geeraart van Ghistele, Ghent's bailiff, left during the political unrest, fearing prosecution after accusations that he had deceived the three suffering banishment. On August 14, an armed and menacing crowd gathered on the Vrijdagmarkt, but the next day civic and Burgundian officials selected new aldermen without serious repercussions. Initially, the duke replaced van Ghistele with an official from Brussels, but certain that his policy of confrontation had worked, Philip returned van Ghistele to his office on October r. 33 Still, many of Ghent's workers seethed with anger. About this time, some guildsmen circulated a threatening leaflet parodying their aldermen as weak and accommodating. The exact identity of its authors is unknown, but the leaflet obviously was meant to appeal to Ghent's ordinary workers. Its cutting barb showed a deepening mistrust of the city's political leaders: "You, cowards of Ghent, who now rule, we will no longer appeal to you, but will complain to a new van Artevelde. "~4 The town was once again on the verge of riot. Angered that the submission at Dendermonde earned rebuke instead of forgiveness, and openly suspicious of the newly elected aldermen, the anonymous author invoked a revolutionary past to threaten political disorder. With the figure of van Artevelde, this Gentenar summoned a historical hero whose memory was inextricably bound up with the city's political and military power, particularly its history of social unrest and political defiance. Events soon gave angry guildsmen reason to act. On October I 3, Pieter Tyncke and Lodewijk d'Hamere, the conspirators who had tried to raise an insurrection in May, accused Jan Goetghebuer, head dean of the weavers, of misdeeds. That was a clear mistake, not only because the head dean was one of Ghent's most powerful politicians but also because the weavers were at the forefront of the political unrest. The weavers responded in the Collatie by having Tyncke and d'Hamere arrested and jailed. Philip the Good hastily dispatched a letter to Ghent's bailiff to have the two released, and when the guildsmen refused to comply, the duke once again withdrew his offi-

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission cials from the city. Many of Ghent's guildsmen, the weavers in particular, greeted the duke's action with armed rallies in their meeting houses. The conflict seemed to spin out of the more conservative aldermen's control. 35 City officials interrogated Tyncke, d'Hamere, and other conspirators and executed the two leaders on November I I over the explicit objection of Philip's administration. 36 Ghent's two head deans stirred up rebellious sentiments through most of November and used the period of unrest to accuse and jail several city aldermen and officials from previous administrations for corruption and fraud. 37 On November IS, Ghent's aldermen addressed a letter to Philip imploring his understanding. 38 A day later, representatives from Ghent's Three Members took the unusual step of appointing a certain Lieven Willemets "justiciar" to replace the absent ducal bailiff. In an important ceremony, participants drew on symbols both of authority and of discord to validate their illegal undertaking. On the morning of November I6, guildsmen marched to the Vrijdagrnarkt, waving aloft their guild flags, symbols of civic association, in an obvious effort to create solidarity. 39 But like the Dendermonde meeting, the Vrijdagmarkt gathering played to the iconography of ducal power. It was with compromise in mind that those who directed the procession cleverly included a Burgundian flag amid the guild banners. The Diary of Ghent reports that "although there was no bailiff there," Ghent's crowds processed with the prince's flag raised high and proceeded "quietly and in union" to the central square. 40 In a letter discussing the incident, Ghent's aldermen boasted that the procession promoted a strong sense of concord, a telling indication that in the mind of civic authorities, this public assembly with guild symbols dramatized the collective unity of the city. 41 By skillfully intermeshing civic and ducal symbols, Gentenars incorporated the duke of Burgundy as a fraternal member of this procession of corporations. But the use of the Burgundian flag just as obviously betrayed the guildsmen's search for an official sanction of their impromptu proceeding. 42 Despite the public display of banners, the events that followed the procession to nominate Ghent's new justiciar further estranged Ghent from Burgundian leaders. On November 20, Ghent's aldermen sent a delegation of clerics and knights, led by the abbots of Sint-Pieter and Sint-Baafs, to negotiate with the duke the return of Ghent's bailiffi in exchange, Philip allowed Sersanders, Sneevoet, and de Pottere to return to Ghent for a six-week period. 43 The diplomatic parlays, instead of

The Public World of Revolt and Submission soothing tensions, provoked hostility and anger in the guilds, whose members again greeted a move toward political compromise with protest. 44 On November 24, worried aldermen sent a letter to Philip urging the immediate return of the bailiff and warning, "We can no longer keep the common people under our control.'145 The following day, mounting pressure from guild workers forced aldermen to release Lieven Boone from prison. Dean of the bricklayers and popular for his anti-Burgundian stance, Boone had been jailed since November I on charges of extortion. City aldermen, swift in their response, immediately appointed him to the post of justiciar in place of WillemetS.46 Guildsmen continued to rally in their meeting houses, and on November 3I, ducal representatives in the Collatie announced Philip's intention to return his bailiff if the guildsmen disbanded and went back to work. Ghent's aldermen likewise urged their workers "to cease the watch and go to work. " 47 But an unbridgeable chasm had developed between Ghent's workers and the more privileged aldermen, and guildsmen responded on December I with an another rally on the Vrijdagmarkt, meeting "peacefully and in union" with banners raised high, but also brandishing weapons. Defiantly, these workers and guild officials stubbornly refused to budge and continued to rally in their guild houses and out on Ghent's largest marketplace. Two days later, the rebellious guildsmen triumphed over some of the more cautious aldermen and selected three local captains to run the city: Jan Willaey, a Ghent patrician; the newly appointed judge Lievin Boone, a guildsman; and Everaerd van Botelaere, a weaver. A new regime inaugurated by political protest had taken over the city. 48

Banners, Rallies, and Guildsmen This was not the first time Ghent had appointed "captains" to conduct city affairs during a time of crisis. Captains chosen from the city's five central parishes had ruled Ghent as early as I3I9-29; then during the ascendancy of the two van Arteveldes, I338-49 and in 1382; and again in 1436, during the conflict with Philip after the Calais affair. 49 As a consequence, the office of the captaincy gave Ghent's new regime symbolic association with past episodes of unrest, in particular, with the political legacy of the van Arteveldes. But the new government of three captains also reflected contempo-

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission rary political circumstances. With a patrician, a weaver, and a lesser guildsman at the helm, Ghent held fast to the political alliance of the city's Three Members. The townspeople's appointment of three captains to govern the city clearly signaled a move away from the use of diplomacy to mediate their conflict with the duke and toward a stronger emphasis on expressions of Ghent's separate corporate identity through public speeches and public assemblies. The extraordinary circumstances of a new regime and direct confrontation with state officials prompted Ghent's guildsmen and other city leaders to dig deep into their own local traditions to anchor their authority. Importantly, Ghent's political culture reflected the slogans and symbols of the guildsmen, who dominated every aspect of the rebellion, including the composing of public responses to Philip the Good's efforts to reduce their privileges. From the onset of serious trouble, at the appointment of a local citizen to replace the absent bailiff, guildsmen had used one of the best available means to voice defiance: public assemblies under guild banners. 50 The three captains made such gatherings a staple of their regime; for their legitimacy depended, fundamentally, on these guildsmen in revolt. In turn, those who rallied both affirmed and reworked their political identity through these public demonstrations, papering over the very real differences among them which normally animated their political life, to muster a collective show of defiance. And yet the relationship between guildsmen, their political life, and public displays of banners was certainly not novel to the Ghent War. Every guild's public identity was rooted in its flag, decorated with a simple symbol of the guild's trade alongside the arms of Flanders and of Ghent. 51 Guild banners appeared often during political turmoil in medieval Flemish cities, particularly after the arrival of guildsmen on the Flemish political scene at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Annales of Ghent, for example, recounts that on March r 3, 1302, the dusk of the monopoly over political power enjoyed by Ghent's entrenched thirteenth-century oligarchy, the city's "commoners" rallied against patricians with their battle standards firmly in hand. 52 On July 12, 1302, the day after the battle of Kortrijk, where Flemish fighters defeated troops of the French king Philip the Fair, urban partisans mobilized support with a procession across Ghent in which soldiers raised unspecified banners aloft. With the attention of other citizens aroused, the party gathered under the

The Public World of Revolt and Submission count of Flander's banner; after assembling, they proclaimed their unity by throwing the king's standard to the ground. 53 Insults to enemy banners were an important element in the political behavior of Flemish workers, to whom these flags were symbols whose meanings depended on their precise use. In September 1379, for instance, during Ghent's celebrated struggle against Bruges and Count Louis de Male, Jan Yoens, leader of Ghent's feared military brigands the White Hoods, had his men murder the city's bailiff, Rogier van Autryve. Van Autryve's crime had been to march to the Vrijdagmarkt beneath the count's banner, determined to arrest Yoens. After van Autryve's death, the White Hoods mutilated the count's banner and threw it alongside van Autryve's corpse, restating their right to control this marketplace. 54 In the violent clash, the count's banner powerfully evoked the space of authority. For van Autryve, it encoded his right to exercise power; for the White Hoods, it threatened an illegitimate seizure of their own turf. 55 The use of guild banners in Ghent was, moreover, intimately linked to the city's military world. Flemish civic militias commonly claimed the right of wapeninge, or the armed assembly with banners in public. Several of Ghent's guild statutes, furthermore, assured guildsmen of this right. The 1350 statute of the tapestry weavers, for example, ordered its men "to come to all the guild's armed assemblies." In addition, the fifteenth-century statutes of the belt makers and the woodworkers penalized members who did not come to the Vrijdagmarkt under the banners of their guild when called to an armed assembly. 56 Despite the guilds' reliance on banners as political tools, the misuse of public gatherings for revolt earned stern measures of punishment from local authorities. The Burgundian dukes were particularly ready to curtail the guildsmen's use of banners as a technique for airing grievances and controlling public space. Political unrest in Bruges in 1407 offers an early example of Burgundian willingness to contest the employment of guild banners to foster dissent. In that year, John the Fearless, to punish recalcitrant town leaders who had stirred up opposition to taxation, issued an ordinance limiting the use of banners by Bruges's guildsmen. The duke permitted guildsmen to carry banners only with his permission, "and also not before our own banner . . . is carried on the marketplace and deployed there." 57 The ordinance also forbade guildsmen to use public assemblies for political protest. Although this decree was annulled in I4II, the 1438 pardon letter issued by Philip the Good after another revolt in Bruges reincorporated its restrictions on banners and public

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission gatherings. 58 This time the Burgundians admitted that banners had emboldened the rebellious crowd. The citizens of Bruges, according to the language of the treaty, "were more resolute from having assembled in rebellion with arms and banners." 59 Ironically, the Burgundian dukes had placed no such restrictions on Ghent. Indeed, Philip the Good had granted a common banner decorated with the arms of Flanders on one side and those of the city on the other side to Ghent's lesser guilds in 1430, presumably for use in military expeditions. In the same act, the duke also had allowed each guild the right to put its symbol on the banner, "in order that the banners become more apparent and recognizable to those who will proceed under them. " 60 Despite the absence of restrictions on banners in Ghent, the city's guildsmen shrewdly grasped the politics behind the display of symbols that so impacted their identity and authority. Had they not placed the prince's banner ahead of the throng of guild banners when they gathered to choose a new justiciar? To avoid conflict, as John the Fearless's 1407 ordinance for Bruges decreed, urban symbols must be conjoined to Burgundian ones. Such· an important decree reminded guildsmen that to usurp public space in order to promote a separate civic agenda was a risky enterprise. Only when compromise failed and outright conflict followed did Ghent's guildsmen risk a full takeover of the city's central square without mobilizing Burgundian symbols. With their mastery of the city secured by early December 145 r, the three captains quickly decreed an ordinance intended to give firmer shape to insurrectionary enthusiasm. Issued in the name of "the prince, the justiciar, and the aldermen," the law ordered guildsmen to gather with their banners in an orderly fashion on the Vrijdagmarkt when called upon to do so. Not only did the decree legitimate the guildsmen's public expression of political rebellion, it also opened the way for street action to determine the course of political events: On behalf of the prince, the justiciar, and the aldermen, we order that whoever, as a member of a guild, does not come under his guild's banner or wants suddenly to leave the Vrijdagmarkt [during the assembly], will be punished with the confiscation of the upper part of his guild outfit. No one, whoever he is, can depart from underneath the guild's banner without the consent of his dean or officials. One who is not a member of a guild does not have to stand underneath a banner, unless he is ordered to do so or comes in the company of the guild's banner. No one shall cry out or act indecently, and whoever does so, will be

The Public World of Revolt and Submission fined twenty groat. However, if someone wants to speak, and has made that known to his dean or officials, who is responsible for making the speech proper, it shall be duly considered. Anyone who does not come to the Vrijdagmarkt under his guild's banner, and then suddenly comes, shall be swiftly punished by the magistrates and the justiciar.61

The three captains were quick to subordinate normal political institutions such as the town government and the Collatie to their rule. They drew much of their authority not from these political structures but from three tactics: the use of assembled crowds to command legitimacy; a reliance on direct speech and public appeal; and a strong pitch to the legacy of urban privileges and rightful subordination to their Burgundian count. All three tactics made generous use of public space, and all three depended on a capacity to guide, even command, crowd action. In this time of conflict, there was a shift in Ghent's public ritual, as all energies and resources were focused within the city's walls. The interaction with other cities and other ritual times which was so much a part of Flemish urban life ceased altogether as Ghent prepared for possible war. Not surprisingly, the three captains inaugurated their regime by swift public action and the prosecution of Ghent's former political leaders. One day after their appointment, the captains sent an armed force to Biervliet, outside of Ghent's Quarter, to secure direct access to the North Sea. 62 They also had a scaffold erected on the Vrijdagmarkt, directly before both the city's banner and the duke's banner, still being careful to intermesh Ghent's emblem of authority with that of Philip the Good. 63 Despite the Burgundian banner hanging in front of the scaffold, the duke vigorously opposed the wave of executions, banishments, and confiscations that began once the scaffold was built. By December 5 the captains had already sentenced five former aldermen to death, although at the last moment the captains spared the life of the former bailiff of Ghent, Boudewijn de Vos. 64 During December, several ducal sympathizers in Ghent either fled, as many had done earlier, or found themselves banished, their goods and property confiscated, like the sixty-eight exiled by the captains on December I I alone. 65 On February 5, the captains even issued a long list of former city officials accused of corruption who had served the city during the sixteen previous years. The new regime's political credibility hinged on discrediting those whom they succeeded. 66 Yet though the new regime challenged, persecuted, and vilified for-

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission mer city administrations, its members remained cautiously respectful of theirprince. A letter issued by Ghent's captains to Liege's city authorities solicited their approval but spoke favorably of Philip the Good. The captains repeated that their appointment, like that of the justiciar, resulted only from the duke's willful withdrawal of Ghent's legal officers. They stressed the orderly nature of the procession that had led to the justiciar's appointment, mentioning that the duke's banner had been prominently displayed. 67 The subsequent rallies of Ghent's guildsmen, they noted, had proceeded from a "common accord and peacefully." The captains even praised Philip as a 11 good, natural, and virtuous prince" and depicted themselves as "true, faithful subjects and citizens. 1168 Clearly, the captains argued, it was not their goal to undermine Ghent's relationship with the Count of Flanders. The letter to Liege discloses what would become a general tactic of the captains: the use of historical precedent to mask any rupture between Ghent and the Burgundian state stemming from their rise to power. By public assertions of traditional political privileges, the three captains located their authority, and their public actions, in the legal and political texts that together codified Ghent's power. By investing their legitimacy in charters so carefully kept under guard in the city's Belfry, the captains joined deeds to words, linking the public world of political insurrection to a textual tradition whose rights made public action possible. With that goal in mind, the three captains sponsored on December 9 a procession composed of aldermen, the two head deans, and guild officials under their flags to the municipal archives housed in the Belfry. 69 The procession to the Belfry only magnified the ritual connection between these privileges and the captains now in charge. Participants in the procession retrieved certain letters from the archives and carried them out for public display. The three captains then assembled crowds on the Vrijdagmarkt and read these letters aloud. The three captains' ceremonies involved strategies laden with political meaning. In the first instance, they breathed fresh life into these historical artifacts by translating them from French and Latin into Dutch, turning foreign texts into local ones. Equally important, they read four historical documents from the balcony of the Tooghuis, one of the most prominent buildings on the Vrijdagmarkt and the place where the counts of Flanders traditionally received oaths of fealty after public entries into Ghent_l0 By doing so, the captains made use of a tactic wielded before in Ghent, during a heated dis-

The Public World of Revolt and Submission pute in I40I between city fathers and Philip the Bold over legal jurisdiction. The aldermen greeted French mediators, who arrived in late March, with a tour of the Belfry, where they eagerly displayed, then read aloud, each important privilege that supported their position/' What made the captains' efforts in I45 I different was their dramatic gatherings on the Vrijdagmarkt, where, before a large crowd, they transformed texts into speech, where words and their meanings follow a different signifying process. 72 Speech is inherently more multivalent than the written word, its utterances interpreted freely, and variously, by its diverse audience, as historian Roger Chartier has clarified. 73 Once translated and read aloud in Ghent's local dialect, the letters acted as political clues to guildsmen willing to grasp their relevance. In this moment of heightened political awareness, it was the audience who introduced new meaning into these old texts. The first letter read was a pledge, by Philip the Fair "as a faithful prince," made in I296, to protect Ghent. 74 The captains also read a promise, issued by authorities in Brussels in I297, that its community would not shelter fugitives from Ghent. They then assured the assembled Gentenars of six other letters from key cities in Brabant, including Antwerp and Mechelen, which offered the same level of cooperation. The captains then read a similar pledge made by John, duke of Brabant, in I307, and a letter issued in I325 by Louis de Nevers, count of Flanders, which assured fair taxation and tolls for Ghent's inhabitants. 75 The letters that had perhaps the most dramatic effect on the audience were the three pardons issued by Philip the Good after Ghent's political unrest of I432, I437, and I440. 76 In these letters, Philip had denounced the Gentenars' use of banners, armed vigils, and gatherings on the Vrijdagmarkt. He had even accused the citizens of lese majesty. But as the letters proved, the duke had ultimately pardoned their actions. 77 The captains reviewed Philip's accusations of revolt for those engaged in this very same action as they listened to the captains' words. The result was twofold. The pardon letters linked those gathered on the Vrijdagmarkt to the past by joining their present association to previous ones. The content of the Philip's letters also gave meaning and legitimacy to the citizens' public actions and assured them of a peaceful outcome. The comparison provided both a past of legendary rights and a blueprint for action.

In the early days of the captains' regime, the three men relied

greatly on the support of the guildsmen who had been assembled on the Vrijdagmarkt since December r. In their first ordinance concerning banners, the captains had affirmed the right to assemble but had

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission demanded that all gatherings proceed peacefully, a stipulation they had to strengthen by prohibiting illegal gatherings and sporadic violence. On December I4, the captains had a certain Hendrik van den Broucke, accused of assault, executed on the Vrijdagmarkt, "in order to make him an example. 1178 The lesson offered was that public rebellion did not mean public disorder. Maintaining discipline was a challenge for the three captains. If they relied on public rallies, drawing their mandate from guildsmen in revolt, how; then, might they disband the crowd that had kept a vigil on the Vrijdagmarkt since December I? After van den Broucke's execution, the captains tried to answer that question by pressing the guildsmen's rebellious energy into the service of Ghent's defenses. The captains praised the guildsmen's steadfastness but urged them to return to work for the good of their guilds and for the support of their wives and children. 79 The leaders delicately suggested that the men leave the Vrijdagmarkt and return to their neighborhoods and homes under their banners. The captains also urged them to form military patrols (koninkstavelrijen) to guard the streets at night and to prepare for armed expeditions. 80 Even if the three captains could successfully disperse the guildsmen, they would still need a system of ordering crowd activity, especially because the Vrijdagmarkt was such a powerful civic space with boundaries clearly in the hands of ordinary workers, not the three captains. Hence to their decree that workers were to disband from the Vrijdagmarkt the captains added a few simple rules for calling them together: After everybody has departed from the Vrijdagmarkt, the captains will henceforth ring the work clock in the Belfry three times on one side, four strikes apiece, when they want to inform the people of any news. Upon hearing this, each person will come from his guild to the Tooghuis on the Vrijdagmarkt, and listen to what the captains have to say. The three captains will read all incoming letters they receive, without fail, in order to determine whether there is any important business that demands the attention of our citizens. If we ring the work clock repeatedly on both sides, everyone is required immediately to come to the Vrijdagmarkt under guild banners in unison, if one wants to preserve his life ... and the captains will jail and consider an enemy of the city whoever speaks out against this summons or stays behind. 81

As a witness to these events specified, the assembly without banners precluded weapons; the assembly with banners, however, concerned graver issues and required guildsmen to come armed. 82

The Public World of Revolt and Submission The captains immediately put their new system to a test, after a careful reminder to guildsmen that the new regime ruled only by the "will, knowledge, advice, and consent of all of you." 83 They ordered crowds to assemble without banners and arms between nine and ten o'clock on the morning of December I9. As the crowd gathered, the captains requested all guildsmen to stand behind their respective deans, "as if they had banners on the marketplace." The captains carefully forbade guildsmen to depart, to mingle with others organized behind their deans, or to wander about, committing distractions and making noise. Once gathered, the captains read the guildsmen a letter from the count of Estampes demanding the release of the city's former bailiff Boudewijn de Vos. 84 More assemblies on the Vrijdagmarkt followed shortly thereafter: to read letters about negotiations, to clarify the new regime's political position, to denounce fugitives and confiscate their goods, and to execute prisoners, among other matters. 85 There is some evidence, however spotty, of resistance to forced assemblies without arms and banners, an indication that the regime did not necessarily enjoy the broad mandate it claimed. On January II, I452, the captains once again publicly demanded that all guild members attend rallies on the Vrijdagmarkt, "because we have determined that many people stay behind." At the same time, the captains also decided to require the city's patricians to participate in rallies, because they too formed part of the civic government. 86 Failure to rally earned stern punishment, and public records show that it happened only once in the conflict. On February 26, I45 3, the head dean of the lesser guilds, in cooperation with all guild deans, fined Jacob Bekaert, dean of the guild of the oil millers (olieslaghers), for not bringing the guild's banner to the Vrijdagmarkt during a public gathering. 87 The deans forcefully reproached Bekaert because his negligence might have resulted in the "destruction of the city." 88 As part of his punishment, the deans ordered a mass sung on August I 5 in the presence of other guild deans at the city's convent of Augustinian friars, a requiem sung there on the anniversary of the rally to which he failed to bring a flag, a weekly mass sung in perpetuity at the chapel of Saint George, and the construction of two stone tablets that bore the sentence against the guild, one for display in the Collatie and the other for display in the Augustinian covent. 89 The sentence against Bekaert underscores just how crucial banners and orderly assemblies were to the captains' mandate. This punishment is a strong indication that the success of political assemblies depended on a unity created by unfurled guild banners, so

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission much so that the absence of one banner should provoke the wrath of the guild deans. As the author of the anonymous Diary of Ghent would have us believe, the visual impact of a field of united banners could also heal political rifts and create union out of discord. The diarist tells of one incident on July 3, I452, when residents from the quarters of Sint-Pieter and the Overschelde squared off against other citizens on the Vrijdagmarkt to dispute the election of a new upper captain. To avoid the two parties coming to blows, authorities urged both to disband, to return to their neighborhoods, and to reassemble under their banners. Only after the crowds had reconvened "in a fraternal manner," with banners aloft, were they able to resolve their differences. 90 The three captains used other public ceremonies to consolidate their rule and the privileges they defended. In February I452 theregime arranged for a neighborhood festive society to perform a play in public which allegorized the conflict between Ghent and Philip the Good by depicting it as an estrangement between a father and the eldest of his four daughters. The daughters obviously referred to the Four Members of Flanders, with Ghent the foremost. The play used family imagery to represent proper power, with the prince as a paternal figure and his dependent cities as favored daughters, much like the fourteenth-century Ghent poem by Boudewijn vander Luere which portrayed the count of Flanders as a father figure and Ghent as a young virgin. 9 ' Still, no public performance matched the regular processions of banners and crowds which marked the captains' regime. Public assemblies on the Vrijdagmarkt fostered a politics rooted in public action; banners gave symbolic expression to the political legitimacy of guildsmen and those whom they appointed to rule. Public assembly was the highest public articulation of the guildsmen's power, and it gave visual proof to their rights as citizens.

War and Submission The triumph of the captains' regime did not completely undermine the power structures that had anchored Ghent's political life for nearly a century. Historians from Henri Pirenne to Richard Vaughan have exaggerated the revolutionary character of the regime that ruled Ghent from late I45 I into I45 3· In fact, although the number of captains changed several times, guildsmen had originally

The Public World of Revolt and Submission divided the captaincy to mirror the alliance of power among Ghent's Three Members, with a patrician, a guildsman, and a weaver appointed.92 And though there is no precise information from which to determine the social basis of the captains' rule, the lack of largescale unrest suggests that the regime commanded the support of the overwhelming majority of Ghent's tradesmen and workers. The captains and their supporters hardly wanted to overturn Burgundian supremacy. Instead, Gentenars aimed to protect civic legal and political autonomy gained during the previous two centuries. Ghent's captains wanted to maintain the status quo, and consequently they looked back for a model, as was common for movements of protest and insurrection, urban or otherwise, in the late Middle Ages. 93 But despite these moderate ambitions, their regime was a direct rebuke to Philip and his aim of gaining control of Ghent's local administration and scaling back its urban privileges. In the face of this challenge, the duke tried mediation but soon turned to force. 94 From April I452 until July I453, Ghent's forces engaged Burgundian armies in a series of bloody battles and skirmishes. At the outset of the armed confrontation, the city made a concerted effort to win the sympathy of other urban regimes, but only Liege and Tournai, both outside Flanders, offered a modicum of support for the captains' effort. 95 To compound the captains' problems, the war finally provoked serious unrest within Ghent. An attack against Oudenaarde on April 13, 1452, proved a disaster, precipitating the downfall of the three captains by the end of the month; five new ones, each selected from one of Ghent's central parishes, immediately replaced them. These new captains had little sympathy for Jan Willaey, Lievin Boone, and Everaerd van Botelaere, their deposed predecessors: they executed the three on April 31, 1452, on the Vrijdagmarkt. 96 By June 19, uncertainty over the course of the war provoked street turmoil that forced four of the new captains to step aside. Guildsmen assembled in military koninkstavelrijen and debated the selection of a head captain to conduct city affairs, and five councilmen to assist him. These men then gathered on the Vrijdagmarkt on June 20 and agreed that Jan de Vas had received the most support in neighborhood rallies. De Vas had served as a city captain since May r 5 and was a former dean of the tapestry weavers from the parish of Sint-NiklaaS. 97 Further political turmoil, however, soon forced de Vos to step aside; guildsmen deposed him on July 2, 1452. 98 The cause of such friction in Ghent is frustratingly elusive, but it

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission is clear that the facade of unity behind the Vrijdagmarkt rallies began to slip, as different guilds and guildsmen jockeyed for power. Exactly who was in control? The two benches of aldermen and the Collatie remained intact, yet ineffective. Many patricians had fled Ghent and had their property and goods confiscated. Influential guild deans appeared torn between their obligations to city hall and the neighborhood politics of their workers. Ghent was pulled different ways by local factions. Into this confusion came ambassadors of the French king Charles VII to negotiate a six-week cease-fire, which began on July 19 and was the first step in an effort to broker an end to the costly war. 99 With the help of bribes, Philip the Good convinced the French party in the summer of 1452 to draft a peace treaty that conformed to his wishes. 100 At the heart of this important document was an effort to undo basic civic structures that had emboldened Ghent's guildsmen to revolt. Many of the treaty's stipulations attacked cherished privileges; Burgundian control over the election of city aldermen, a restriction of Ghent's rights over its Quarter, and the supreme legal power of the bailiff were just a few of its most devastating demands. 101 To dramatize Ghent's punishment, Burgundian authorities and the French ambassadors, acting in concert, also designed a set of rituals intended to strip Ghent's guildsmen of their civic symbols and traditions. Shrewd judges of Ghent's war regime, the Burgundians understood the amalagam of public symbols and public actions that had inspired Ghent's guildsmen to think of themselves as the "lords of Flanders." 102 Public ritual imparted legitimacy to Ghent's war regime, because much of the guildsmen's insurrection focused on rites of association: armed assemblies, public readings, processions of banners, and the display of political privileges. Both the extent and nature of the treaty's punishments reveal just how easily the duke grasped these political acts, so much so that the document reads like a step-by-step engagement with each of the Gentenars' most important public codes. During the discussions at Lille, the Burgundians, calling for fundamental changes in Ghent, followed a strategy by which extreme punishments were suggested, then softened in order to indicate the depth of the duke's grace. 103 Their negotiators thus at first insisted that the city's gates, towers, and fortifications be destroyed so as to efface the physical manifestations of civic power. Knowing very well that to dismantle Ghent's defenses w:as tantamount to full annihilation, the negotiators then settled for the permanent closing of two

The Public World of Revolt and Submission gates near the abbey of Sint-Pieter, the Persellepoort and the Heuvelpoort, from which gate the original attack against Oudenaarde had begun; and also the Spitaalpoort, near the Sint-Baafs' abbey, from which Ghent's militia set out to fight the battle of Rupelmonde. 104 To seal shut three critical gates would dissolve the fortified boundaries that set urban space apart from the outside world and thus visibly alter the geography of Ghent's autonomy. To annul and confiscate Ghent's legal and political privileges, which the Burgundian party next suggested, would finally, and irrevocably, end its urban independence. As expected, after threatening such a confiscation, the state negotiators then lowered their demands: Ghent's guildsmen must relinquish their banners, place them under lock and key, surrender ownership of guild meeting houses, and prohibit illegal assemblies. 105 The Burgundians initially suggested the surrender of all city and guild banners, but they allowed a second option that would confiscate the banners and make them available to the duke's bailiff, the aldermen, and a single representative from each of Ghent's Three Members. The Burgundians also wanted to prohibit guildsmen from retrieving banners without the duke's permission and the permission of Ghent's local officials-much as they had ordered in Bruges in 1407. By this stipulation, the negotiators hoped to deny Ghent's workers their single most important ritual expression of political force. 106 So too with assemblies. The Burgundians threatened to demolish most of the meeting houses of Ghent's guilds. But in keeping with their negotiating strategy, they immediately lessened that demand and suggested prohibiting guilds from owning these houses, so as to prevent them from serving as staging grounds for insurrection. The prince's men also insisted that six especially troublesome construction guilds-the carpenters, the straw and tile roofers, the masons, the plasterers, the sawyers, and the wood merchants-cease to assemble adjacent to their meeting house at the southwest comer of the parish church of Sint-Niklaas because they had provoked several riots in Ghent. 107 Burgundian measures to restrict urban political action culminated in a demand for a ceremony of public reconciliation in which all Ghent's political leaders would kneel, semiclothed and repentant, before Philip the Good or his son Charles. This theatrical celebration of punishment had as its goal to reconstruct good and pliant subjects from defiant citizens. With one large public ceremony that shamed

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission important Gentenars, Philip would finally avenge the defeat he experience before Ghent's Collatie in I447 by inverting his townsmen's methods of rebellion. Given the destruction wrought by the war, it is little wonder that the duke's party suggested such an elaborate ceremony to end the confrontation between city and state: All those who were captains of Ghent, and are still alive, are required to appear before the prince, or his son the count of Charolais, in such a place and as far outside Ghent as it pleases the prince. They must appear with both current and former aldermen, and all guild deans, prominent or minor, in the manner and number specified. First, the captains entirely nude, except for their undergarments, wearing cords around their necks, and following them, current and former aldermen, the two Head Deans, all the other guild deans, and officials of the weavers, nude except for shirts and undergarments. Next, all of Ghent's prominent citizens: at least four thousand patricians, guildsmen, and weavers, bareheaded and barefoot. They must all leave Ghent dressed in their best, with their heads bare and their feet without shoes, and come to a place specified by the prince. When the Gentenars see the prince, they must kneel, and genuflect three or four times as they approach him or the count of Charolais. As they kneel, they are to face the prince and bend their heads toward him. One of the Gentenars, who represents the others, must say in the name of all of them that they recognize and confess that they have been seditious, behaving as conspirators and rebels toward their prince and natural lord, that they have failed, offended, and misled him and his lordship to the highest degree, for which they are sorry, sad, and repentant. With hands clasped together, they are to beseech with all humility the prince's grace and pity; and beg him to pardon their offenses, and receive them with his grace.ws

To commemorate this submission, the ducal party insisted that Gentenars construct a wooden cross at the spot designated for the ceremony and "richly adorn it with images and remembrances." The Burgundians, furthermore, charged Ghent's officials with maintaining this holy shrine to their defeat at their own expense, thereby incorporating this ceremony into the city's ritual fabric and its historical memory. 109 The second version of the peace treaty, proposed by the French ambassadors on July 4, I452, differed little from that put forth at Lille, which reflects the success of the French negotiators. The revised treaty confirmed the right of ducal electors to have a firm hand in selecting aldermen, underscored the power of the duke's local bailiff, specified Ghent~s loss of political power over its Quarter, and

The Public World of Revolt and Submission counseled strict adherence to Ghent's rights of citizenship. It also reiterated the Burgundians' insistence on ceremonial amends: the Gentenars were to close the three gates suggested by the Burgundians; surrender city and guild banners under lock and key to Ghent's bailiff and its Three Members; prohibit illegal assemblies, particularly by the six construction guilds; and submit, as specified, in a large-scale ceremony. 110 Yet despite their adherence to Burgundian demands, the French ambassadors interestingly softened some of the specifications of the treaty's central ritual act. They did not demand that Ghent's captains wear nooses around their necks like criminals scheduled for public execution, nor, curiously, did they require Gentenars to construct a shrine to commemorate the city's defeat and humiliation. Their final version of the treaty, however, fully supported the central role of the ceremony of repentance as the Burgundians had conceived it. This ceremony, or so-called honorable amend (amende honorable), was a public rite much favored by Burgundian authorities to shame urban rebels. The amend was used throughout Flanders in the late Middle Ages as a ceremony of expiation, and it typically combined a public recantation, a plea for pardon, and an array of political punishments. 111 Counts of Flanders had used this juridical penalty for political acts before Burgundian rule. As early as I3II, Robert de Bethune had demanded that rebellious Gentenars submit before him outside the gates of the city in bare feet and with bare heads. 112 Philip van Artevelde himself was evidently aware of the power of such a ritual submission when, in Froissart's colorful account, he rejected outright a peace treaty in I382 which required Gentenars to perform an amend. 113 But it was the Burgundians in the fifteenth century who seized on the honorable amend and made it an essential part of their strategy of settling town insurrections. The Lille treaty was neither the first example nor the last. Perhaps the most spectacular use of the honorable amend before I45 2 involved the harsh punishment that Philip the Good meted out to Bruges for its revolt in I43 7. 114 The first stipulation of the peace treaty required all city authorities to kneel bareheaded and barefoot outside the city's gates on Philip's next visit to Bruges, demanding his grace and forgiveness. 115 When Philip entered Bruges on December I I, I440, city officials submitted in contrition before the duke exactly as demanded by the treaty, surrendering the

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission city's keys, before the other festivities marking this rite of defeat took place. 116 Indeed, it was probably the strong memory of Bruges's forced submission and the punishment that accompanied it which prompted Ghent officials, weary for peace, to decide in 1452 to fight. As early as July 5, 1452, city aldermen and the head captain had agreed to a "submission," but only if the punishment involved reparations alone and left their privileges untouched. 117 By July 15, they were even ready to admit their guilt in the conflict, an offer they repeated at Lille. 118 But in response to the exceedingly harsh demands of both the French and Burgundian ambassadors, Ghent's officials at Lille fell back on the standard arguments employed throughout the conflict to justify their rebellion. 119 All to no avail. On September r, the city's deputation left Lille, and the failed negotiations provoked an armed response of guildsmen, who assembled on the Vrijdagmarkt, banners defiantly aloft. 120 In response to Ghent's incredible stubbornness, Burgundian forces burned and pillaged the villages and countryside around the city during the winter months of 145 3-this despite occasional peace efforts throughout the spring. By June the duke's army besieged Ghent's last significant holding, the castle of Gavere, sixteen kilometers south of the city near the Scheidt river. The Burgundian army scored a decisive victory there on June 23 when Ghent's resistance crumbled after losses reached into the thousands. 121 In the peace that followed the end of the war, Philip the Good, true to his word, neither destroyed Ghent nor plundered it; but he did impose a treaty on July 28 that departed little from the one rejected by Gentenars a year earlier. 122 The city's Three Members lost their near monopoly over the aldermen's seats and their absolute political control over Ghent's Quarter and were forced to adhere scrupulously to the specific privileges of citizenship. They could no longer readily appeal cases from other cities before their aldermen, nor could they issue banishments without the explicit approval of the duke himself or his bailiff. Philip the Good also demanded the abolition of Ghent's paramilitary force, the White Hoods, with its reputation for terrorizing the local countryside, and imposed an enormous indemnity of two hundred thousand golden ridders. 123 The ritual stipulations were no less severe and followed the suggestions in the Lille treaty. Philip demanded that Gentenars close the Persellepoort and the Heuvelpoort every Thursday, the Spitaalpoort permanently, because the battle of Rupelmonde, launched

The Public World of Revolt and Submission from the latter, resulted in the death of one of the duke's favorite bastards.' 24 This double manipulation of space and time was guaranteed to alter Ghent's public world, as gates were critical to civic identity; determining inside from outside, local from foreign. Without hesitation, Philip further specified the surrender of city and guild banners but now combined that act with the repentance ceremony that capped the treaty. 125 Without banners, Ghent's guildsmen lost their formal symbols of assembly; much as they; as citizens, had lost the right to determine civic boundaries. At the ceremony of expiation, Ghent's captains, their assistants, the aldermen, guild deans, and other unspecified burghers, numbering at least two thousand, had not only to kneel in penitential garb before Philip the Good but to present their confession of guilt and plea for reconciliation in French, a further humiliation. Because all political decrees in Ghent since the rise to power of the captains' regime proceeded in Dutch, the measure aimed to strip unruly citizens of the vernacular underpinnings of their defiance. 126 The final ceremony that closed the Ghent War at once clarifed the power of the prince over his rebels and dramatized-in a fully theatrical rite-the complete unraveling of Ghent's public rituals of rebellion. On July 30, 145 3, Ghent's political and civic leaders, including former captains, city aldermen, guild deans, and all prominent male citizens, met a party of Burgundian officials outside the walls of the city; in Ledeberg, southeast from the Lievenspoort. The scene could not have been more poignant. Ghent's deposed captains, dressed in nothing but white undergarments, standing barefoot with hands clasped .i,n supplication, approached the Burgundians. A party of two thousand followed them, with aldermen, guild deans, and civic leaders barefoot and bareheaded, their somber mood somewhat relieved by a colorful array of guild banners, now once again unfurled, bobbing up and down as the men proceeded. 127 The abbot of Ghent's Benedictine monastery of Sint-Baafs led the procession of urban penitents. In Olivier de La Marche's recollection, the abbot begged forgiveness in French as specified in the peace treaty; carefully requesting the duke's mercy three times. 128 His intervention only heightened the sacred quality of contrition that Burgundians intended the ceremony to evoke. The author of the account traditionally; but probably erroneously; ascribed to Chastellain gives a more dramatic summary: "It was really spectacular weather because it rained such that deep and wide streams of water ran underneath the kneeling Gentenars, some nude in their undergarments,

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission others bareheaded and beltless, saying the words required by the sentence as it rained." 129 The duke's party contrasted most vividly with the mud-soaked, wet, and semiclothed citizen. An illustration of the honorable amend from the Privileges of Ghent and Flanders-made in Ghent itself in 1458-offers a striking depiction of the event and speaks more eloquently than any written account of the magnificence of the prince's men (Figure 8 ). 130 Philip the Good leads a party of Burgundians, all splendidly outfitted in military armor and upon horseback. The duke, poised as a military conqueror, wearing a bejeweled helmet, grasps a raised baton; beside him is a pennant that displays his arms and personal motto, "Aultre n'auray." Ghent's party kneels in front of him. Behind four city captains, dressed in nothing but white undergarments, we see an array of men waving guild banners and, in the background, a panorama of the city they have left behind. The picture's verdant foreground and deep blue sky contrast sharply with the account of inclement weather. But all.descriptions of the event assign a near-religious quality to the ceremony. Indeed, as the art historian Elisabeth Dhanens has pointed out, even the scene depicted in the Privileges of Ghent and Flanders bears a striking resemblance to a panel portraying the Knights of Christ and the Righteous Judges in the Van Eyck brothers' celebrated Lamb of God altarpiece. 131 In both the visual and written versions of the ceremony, the Burgundians command attention as soldiers of God before contrite sinners. At the ceremony's conclusion, the Burgundians confiscated the allimportant city and guild banners. What is more, as .the duke's men departed the next day toward Oudenaarde, they instructed archers in their retinue to display proudly the confiscated banners at the front of the ducal train. The Burgundians later displayed Ghent's banners in the two churches of Boulogne and Halle, the most popular pilgram centers dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the area. At the spot where the Gentenars genuflected, Philip knighted seventeen courtiers who had served him in the war. 132 The amend assaulted the city's public identity and political community, even as it reconciled prince and townsfolk. Philip not only physically emptied Ghent of its ruling elite, leaving it unprotected; he also imposed his punishment on these men outside the city's walls, comfortably beyond Ghent's marketplaces and meeting houses. Obviously, this control of space allowed Philip to mock the rank and stature of Ghent's political leaders, robbing them of their civic

Figure 8. The honorable amend of 1453. Boek van de Priviligien van Gent en van Vlaanderen, MS 2583, fol. 349v. Courtesy of Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission milieu and inverting their gestures of defiance. But the honorable amend also lumped into a contrite whole a range of citizens who had in common only some level of participation in Ghent's political life. The homogenizing of this group of townsmen purposely, if temporarily, suspended social distinctioni in a single act, Philip the Good capably shamed these men, rendering them dependent and powerless. Moreover, the punishment emphasized to the other citizens of Ghent that the prince was a more capable leader than their aldermen and captains, who had failed to prevent the town from near destruction. And although the honorable amend encompassed the double purpose of punishment and forgiveness, the inversion motif, as the central ritual act, inscribed shame as the ceremony's signature. For even if notions and gestures of submission saturated the religious and political world of late-medieval Europe, undoing the power, symbols, and spaces that patterned-indeed made possible-the captains' and guildsmen's defiance, left them utterly powerless, on their knees outside the walls of their city upon whose central marketplace they had fomented their rebellion. The confiscation and redisplay of Ghent's civic and guild banners, along with the knighting ceremony on the site of the humiliation, ensured the public memory of this political insult. Ghent's banners were stripped of local meaning, now serving as private booty for the Burgundian victors, available for public exhibition as part of the symbolic treasure of the state. The seventeen new Burgundian knights, moreover, symbolized Philip the Good's military muscle. Earning their new titles at exactly the spot where Ghent's men surrendered their political rights, the knights portrayed how the shame of Flemish rebels fashioned the honor of Burgundian victors. Ghent War opened and closed with ceremonies that complemented one another and that demonstrate the central role public ritual assumed in the conflict. This role was hardly predeterminedi it emerged in conjunction with the shaping of new political identities as events ran their course. Philip's appearance before Ghent's Collatie in 1447, and his appearance outside the city walls in 1453, could not have contrasted more sharply. Seen together, they convey the complexity of public interactions between the state and Ghent during their long season of hostilities. The duke's 1447 visit drew on princely rhetoric that stressed the ties that bound him to the city. Although part of a larger plan to THE

The Public World of Revolt and Submission bleed Ghent, Philip's address before the Collatie displayed a strong recognition of Ghent's real importance, which he demonstrated by his willingness to meet Gentenars on their own level and even in their own language. The ceremony that ended the Ghent War neatly reversed the outcome of Philip's last major appearance in the city. It forced townsmen to plead their dependence on the duke's terms and in the duke's language. Typical of Burgundian ceremony; the honorable amend promoted the prince's power by placing citizens, stripped, kneeling, and defeated, before him. With incredible economy, the ceremony restored the duke to his rightful stature after his authority had been contested during years of political unrest. Events within Ghent during the war allow us to peer into the political dynamic of the city's public realm and witness how new political relationships emerged. That group identities were not simply etched in stone but could be challenged and remade by the exigencies of the moment is one important lesson of the revolt. But equally revealing is that crowds, banners, and the central marketplace undergirded Ghent's war regime to such an extent that it took the spectacle of an honorable amend to sweep their work away. The issues debated during the Ghent War, and the various actions that resulted, directly affected both the political privileges of Ghent's guild-based government and the way in which it chose to express political concerns in the public sphere. No easy distinction, then, can be maintained between the ceremonial and political problems and solutions. Both were expressions of the same debate over the political and cultural prerogatives of Gentenars and the late-medieval urban world they inhabited. The legal, political, and ceremonial punishments of the treaty ending the Ghent War had in common a desire by Burgundian officials to limit the power of urban citizenship as practiced by Ghent's regime. In formal political terms, this meant enforcing stricter Burgundian control over the power of local aldermen and their right to make law. It also meant inhibiting this powerful urban commune from granting citizenship privileges indiscriminately. But citizenship, as the Burgundians learned, implied more than just a formal body of laws. It encompassed a whole set of political behaviors too, bound up officially with the right of working men in legally privileged guilds to command public space and to challenge adversaries by public demonstrations that mobilized rallies in meeting houses and on public squares, guild banners, written privileges, and public orations. A textual tradition that assured these men of

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The Public World of Revolt and Submission their political and legal rights functioned alongside a set of customary behr~viors that permitted public action to sustain what amounted to a public culture of defiance. Gentenars lost the war but continued to struggle over political issues with their Burgundian leaders. The resolution of the crisis opened a new era in city and state relations and ended one of privileged autonomy. The conflict fundamentally affected the public life of the city, but the aftermath did not eliminate the exchange networks that had characterized relations between the Burgundians and their urban subjects. Conflict only temporarily suspended those interactions and forced Gentenars to concentrate their attention more directly within the walls of their urban commune. Still, the impact of the ducal punishments was real enough. They affected the ways in which Ghent's privileged interacted with Burgundian authorities in the years to come and even foreshadowed the emergence of new ritual groups in the city. Indeed, in the years of unsettling peace after the war, Ghent's public world gained in significance in the struggle to negotiate the political and cultural boundaries of the Burgundian state.

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of r 4 58 and 1467

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Of all the rituals favored by Burgundian leaders, none was as popular as the joyeuse entree. 1 Philip the Good and Charles the Bold promoted public entries into their territories' urbanized north with an ambitious schedule of activity. From 1419 to 1477, the Burgundian dukes, duchesses, and their children made well over two hundred ceremonial entries into their Low Country cities. 2 They elaborated what had been a smaller affair into a full-fledged spectacle that led one observer at Arras in 145 5 to exclaim, "If God had descended from Heaven I do not know if the citizens would have paid him this much honor." 3 Because of the history of political turmoil in Ghent, Burgundian entries into that city were an infrequent yet essential element of its public life. Many entries proceeded without much fanfare, lost to the historical record. But two in particular, by Philip the Good in 1458 and Charles the Bold in 1467, figured among the most critical public rituals of the fifteenth-century Burgundian state. Philip's 1458 entry was an act of deliberate solemnity-a stylized meditation on the value of contrition after the excesses of the Ghent War. 4 Town leaders and guildsmen competed among themselves to win the duke's forgiveness. And yet as if to prove that artifice is just that, Charles the Bold's public entry in 1467 undid what the organizers of the 1458 entry had set out to accomplish. 5 What had begun as a routine first visit of a new count ended as a city-wide revolt that threatened Charles's rule. This chapter reverses the usual way the late-medieval public entry 127

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 is studied by employing an urban perspective. From the vantage point of the city, the entry appears a fluid and dynamic ritual, not a seamless cultural representation. The entry was one of the Burgundian state's most important ceremonies, designed to dramatize and cement the image of political unity between townspeople and their lord. But because the entry depended on an audience, diverse in its composition, the unity it invoked poorly masked the multiple strategies and responses of its various participants. To understand this audience, it is necessary to examine the structure of a count's entry into Ghent, and assess its cultural and political value. A comparision of the ritual agendas of the 1458 and 1467 entries uncovers the powerful ways in which social and political conflict lurked directly beneath their field of symbols. In the delicate postwar political climate, the entry ritual allowed the reappraisal of the public boundaries and real power of city and state.

Ghent Entries From the outset of their rule in Flanders, the Burgundian dukes made processional entries into Ghent, either on the first visit as count or on routine political missions to the city. The initial entry, without a doubt, was the more important of the two. Despite the stormy politics between Ghent and the Burgundian state throughout the fifteenth century, the critical first visits of new Burgundian dukes to their largest Flemish city-visits that officially inaugurated their rule as counts of Flanders-were generally peaceful and modest.6 Philip the Bold, the first duke of Burgundy, had to delay his entry into Ghent for two years because of the war that raged in Flanders. Yet though Philip's inauguration as count of Flanders had rested on the bloody defeat of Gentenars, his welcome on January 4, 1386 in this enemy city bespoke a polite exchange of rights and obligations, with only minor reference to the city's rebellion/ The entry of his son John the Fearless into Ghent in 1405 differed little, even if during the ceremony town leaders burdened the new count with a host of economic and political complaints. 8 In a similar fashion, Philip the Good's first entry on September 20, 1419, provoked little more than the required formalities. 9 The Flemish entry ceremony underwent noticeable elaboration in the mid-fifteenth century, as Philip the Good matured and as the state he administered grew more powerful. 10 The increase in local

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 Flemish celebrations during Burgundian entries, most evident in the growth of street theater championing the duke, was not an isolated occurrence. 11 It was in fact part of a larger trend by northern European monarchs in the fifteenth century, particularly the French crown, to glorify, and at times to sacralize, sovereign entries. The increasing frequency of entries and their more elaborate trappings demonstrate a renewed interest among state officials in the triumphal entries of imperial Rome. Indeed, this nostalgia for classical ceremony marked a calculated attempt to forge more powerful public symbols of monarchical authority in an era of burgeoning state power. 12 But if entries in northern Europe centered more steadily on the ruler's magnificence, no amount of elaboration obscured the corporate nature of these ceremonies. The entry served as a vehicle, rooted in the notion of legal contract, through which both ruler and townspeople publicly confirmed their privileges and duties with an exchange of rightsY Nowhere was this more true than in fifteenthcentury Flanders, where the duke of Burgundy's ambitious policy of centralization confronted considerable urban resistance. The structure of a Burgundian entry into Ghent fully replicates a late-mediev~l corporate model, based on a theory of shared rights and negotiated authority. 14 Bound to a ritual framework whose purpose was to dramatize urban and princely concerns, Ghent's entry ceremony stressed the beneficial consensus between all urban corporations and the new count. It brought together guildsmen and aldermen, patricians and clerics, to enact each group's rights and show their multiple points of contact. 15 Ordinary townspeople, men and women alike, participated too with street decorations and public rallies, but apparently they did not form part of any official delegations. 16 The first entry of a new count into Ghent during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries typically began with the prince's welcome outside the city after an overnight stay at Zwijnaarde. Approaching Ghent, the count and his men headed on horseback toward SintPieter's Village, right on the southern border of the city. A ban mile beyond the Percellepoort, a group of town clerics and aldermen greeted the Burgundians. As the retinue entered the Percellepoort into the abbey village, several guild deans and guildsmen stood on opposite sides of the streets to welcome it. 17 Led by the abbot of SintPieter's Benedictine monastery, a procession of clerics and city officials brought the new count to the abbey's church, where they celebrated mass. Entering the church divested of his military garb, the

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 prince humbled himself as a servant of God, kneeling to kiss the church's holy relics. Following the celebration of mass, the abbot girded him with a sword, an act symbolizing the count's resumption of his position as powerful lord and victor. The count, in turn, swore in French to uphold the privileges and rights of Sint-Pieter's abbey. 18 The oath administered, city and ecclesiastical leaders from within Ghent's domain led the prince northward toward the parish church of Sint-Jan in Ghent. Before the central altar, the prince kissed a piece of the Holy Cross, after which he formally assumed the countship of Flanders with a promise to maintain the privileges of Ghent. Taking the church's bell into his hand, the new count rang it two or three times, symbolizing his inauguration. 19 Oath and bell ringing were vivid reminders of the political stature of Ghent-its power to actualize the count's new rule only upon recognition of the city's legal rights. The ceremony's formalities concluded on the Vrijdagmarkt; the count, on the balcony of the Tooghuis, listened to an assembly of Gentenars-presumably a mix of townspeople of both sexes and various social groups-swear fealty to him as sovereign lord. 20 This acclaim was dramatic but also modest, even when banquets and jousts followed the entry ceremony. In the early part of the Burgundian period, aldermen spent little for gifts of meat and wine to the duke upon his entry, underscoring Ghent's rejection of ceremonial adulation.21 But a small financial outlay did not mean that entries were neither unimportant nor nettlesome. As with other Burgundian rituals, the purposes entries served, and consequently the shape they took, shifted according to political needs and regional circumstances. For instance, only the first entry of a new count featured a strong juridical thrust; other visits could take markedly different forms and, for example, could put the stress on princely might rather than contractual relations. In fact, in the aftermath of the Ghent War, the entry ceremony became a much-vaunted opportunity to take stock of the relationship between city and victors. Because entries featured images of consensus, elite Gentenars saw in them an opportunity to rewin Burgundian favors by public demonstrations of fealty. To reassert the value of their public life to the Burgundian state in the hope of diminishing the considerable political and financial consquences of the Treaty of Gavere, Ghent's aldermen began a concerted effort to prod Philip the Good into an entry four years after he had defeated them. Burdened by the prince's ill will, and a massive war indem-

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 nity, the city's leaders hoped that an entry ceremony might heal the rift. 22 Using their public space as an arena in which to whet the duke's insatiable need for public acclaim, Ghent's aldermen attempted to negotiate a delicate balance between reasserting their public stature and choreographing a spectacle designed to boost state power. r 4 58: The Prince as Victor What was a city of burghers without a prince to viSit it? Ghent's aldermen knew that their political future rested on securing Philip's favor, and they repeatedly tried to urge the prince to share his goodwill-and by extension his political largess-with Ghent by breaking his four-year absence from the cityY In April 1458 the aldermen finally sent ambassadors to Philip's court in Bruges to test his willingness to enter Ghent. 24 Despite Chastellain's typical hyperbole, his initial impression of Ghent's desperation is revealing: the citizens of Ghent, who, at this time and in previous lengthy attempts, had labored to entice their prince, the duke of Burgundy, into their city and to come see its people, whose hearts languished because he visited all his other cities and treated his central city as if with mistrust and avoided it and sought to distance himself by going around it. Thus were the people of Ghent deeply melancholic, and this avoidance brought new pain to their concern for past wounds and ruin and for which they had no remedy. To this end, several times many notable Gentenars were sent before the duke, humbly begging him that, out of mercy and forgiveness for past faults, his kindness would allow him to approach them for once and to come visit his city. 25

Appearing before Philip, Ghent's twq ambassadors, Mathijs de Grootheere and Jan de Stoppelaere, very carefully tried to calm the duke's suspicion of Ghent by proclaiming it "a fear without root." True, Ghent had previously fallen hostage to malevolent forces, but it now stood united in a desire to welcome its rightful prince. Chastellain's vivid description is obviously fashioned to develop a tight sequence that conveys the entry's danger, excitement, and ultimate triumph. It recounts a drama complicated by a tangle of urban enticement, princely suspicion, and treacherous undercurrents, be-

ginning with the promise by Ghent's ambassadors to reconcile the prince with his townspeople. 26 Chastellain portrays the ambassadors' disappointment when the duke's men greet their offer with skepti-

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 cism, even fear. The bishop of Toul, speaking for the court, worried aloud that the city still teemed with unsavory men, all without honor, who, "thinking to revenge their vexation might assemble at night, at exactly the time when he [the prince] and all his servants slept, and could enter and kill everybody, the master and his family." 27 The memory of the Ghent War was too fresh, concluded the bishop, its destruction too deeply felt, to guarantee the duke's safety. "The entry could be dangerous," reasoned the bishop. 28 Chastellain describes a final attempt by Grootheere and Stoppelaere to depict Ghent as a pacified city, assuring the court that Gentenars from all backgrounds and occupations sought the duke's visit. They even suggested that the city's destitute wished Philip to enter and were ready to fall upon their knees and cry as "proof of their love" if Philip so honored them. 29 The Burgundians listened with keen interest, and in the end they agreed to send ambassadors to Ghent to negotiate if and when an entry might occur. When the bishop of Toul and the marshal of the ducal household finally arrived in the city, the aldermen added a financial incentive: Ghent would pay Philip the handsome sum of twenty thousand lyons d'or if he entered. 30 Prompted both by the offer of money and by repeated requests, Burgundian leaders finally agreed to an entry. With nearly a month of negotiations behind them, Ghent's leaders and the Burgundians worked closely together in 1458 to ensure a smooth celebration. 31 For a ceremony whose goal was harmony, fear and divergent interests were the forces that drove both parties during the preparations. The negotiations alone, rooted in suspicion, are proof enough to belie the concord that the entry subsequently evoked. In fact, so uneasy were the French dauphin's men when they visited Ghent to check on preparations for the celebration that the dauphin himself-the future king of France Louis XI-urged Philip to cancel the entry. His party had seen many streets blocked off in Ghent, as citizens worked to lay out the processional route. The men immediately suspected a plot and feared that the entry was a ploy to lure the duke into a trap. 32 Once again, the proof of fidelity fell to the Gentenars. Heightening his drama, Chastellain describes how Ghent's aldermen responded to the dauphin's report with wounded pride: "Are we people of malice and wicked defenses who would make both a son of the king of France and our natural prince and lord visit us under the pretext of peace, wanting to offer them reverence and solemnity, only to kill and murder them?" 33 Ironically, if a revolt was imminent, it was the

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 result of popular discontent over the reluctance of the prince to visit. Fearing an insurrection over the burden of the war indemnities, the aldermen once again dispatched ambassadors to Bruges to urge the duke to mount an entry. After one last visit to Ghent by the marshal of the household, court authorities made a final decision to enter. 34 The duke's men purposefully selected April23, the feast day of Saint George, because of the bonds that united a distinguished segment of Ghent's elite, the Saint George confraternity, to the duke of Burgundy.35 But unlike the 1440 crossbowmen's festival, the duke would enter as no mere citizen-prince but as a triumphant lord. It was a Sunday afternoon when Philip the Good and his courtiers approached Ghent, thus ensuring a large .crowd of spectators. Both the Burgundians and the Gentenars had prepared a spectacle unlike any other entry ceremony in the history of the Low Countries. Luckily, the entry's specifics are recorded in a lengthy account by a Flemish author, unfortunately anonymous, whose economy of style and straightforward detail is a happy contrast to Chastellain's inflated narrative. 36 Ironically, the post-Gavere ceremony far overshadowed Philip's first entry into Ghent in 1419 as its new count; freed from all the constitutional restraint of the earlier event, this welcome celebrated the duke's mighty rule by forfeiting the customary stress on civic rights. The entry's theme of triumph and repentance sanctified the duke's power; a program of classical and biblical stagings depicted Philip as a warrior God and Ghent as the Prodigal Son seeking absolution. There was no immediate hint of the political symbols Gentenars marshaled during the 1452-53 war. To the contrary, guildsmen, patricians, and clerics-the city's most important leaders-used street theater to impress Philip with their conciliatory mood. Although a result of conflict and negotiated with skepticism, the entry created an image unburdened by past turmoil. Its purpose was to suppress difference by proclaiming unity. . The entry opened with an official delegation of Gentenars sent outside to greet Philip and his party of advisers, courtiers, and senior councillors. As this was not a first visit, the welcome proceeded somewhat differently, dispensing with the traditional passage through the Percellepoort and with the oaths that generally followed. In place of the usual procession to Sint-Pieter's abbey, the eight aldermen, two bailiffs, and hundreds of prominent citizens who rode out, all

dressed in fine black, to greet the ducal party brought Philip the Good into Ghent through the Waalpoort, slightly northwest of Ten Walle, the Burgundian court. 37 The city's delegation was large enough

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of 1458 and r467 to need some four hundred horses; Mathijs de Grootheere, a prominent city lawyer, greeted Philip in French with a welcome that set the tone for the celebration: Your most excellent, powerful, and highest prince, our most feared and natural lord, we have long desired your joyous entry into our good city of Ghent. We now see the time for which we have long wished, and we are thankful to God for the grace he has granted us today. For certainly this most joyous and happy entry has removed all the doubt and fear we had in our hearts that your indignation toward us had not ceased. Because it pleases you, owing to your most blessed grace, to visit us, we rest assured that the past is over and effaced, thanks to your noble courage. We thank you as humbly as we can by offering you what is ours and what is possible, namely, our corporations, our goods, our wills, and whatever might please you in order to sustain you. 38

If Grootheere pleaded Ghent's need for Philip's physical presence, then the removal of the bolts, hinges, and main frame of the Waalpoort itself was further proof of the aldermen's wish to placate the duke, as well as a measure meant to quell any suspicion of "unrest or ill will" that Gentenars might be harboring. 39 Chastellain reports that like Bruges's citizens in 1440, Ghent's official delegation presented Philip with the city's keys as a token of its submission and trust. 40 The dismantling of the gate of entry and the surrendering of the city's keys thoroughly altered the reciprocity in welcome gestures. Gates and their keys marked off urban boundaries and were not just physically powerful but symbolically significant. Gates mediated the world inside and outside; controlling their use was central to medieval urban elites, especially during visits from local and foreign dignitaries. By undoing the Waalpoort and placing the keys to the city's gates in Philip's hands, Ghent's officials divested themselves of their right to control their own political space. 41 Now in possession of Ghent, Philip approached the Waalpoort. On both sides of the street, about five hundred guildsmen, weavers, guild deans, and lesser officials stood ready to salute him. Brandishing torches that illuminated Philip like a devotional object, the Gentenars knelt bareheaded as he entered. No matter that this gesture of deference was standard in late-medieval entries, in Ghent's postwar climate it eerily recalled the ritual amend performed nearly five years earlier when Philip last visited the city. 42 As the duke crossed the gate's threshold, he witnessed a city magically transformed, its streets hung with black, red, and gray wool cloth and lit up by hun-

Unity into Discord: The Entries of r458 and r467 dreds upon hundreds of torches. The injunction from the Book of Judith (3:6), "Veni nobis pacificus Dominus, utere servitio nostro, sicut placuerit tibi" (Come to us pacific Lord, use our service as it pleases you), embroidered on the hanging cloth, reminded Philip of his purpose there; it was yet another gesture that the city now belonged to him. Philip also saw his escutcheon hanging on the gate beside his personal motto, "Aultre n' auray," and, finally, the symbol of his prestigious Order of the Golden Fleece. Trumpeters and minstrels offered music and drama to enhance the splendid welcome. Directly inside the gate itself, Ghent's religious communities, including the city's Beguines, friars, and parish priests, heralded Philip with a Te Deum. 43 All the official corporate groups welcomed the duke to a city now wonderfully redecorated into a stage for his pleasure. Once inside Ghent, the ducal party headed in a southeast loop before turning north toward the Burgundian residence. Along the way, Philip encountered not merely the usual array of cheering citizens but also a series of street tableaux vivants sponsored by assorted neighborhood societies and guilds which celebrated princely triumph and urban accommodation. Who exactly staged each individual tableau is lost to the historical record, but the anonymous witness whose description survives tells us much about the subject and location of each representation. A few common themes emerge from the various classical, biblical, and mythical topics performed: the portrayal of Ghent as an errant but contrite city, the championing of Philip as a forgiving father, and choice allusions to ancient history. All aimed to create an extraordinary climate for the celebration. But if certain themes were similar, the stagings themselves portrayed an unsettling jumble of historical times, patched together to impress Philip with a sense of grandeur. While aesthetically overbearing, Ghent's street theater nonetheless achieved its goal of visual splendor. 44 The tableaux were also politically effective, transforming groups of citizens into artistic objects, distilling unanimity from everyday conflict, and burying all the usual social and political divisions that defined Ghent's urban life. Townsfolk now regaled the duke with symbols of unity and submission, laying aside their querulous claims for the moment. Inside the Waalpoort, the first representation that greeted Philip's eyes featured the Prodigal Son, kneeling before his stern father. Shortly thereafter, the duke was offered another lesson in history: Julius Caesar, sitting on his magnificent throne, sur-

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 rounded by twelve senators, all gathered to hear Cicero praise Caesar's respect for political liberties. If, perchance, Philip missed both the analogy and its message, an inscription at the top of the stage reminded him that "nulla de virtutibus tuis major dementia est" (None of your virtues is greater than clemency). 45 The stagings continued in a similar vein as Philip headed toward Ghent's center. Marriage was a particularly striking motif mobilized by Gentenars, interesting for the legal and erotic implications embedded in the use of matrimony to symbolize the political union between Ghent and its count. When Philip first crossed the Waalpoort, he confronted a young girl dressed as a bride, beckoning him with a verse from the Song of Songs (3:4), "Inveni quem diliget anima mea" (I have found him whom my soul loves) as she knelt before him. 46 At the Torrepoort, southwest of Ghent's center across the Leie, the Old Testament figures of David and Abigail greeted Philip. David was "richly armed with Jewish weapons" and faced a kneeling Abigail beside two other kneeling women. 47 At the end of the procession, directly in front of the prince's court, Philip also encountered Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, with the queen kneeling alongside three virgins before the king. 48 Both biblical couples portrayed the bond between Philip and Ghent in gendered terms familiar to Flemish representations: the duke as the powerful king invested with the legacy of ancient leaders, Ghent as his meek bride, deferring to his authority. Obviously the metaphors of bride and groom were steeped in the language of medieval theology, denoting submission, love, and union. But the decidedly feminine character of these tableaux vivants endorsed a theory and practice of symbolic representation which tagged political unequals, however fleetingly, with opposite gender identities. As a demonstration of their diminished political statureand as a token of their willingness to submit-Gentenars temporarily identified with these biblical heroines. In a civic world so suffused with the culture and priority of guildsmen, this symbolic gender reversal speaks volumes about the aldermen's fervent desire to convey the image of submission to Philip the Good. 49 The representations also cultivated exoticism by their use of "Jewish" clothing and weapons. The ample biblical and classical themes of the tableaux allowed Gentenars to indulge a fascination-common to this period-with the Near East. 50 In fact the duke even encountered four children and two men, dressed as Jews and "black as Moors," when he entered his court. There was also an elephant made

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 "in realistic fashion," over whom one "Jew," bearing a spear, watched. 5 1 The strangers who greeted Philip before his palace (and sang him a song of welcome) were part of an attempt to mirror the fantastic world Gentenars suspected existed inside the Burgundian court-a world of different social codes and such unusual pleasures as a menagerie. The animals and foreign figures beneath Ten Walle eased the passage from the streets into the court, but they also pointed out that townspeople could generate cultural artifacts wholly unfamiliar to their everyday activity. The erotic and exotic overtones of many of the street stagings had in common a dismantling of Ghent's usual civic landscape in a hopeful attempt to share in-and flatter-the duke's courtly privilege. To that end, Gentenars remade their city into a terrain of symbols hospitable to Burgundian culture. City leaders drew heavily on fire displays, cloth hangings, and tapestries to embellish Ghent's usual physical appearance. In addition, court emblems of special relevance abounded, particularly those related to the Order of the Golden Fleece. At both the beginning and conclusion of the entry, the ducal party encountered reminders of Philip's prestigious chivalric order. Gentenars decorated cloth hanging upon the Waalpoort with Golden Fleece symbols and repeated this again at the Torrepoort, with the added touch of all the names of the order's knights. Finally, at the court itself, a group of Gentenars staged the story of Gideon, the order's biblical hero. 52 Most dramatic, however, was a reproduction of Ghent's celebrated Lamb of God altarpiece. Set up on the Poel, a city square, the tableau centralized the figure of the Paschal Lamb, at once the symbol of the court's knightly order and of Christ himself. This recreation, long of interest to art historians, carried added importance because, though it highlighted Philip's prestige, it did so in a local idiom, by duplicating the van Eyck brothers' masterpiece. 53 But despite their urgent appeal to Philip's largess, Gentenars were especially careful to remind the duke of their centrality in the production of this spectacle. At the end of the long passage from the Waalpoort to the Burgundian residence, a second official delegation of aldermen saluted the duke with a welcome speech almost identical to the first one. Only this time, now inside the city, a Gentenar delivered it in Dutch. 54 The change in language is significanti for it underscores the vernacular terms of the ceremony and recalls the

powerful struggle over language rights during the Ghent War. True,

the welcome in French outside Ghent's walls had echoed the plea for forgiveness forced on Gentenars in 1453. But now safely within, its

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Unity into Discord:' The Entries of I458 and I467 aldermen insisted on publicly reclaiming the ceremonial validity of their mother tongue. The Dutch speech also began a new phase of the celebrations, which continued for the next two days. The cluster of tableaux vivants Gentenars mounted was a powerful gesture of reconciliation but not a complete one. To sharpen their conciliatory pitch, citizens next competed for prizes among themselves to celebrate the duke's triumph, in a fashion much like the competitions organized during the military confraternities' shootings. Guildsmen, groups of patricians, and neighborhood festive groups squared off against one another to honor the duke. Ironically; this contest undermined Ghent's facade of one united community; as suggested by the tableaux. Yet this competition for prizes eschewed dangerous conflict, even if it did reveal social and political distinctions. For by organizing civic groups into peaceful competition, those who directed these festivities revealed that urban rivalries could be conducted without danger and even for the benefit of Ghent's prince. 55 In preparation for the entry; the aldermen had announced prizes of silver for the "society of guildsmen, quarters (wycken), or neighborhoods" that on the evening of the duke's entry produced the most splendid fire displays and street decorations; the society that staged the best theater pieces before the town house with "pure, new, and well-crafted poetry"; the society that performed the most pleasing theater; and the one that presented the best overall celebrations during the entry. 56 The prizes were intended both for neighborhood festive groups and for formally organized literary-rhetorician-confraternities, even those from outside Ghent, as the aldermen included a prize for the best "local and foreign group." A confraternity from Oudenaarde does appear to have participated in the competition. 57 Acting alone or in groups, all Gentenars scrambled to sustain the pitch of excitement for the celebrations. Prominent townsfolk (our observer notes three pages of names) bedecked their residences with torches and fine cloth. 5H But it was the weavers' guild and the fiftythree lesser guilds that sponsored some of the most elaborate decorations, a sure sign of their wish to ameliorate the political damage from their role in the war, 59 They erected scaffolding, fancifully covered with bright cloth, to support burning torches in front of important squares, streets, bridges, and monuments throughout the city. Most of the cloth coverings displayed Burgundian coats of arms, of~ ten cleverly placed next to the arms of the guild. 60 Mixing ducal and guild symbols conveyed a sense of interdependence, a strong message

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 that Ghent's guildsmen and the Burgundian duke could work and prosper together. But the display of guild arms also made a less conciliatory point: they reminded Philip that even stripped of their banners, guildsmen had some powerful symbols at their disposal and were thus to be reckoned with. Some prominent guilds pushed this message to the limit, overwhelming the duke with the brilliance of their displays. Our Ghent observer recorded the tableau vivant of the shippers' guild in detail worth quoting in it is entirety as a gauge of the magnificence: The shippers' guild celebrated splendidly and conducted itself richly behind the Vleeshuis beneath the Leie's Veebrug in a big cargo boat in the following manner: First, the ship was decorated and made up like a big sea ship with two castles, one on the bow, the other on the stern. Above them on the mast there was another castle, hung with green cloth, with the duke's coat of arms, his motto, his image, and the city's coat of arms. The mast supported several lances and a man wonderfully dressed up. Beside him there were two pennants: one, my redoubtable lord's coat of arms and the Flemish coat of arms; the 'other one, the coat of arms of our city and our guild. On the deck of the mast's castle were some thirteen torches. In place of sails, the mast itself bore a huge three-sided shield colored all green with the sharp end pointed up. There were also fifty-three torches four stories high, with a shield in the middle, black and gray, and the duke's coat of arms. The duke's insignia and symbols were richly decorated with paintings. The figure of Abraham stood in the castle on the bow; about to sacrifice his son Isaac as God had commanded. Before him was written: "Abraham! Abraham!" Abraham replied: "I am here." "Do not raise your hand against the boy," the Lord's angel said. "Do not harm him, for now I know you fear God. You have not refused me your son, your only son." And in front of Abraham there was a wonderful pennant with my redoubtable lord's coat of arms. Moses stood on the castle at the ship's rear, and three of Israel's children, to whom Moses was preaching. In his hand Moses bore a roll, upon which was written: "We shall observe and obey all things which God has commanded." A wonderful pennant with the guild's coat of arms stood in front of Moses. On each side of the ship, forty notable guildsmen were kneeling, dressed in black, bareheaded, each with a burning taper in his hand. On each of the ship's sides there were also torches running from front to back, a foot apart, around fifty. Each side was bedecked in green cloth which ran down to the water, bearing the duke's and the guild's coats of arms. Extensions from the front to the back of the same ship were constructed down below in the water, with eighty torches on each side, about as many as could possibly fit. Next to the ship there was a floating sea-knight and a mermaid made like two

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of r458 and r467 little children, serving well its purpose and well fashioned. Next to the two figures were twenty-five floating torches. All in all, there were 43 I torches. The ship itself was fully decorated. Between the mast and the bow; green barley was strewn about, and between the mast and the stern, green cloth covered everything. A beautiful dresser stood there as in a beautiful room, with costly golden and silver gems such as mugs, goblets, cups, pitchers, scales, etc. There was also a handsome long table where good men from the guild sat, eating, drinking, making good cheer, celebrating with trumpeters, and feasting in a splendid banquet in order to please my redoubtable lord. 61

If pleasing to the duke's eye, the display promoted the guild's importance as much as it did Philip's honor. Its messages captured the tableau's double purpose. Obviousl~ the shippers echoed the central city-wide theme of contrition and mere~ especially with the biblical allusion to God sparing Abraham his son and with the more contemporary reference to the 1453 amend, which the kneeling guildsmen recalled. This conflation of sacred history and past experience serviced the reverence demanded by Philip the Good and was characteristic of the Burgundian state. But with the ample use of guild symbols and with the sponsorship and mounting of the tableau itself, the guildsmen also flaunted their own power, perhaps so boldly because of their local prominence and their more traditional sympathy for Burgundian authority. 62 The images of conviviality and richness-the banquet, the precious items on the dresser-stand in striking contrast to the shippers' plea for forgiveness and to the general theme of submission. Indeed the carnivalesque excess of such abundance signaled the shippers' own perception of their notability. Guilds clearly dominated the entry celebration, but neighborhood and parish festive societies rivaled their official displays in a way rarely recorded in fifteenth-century Ghent. One group in particular, the "captains, parishioners, and neighbors of the church of Sint-Veerle," equaled the shippers with tableaux vivants that ran from the Hoofdbrug to the Gravenbrug adjacent to the Gravensteen. 63 One of SintVeerle's tableaux supported three groups of young women, all of whom personified abstract virtues; another featured a banquet scene; and a third, to the accompaniment of "diverse musical instruments," told the story of Miriam, sister of Aaron. 64 Besides the abundant tableaux and fire displays, Ghent's aldermen sponsored a separate drama competition, for which lots were drawn in the town hall on Monda~ April 24, the day after Philip entered. Seven theater societies participated: two official rhetorician confra-

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 ternities and five seemingly unincorporated neighborhood groups. All performed "pleasing mystery plays. 1165 That same day, the Ghent playwright Jan de Cuelneere and his company staged a piece that illustrated the clemency of King Alexander toward the king of a city he had besieged-still another obvious plea for Philip to forgive Ghent's past misdeeds. 66 Before de Cuelneere's performance, unspecified groups performed the so-called Ghent Play. Sponsored by the local aldermen, the drama explained the meaning of the city's tableaux vivants. 67 The following afternoon, the aldermen had reenacted all the representations mounted the day of Philip's entry. On the evening of the next day, Wednesday, April 26, the Ghent Play was performed in French for Philip the Good. 68 The city, glossing its own ritual, provided a fitting conclusion to Philip's welcome; for although Ghent's aldermen, guildsmen, and festive groups wove a tale of reconciliation, they kept the discourse in their own hands, shaping it according to their own needs and drawing on local idioms. More than just an act of contrition, the celebration reflects a careful strategy for winning back the duke's favor and, by extension, Ghent's cherished privileges. Despite their fragile position, Ghent's leaders steadily controlled the terms of the celebrations, skillfully luring Philip into their city. The aldermen and guild deans who had such a large hand in organizing the entry succeeded in suppressing difference by dressing the city up like a present to the duke. But they did so without forfeiting their own local culture or their central position in it. What, from one perspective, might look like a city bequeathing its space to Burgundian magnificence, from another reveals a tug-of-war between symbols of hierarchy and power. In its final hours the entry celebration moved from moralistic pleading to a more balanced sense of accord to achieve equilibrium. On Sunday, Philip the Good, his men, and Ghent's aldermen and prominent patricians joined together for a banquet at the town hall, which our observer from Ghent claims the duke himself sponsored. 69 A week later, on May 7, Gentenars and Burgundians celebrated together again, with a resplendent tournament on the Vrijdagmarkt. Two days later, after a seventeen-day visit, Philip and his retinue left the city, concluding one of the largest urban festivals ever held in Flanders. 70 Philip the Good's entry into Ghent in 1458 was a triumph. "Behold the treason and malice Gentenars plotted against their duke transformed into such happiness, love, and honor," marveled Chastel-

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of 1458 and 1467 lain as he searched for words to summarize his impression/' His formulation was clearly overdrawn-political hostility obviously remained-but it certainly revealed a truth about the celebrations' symbolic efficacy. Nearly five years after their humiliating defeat, the townspeople had succeeded in publicly transforming Burgundian opprobrium into respect for their capacity to flatter, not the least because of their power to generate public ritual. But the entry's success was not one sided; for both Burgundians and Gentenars profited from the duke's extended visit. For the Burgundian prince, the entry corrected Ghent's past sins and reconsecrated its behavior as licit. In the most dramatic terms possible, the entry assured Philip of his prominence in the urban sphere and of the respect and honor his urban clients owed h1m. For Ghent, the entry restored the civic link to the Burgundian state and provided a timely excuse for forgiveness. It offered Philip a near-perfect picture of urban harmony after a difficult war that had revealed all the city's competing factions. It portrayed the aldermen as in control, the guildsmen and neighborhood organizations as peaceful bodies whose self-esteem depended in part on a rivalry for the duke's favor. In the eyes of the Burgundians, this was competition at its best: shorn of political fury and put in the service of state power. However nuanced its representations, the entry's most vivid message was that ritual could remake social and political relations by repudiating past turmoil. The real success of Philip the Good's joyous entry was that it emphasized this reconfiguration at the same time that it promoted the vitality of Ghent's urban life and the richness of its culture.

1467: Exits, Entries, and Civic Revenge As spectacle, the 1458 entry celebration could not have been more successful, but it failed to elicit political concessions from the Burgundian duke. 72 The burden of war reparations, though reduced somewhat in 1455, continued long after the duke had left Ghent. To meet the payments, the aldermen were forced to increase indirect levies, including taxes on beer, wine, and firewood and the grain assize. In addition, as Marc Boone has noted, they had to undertake a massive and forced selling of rents to maintain the reparations, and as late as I46r, half the city's intake was spent on the repayment of debts incurred from these sales/3 Ghent tried to remain in the aging duke's good favor-in 1464 the city sent three hundred men to assist

Unity into Discord: The Entries of r458 and r467 in his tragicomic crusade-but town leaders never regained their political autonomy and only sank deeper under financial obligation to the state. 74 Few Burgundian luminaries visited Ghent during the final years of Philip's reign, and early official contacts between Philip's son Charles, count of Charolais, and Ghent's officials were not propitious. Twice between 1464 and I466, Ghent's Collatie refused Charles a sum of one-hundred thousand ridders which his father, still duke, had requested. Ghent did celebrate a magnificent tournament on the Vrijdagmarkt for Charles on November 9, 1466, but it was a ceremony that did not procure the desired money. 75 Ghent's cool attitude toward the count of Charolais changed dramatically when he succeeded as duke after Philip's death at Bruges on June 15, 1467. 76 With the memory of the 1458 entry still vivid, the city's aldermen easily comprehended the importance of the new duke's first entry into Ghent as count of Flanders. They saw the visit as a golden opportunity to seek new concessions and to remind the fledgling duke of the city's central role in Burgundian political life. With the shrewd Philip now dead, the aldermen welcomed the opportunity to begin anew to try winning back the political rights they had failed to secure by the 145 8 entry. Once again the Gentenars relied on an entry to shore up their political power, but the results were dramatically different. Whereas the former entry had been the quintessential good ceremony, what transpired in 1467 was an embarrassing fiasco that overturned any ideal of ritual consensus that might have been achieved in 1458. In fact, the limited success of the first entry-the aldermen's failure to secure the revocation of the Treaty of Gavere-created the conditions for the chaos that ensued. Beneath the smooth surface of ritual unity lurked the undercurrents of turmoil, which were revealed through the unraveling of this most critical of city and state ceremonies. 77 With real prescience, Burgundian officials had worried long in advance about the new duke's need to make an entry into Ghent. On the eve of the duke's visit, Burgundian representatives summoned ambassadors from Ghent to interrogate them because, as Georges Chastellain observed, "this city of Ghent, from former times, is very dangerous; its people, by natural influences there, are much to be feared. 1178 Like his father, Charles the Bold was concerned in particular that the legacy of Ghent's defeat in 1453 might provoke trouble. Officials at court had heard rumors that town officials wanted to use the entry ceremony to pressure the duke to rescind the humiliating

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 treaty/ 9 But the success of the 1458 entry, with its invocation of submission and reconciliation, ultimately convinced Charles of Ghent's fidelity. Moreover, legal and ceremonial traditions made this entry all but required; for without this inaugural rite in which oaths were sworn, formal political relations between the new Burgundian duke, acting in his capacity as count of Flanders, and his largest city could not commence. The decision to enter made, Charles confidently rode into the city on Sunday, June 28, 1467, after Ghent's aldermen reported a calm mood there. The Burgundian duke and his retinue entered at the Percellepoort, which led to the seigneury of Sint-Pieter's abbey. Ghent's aldermen rode outside the gate on horseback to welcome Charles; the city's religious community, including all major orders, followed on foot, with guildsmen and guild deans behind them. 80 Mathijs de Grootheere, a prominent city lawyer, personally greeted the prince and praised the sagacity of his deceased father. The ducal party then entered Sint-Pieter's seigneury with 784 Gentenars, formerly banished for past misdeeds, whom Charles had pardonedY Trumpeters and minstrels greeted the duke with music and drama as he entered through the Percellepoort. After mass at Sint-Pieter's abbey, and after the administration of the comital oath in the parish church of Sint-Jan, Charles made his way to the Vrijdagmarkt, passing the city's Belfry and its town hall, both hung with black wool cloth. Once on the marketplace, Charles entered inside the prominent Tooghuis and appeared at its window; as was customary, to hear the citizens assembled below pledge their obedience. 82 Then, departing from tradition, several aldermen, guild officials, and patricians knelt before the duke at the conclusion of the rally. They beseeched Charles to restore Ghent's political independence and its control over eastern Flanders. 83 This entry differed considerably from the last two major visits by Philip the Good in 145 3 and 145 8. Although the ceremony had proceeded as expected, despite the aldermen's request, it lacked the citizens' extreme submission displayed in the former welcomes. Because it was a joyeuse entree that began a new reign, Charles the Bold's welcome restored a ceremonial balance between city and state, with both parties demanding recognition: the state, for the duke's new reign as count; the aldermen, for their traditional rights and privileges. Burgundian public entries, like other state ceremonies, promoted an idealized portrait of consensus between townspeople and the

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 dukes; the ritual formula both assumed and presented, in the words of anthropologist Catherine Bell, "a relatively unified corporate body," which in fact rarely existed. 84 The entry offered a well-rehearsed ritual format in which an urban community and the Burgundian prince could dramatize their relationship to clarify respective political powers. In 1458, Ghent's aldermen and its guild leaders desired a public performance of peace in hopes of regaining what they had lost from war. In 1467, both aldermen and the duke once again hoped for an untroubled ceremony; the duke, because it would set a standard for other cities at the outset of his reign, and the aldermen, because they still sought to regain a measure of local autonomy. But Charles the Bold and Ghent's political leaders had unwittingly committed serious errors whose consequences soon became apparent. The morning after Sunday's festivities, a riot erupted on the Vrijdagmarkt at the very same spot where townspeople had legitimated the duke's tide to the countship of Flanders a day earlier. Swift and turbulent, the riot caught unawares both city and court officials, demonstrating the complicated role of Gentenars as ritual performers and revealing in addition that the entry ceremony, as a cultural peformance, was less a static evocation of political relations than an avenue, neither secure nor stable, through which change could be effected. The Revolt Charles the Bold had entered Ghent on June 28, the day of the city's popular religious procession of the relics of Saint Lieven. The translation of Lieven's relics, housed at Sint-Baafs' abbey, to Houtem and back prompted Ghent's largest civic celebration besides carnival. It involved not only an official confraternity that led the procession but thousands of citizens, and young men in particular, who followed the holy relics in a sacred tumult that mixed together worshipers from different social classes. 85 With Ghent's public world accustomed to ducal monitoring since 145 3, neither state officials nor city leaders in 1467 had found the decision to allow the new duke Charles the Bold to enter Ghent on the feast day of its cherished saint too troubling. After all, the Burgundians now wielded greater authority in Ghent, and the nettlesome guildsmen were held in check by aldermen whose selection since 145 3 was more firmly in the hands of the state. Why worry

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of r458 and r467 about the ever popular feast day of Saint Lieven if the political excesses of its most visible participants-guildsmen, especially young journeymen-had been curbed? Perhaps the duke and the aldermen had even conceived of an entry on such an important day as a special assertion of ducal rulership, a blunt yet magnificent statement that though lordly power was contracted, it nonetheless rested on a basic authority so great that it could displace at will the city's religious calendar and co-opt the sacred power of Saint Lieven. Perhaps too the decision had also seemed to guarantee a more pacific crowd, given that many of Ghent's potential troublemakers would be absent during the entry, required by decree of the aldermen to leave Ghent with the saint's reliquary a day earlier than usual, on Saturday, June 27, and to return on Monday, June 29, as was customary. 86 If such a move was meant to keep celebrants appeased, ensure the., duke's assertion of lordship, and guarantee a peaceful atmosphere, it failed to meet any of these purposes. The reworking of urban time at the expense of Ghent's most cherished procession upset the fragile political and cultural order. It would ironically also complicate the new duke's relationship with the city's aldermen. Philip the Good had been much wiser in his calculations when he chose the feast day of Saint George, patron saint of the powerful crossbowmen's confraternity, for his entry in 1458. He had isolated a special time that reflected his stake as fellow member of the elite confraternity, emphasizing a common bond with Ghent's most established townsmen. In contrast, Charles and Ghent's aldermen tactlessly strained Ghent's public order, freely rearranging it with seemingly little concern for the consequences. The response of the Lieven pilgrims to the upstaging of their procession demonstrates the seriousness of the mistake, and the collision of ritual times that ensued. Monday afternoon, angry pilgrims carrying the saint's relics reentered Ghent. Their mood was hardly serene. George Chastellain sketched a detailed account of the entry gone awry, purposely designed as a morality tale in which the new duke, still grieving for the death of his beloved father, and some earnest city aldermen, eager to please their new count of Flanders, fall victim to a conspiracy of wicked guildsmen and certain of their leaders to rob the prince of his dignity. With characteristic verve, Chastellain angrily described the Lieven worshipers as they returned as "a group of lowlife and young brats carrying the saint, shouting and crying, singing and dancing, making a hundred thousand insults, all drunk. " 87

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 As several reports of the incident note, "all these young rude folks/' in Chastellain's words, headed toward the Koornmarkt in central Ghent, where, crying aloud "Let Saint Lieven pass!" they smashed a hated tax booth to pieces. Emboldened by that success, the protestors rushed toward the Vrijdagmarkt, shouting denunciations of the city's aldermen, whom they accused of using war reparations as an excuse to overtax basic foodstuffs. 88 The pilgrims' anger, inspired by the displacement of their procession and by economic dislocation, found a perfect target in burdensome taxes. The special circumstances of the feast day procession, especially its foregrounding of ordinary townspeople, emboldened those whose rights had been curtailed since the end of the 1453 war. If Chastellain is correct, youth in the procession, and young journeymen in particular, led the procession (which seems probable given that they also played a key role in a second revolt of Lieven pilgrims in 1491 ). The wrath of young men, who so often were at the forefront of political unrest in late-medieval and early-modern urban life, points to an important distinction that was more generational than occupational. Whereas the guild deans had formed part of the official welcome delegation for Charles the Bold, and whereas some of them had, whether indirectly or directly, access to or seats at town hall, a number of their journeymen had obviously broken rank and become leaders in the social unrest. Although the various accounts of the revolt allow no sociologic precision beyond the broad categories they employ, such as "common folk/' "workers/' "journeymen," and "youth/' there is enough here to hint at fundamental divisions in the guild world. 89 Court officials such as Chastellain did not have such a nuanced perception of the turmoil and suspected a conspiracy of guild elites to humiliate the new duke. Chastellain himself describes how the protestors had secretly made in advance the guild banners whose public use had been prohibited since 1453, unfurling these now illegal symbols of labor and civic pride as they reentered Ghent. 90 One local account, The Diary of Ghent, offers a slightly different, but much more revealing, explanation, and one less driven by the Chastellain goal of crafting a melodramatic story of an unreproachable prince and duplicitious conspirators: that Gentenars in the procession, lacking the guildsmen's typical symbols of association since 145 3, simply borrowed another equally significant one, the cloth that draped the saint's reliquary, and marched beneath it to the Vrijdagmarkt.91 Thus these townsfolk superseded the previous day's dra-

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I4SB and I467 matization of urban and ducal commitments with a direct assertion of political rights and local proprietorship. By gathering on the Vrijdagmarkt, the rioters signified that this space, so important to the success of the Ghent War, was the exclusive site of urban power and urban defiance. The assembled crowd began to grow, and Charles the Bold and Ghent's aldermen were forced to react immediately to prevent an armed takeover of the whole city. The rebellion of the Saint Lieven pilgrims proceeded so rapidly and so successfully in its early hours in part because the saint himself, and his veneration, meant so much in Ghent. If the duke charmed his city with aristocratic charisma, the holy power of Saint Lieven, when contested, could prove a mighty competitor, especially in Ghent's most important public space. Three quarters of a century later, one astute observer of the procession, writing down in 1541 what he had seen a year earlier, noted that the boisterous enthusiasm inspired by the devotion to Lieven could easily spill over into the political arena, a fact confirmed by the many fifteenth-century local ordinances intended to police the procession. 92 Indeed, as Victor Turner's work on religious processions reveals, group participation in sacred activity often suspends established patterns of behavior and, in turn, temporarily transforms social and psychological identities and creates the potential for change. 93 In fact, Ghent's local leaders most feared the Lieven procession's potential for fostering new social relations. For the visitor from Lille who wrote about the 1540 procession, it was a time of heightened disorder, a drunken debauchery masquerading as holy business. Having watched the returning pilgrims encircle the Vrijdagmarkt three times with Lieven's relics, this writer scoffed that the crowd fancied itself in control of city space. He recognized the procession around the Vrijdagmarkt as the most dangerous moment of the two-day celebration, and rightly so, because this central square was a traditional venue in which to foment rebellion: And, with all the evils and sins committed during the pilgrimage, there is one other danger that many good people fear and hope will not occur then. When the majority of the common people of Ghent are heated up and restless there is the danger that, entering Ghent thus, yelling and shouting with the saint's body, they are always inclined to commotion when they are upon the central Vrijdagmarkt, which they circle three times, running with the reliquary, and shouting like men without any sense, any memory, any understanding. 9'

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 The importance of the Saint Lieven procession was well established in Ghent before 1467, and others besides the Lille visitor had publicly criticized its profane behavior. The visitor from Lille estimated that one-third of Ghent's population participated. 95 The procession's official organization, however, devolved on abbey officials and members of a local confraternity named in honor of the saint. 96 Incorporated in 1284, but probably older than its legal endowment, the Saint Lieven confraternity was a guild-based and mixed-sex corporation, whose members, according to the fifteenth-century sacristan Henrik d'Hooge, included boatmen, brewers, shipmakers, coverlet weavers, fishmongers, wool weavers, coopers, and shiploaders. 97 Preparations for the saint's translation began on June 2 5 at SintBaafs, when the monks displayed his relics, thereby setting in motion a series of private celebrations within the abbey's community. On June 2 7 in the afternoon, members of the Lieven confraternity arrived at the abbey, circling its walls in a procession before entering. At midnight, after the Benedictines and the confraternity brothers had honored their ritual union with an evening meal, a priest celebrated midnight mass in the crypt of the abbey's church. At its conclusion, monks opened the abbey church's door, and throngs of city pilgrims entered to hear a public mass. 98 The early-morning mass brought all worshipers together and created the appropriate ritual context for the start of the procession. Carrying Lieven's relics, the brothers left Sint-Baafs's church and processed toward the abbey's gate, followed by the abbot himself and magistrates of Sint-Baafs's Village. At the Jorispoort, the village's principal gate, the Benedictine community officially surrendered the relics to the confraternity brothers and to the host of worshipers gathered there. The fishmongers, prominent members of the Lieven confraternity, stood at the front and back of the reliquary. Once situated, the confraternity members began the twenty-kilometer procession to Houtem, leading a group that included monks, representatives from the magistrates of Ghent and Sint-Baafs, and thousands of pilgrims, armed with flags, candles, torches, and musical instruments. 99 The Saint Lieven procession flourished throughout the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, though Ghent's aldermen had begun to police it by the mid-fourteenth century. 100 The anonymous Lille critic, reflecting in 1541 on more than two centuries of trouble caused by

the procession, lambasted it as a profane time when female wor-

shipers were lucky to avoid assault. 101 Despite his censorious tone

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 and his use of sexual disorder to describe a politically threatening event, the visitor captured the connection between the saint's popularity and Ghent's civic world. So too did the fourteenth-century Ghent poet Boudewijn vander Luere, whose poem The Virgin of Ghent describes how the sacred authority of at least twenty-five saints, including Lieven, contributed to Ghent's mightiness. Discussing an image of a Virgin, representing Ghent, sitting in an arbor (prieel), vander Luere explains that the arbor symbolizes Ghent's marketplace and that the saints join to protect the city. 102 On April 4, 1452, the eve of the outbreak of armed conflict between Ghent and the Burgundian state, the city's ruling captains proved vander Luere's point when they mobilized Lieven's relics for a city-wide procession to avert war and save Ghent. 103 Although under the authority of the abbey of Sint-Baafs, the worship of Saint Lieven ran deep in the civic consciousness of Gentenars.

Negotiation and Reconciliation The revolt of Lieven's worshipers on June 29, 1467, resulted from the careless overlapping of two ritual agendas, a ducal-civic affirmation of what each owed the other and a civic-sacred extravaganza. But the conflict over ritual priorities was not the only cause of armed uprising. The very nature of both the joyous entry and the Lieven procession invited the airing of grievances, the former because it was a traditional vehicle to issue urban demands, the latter because its symbolic activity altered the usual social and status boundaries for its duration. Once on the Vrijdagmarkt, the worshipers manipulated both Lieven's relics and public space to buttress their legitimacy. Installed on the traditional spot in Ghent for rallies, and commanding the sacred power of Saint Lieven, the protestors refused to disband, behaving much as they had during their revolt against the new duke's father. Now upstaged by the very celebration they had tried to control, neither the duke nor the aldermen had any clear plan for how to respond. Charles the Bold, advised of the insurrection while at court in Ghent, immediately wanted to confront the protestors, because, as Chastellain remarked, "it seemed to him that this indeed was a peculiar and difficult reception and entry." 104 But Lodewijk Gruuthuse, a close Flemish adviser to the duke, recommended caution, warning, "Your life and ours rest upon your careful behavior. //los

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 No account of the event agrees on who spoke first, but all say that both Charles and Gruuthuse addressed the assembled crowd. 106 Gruuthuse, a Fleming in service of the court, hoped to reconcile the protesters rallying around Saint Lieven's reliquary with the duke's men. He chastised the Gentenars for burdening a "good, debonair, and honest" young prince with their complaints. "This is not honorable," Chastellain has Gruuthuse argue, "to riot at the duke's entry; the day before to receive him with solemn processions, and now to salute him with iron swords." 107 The crowd responded that it was not the duke who was the object of its vituperation but the greedy aldermen who had overtaxed citizens to enrich their own pockets. 108 Gruuthuse had argued that an entry ceremony was not a suitable occasion to riot because it was a time to honor the duke as their new count. The protestors, cleverly, did not reject this point, but instead seized on its logic to appeal to the duke's legal obligation to protect them, a promise just sworn a day earlier, and a political foundation for the respect Gentenars owed him. All accounts of the riot, including one from Pieter van de Letuwe, a magistrate from Ypres who witnessed the events as a member of the crowd, note that it was Charles's appearance that undermined Gruuthuse's mediation and, with it, any hope for a peaceful outcome. Marching onto the Vrijdagmarkt at the head of an armed troop of archers and knights, the duke, dressed in black, brandishing a sword and hot with anger, pushed through the crowd. So exasperated by events was Charles that he even struck one passerby with his weapon, knocking him senseless and provoking the assembled citizens. 109 With his violent behavior, the duke had clearly violated the rioters' sense that the Vrijdagmarkt was theirs alone, only to be approached or used by others with permission and care. Members of the shippers', butchers', and fishmongers' guilds, prominent corporations in Ghent with warmer ties to Burgundian authorities, escorted the duke through the marketplace to the Tooghuis to guarantee his safety. Chastellain notes that Charles addressed the crowd in Dutch, appealing to the protestors as "my children" and promising his support for their grievances, trying his best to reassert the ducal paternalism of the previous day's celebrations. 110 But as reported in both the anonymous Chronicle of Flanders and Chastellain's narrative, Charles's charitable mood abruptly changed when an ordinary Gentenar, a certain Hoste Bruneel, described in one account as a "man-servant," upstaged him and tipped the dynamic back toward the protestors. Somehow Bruneel had managed

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 to enter the Tooghuis and appear beside the prince in its window. Facing the crowd, Bruneel demanded that Charles punish the city's aldermen, abolish the hated indirect taxes known as cueillotes, allow guildsmen to have their banners, reopen three gates closed since the war, and restore Ghent's political and legal autonomy, which his father had restricted in 1453Y 1 Having failed to subdue the crowd, Charles departed in a furious mood, incredulous that a mere servant had seized the initiative and thereby validated both the rioters' bill of complaints and their singular appropriation of the Vrijdagmarkt. The aldermen and many of Ghent's guild deans, also powerless to intervene, watched in resignation.m The protestors, in contrast, grew even bolder. As the duke himself later reported, several tried to storm the city's Belfry to sound the alarm, as they had done during the Ghent War to assemble crowds on the Vrijdagmarkt. Finding its entrance closed, several men entered the parish church of Sint-Jacob and rang its bell. Many more city guildsmen responded to the call.ll3 The diverse crowd of Lieven pilgrims, laborers, and guildsmen who swelled the Vrijdagmarkt, certain of their success, remained there overnight after Gruuthuse, returning to the marketplace, advised them to put their grievances in writing. ll 4 In his own account of the event, Charles the Bold recalled how he conferred with Ghent's aldermen, who suggested returning guild banners as the only way to disband the rioters. Without banners, the aldermen argued, the protestors lacked the formal means to depart, an astonishing admission that revealed the extent to which this insurrection was rooted back in the public world of the Ghent War. The duke, desperate, consented, but the result was the opposite of what he had intended. Unfurling their banners for the first time in fourteen years and rallying around Lieven's reliquary, the Gentenars, now conjoining sacred and secular emblems of power, stubbornly refused to leave the VrijdagmarktY5 By evening, an official delegation of city and court officials which included Gruuthuse; Clais Triest, the bailiff of Ghent; Ghent's aldermen; and Jan Petitpas, the ducal secretary, arrived on the marketplace. Conceding defeat, they announced to the crowd that Charles the Bold had agreed to all their demands except Ghent's control over its Quarter, an issue reserved for a review by a special committee. 116 The crowd responded with jubilation. Rebellious Gentenars had not only successfully wrested civic space from the duke and his ceremony. They had regained their right to banners, their secular em-

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 blem of authority, with the help of Saint Lieven, their sacred repository of power. Scattered groups of disbanding protesters celebrated their victory by attacking another tax booth in central Ghent and smashing it to pieces; they then headed for the Spitaalpoort, sealed since 145 3, and forced it open. Meanwhile, members of the Lieven confraternity returned Saint Lieven's reliquary to the abbey of SintBaafs now that their sacred mission was completed. 117 If many rejoiced, neither the duke nor Ghent's aldermen were pleased. The duke's ceremonial and political ambitions for his entry had been checked. The chronicler Philip de Commynes, with great insight, had emphasized the importance of Charles's first joyous entry into Ghent; for other cities were watching to see what kinds of political concessions might be earned from the new duke. 118 Because of Ghent's central place in framing city and state relations, Charles's entry was to have been exemplary, a quiet sequel to the Gentenars' spectacular display of fealty in 145 8. Instead, events proved that the pageantry and stylized unity of the previous Ghent entry were no more than a veneer. Even worse, de Commynes's prediction proved true, and mini-rebellions shook several other cities. 119 The 1467 joyeuse entree had both failed to create a single urban voice and brought two ritual times into direct confrontation. Charles and his men departed Ghent on July r, leaving behind a fractured community whose political leaders were deeply shaken by the insurrection. True, the urban rebellion had forced Charles to grant concessions much desired by all Gentenars. But the aldermen and leading guild deans knew that the future of political relations between Ghent and the Burgundian state depended on exculpating themselves. They were in a delicate position, trapped between the scorn of the duke and the radical politics of the city's guildsmen. Several aldermen and guild deans confronted Charles as he left Ghent, their request reflecting the difficulty of their position. They offered profuse apologies for the rebellion, but, as the Yprian Pieter van de Letuwe personally witnessed, they also pleaded with Charles to put his concessions immediately on paper to protect them from the wrath of the common folk. 120 Ghent's elite knew that no amount of imploring would heal the rift that the rebellion had produced. Just as civic ritual and its symbols had given city protestors the means of articulating their dissent, so out of this symbolic stock might come the means of formal reconciliation. On July 28, the duke issued Gentenars a pardon for their rebellion, officially reopened Ghent's three sealed gates, and once

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 again allowed its citizens the use of guild and civic banners. 121 At the same time, Charles insisted on a ceremony of ritual repentance in which Ghent's political elite would pay for the insubordination of the lowly. The duke demanded that sixty-three leading townsmen kneel bareheaded before him and solicit his grace. 122 On August 8, four of Ghent's aldermen, its two head deans, and fifty-seven patricians and guildsmen, divided into three groups of nineteen, submitted before the duke as required. Unlike the honorable amend in r45 3, which had taken place right outside Ghent's walls, this ceremony forced the Gentenars to travel to the Burgundian court in Brussels to beg mercy before top Burgundian officials. 123 Intense negotiations had preceded this submission; delegations from Ghent had beseeched the duke's forgiveness, at one point arguing that "Ghent is not Sodom and Gomorra" but instead a town ready to repent. 124 The humiliation of a pardon outside Ghent on the duke's terms and in the court's domain was balanced at least by the gains secured by the Gentenars. True, the ritual censure of Ghent's aldermen and guild leaders was an especially painful reminder of the submission imposed on them by Philip the Good in 1453. What is more, forcing these townsmen to kneel before the duke in Brussels carried a connotation of defeat; for it denied these townsmen their own meaningful space. But in the eyes of Ghent's leaders, the weight of this burden of shame was matched by the political concessions the Lieven protestors had won for the city. Indeed the revolt had secured the duke's promise to overturn the Treaty of Gavere's most cumbersome stipulations-something the aldermen themselves had failed to accomplish. The Brussels submission, then, was a distasteful yet effective means· of regaining a share of the city's former political strength. Many of Ghent's leaders doubted, however, that the Burgundian duke would let them off so lightly. Serious unrest in Liege occupied Charles the Bold throughout much of the rest of 1467 and 1468, ending, unhappily for the city, with its near total destruction by the duke's forces in late October 1468. 125 Predictably, after the conclusion of the brutal Liege campaigns, Charles once again turned his attention back to Ghent, now ready to throw his full weight into punishing this errant city. Civic authorities needed few hints to settle on a course of action. The aldermen had sent a messenger to attend the sacking of Liege on October 28, and he had stayed long enough to witness the utter destruction. Terrified by what the messenger had seen, Ghent's politi-

Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467

cal elite overreacted, quickly suggesting to Charles their own willingness to submit before his full princely authority and jettison their opposition to the Treaty of Gavere. On November 22, the aldermen sent a delegation to Liege to congratulate the duke on his campaign there. On December 22, city representatives met in the Collatie and agreed on anti-agitation measures, promising to relinquish guild banners, to reclose the three city gates opened after the revolt, and to punish severely any urban unrest. They admonished guildsmen in particular to avoid any armed gatherings or political protest, threatening arrest, banishment, and the loss of guild membership. At the same time, they reminded all Gentenars-"men, wives, young and old"-that no one would escape the full measure of the law. 126 A second and more substantial amend at the Burgundian court in Brussels on January 8, 1469, capped the duke's tardy punishment of the Gentenars for their inversion of his entry ceremony a. year and a half earlier. 127 Ghent's aldermen, fifty-three of its guild deans, and some lesser jurors all gathered outside the court in Brussels on the Coudenberg square, forced to wait in the snow for more than an hour and a half. Chronicler Olivier de LaMarche and Pierre Bladelin, maitres d'hotel for the Burgundian court, finally arrived to meet the Ghent delegation. They led the wet and cold civic delegation inside the court's central hall, now packed with prominent officials and seventeen or more foreign ambassadors, and decorated lavishly with fine tapestries of classical rulers. Guild deans carried their banners as they approached the central hall with other city officials. All the townsmen knelt thrice before entering and carefully laid down their banners, crying "mercy" in unison, much as they had done after the Ghent War in 1453. 128 Entering the grand hall, the humbled men saw Charles the Bold seated on an elevated throne magnificently covered with golden cloth. Charles immediately ordered his senior chancellor Pierre de Goux to shred Ghent's privilege of I30I, the basis of its right to selfgovernance, thereby annulling it forever before the full court. 129 In a rare move, the duke then directly addressed the vanquished citizens; he complained about their two decades of misbehavior and furiously denounced their subversion of his entry ceremony in 1467. Charles had come to Ghent "to swear to maintain and respect its privileges," but city folks had responded by profaning his honor. His only choice, therefore, was to enforce their obedience and to hope that they would henceforth promise to be "good people and good children." 130 Ghent had thus lost all claims to political autonomy. Its civic

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and I467 leaders were forced to witness the physical and symbolic laceration of their essential legal privilege in a ceremony designed to etch indelibly in their minds the price of failing to prevent political unrest. In April 1469, Charles even restored the much maligned cueillote, and in August, he selected Ghent's aldermen without any participation by the city's political elite. 131 With three of Ghent's gates reclosed and with the ritual surrender of its guild banners, the city's townspeople had once again forfeited some of their most powerful symbols. In response, Ghent's aldermen legislated further restrictions on the Lieven procession. They forbade pilgrims to carry the reliquary and demanded that they place it on a wagon, apparently to lessen actual physical contact with the saint's relics. 132 Banners and relics, the secular and sacred tools of the rebellion, were casualties of the peace that followed. So too was the right to assemble unquestioned in public and the right of townspeople generally, particularly guildsmen, to control their own urban space. On May 20, 1469, the city pacified, Duchess Margaret of York visited Ghent. Eleven days later Charles himself entered; city leaders feted him properly with gifts, and townspeople welcomed him with tableaux vivants. Town authorities even organized a water tournament on the Leie, in which guildsmen and those in the ducal retinue competed for prizes awarded for the best processional entries. 133 The ritual interaction between Gentenars and the ducal family expressed in these two entries ameliorated but did not eradicate the discord produced by the entry that had gone awry. The 1469 entries, following on the heels of two formal amends, certainly restored the much desired image of consensus, but only at the expense of Ghent's public life. In these two entries, the aldermen were able to assure the duke and the duchess that they had firmly reestablished peace in Ghent, but they did so as political weaklings, without their former civic privileges. The guildsmen too successfully displayed a pacific mood. The playful water tournament between the duke and these townsmen suggested that though competition might be inevitable, it could promote a spirit of fraternity and reconciliation between ruler and subjects. Once denied their banners and their right to rally, the guildsmen again became feckless participants in the game of state ritual. entries into Ghent, as we have seen, were key to shaping political relations between city and state, offering a formal means of articulating consent or discord and providing a ritual for-

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of r458 and r467 mat that spawned both conflict and reconciliation. Still, historians of late-medieval and early-modern entry ceremonies have often shied away the social world of the entry, focusing instead on deciphering how entries translate formal constitutional, political, and iconographic principals into street spectacle. From such a perspective, entries become large-scale shows whose rich stagings and processions reflect political and social life and do so in a highly useful way; as cultural representations, they serve as a kind of signature of a community's ideal self-image. Although it is true that the entry spectacle often allowed townsfolk to map out their political and social groupings, historians routinely abstract entry ceremonies from the realities of the political and social conflicts that have informed them over the centuries. 134 The example of Ghent suggests that Burgundian entries were deeply embedded in the political process they represented and that they brimmed with an almost messy dynamism. Exactly because they dramatized political relations so vividly, entries became powerful tools in transforming social and political identities, offering a rare opportunity to size up the status quo and even to seek change. Far from revealing civic unity, entries permitted various urban groups to articulate conflicting goals and diverse interests. 135 When successful for those in charge, as in 145 8, an entry provided a theatrical frame within which social and political relations were confronted, assessed, and confirmed, thereby silencing conflict. Through the process of what has been called "ritualization," the enactment of the entry ceremony made vivid the all normative structures undergirding political life, allowing political leaders to evaluate the relations of power that animated their daily lives. 136 In contrast, Ghent's troubles in 1467 perfectly illustrate the multiple goals of the entry's players, a set of divergences that the formal ceremony itself is designed to contain. The city's elite desperately sought to flatter the duke but, in the end, were forced to pay for the transgressions of journeymen, Lieven pilgrims, and other city folk (all too unspecified in the historical record) they were unable to police properly. The aldermen wanted to renew Ghent's political order by winning Charles's approbation, but they mistakenly disrupted the city's civic calendar to achieve it. The rioters reacted by reasserting their claim to Ghent's streets and squares and rested their political action on the ritual efficacy of local emblems of power. In 145 8, Ghent's communities managed to present a show of common accord with their Burgundian count; in 1467, a battle over political and cui-

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Unity into Discord: The Entries of r458 and r467 tural priorities prevented even the appearance of urban consensus. Most ceremonial entries of late-medieval and early-modern Europe proceeded without the serious mistakes committed by Charles the Bold and Ghent's aldermen in 1467. For that reason, perhaps, historians have too confidently assumed their function as passive artifice. Scholars have skillfully charted and catalogued the powerful symbols manipulated during entries and read these ceremonies with the utmost care for what they reveal about the manifold parts of a political community. But if nothing else, the contrasting fortunes of Ghent's 1458 and 1467 entries demonstrate that symbols, like those who wield them, have a flesh-and-blood reality behind them. Entries in late-medieval Flanders might have been crafted as testaments to unity; but they were no more stable than the urban communities that sponsored them.

6

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians

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The competing symbols of civic unity and chaos so powerfully evoked in the 1458 and 1467 Burgundian entries into Ghent were the work of a crowded field of political players. Still, not all civic associations in Ghent contributed to the festivities honoring Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. Most noticeably missing among the mix of aldermen, patricians, guildsmen, and clergy who made up the entries' official ceremonial mosaic were the city's leading military confraternities, the Saint Sebastian archers and the Saint George cross bowmen. Jn the first half of the fifteenth centur~ these elite members of Ghent's militia had earned considerable prestige as servants both to their city and its Burgundian princes. By 1440, Ghent's crossbowmen had captured a prominent place in the city's festive world with an enormous shooting competition that skillfully joined townsmen and their prince in ritual competition. 1 But thereafter an active schedule of events took the crossbowmenand the city's archers-on regular trips outside the city. 2 Though the archers' and crossbowmen's prominence remained secure through the second half of the fifteenth centur~ their frequent absence allowed other festive corporations to command considerable public attention at home. Alread~ by Philip the Good's 1458 entry into Ghent, there were shifts in the city's ritual configuration; its neighborhooqs and quarters witnessed the emergence of several lay groups more concerned with theater than with military or ecclesiastical affairs. By the last quarter of the fifteenth centur~ scores of new confraternities, known 159

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians to contemporaries as "chambers of rhetoric," emerged to alter urban culture in the Burgundian Netherlands. 3 Interpreted variously by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars as play groups, literary societies, inheritors of the sacred dramatic traditions of the medieval clergy, and pioneers of the secular literary esprit, these urban confraternities of so-called rhetoricians are routinely held up as harbingers of municipal self-consciousness, as proud witnesses to a victorious burgher culture that ushered Low Country cities into the modern world. 4 These rhetorician confraternities, though certainly shaped by urban concerns and attitudes, embodied a central paradox. They came of age at the apogee of Burgundian territorial and political consolidation, a topsy-turvy time when urban centers were beset with violent economic and political unrest as power passed increasingly away from the cities. 5 If the growth of rhetorician confraternities signaled a robust urban culture, that strength masked a decline in real political fortunes, most notably reflected in the loss by city regimes of well-entrenched urban privileges. 6 The link between Ghent's slipping political power and its flourishing cultural life is to be found in the development of the city's four rhetorician confraternities. Their history; their exact role in Ghent's public life, and their interaction with other urban groups reveal the ritual priorities that rhetorician confraternities promoted. First, they tapped into the ritual networks of exchange that archers and crossbowmen had elaborated, yet they worked them in way that established a firmer distance between civic and state participants and helped to shape a more restricted cultural world. Second, by regularly feting Burgundian officials, the rhetoricians played a public role in leveraging Burgundian spectacle, this despite a general urban opposition to centralizing pressures from the state. Third, rhetoricians shifted the festive priorities away from men at arms to poets and dramatists, undercutting the attention paid to crossbowmen and archers in order to celebrate townspeople who aped aristocratic belles lettres. This latter development had serious political consequences; for rhetoricians were easily more manageable than men who wielded military weapons. Yet in spite of their less threatening skills, the rhetoricians' urban sensibilities-and their guild commitmentsencouraged a staunch awareness of the power of Low Country cities. By 1493, the rhetoricians' civic orientation was strong enough to prompt an effort by the Habsburg duke Philip the Fair to control their festive license. At the end of the fifteenth century, Ghent's rit-

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians ual groups still vigorously intersected with the public life of the Burgundian state, posing challenges only resolved in the first part of the sixteenth century by the Habsburg Burgundians.

Origins and Traditions Urban confraternities that specialized in poetry and drama first sprang up in the cities of the southern Netherlands in the late fourteenth century, spreading rapidly thereafter throughout Burgundian terrain. Similar to the archers and crossbowmen, with whom they shared many characteristics, the rhetoricians' ancestry is no toriously difficult to retrieve. 7 The confraternity De Heilige Gheest (The Holy Ghost) was chartered by Diksmuide's municipal officials in I394, giving it the earliest known statute for a rhetorician confraternity in the Low Countries. Authorities in Brussels approved a charter for the confraternity Den Boeck (The Book) in I40I. But already some decades before, "drama societies" (gezellen van den spele) crop up in city financial records throughout the southern Low Countries, paid for their participation in urban ceremony. 8 As with the archers and crossbowmen, the emergence of these thespian groups roughly paralleled the development of Burgundian power in northwestern Europe. Perhaps just as important, the rise of drama groups throughout Flanders, Brabant, and other regions of the Netherlands by the late fourteenth century followed a general surge in urban theater throughout western Europe. 9 From Italian confraternities undertaking sacred representations to French and English confraternities commemorating saints' lives and local miracles with street plays, theater groups flourished, stimulated by an overall growth of urban corporations. The cities of northern France, particularly significant centers of urban theater, were home to religious brotherhoods-staffed by clerics and laymen-such as the famous Parisian Confraternity of the Passion, which secured a royal monopoly in I402 on the representation of Easter plays. 10 The impact of the Confraternity of the Passion and other French religious confraternities was felt throughout the cities of northwestern Europe; the similarity of tableaux vivants and staging techniques in France, England, and the Netherlands led George Kernodle long ago to speak of

a common theater tradition. 11 In the Low Countries, De Heilige Gheest's incorporation in I394 began a trend that would run for more than a century; by ISSO, virtually every city and town in this

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians region boasted at least one rhetorician confraternity; and major urban centers supported up to six. 12 This amazing development ended the near-monopoly over intercity festive competitions enjoyed by the shooting confraternities. But although the cultural groundswell that brought the rhetoricians into prominence in urban life evidently eclipsed the ceremonial power of archers and crossbowmen, no smooth sequence of events transferred preeminence from the shooting to the rhetorician confraternities. The transition was more complicated, and all the more fascinating too, because archers, crossbowmen, and rhetoricians played off each other to consolidate their respective roles. Rather than inhabiting separate spheres, the two sets of confraternities developed in tandem, challenging and rechallenging the urban ritual map. Of the myriad ideas about the institutional origins of these rhetorician confraternities, the one theory that acknowledges an urban public tradition places the emergence of these drama organizations in the context of the history of shooting confraternities themselves, given that the earliest and largest of the shooting competitions included a role for troupes of actors. 13 Whether these companies formed independent associations or were merely a sub-specialization within archer and crossbowmen confraternities is difficult to say. But regardless of their parentage, the drama companies' involvement in shooting matches is obvious. Crossbowmen at the month-long Tournai competition in 1394 offered prizes for "the best games and comedies without villainy; performing pleasing and delightful amusements," a hint that they had actors in their company. 14 The 1404 competition of crossbowmen at Oudenaarde was called "the festival of amusements," and prizes were once again promised for "the best game and comedy without villainy. 1115 Even Ghent's celebrated 1440 competition included among its many awards a category for the best comic drama performed both in Dutch and in French. Indeed, an entry in Oudenaarde's financial accounts for that year proves that municipal authorities sent a group of "good men of drama" to Ghent to accompany their crossbowmen. 16 All the largest shooting competitions included plays, even if the processions and military exercises of the crossbowmen and archers remained their ceremonial apogee. Despite this close relationship between shooting confraternities and early Low Country drama, the cultural and social influences that shaped rhetorician confraternities were as complex and varied as the urban communities from which

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians they came. Some historians rightly see the religious background of the rhetoricians as particularly salient. Like related confraternities throughout northwestern Europe, city rhetoricians in the Low Countries seem to have played a significant role in urban religious life. In nearly all the region's cities, drama groups participated vigorously in processionsY The evidence for the role of rhetorician confraternities in urban sacred activity is piecemeal for the fifteenth century; but it nonetheless points to a strong pattern of participation in festivals honoring the Annunciation and Corpus Christi. Apart from Ghent, such important cities as Kortrijk, Mechelen, and Lier had rhetoricians who performed sacred drama for these two celebrations throughout the century. 18 An abbey chronicle, for example, reveals that there were Corpus Christi tableaux vivants staged as early as 1409 just south of Ghent in Oudenaarde, whose Franciscans first began the representations, mounting them on wagons paraded through the streets. By 1412, a drama group had joined the Corpus Christi celebrations, and local neighborhoods held contests to see which could best embellish its processions. In 1413, city authorities even offered awards for "the most beautiful and best representation" staged by local quarters. Within a year, so-called theater societies (gezellen van esbattemente)-the embryos of Oudenaarde's two rhetorician confraternities-became involved in staging dramas. 19 The example of Oudenaarde warrants attention because it nicely indicates the dual heritage of rhetorician confraternities in the southern Low Countries. Above all, these theater groups share a common link to drama organizations throughout western European cities, differing only in degree but not in kind from the confreries in France and the compagnie in Italy. But unlike their associates outside northwestern Europe, the Low Countries rhetoricians developed alongside shooting confraternities, a fact that certainly shaped their public ritual. In both 1404 and 1440, as we have seen, Oudenaarde's crossbowmen included theater and actors in their shooting competitions. The rhetoricians' double connection to the festive history of archers and crossbowmen and to urban ecclesiastical groups and their sacred calendar, though inadequately understood, suggests a complex relationship between rhetoricians and other urban corporations.

Both the internal structure of rhetorician confraternities and their small surviving literary output from this early period also reveal a diverse ancestry. 20 In their confraternal organization the rhetoricians

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians often resemble the archers and crossbowmen. Ruled by an honorary "prince," "king," or "emperor," a rhetorician confraternity entrusted its administration to a body of deans and officials. Unlike the shooting confraternities, however, each confraternity of rhetoricians placed tremendous importance on an official poet (factor), who wrote and supervised most of its plays and poems. Despite this novelty, in most aspects of regulation the rhetoricians were typical lay confraternities. All rhetorician confraternities demanded, of their members, matriculation and maintenance fees, a death fee, and mandatory attendance at the patron saint's feast day and at weekly poetry exercises. 21 For the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even fewer rhetorician registers of matriculation survive than do those of archers and crossbowmen. Besides one example from Ghent (which I consider later), the Mechelen confraternity De Peoene (The Peony) is a happy exception; for it left behind a book of members that begins in the late fifteenth century. Eugeen van Autenboer has evaluated the confraternity's membership from its incorporation in 1471 to the sixteenth century, checking individual rhetoricians against other city records in which they appear. He concludes that the confraternity cut across social and political groups, including in its ranks many secular clerics, city patricians, and powerful guildsmen such as fishmongers and butchers. The confraternity even enrolled a small but inactive group of regional nobles. What scarce information exists for other cities points to a similar heterogeneity, though certain prominent confraternities remained more exclusive. Despite patrician and ecclesiastical participation, it was, more often than not, richer guildsmen who made up the core membership. 22 For confraternities that routinely serviced Burgundian needs for public acclaim, the rhetoricians were less immediately dependent on lordly patronage than the shooting confraternities. Interaction between regional sovereigns and the rhetoricians existed from the beginning, but it differed in degree and kind. Brussels's Den Boeck enrolled Jan I~ the duke of Brabant, as a member, and the duke reciprocated by treating the Brussels rhetoricians to a banquet in 1417· When Philip the Good gained possession of Brabant in 1430, he too joined the confraternity, a practice continued by his successors. The Habsburg Philip the Fair, grandson of Charles the Bold, even on occasion attended Den Boeck's poetry exercises. 23 But as a general pattern, few rhetorician confraternities seem to have included princes

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians as actual members, despite the warm words rhetoricians extended toward them. 24 This should come as no surprise, inasmuch as the chivalric ethos of the late-medieval court still encouraged its men to cherish physical and military prowess. Never mind that rhetoric was part of the classical trivium; princes above all fancied themselves warriors and hence tended to favor direct participation with archer and crossbowmen confraternities. 25 As a social elite, the rhetoricians' main business was to promote the world of letters in the urban sphere and out in public. For just as rhetoricians wrote, so too did they perform, most noticeably during civic festivals, both religious and secular. Apart from weekly poetry exercises and indoor drama such as the "table plays" (tafelspelen), the vast majority of the rhetoricians' work happened out in the streets, for the benefit of city dignitaries but also, on special occasions, for the profit of Burgundian leaders. By the second half of the fifteenth century, rhetoricians were a regular feature of urban celebrations honoring Burgundian princes, and as the century closed they became even more active participants in festivities on behalf of state officials, praising such Burgundian activities as princely births, deaths, marriages, entries, and military victories. 26 The reasons for the growth of Low Country rhetorician confraternities are indeed complex. Their vigorous emergence across the urban landscape coincided with the peak of Burgundian power and with the difficult transition of that power into Habsburg hands. Rhetoricians flourished in conjunction with the erosion of civic autonomy at the hands of Burgundian expansion, as did the archers and crossbowmen. But if the shooting confraternities drew on well-established military groups that had prospered for centuries, rhetorician confraternities reflected a relatively young world of literate urban townspeople. City rhetoricians came to be a new cultural elite, eager to distinguish themselves from workers and peasants and quick to assume a central role in urban ceremony. They revitalized urban life by legitimating the Dutch language as an important cultural force, while as social groups they were striking emblems of civic pride. But the rhetoricians' activity was affected by the state, whose powers had begun to reach deep into their urban communities. Poised between the city and the state, the rhetoricians paradoxically enriched civic ritual while political independence waned with the ascendancy, like in Ghent after 145 3, of a narrower group of magistrates with more pronounced Burgundian sympathies. 27 Rhetoricians simultane-

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians ously established the urban vernacular as a serious intellectual enterprise and fostered a social elite cultUially indebted to the literary world of the aristocracy.

Rhetorician Confraternities in Ghent The celebration for Philip the Good's entry in 145 8 drew so richly on drama companies and tableaux vivants that it provides one of the most revealing glimpses of the all-too-hidden world of theater in fifteenth-century Ghent. This is not simply because De Fonteine (The Fountain) and Saint Barbara, two of Ghent's rhetorician confraternities, are mentioned among the seven "drama groups" that performed on the third day of festivities honoring the duke. 28 More significant is that the city teemed with neighborhood festive groups, all eager to prove their dramatic skills by competing with guildsmen and patricians for the attention of the aldermen and the prince. The complex interweaving of urban corporations through ritual competition suggests how we can make sense of Ghent drama and its relation to the Burgundian state. Festive societies in Ghent organized much of their business around rivalries to prove individual worth and garner group esteem. Rhetoricians in particular converted public performances into public contests, opening up a world of urban drama in which competitions among city neighborhoods and parishes doubled as venues for publicizing the power of city theater. More noteworthy, Burgundian lordship and its prerogatives regularly inspired drama competitions. The burst of theater activity in 145 8 makes the rise of drama in Ghent appear sudden, though in fact there was precedence. Before the formal establishment of confraternities, Ghent rhetoricians had contributed to the city's ritual life in a way that has left traces. On May 31, 1431, a "theater society from Ghent" participated as a guest in Oudenaarde's Corpus Christi procession, performing a "wagon play" on a moving cart. 29 Then, in 1432, to celebrate the birth of Philip the Good's first son, Ghent hosted a series of plays and street celebrations, inviting groups from other cities in the region. 30 As a chronicle from Oudenaarde informs us, "Gentenars offered a prize for the question: Who best could praise the baptism and nobility of Josse, duke Philip's son, recently born in Ghent." Mechelen won the contest, and Oudenaarde captured second place.31 In 1442, Ghent's aldermen paid a group of the city's rhetoricians three pounds groat

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians for participating in a drama competition in Antwerp, and they recompensed a messenger for inviting local drama groups to a similar contest in Bruges. 32 In 1443, Nieuwpoort send a messenger to invite Gentenars to attend its celebrations honoring Christ's passion, to which Ghent responded favorably by sending a delegation of actors. 33 Also that same year aldermen paid Gheeraert Pypkin, a local Ghent rhetorician, for his work on behalf of "the honor of our redoubtable lord and prince. " 34 These tidbits of information raise more questions than they answer, but they do reveal an active circuit of exchange among urban rhetoricians before Ghent's aldermen had formally chartered drama confraternities in their city. Rhetoricians stepped comfortably into the overlapping ritual zones so characteristic of Low Country cities, embellishing the competitions of shooting confraternities on some occasions, holding their own festivals at other times. From the outset, their ritual priorities seemed firmly determined by two forces: the urban sacred calendar and the ever-growing presence of Burgundian activity, including a firmer grip over urban elites. Straddling the sacred and the secular, rhetoricians in Ghent and elsewhere assured themselves a broad and fixed public visibility. Ghent's aldermen first chartered a rhetorician confraternity, De Fonteine (The Fountain) in 1448, thus distinguishing it from the city's other theater societies. 35 As early as 1446, rhetoricians grouped under this name had begun to worship at a chapel of the Holy Trinity in the central parish church of Sint-Niklaas. 36 On December 9, 1448, the aldermen officially recognized De Fonteine as a "brotherhood and confraternity of the craft of rhetoric" (broederscip ende geselscip vander canst van Rethoriquen).37 The charter of incorporation-dated that same day and one of the few fifteenth-century texts that survive for De Fonteine-is rich in detail and particularly revealing for how it conflates political and cultural concerns. Most telling, it stresses Ghent's need of a rhetorician confraternity to reflect its power: "Many people have noticed that in the great majority of prominent cities in Flanders and also other places, there are honorable and brotherly drama confraternities. But Ghent lacks any, although it is the region's leader, and above all other cities. " 38 De Fonteine's birth was ironically timed, occurring on the eve of Ghent's humiliating war against Philip the Good. The officials' legal inauguration of the first of several rhetorician confraternities at the beginning of serious conflict with their count resonates with meaning. The dawn of urban drama, with the accompanying readjustment

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians of the city's ritual priorities, marked the dusk of Ghent's political autonomy. Rhetoricians in Ghent began to flourish at exactly the point at which Burgundians stood poised to assert power over the city's political life, placing their clients in city offices. For the aldermen, however, a surge in local pride lay behind the founding of a rhetorician confraternity, even if their hold on civic independence was rapidly declining. Indeed, Ghent's political rulers perceived the rhetoricians as shock troops in a campaign to bolster urban culture-as the protagonists in a new kind of civic boosterism. First and foremost, as suggested in De Fonteine's charter, the fledgling rhetorician confraternity would wage a moral battle; as a learned cadre, its members would combat idleness and melancholy, because "men have no greater enemy" than these twin vices:19 With its symbol of a fountain forever gushing with virtue, the confraternity would serve as a perfect example of piety and good behavior, for the glory of God, to help and support goodwill, pleasure, and recreation." 40 As poets endowed with celestial grace, the Fonteinists would be models of virtue with Ghent's public life as their realm of moral instruction. That confraternity officials and aldermen devoted extra care to ensuring a special code of behavior among De Fonteine's members is hardly surprising in light of their open admission that the confraternity promoted Ghent's political stature in the Low Countries. They insisted that the Fonteinists adopt the symbol of a fountain bursting forth three great streams of water to recall the Holy Trinity. Bearing this pious emblem on their livery, members would be easily recognizable as examples of good demeanor. In fact, if a chapel in SintNiklaas is one sure sign of the confraternity's social prominence, another is the aldermen's careful specification that the Fonteinists had to be "capable in a craft, either acquired from birth or from other excellent and honorable circumstances. " 41 That such creative skills were immediately assumed to be a function of birth or artisanal excellence makes it even more apparent in the absence of records of matriculation that De Fonteine catered to an urban elite of guildsmen and patricians. Indeed, even more so than the shooting confraternities, the rhetoricians firmly anchored their elitism to decorum. During informal exercises and public performances, De Fonteine explicitly forbade all sorts of irreverence, such as laughing, leaping, speaking, singing, yelping, rudeness, and foolishness." 42 In fact it was exactly those boisterous manners that rhetoricians wanted to shun as the rude mores of lesser folk, the 11

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians clumsy street antics of unlearned Gentenars. If the Fonteinists were performers, they were quick to shed any base connotations associated with theater. De Fonteine's officials absolutely prohibited its rhetoricians from betting, dicing, cards, and all other games so popular in gambling houses throughout the Low Countries.43 They also carefully prescribed etiquette. They strongly cautioned "anyone against speaking rudely to another with lies or curses, against insulting women or anyone else, whether present or not, with a cold heart or hot blood in a uncouth manner. " 44 As Herman Pleij has perceptively argued, the whole cultural project spearheaded by the rhetoricians was founded on the repudiation of what well-to-do townsmen thought were provincial attitudes and behaviors. 45 Gambling, spoofs, insults-this was just the kind of tavern behavior the Fonteinists eschewed. Their standard of measurement was that of an official city confraternity with the right to determine proper forms of play. As a consequence, the Fonteinists distanced themselves from other urban festive corporations. If by chance a member of De Fonteine lived in a city neighborhood where he was asked to participate in a local celebration, confraternity officials gave him the choice of performing with his local society or with De Fonteine itself. But even if he opted for joining his neighbors, confraternity officials held the rhetorician accountable at all times for his behavior. 46 What was acceptable for street associations, carnival"kingdoms," and corner taverns hardly befitted rhetoricians who proudly bore the livery of the Holy Trinity. As for its organization, De Fonteine scarcely differed from Ghent's other confraternities, except for its main task of promoting poetry and drama. A head official known as a "prince," assisted by three administrators, a clerk, and a messenger chosen every two years during Easter, oversaw De Fonteine's affairs. 47 All confraternity officials attended a Sunday mass at De Fonteine's chapel in Sint-Niklaas. Entrance fees for new members amounted to sixteen grooten and covered the upkeep of the chapel and the support of senior officials; upon death, each member left a sum of money behind. In addition, new rhetoricians had to present De Fonteine's officials with a jug of wine as a token of good faith. The confraternity's livery was considered especially significant because with it members proudly bore De Fonteine's symbol. Every two years, the Fonteinists replaced the livery with a new one, whose color was determined by senior officials. 48 The main task of De Fonteine was to write and practice verse. Every three weeks its rhetoricians held lyric contests to hone their

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians creative skills. But they certainly did not consider poetry and drama to be private matters. Their charter of mcorporation specifies a distinct role for performances during Ghent's public celebrations and demands that rhetoricians who might have written a play intended for a city festival seek the help and approval of other confraternity members. Only in the absence of enough rhetoricians did the confraternity begrudgingly accept outside participation during public shows (yet another indication of De Fonteine's elitism) and then, the Fonteinists had to keep the untrained participants from acting in a shameless manner. 49 As public servants, the Fonteinists took themselves most seriously as the city's foremost ritual corps. Thus De Fonteine was a private corporation, especially attuned to Ghent's public life, and governed by a written code of manners. The important dynamic between their set of mores intended to exclude most of Ghent's townspeople and their set of obligations to represent the city during festivals meant that in public appearances they showcased their literary and dramatic talent for other townsfolk, modeling a refinement and speech uncommon to most Gentenars. Behind the confraternity's commitment to entertain was a responsibility to represent good diction. This educational task assured De Fonteine its prominence in Ghent's public realm, but it was no guarantee of an official monopoly over local drama. In fact, within a matter of decades, between 1450 and 1480, the city had at its center two more rhetorician confraternities, and a third right outside its jurisdiction in Sint-Pieter's Village. 50 Saint Agnes, Marien Theeren (In Honor of Mary), and Saint Barbara became both colleagues and rivals of De Fonteine. The four rhetorician confraternities regularly competed at festivals and feast days, unlike Ghent's archer and crossbowmen confraternities, which tended to maintain separate public agendas. None of the new confraternities could ever match De Fonteine's social prominence, but at least two of them shared its chief goal of promoting social elitism and urban drama. The rhetorician confraternities' twin obligations to represent religious and civic lessons to Ghent's populace and to inculcate a love of letters in Ghent's elite set the tone of their public interactions. The confraternity of Saint Barbara played a role in Philip the Good's 145 8 entry into Ghent, but there is little additional information about its rhetoricians. 51 Although for practical purposes it was a Ghent lay association, Saint Barbara was located within the jurisdiction of Sint-Pieter's Village. 52 The confraternity's original charter is

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians apparently lost, and its members appear only rarely in city records. 53 In 1466, aldermen recompensed rhetoricians from Saint Barbara for tableaux vivants staged during a visit by Charles the Bold, then count of Charolaisi in rsoo, Lieven Bautkin, head poet of the confraternity, penned a celebrated poem honoring the birth of Charles V at the Burgundian court in Ghent. 54 In these three and a half decades, the confraternity made a surprising number of excursions into Ghentat least twenty-one-to perform during important festivals. Still, its rhetoricians left few other marks on the city's political history. 55 Its public activity notwithstanding, Saint Barbara's location outside of the center lessened its threat to De Fonteine's pretensions. In contrast, the rhetoricians who worshiped since 1469 in the prestigious Borluut chapel of Saint Agnes in the crypt of the church of Sint-Jan clearly did challenge De Fonteine's prominence. In that year of fateful submission of Gentenars to Charles the Bold's authority, the parish officials of Sint-Jan recognized the right of "a confraternity and society in the form of a guild of the most excellent and pure virgin Saint Agnes" to hold services at the crypt chapel every Sunday and on important feast days. 56 Of importance is not only the new confraternity itself but also its location and date of recognition. In the absence of a register of matriculation for the confraternity, Saint Agnes' right to worship in the chapel of the Borluuts, Ghent's most important patrician family, in the city's most powerful parish church indicates that the new rhetoricians were no mere parvenus, but well-to-do townspeople. In terms of institutional prestige, the Saint Agnes rhetoricians even surpassed the Fonteinists, who were located in the less wealthy parish of SintNiklaas. What the two confraternities did have in common, however, was inception and incorporation during a political maelstrom. Indeed, the irony of Saint Agnes's rise to influence in 1469-the same year Ghent's aldermen and guild deans reluctantly yielded political power to Charles the Bold-matches that of De Fonteine's establishment on the eve of the Ghent War. More than just coincidental, these two dates suggest how the new ritual groups were closely associated with the erosion of political autonomy once enjoyed by Ghent's citizenry and the expansion of power after 1453 of a political bloc, with great patrician families in its- forefront, more favorable to Burgundian supremacy. 57

Despite Saint Agnes's legal use of the crypt chapel, it took until October 22, 1471, for aldermen to charter its rhetoricians as a cbnfraternity.58 Governed by a dean and twelve officers, Saint Agnes was

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians a mixed-sex association open to all "men and women of good name." As a general rule, at least six of the confraternity's administrators had to be skilled rhetoricians. 59 Its officials were responsible for distributing new liveries every year and had also to attend all masses held at the Saint Agnes chapel. 60 But beyond these modest requirements, the charter is strikingly silent about the rhetoricians' private and public duties. Not until aldermen updated the charter on August II, I477, is there any mention of proper behavior or specific qualifications for membership; in fact, the confraternity's service to Ghent was not fully formulated until IS08. 61 Yet even given the long silence about public obligations, aldermen did concede by I477 that the confraternity displayed a remarkable "service in honor of this city with representations and other things." 62 Lacking De Fonteine's obvious capacity for obtaining public recognition quickly; the Saint Agnes rhetoricians were, nonetheless, trenchant observers of prestige. It was a notable coup to secure from the heirs of Joos Vijt and Lisbette Borluut the right to use in perpetuity their crypt chapel. In a letter of approval dated May I9, I475, the heirs of these wealthy Gentenars demanded in return worship and burial privileges at the chapel and an absolute guarantee that the confraternity would not displace the families' escutcheons. As an important concession, the heirs also allowed the rhetoricians the right to display the confraternity's coat of arms alongside the Vijt's and Borluut's. 63 More than just a small token of appreciation, the careful stipulation about familial and confraternal emblems negotiated symbols of power: it allowed the rhetoricians to represent the holy patronage of Saint Agnes alongside the support of prominent Gentenars. On August I4, 1478, aldermen incorporated the confraternity of Marien Theeren with a chapel in the church of Sint-Jacob, thus creating a triangle of competing rhetoricians in Ghent's three central parishes. 64 In contrast to De Fonteine and Saint Agnes, the new confraternity arose during the calm between 1477, the end of the era of the Valois dukes of Burgundy; and 1482, the beginning of the real campaign by the Habsburg successors against Flemish particularism, when Gentenars made a sustained but ultimately futile attempt to resecure their political autonomy. 65 Even given this important juncture in time, the new confraternity in no way represented a voice of resistance to state encroachment. In truth, as witnesses to a general period of sharp economic and political decline in Ghent, the con-

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians fraternity of Marien Theeren played the familiar role of festive advocates of civic and state splendor. Marien Theeren, much like Saint Agnes, had a dean and. twelve officers appointed to administer it, standard membership fees, and a livery as its badge of identity. 66 Nicely situated with a chapel to the Virgin Mary in the church of Sint-Jacob, Marien Theeren's activity was by no means restricted to parish boundaries. Confraternity officials were responsible for negotiating "drama, tableaux vivants, or other things," which their rhetoricians might mount during citywide festivals. 67 More important, they also had to yield to majority opinion if members wished to participate in any intercity drama competition outside of Ghent-a rare documentation that such gatherings among rhetoricians did occur during the fifteenth century. 68 Despite these stipulations, local neighborhood obligations did apply both to Marien Theeren's rank-and-file rhetoricians and to its officials. The confraternity celebrated Sint-Jacob's Corpus Christi feast with a procession to its chapel and with a banquet. 69 More of a surprise, as early as 1484 Marien Theeren's dean and twelve officers had to offer citizens in their local quarters a small banquet every Sunday afternoon, or two shillings parisian in its place. 70 For Marien Theeren, a register of matriculation survives, one begun in 1484 and updated regularly thereafter. The Ghent historian Marc Beyaert's scrutiny of the original 248 names reveals a highly diversified range of members, from a small core of patricians and clerics of Sint-Jacob, to a much larger pool of local guildsmen, including a surprising number in textile and leather work. In the rare instances where the domiciles of Marien Theeren's rhetoricians are given, they refer almost exclusively to inhabitants of Sint-Jacob's parish/' Women, both as wives and widows, also figure among the tally of names, sometimes listed separately, more commonly placed in the same entry as their husbands; thirty-two female members are given just in 1484. 72 Although it remains impossible to specify the exact social composition of Ghent's three principal rhetorician confraternities, a close reading of all their various charters clearly reveals De Fonteine as the most selective and ambitious. In their founding document the Fonteinists rigorously distinguished themselves from other festive corporations, but they obviously faced a great challenge when con-

fronted by fellow rhetorician confraternities within or just outside the same city. Marien Theeren, for example, made no secret of its

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians search for elite status: the membership placed the arms of the Burgundian duke and the symbol of the Order of the Golden Fleece right next to Flemish emblems on their register of matriculation. 73 By the last quarter of the fifteenth century, Ghent's Fonteinists faced a civic world that no longer gave them an official monopoly over local drama. It is with this ritual nexus of Ghent's rhetorician confraternities in mind that we should understand the decree Charles the Bold issued on May 29, 1476, granting absolute seniority to De Fonteine. 74 This important concession not only accorded the Fonteinists the right to wear the ducal colors of red and black but to display proudly the duke's coat of arms upon their livery. 75 As a special benefit, the duke assured De Fonteine that its rhetoricians would have complete priority over other festive groups in Ghent when choosing to stage "comedies, mysteries, and histories~' i Charles freed them in fact from any negotiations to be held among city rhetoricians to arrange the order of public appearances in future city festivals. 76 In his grant, the duke made no secret of his admiration for De Fonteine's "prince" and its "virtuous men," lauding their cultivation of "the noble science and art of rhetoric. 1177 Indeed the charter transformed this elite confraternity into his local ritual clients. The duke's privilege to De Fonteine nicely anchored the twin worlds Ghent's rhetoricians serviced. De Fonteine's establishment just before the Ghent War began the blossoming of the city's rhetoricians in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Chartered in part because the aldermen saw the need to represent their considerable authority with a powerful drama confraternity, De Fonteine satisfied Ghent's need to mask its loss of political stature with a literate and well-mannered group of public performers. But just as the Fonteinists gratified city leaders, their ritual activity as dramatists and poets sparked the interest of the Burgundian leaders, who saw their thespian skills as useful to the dramaturgic cultivation of state power. By investing the Fonteinists with the Burgundian stamp of approval, Charles the Bold advanced his search for allies among Ghent's social elites. Out of Ghent's four rhetorician confraternities, the duke's choice of De Fonteine as his urban champions revealed the Burgundians' astute understanding of Ghent's social corporations. By his move, the prince gained a surer hand in the city's quest for outstanding public ritual without in the least undermining it. This strategy was possible because the foundation of city legitimacy, among other things, rested even more heavily after the Ghent War on satisfying

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians the Burgundian state's insatiable need for political and ceremonial acclaim. In public, Ghent's rhetoricians did not abjure attempts to meet that need. In Praise of Power If Burgundian ceremony was deeply embedded in the public life of the cities of the Low Countries, nowhere was the public intersection of city and state more apparent than in the rhetorician confraternities' activity on behalf of the Burgundian aristocracy. Apart from their commitment to municipal celebrations, one of the most consistent and visible public roles rhetoricians assumed was as performers in civic ritual honoring Burgundian ambitions. Between 1448, the year of De Fonteine's foundation, and 1500, the year of the future Habsburg emperor Charles V's birth in Ghent, rhetoricians participated at least every other year in city festivals lauding the Burgundian state and its clients/8 But while designed to demonstrate urban ritual accord, the role of rhetoricians in such celebrations promoted as much as suppressed civic rivalry. 79 The ritual strategies employed by Gentenars to welcome Philip the Good in 1458 set the pattern for future state celebrations in that city: by encouraging rhetorician confraternities and even unincorporated neighborhood societies to compete among themselves to honor the Burgundians with theater and street decorations, city aldermen created ceremonies that fostered an urban factionalism innocent of the potential for political subversion. 80 The rhetoricians' involvement in Burgundian spectacle to a certain degree resembled the public contests of the shooting confraternities. Both types of performance cherished the opportunity in urban ritual competition to generate a dignified public space in which townsmen could vaunt their elite ambitions and considerable skills. And both also earned some measure of patronage or participation of Burgundian leaders as part of a cultural strategy to encourage open ties between prince and important townsmen. Both state and city invested considerable expectations into such interactions: the state because these exchanges tapped the Burgundians into urban cultural and social' networksi the city because the ceremony advanced the urban arena and its leaders. In the interstices of this two-way process, leaders of both political worlds cultivated a measure of legitimacy and power useful exactly because one did not cancel the other out.

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians But if the ritual performances of shooting and rhetorician confraternities had shared features, the markedly different political climates within which the two sets of lay associations flourished assured critical differences too. The unprecedented growth of archer and crossbowmen confraternities between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries dovetailed nicely with the Burgundian process of state centralization, when urban elites and Burgundian officials actively shaped the boundaries of political power. Before the mid-fifteenth century the Burgundian empire was still coalescing. To reflect this unfinished business of state building, the magnificent shooting matches among scores of cities encompassed an amazing ritual flexibility insofar as the contests of archers and crossbowmen allowed both prince and townsmen to criss-cross symbolic universes. No less important, the matches also highlighted the centrality of urban space and power with vivid demonstrations of the military might of a civic realm that had not lost all its political muscle. The ritual capaciousness of shooting matches reflected a political elasticity increasingly diminished, but not overturned, as the Burgundian dukes developed a more rigid control over their cities. After 1453, Ghent's political elites were under the powerful control of Burgundian officials, a grip that tightened after the embarrassing Saint Lieven revolt in 1467. When the careless Charles the Bold met his death on the battlefield on January 5, 1477, Ghent and other Flemish cities momentarily regained their beloved privileges from the frightened heiress Mary of Burgundy, with social upheavals and reprisals against pro-Burgundian townspeople following this victory. But if the townspeople's fortune was sweet, it was also both quixotic and short lived; for when Mary died in a hunting accident in 1482, her husband Maximilian of Austria, the future Holy Roman emperor, waged a ten-year campaign against renascent Flemish autonomy. The result was complete victory, with the peace of Cadzand in July 1492, when Ghent, the strongest civic adversary, finally capitulated to the same restrictions Philip the Good had imposed in 1453. 81 As state victories in the Flemish urban world increased, especially in Ghent, the face of civic ritual grew more magnificent even as its meaning shifted. The 1467 revolt excepted, there was a certain static, quality to public celebrations in Ghent in the three decades after the Ghent War, and no doubt this stasis had much to do with the rising fortunes of Ghent's rhetoricians. Working through peaceful intraurban competition, rhetoricians played adjuncts to state spectacle, sel-

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians dam questioning their position in the ritual process between city and state. Although rhetoricians maneuvered into the ritual networks established by urban archers and crossbowmen, they did not symbolically alter relations of power. The subtle difference in ritual possibilities their participation brought had very real consequences, however. Rhetoricians allowed their leaders the title of "king" or "prince" and established a literate ethos meant to espouse courtly styles, but they never assumed that the Burgundian leaders were their fraternal equals. Rhetoricians confirmed the ceremonial and political distinctions between townspeople and their Iordi for unlike the archers and crossbowmen, the rhetoricians did not during their ceremonies seek a ritual parity with the royalty they feted. To note the rhetoricians' subordinate role in Burgundian splendor is not to dismiss the status they earned from performances before both their aristocratic superiors and their civic communities. Without a doubt, the dramas rhetoricians mounted during processional entries, banquets, and the like earned them many accolades. Their representations before the duke, duchess, or any important member of the ducal household earned them the princely imprimatur of excellence. Because they performed in public, rhetoricians were assured an instant audience of fellow city folk, who watched on behalf of the prince. 82 For these Gentenars, rhetoricians, unwittingly or not, taught the honor of 'political subjection. A brief review of the rhetoricians' activity in Ghent on behalf of Burgundian authorities provides a sense of their commitment to their roles as civic actors engaged in state issues. Between 1448 and 1500, Ghent's rhetorician confraternities were involved in mounting tableaux and plays during fifteen Burgundian entries. 83 On at least three occasions, they also performed during city banquets honoring foreign dignitaries. In addition, civic records confirm that they celebrated with street theater five Burgundian peace treaties and three aristocratic birthsi in February 1486, they even saluted Maximilian of Austria's coronation as king months prior to the event, to help assure his success. 84 These figures, based on payments made to the confraternities by Ghent's aldermen, in all likelihood reveal only part of the rhetoricians' ritual work. City accounts seldom mention the rhetoricians in connection with civic ceremonies, not because the rhetoricians absented themselves but because such activity did not earn them financial support. One rare exception was in 1484,

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians when Ghent's four rhetorician confraternities joined a host of neighborhood societies in celebrating the completion of the city's new town hall. 85 Despite the difficult climate in Flanders during the second half of the fifteenth century, especially the confusing period between Charles the Bold's death and the triumph of Habsburg power in 1492, the public ritual of Ghent rhetoricians reflected a steady commitment to fete Burgundian authority at select moments in the otherwise rocky political situation. Such a fundamental task carried with it few complications; tableaux vivants and lofty poems welcoming Burgundian favorites into Ghent constituted the core of this part. of their ritual work. No doubt a particular emphasis on classical and biblical themes owed much to the humanist project that by the fifteenth century flourished in Italian cities and had begun to find a home in northern Europe. 86 But rhetorician theater eschewed a universalist perspective, remaining tied to the Dutch vernacular and to Low Country ritual structures. Still, no matter how routine, rhetorician performances were not passive invocations of state power; for in their celebrations these urban actors never strayed from an unflinching commitment to Ghent's public life, a political fact that complicates the meaning of their theater. That in the most important public appearances, Ghent's rhetorician confraternities performed alongside other festive groups reveals a level of complexity not immediately obvious to the student of their ritual. 87 The general format of competition itself suggests rhetoricians were working through the political and social complexities basic to their own urban experience. Simply put, even the most rudimentary street theater performed by rhetoricians during a Burgundian visit placed Gentenars and their political divisions at the center of the ritual process. Sharing the public stage with neighborhood festive societies, Ghent's rhetoricians profited in two senses. First, they maintained a deep connection with the whole of Ghent's play associations, so that their public appearances were often part of a broader cultural representation of the city. Second, and more significant, they showed themselves off as the foremost ritual cadre in front of a range of other societies, assuring their dominion. In fact, the celebrations in which the rhetoricians joined other festive groups always imposed an acute division of ritual labor: the rhetoricians monopolized theater among themselves, while other groups competed for best street decorations. In November 1468, for example, to celebrate the Peace of Peronne

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians between the French king and Charles the Bold, Ghent's neighborhood societies competed for the best fire displays while the rhetoricians held separate drama productions at the town hall. 88 This hierarchy of celebration, with the rhetoricians at the top, showcased the superiority of their confraternities without tainting them with the sin of exclusivity. With such divisions between Ghent's festive groups made obvious, the prince or princess visiting the city had a visual roadmap of its basic political and social fissures. The aristocratic guest leisurely watched the various associations square off to enliven their modest neighborhoods and the rhetoricians from Ghent's three central parishes-plus the Sint-Pieter's Village-compete for the most pleasing and spectacular drama. If, as in the 1458 entry of Philip the Good, the classical and biblical motifs of the tableaux vivants denied domestic history, the structure of such celebrations ironically betrayed the local context. A representation involving Ghent's quarters and parishes was, after all, a representation of Ghent itself. On the one hand, this representation captured the power of the city-the capacity of its townspeople to stage magnificent ritual and the centrality of their skills to Burgundian ceremony. On the other hand, it delineated the different social and political groups, demonstrated their respective degrees of authority, and revealed a city whose unity depended on the ritual presence of a princely visitor. This tension between a fictionalized unity and a competing set of performers communicated a mixed message to both city and state: even with diminished political rights and a more pliant civic culture, Gentenars could not relinquish the importance of rivalry to their public life.

Exchange and Control: Establishing Boundaries Ghent's rhetoricians neither undid the exchange networks of the shooting confraternities nor removed the crossbowmen and archers from public life, despite their festive work on behalf of the Burgundian elite. In fact, in the last decades of the fifteenth century, as part of a larger trend among city dramatists in the southern Low Countries, Ghent's rhetoricians ventured outside city boundaries both to participate with other rhetorician confraternities in elaborate drama competitions and to provide entertainment during the

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Drama, Power, 'and City Rhetoricians shooting matches of archers and crossbowmen. With apparent ease, Ghent's rhetoricians moved back and forth between these two worlds, both embellishing the military ceremonies of archers and crossbowmen and fashioning their own theater events with much the same ritual structure. A drama contest held at Louvain in 1478 is the first direct evidence since 1443 of the appearance of Ghent's rhetoricians in an intercity festival; unfortunately, we know almost nothing about this event. 89 Then in October 1483, De Fonteine traveled to Hulst to participate in a better documented competition. 90 Although rivalry for the best verse and drama formed the core of the celebration, there were awards for the same ritual categories that archers and crossbowmen had devised for their own contests. 91 Like the archers and crossbowmen, the rhetoricians were judged according to the best processional entry, the quality of their street decorations, the best comic performance, and the farthest distance traveled. 92 Behavior was all important. The host confraternity proscribed all forms of derogatory conduct: at no time during the competition were rhetoricians to curse or act in a base manner. 93 But if the regional festivals of archers, crossbowmen, and rhetoricians were so closely linked, what can account for the thirty-five year gap in which Ghent's rhetoricians apparently failed to enter the festive traffic with other cities of the Low Countries? Partly, this absence can be explained by a long infancy during which their principal ritual was anchored in a local context, before maturity brought with it a broader milieu. But the political climate obviously affected priorities and opportunities. It might be coincidental that the first clear involvement of Ghent's rhetoricians in an outside drama festival occurred in 1478, just one year after the end of the reign of the four Valois dukes, the fact cannot be dismissed that exchange rituals among rhetoricians began to flourish with Habsburg rule. Not until Maximilian of Austria prevailed over Ghent and the southern Low Countries in general in 1492, in fact, did the regional contests of rhetoricians become truly spectacular. Two magnificent celebrations, one held among city rhetoricians at Antwerp in 1496, the other sponsored by the Saint George crossbowmen at Ghent in 1498, define the strong ritual commerce among southern Low Country cities on the eve of the sixteenth century, demonstrate the ever increasing interplay between shooting confraternities and rhetoricians, and forecast the eventual displacement of archer and crossbowmen celebrations in favor of the rhetoricians. 94

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians The Antwerp spectacle was a full-blown rhetorician festival, a thing of the future modeled on the shooting competitions of the past. The Ghent festival was the largest crossbowmen's celebration held in the city since 1440; similar in structure to previous competitions, it captures the perfect joining of old forms to new circumstances. Both were harbingers of things to come, and considered together, they illustrate the shift in ritual priorities that renewed the exchange of urban festive confraternities among cities of the Low Country. The Antwerp festival, held in June and sponsored by the city's rhetorician confraternity De Violiere, involved twenty-eight confraternities from Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zeeland, of which three, De Fonteine, Saint Agnes, and Saint Barbara, came from Ghent. 95 Drawn up on March 12, 1496, the letter of invitation carried by De Violiere's messengers describes the competition as a "festival of rhetoric," otherwise called a "triumphant and noble jewel of the nation (landjuweel)." 96 Something of a departure for rhetorician festivals in the sixteenth century, the Antwerp celebration is striking for its duplication of the ritual layout of shooting competitions. Although the specific object of the contest was now drama and poetry-each confraternity performed a morality play, a refrain, and a comic piece-much of the activity came from processional entries, both by land and by water, street decorations; public conduct; and fire displays. 97 There were also specific awards for the two confraternities with the best fools. 98 Still, the element of farce that the rhetoricians cultivated adhered to strict rules of behavior. Not only was there the usual stipulation against indecent activity; the festival was also restricted to rhetoricians alone, as the organizers absolutely prohibited all other urban dramatists from participating. 99 Even though no princes or princesses attended, the 1496 spectacle bristled with political significance, both because it brought together several important regional cities and because De Violiere mandated that each guest confraternity compose a prologue lauding the virtues of Antwerp. 100 The landjuweel prefigured a type of festival to enjoy a great measure of success in the decades to follow. It promoted the ritual union of Low Country cities, the literary ethos their elites espoused, and the magnificence of the host city. 101 But these celebrations were without the ritual arbitration between lords and townsmen which so characterized shooting competitions. In fact rhetoricians devised a solid distinction between city ceremonies dedicated to the state and those that celebrated their own ritual exchange. To

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians be sure, rhetoricians enhanced the role of processions, theater, and poetry in civic life; but in their own ceremonies they abandoned yoking prince and townsperson. In contrast, the shooting contests of archers and crossbowmen continued to traffic in symbolic blurrings, but even this ritual underwent an important change: a wider attention to processions and theater overshadowed the display of martial skills. Rhetoricians now contributed to archer and crossbowmen competitions by producing verse descriptions of their shooting ceremonies. Without coincidence, the shift to magnifying the formal aspects of the shooting competitions, especially to heightening the role of rhetoricians in their production and commemoration, corresponded to a sharp decrease in the use of archers and crossbowmen in military expeditions. The new warfare that triumphed in northern Europe by the mid-fifteenth century featured the use of gunpowder and projectiles, not bows and crossbows. 102 With their utility to European princes now diminished, archers and crossbowmen could not retain their critical role in the cultural domain of the Burgundian Netherlands. And yet, archers and crossbowmen continued to contribute to the political dialogue between state officials and urban elites. There is no better example of their ongoing importance in Flemish public life than the great crossbowmen spectacle held in Ghent from May 20 until the beginning of July 1498. Involving thirty-one cities of the Low Countries (fewer than in 1440), and attended by duke Philip the Fair and duchess Joanna, this festival had the obvious political task-made clear in Philip's official letter of permission-of healing the wounds of the conflict that had plagued Flanders for the better part of two decades. 103 To reflect this search for consensus, the nineteen-year-old Philip the Fair made his presence felt at the shooting match, much as Philip the Good had done in 1440. The crossbowmen, in turn, seized the occasion to acknowledge their debt to Habsburg sovereignty. Some confraternities, like Lille's, proudly held aloft the duke's arms during their processional entry into Ghent. 104 Others, for instance Brussels's and Bruges's crossbowmen, carried images of the duke himself, outfitted as king of their confraternities. 105 But perhaps the most striking proof of the integration of the duke into the ceremony is a woodcut in the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen which depicts Philip shooting with members of Bruges's Saint George crossbowmen in his capacity as king of the confraternity (Figure 9 ). The image, which accompanies an account of the ceremony published in 1531, cozily places Philip between Ghent's

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians

Figure g. Philip the Fair at the crossbowmen's festival, 1498. Willem Vorsterman, Dits die Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen, fol. 286r. Courtesy of the Stadsarchie£ te Gent.

city hall and its Belfry, standing directly in front of a host of costly goblets. Though the figure of the duke both as a fellow crossbowman and as the supreme political leader certainly gives weight to the image, Philip is himself dwarfed by two striking emblems of civic authority and surrounded by members of one of the competition's leading confraternities. Consequently, there is a tension in this image between city and prince typical of shooting ceremonies. It is a vivid reminder that on the eve of the sixteenth century shooting matches were still laden with a type of political symbolism that problema-

tized the relationship between civic life and state authority. That very symbolism, however, was more and more in the hands of city rhetoricians. Indeed, at the 1498 shooting competition, rheto-

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians rician confraternities from various cities performed every night and, in addition, mounted five separate plays during the first two days of processional entries. 106 In fact Ghent's crossbowmen promised an award to the rhetorician confraternity that performed the best comic piece during the festival, making the usual stipulation that the parody had to be free of rude behavior. 107 Ghent's De Fonteine even feted all visiting rhetoricians with a sumptuous banquet at some point during the celebrations. 108 But the most important contribution of rhetoricians to the I498 festival was to shape the city's memory of the event. The best description of the ceremony is found in the I 53 I Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen, which contains a rhetorician's verse account of the thirty-one processional entries, on land and water, of the visiting confraternities. 109 With loving detail, the poet, who most certainly attended the festival, lays out. the brilliant abundance of the two-day cycle of entries: a dazzling array of wagons, horses, men on foot, brightly bedecked ships, and flags held aloft. The rhetorician's description of the entry of Bruges's crossbowmen vividly captures the ceremony's ostentation. Not one of the contest's most spectacular processions (both Brussels's and Antwerp's were noticeably larger), Bruges's entry and the welcome it received typify the close ritual interaction achieved on the streets of Ghent among urban politicians, crossbowmen, and rhetoricians: · Bruges entered in a rich fashion, with five wagons full of her rhetoricians, also filled with crossbowmen with good cheeri twelve horsemen with their standards, Four city fifers and over one hundred horsemen, The fool upon a wagon drawn by two hundred horsemen, followed by twenty-five horsesi Six trumpeters and clarion-players, led twenty-four pairs of horses, all appeared from Lombard~ Spain, or belonging to the emperor of Germanyi Next entered honorably the aldermen of Bruges, upon twenty-six horsesi Then four trumpeters with the arms of Saint George, Carried aloft was an image of duke Philip, King of the Saint George confraternity of Bruges, who with his noble hands oversees shooting the popinjayi All were dressed in blue and yellow-brown hats,

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians interlaced with fine white and red ribbon, some wore hats in the German fashion; It was a wonder to see.ll0

In the poet's verse is a sense of the ritual grandeur that the brigades of crossbowmen promoted, but lost is any appreciation of their role as military men. In other words, the crossbowmen's competition has become nothing other than one great procession of luxury for which verse is a suitable voice. With the skill of a poet to capture its ritual, the ceremony is presented as a literary event, a thing of words to be read and appreciated. Indeed, the simple but clever verse has drowned out the reality of the event itself; we are left with not much besides the poem itself. Clearly, then, the real triumph in 1498 was the triumph of rhetoric, just as in Antwerp two years earlier. Although archers and crossbowmen did not fade from public life in the cities of the Burgundian Netherlands, the 1498 festival was in fact the last great late-medieval statement of their ceremonial capabilities. In Ghent, not until the early seventeenth century did shooting contests show renewed vigor. 111 Instead, the heavy ritual demands of the international Habsburg empire perfectly suited the skills and aspirations of city rhetoricians. Already by the turn of the sixteenth century, Ghent's rhetoricians were cheerfully composing windy verses in praise of Habsburg accomplishments. 112 But as the new century approached and the obstreperous cities of the Low Countries still challenged Habsburg hegemony, Philip the Fair took steps to establish a firmer control over urban rhetoricians. Unlike Charles the Bold, who was content to outfit Ghent's De Fonteine with his colors as a means of political control, Philip sought extra authority over the civic ritual leaders of his Low Country territories. At a drama festival he had organized at Mechelen on May r, 1493, the duke proposed a new sovereign rhetorician confraternity to be called "Jesus with the Balsam Flower" (Jezus met de Balsembloem), and designed to rule over all Dutch-speaking rhetoricians, regardless of these urban poets' history of service to the state. 113 In a transparent effort to undercut De Fonteine's status, Philip located the new confraternity in Ghent, offering the Balsam Flower a chapel in the Burgundian court and appointing his chaplain, Pieter Aelturs, as its prince. 114 Perhaps equally threatening to Ghent's established rhetoricians, the new confraternity's members would be selected

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians from the local population. They would include not only men and women but also fifteen youth to serve as apprentices, a provision no other rhetorician confraternity had in its statutes. 115 Although packed with what one observer in I565 called "the most noble rhetoricians in this land," Jesus with the Balsam Flower neither succeeded in supplanting the De Fonteine in prominence nor left a superior mark on the public life of Ghent or any other Low Country city. 116 There is no record that the Balsam Flower performed alongside other urban rhetoricians; the main thrust of the Balsam Flower's charter of incorporation actually concerns rites of religious devotion and not public theater. 117 As a result, the Fonteinists continued to enjoy the public seniority Charles the Bold had granted them in I476, and it was De Fonteine that authorized five new Flemish confraternities the right to incorporate between I 5oo and I 53 7. 118 Despite the shock of a court-based confraternity in their midst, Ghent's rhetoricians suffered no loss of public stature. In the opening years of the sixteenth century, there is no noticeable change in their calendar of ritual activity. 119 Philip's city-based court confraternity ultimately failed in its principal task of gaining ascendancy over the rhetoricians of the Low Countries, the venture itself is no less startling. The move to fashion a court-sponsored confraternity out of urban materials established a more aggressive state policy toward the ritual landscape of the Burgundian Netherlands. Elementary patronage, like that of Charles the Bold toward De Fonteine, was, by the end of the fifteenth century, becoming a thing of the past. To Philip the Fair, the urban location itself represented a threat, even though the rhetoricians since their inception had performed on behalf of Burgundian leaders. As all fifteenth-century dukes of Burgundy had learned, a public life that placed townspeople as important players in the production of state spectacle risked promoting urban claims as much as it assured state leaders of their power to rule. No doubt, city rhetoricians triumphed in the latter half of the fifteenth century in part because of their regular work, during urban ceremonies, on behalf of the Burgundians. But precisely because in composition and structure they were so recognizably urban, rhetoricians brought home to the foreign dignitaries whom they feted the stubborn reality of municipal culture. As a result, though less aggressive than crossbowmen and archers, and more clear about the ritual boundaries between themselves and the Burgundians, rhetori-

ALTHOUGH

Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians cians failed to bridge the divide between state and city. Indeed, their own intercity competitions, even if shorn of princely participation, served to preserve the ritual communication among Low Country cities. Through the mechanism of regional competitions, rhetoricians carried on the confraternal tradition of sponsoring forums for urban cultural elites to test hierarchies of prestige and degrees of solidarity. However tempting it might be to posit the rhetoricians as the perfect Burgundian answer to city and state rivalries, the reality of the success of these literary confraternities defies such an easy assumption. In fact, the example of Ghent shows, instead, that rhetorician confraternities, though they emerged as the city's real political influence declined, bestowed distinct municipal advantages. Ghent's rhetoricians carried much of the city's burden of public representation; they literally showcased the capacity of its elite citizens to generate spectacle. More broadly, the rhetorician confraternities affirmed a new urban cultural elite: literate, skilled, and exemplars of the emerging early-modern aspiration to refined manners so expertly described by Norbert Elias. 120 In celebrating civic and state authority with impeccable skills, rhetoricians taught other citizens a type of decorumpolite and controlled-unthreatening to political authorities. Byestablishing a sharp distinction between correct and incorrect play, they also drove a wedge between their own literate culture and the regular mores of their fellow townspeople. At the end of the fifteenth century, Ghent's public world had undergone a transition that for the reasons sketched above gave ritual priority to the rhetorician confraternities. Philip the Fair's unsuccessful effort to scale back the prerogatives enjoyed by De Fonteine and other Flemish rhetoricians is a telling indication that Ghent and the Burgundian state-now a Habsburg possession-remained locked in a contest over the boundaries of urban culture. Despite a weakened economy, a less powerful government, and a new ritual landscape, Ghent had reached no secure accommodation with state officials over the city's public realm. If anything, the fact that both the city and state still garnered much symbolic capital from their public interactions demonstrates that the whole knotty question of urban ritual and its place in political life remained unresolved. The claims of civic life and the demands of Habsburg hegemony overlapped in the uneasy relationship of city and state. In public, rhetoricians helped in their own way to smooth that relationship, but their involvement in both worlds like

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Drama, Power, and City Rhetoricians that of the archers and crossbowmen, resulted in a tension between their civic voice and their obligations to the state. It took events at the beginning of the sixteenth century to shake up the cultural process that allowed the public culture of Low Country cities and princely authority to flourish so closely together.

7

The New Public Order

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On Febru"'y 24, •soo, at the Bmgundian comt in Ghent, Joanna of Castile gave birth to a son, the future Habsburg emperor Charles V. Townspeople gathered throughout the city at the news of a successor to Philip the Fair. As ceremonial masters, Ghent's four rhetorician confraternities had fittingly prepared tableaux vivants to celebrate the occasion. 1 Lieven Bautkin, the senior poet of the Saint Barbara confraternity, even penned a poem to commemorate the birth, marveling at a City full of all types of joy, with festively bedecked streets and houses with theater figures, many youngsters about, and bonfires on the street. 2

To cap the celebrations on February 24, city rhetoricians staged several plays, all of which, Bautkin carefully noted, conveyed the message that "a good subject will always honor his superior." 3 But this pious lesson in political relations did not end the festivities; ongoing celebrations only came to a close with a magnificent procession on March 7, the day of the baptism. After Gentenars had laid out a route from the Burgundian court to the central parish church of Sint-Jan, they raised an enormous canopy, fancifully arranged with bright cloth, under which the royal family carried the infant Charles to the baptismal font. Townspeople also constructed three triumphal gates, one at the Hoofdbrug, another at the Hoogpoort, and the third

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The New Public Order at the Belfry, symbolizing wisdom, justice, and peace, respectively. Tapestries, tableaux vivants, and spectators greeted the procession as it wound through central Ghent. 4 Celebrations in honor of royal births were nothing new to latemedieval Flanders, but there was an exceptional character to this staged enthusiasm for the newborn Charles. Nothing could better prove the continued affiliation between Ghent and the Burgundian state than the symbolic and material resources Gentenars expended in welcoming the infant prince into their civic world. Born in the heart of Ghent, baptized in .its most important parish church, commended by Ghent's leading rhetoricians, Charles was christened with the full blessing of his urban subjects. But though the celebration confirmed the bond between Ghent and the state, its happy exterior only partially masked a shift in political and cultural winds. Ghent was no longer the great center it had once been; an erosion of its economic and cultural independence had sapped the political strength of many of its leading citizens at just the time the Habsburg state grew in power. And in its own way, the pageantry on behalf of the infant Charles exposed this shift in political equilibrium. In the rhetoricians' plays about the honor of obedience was the hint of a political new beginning in which townspeople were to lose more political liberties.

Urban Culture under Imperial Rule The opening of the sixteenth century in Ghent seemed remarkably peaceful. Although Philip the Fair's Peace of Cadzand in 1492 had firmly reestablished the political subordination of Ghent, the urban political world remained divided among its Three Members. 5 The halcyon days of the textile industry were over, but Ghent's sizable merchant community still retained its cherished grain staple on the Scheidt and Leie, which allowed several economic corporations in the city, such as the all-important guild of the Free Shippers, to flourish. 6 Still, there is no doubt that the city faced hard times. By the end of the fifteenth century, Ghent's social structure reflected a troubled economy: a small core of rich townsfolk, inhabiting Ghent's traditional commercial center, held sway over a city experiencing growing poverty. According to Marc Boone, Machteld Dumon, and Birgit Reusens, a full half of Ghent's population lived in poverty by 1500,

The New Public Order and a stagnant economy generated insufficient capital to reinvigorate the textile industry/ Even the powerful weavers' guild was hard hit, its membership diminished, its political clout reduced. The aldermen were finally compelled to opened a public poorhouse in 1534 to care for the indigent, though they had repeatedly enforced ordinances since 1491 to prevent all able-bodied townspeople from collecting alms. 8 A shrinking economy did not signal the end for Ghent as a viable city-to the contrary, its merchant community remained dynamicbut economic problems did sharply reduce the city's prominence in northwestern Europe. The furious pace of economic, political, and cultural changes wrought by the extension of merchant capital and by the consolidation of power among western European states pushed Ghent into the shadows as new centers of banking, commerce, and trade, such as Antwerp and Amsterdam, swiftly rose to prominence. 9 The enormous religious and cultural upheavals set in motion by the Protestant Reformation likewise affected Ghent, though slowly at first. Religious discord did not seriously trouble Flanders until the mid-sixteenth century, when it turned furious. 10 On the surface, Ghent's public culture at the beginning of the sixteenth century appeared not the least dislocated by the changes engulfing'the city. In its ritual guise, Ghent still presented itself to the outside world as a community of economic corporations, with the guildsmen and their priorities in the forefront of all public representations.11 Moreover, Ghent's rhetoricians maintained their hardearned prominence with unflagging energy, clearly dominating the city's public ritual. A survey of Ghent's festive calendar for the years 1500 to 1540 reveals the rhetoricians' continued preoccupation with drama and poetry in honor of urban life and the Habsburg state; they mounted annual celebrations for Habsburg military victories, marriages, and births. 12 The strengthening of the rhetoricians' control over Ghent's official culture forged a closer working relationship among the four confraternities, just as it solicited new encouragement from city officials. In 1514, for example, Ghent's aldermen urged its rhetorician confraternities to attend one another's feast days for their respective patrons. 13 The aldermen broadened their effort to inspire camaraderie among Ghent's rhetoricians with an important law in r 532 that introduced annual stipends of three pounds groot for each confraternity in exchange for public work on behalf of the city. First, each confraternity had to perform two public "wagon" plays a year, "for

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The New Public Order the pleasure of our citizens." Second, rhetoricians, with full city support, had to prepare drama and tableaux vivants upon the entry of any foreign dignitary. Third, the rhetoricians had to fete all types of political business, from peace treaties to military triumphs. Fourth, a confraternity had to offer theater pieces in front of Ghent's town hall on the feast day of Corpus Christi, a duty to rotate annually among the rhetoricians. To justify both the yearly stipend and the demands made, the aldermen advanced only one reason: "They represent this city in all things concerning rhetoric." 14 This modest support of Ghent's rhetoricians by the aldermen was in truth a belated response to the municipal funds offered to rhetoricians in other neighboring cities. Although, as the aldermen proudly stated, Ghent was "the chief city in Flanders," already "Bruges, Ypres, Oudenaarde, Dendermonde, Veurne, Eeklo, and many other places" generously underwrote their rhetorician confraternities. 15 In I525, for example, Oudenaarde's aldermen gave that city's rhetoricians a near monopoly over the direction of all official cultural productions, pushing aside other festive groups. 16 This delegitimation of parish and neighborhood play groups happened at a much slower pace elsewhere, yet in all Flemish cities rhetoricians were expanding their control of public ceremony. The widening of the rhetoricians' power in Ghent and other cities clearly enjoyed the support of city and state elites, for whom rhetoricians betokened secure purveyors of ritual acclaim. Predictably, this move to make urban rhetoricians brokers of official civic culture also stimulated an effort to control the festival boundaries of other types of urban ritua}/ 7 and Ghent was no exceptionY Already by December 17, 150I, the aldermen had proscribed neighborhood plays, flag waving, crowd gatherings, and public fights during Ghent's carnival. 19 Although this was just a ripple in the water, the aldermen's disdain for workers' street antics and disorderly conduct contrasted dramatically with the honor they accorded rhetorician theater. Other decrees in early-sixteenth-century Ghent followed the ISOI carnival law. In I 5 I4, youth were prohibited from celebrating Epiphany with street plays, and between I486 and I528, aldermen tightened the regulations that governed the Saint Lieven procession, prohibiting first weapons and fighting, then all types of banners. 20 These decrees, though not broadly applied to all festivals until I 540, attacked Ghent's most threatening celebrations, those with a large and diverse social composition in which youths predominated. 21 The aldermen's move to curtail Ghent's festive licence could not

The New Public Order but have pleased its rhetoricians. Had not the Fonteinists as early as I448 pegged their ambitions to an attack on so-called unlearned behaviorP2 The cultural elitism afoot in early-modern Low Country cities created internal hierarchies by discrediting, and then suppressing, older forms of legitimate behavior. What emerged in place of the play corporations of urban citizenry were official festive confraternities more attuned to the new political boundaries imposed by the Habsburgs and other western European princes. The celebration for Charles V's birth clearly marked the new ceremonial choices and realities. A carefully arranged production, the celebration did not exalt the local guild culture but rather transformed it into a morality play with universal appeal in which triumphal arches touted classical virtues and rhetoricians preached the values of "good subjects." It was exactly this kind of protohumanist political oration on classical stagings that the sixteenth-century northern Renaissance ushered into the Low Countries. 23 But the transition was neither immediate nor complete. The work of some historians notwithstanding, one cannot simply tally the number of triumphal arches and encomiums to derive shifts in cultural practice. For every change, there was a resistance; for every move of accommodation, there was a fight to maintain old ground. The tangled web of old and new produced tensions and ambiguities in the cultural idioms, imbuing urban and state celebrations with contradictory political messages. The mixed receptions of Charles V in Bruges and Ghent in I5I5, the year he gained the countship of Flanders, illustrate the complexities of this period of tradition and change and reveal how townspeople stubbornly preached the rights of citizenry alongside promises of subjection. In Ghent, the adolescent Charles's entry on February 24, I5I5, inspired political unrest. 24 Upon his arrival, Charles refused to swear the traditional oath of fealty as count of Flanders unless aldermen changed the text to reflect the city's reduced autonomy. Surprisingly, the ceremonies came off without a hitch, despite the new count's demands. The weavers broke the calm a few days later, however, provoking an uprising to protest the diminution of their political status. During a rally on the Vrijdagmarkt, they demanded the right to select their own guild dean, a right prohibited by the Peace of Cadzand in I492. Charles had several of the protestors arrested, executing two and banishing four others. On April I I, he issued a decree, derisively labeled the "Calfvel" (Calfhide) by angry Gentenars, which demanded strict enforcement of the Peace of Cadzand, prohibited

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The New Public Order political gatherings in public, and required all office holders in Ghent henceforth to swear allegiance to the new ordinance. 25 The political grievances of the weavers weighed heavily enough to unsettle any ritual attempt during the entry ceremony to glorify Habsburg leadership. The revolt, a telling reminder that political dissent was alive in Flanders, pitched state aspirations against urban demands in a way familiar to most Gentenars. In contrast, Charles V's entry into Bruges on April r8, rsr5, subsumed the local into the sovereign, adumbrating the new ritual style of sixteenth-century entries.26 This entry was remarkable on a number of levels, but its greatest significance lies in the chronicler Remy du Puys's commemorative booklet, The Triumphal Entry of Charles, Prince of Spain, into Bruges in ISIS, published that same year in Paris. Filled with woodcuts and lengthy descriptions of the twenty-seven separate representations sponsored by Bruges's guilds and foreign merchants, du Puys's work exemplifies the relatively new genre of printed booklets (livrets) of joyeuses entrees in northern Europe. 27 Du Puys's text is no innocent medium. Without a doubt, this publication marks a decisive change in how an entry ceremony was fashioned and remembered. By alternating illustrations of Bruges's tableaux vivants with written summaries, du Puys offers his audience both narration and explanation. He even discusses the meaning of the symbols deployed in the entry, providing his reader with a user's guide to negotiate the intricacies of the street ritual. Here is spectacle, packaged, directed, and easy to comprehend. In the past, urban communities had arranged the production and display of the entry. Although that tradition continued, commemorative booklets dished up authorized interpretations, binding city spectacle to an official, textual meaning. With the power to write, publish, and distribute official accounts of city ceremony, court authors held a new and important advantage over the urban performers. 28 The question of who controlled the new ritual discourse of entry celebrations, however, is not a simple one. All major Habsburg entries into the Low Countries after I 5 I 5 were followed by booklets, which gave the state the upper hand in re-presenting ritual. 29 But in I 5 I 5 at least, guildsmen and merchants still commanded center stage in entry rituals, advocating their interests and power. In fact city rhetoricians designed Bruges's ceremony for Charles to recount the economic history of the city and its dependence on Burgundian patronage. 30 Remarkably, two of the entry's central allegorical figures were "commerce" and "gain," valorized as the twin pillars of

The New Public Order princely honor and urban might. Each tableau vivant portrayed Bruges's economic history in sequence, but the whole spectacle ended purposely with images of a city in decline. After presenting the story of a city facing hard times, Bruges's citizens issued a poignant call for Charles to revive their former greatness. Du Puys himself was quick to understand the message that rich subjects better serve a prince than do poor ones. 31 Charles V's entries into Bruges and Ghent, and the different receptions he received, capture Flemish ceremony at an important juncture. In Ghent, angry weavers belied the rhetoricians' promise at Charles's birth that this was a city of honorable subjects. In Bruges, merchants and guildsmen preached the compatibility of city and state interests and hinged economic revival on subjection before the prince. Remy du Puys's booklet, moreover, assured court authorities the final word; it claimed for writers under state patronage the right to interpret urban spectacle. There is yet another lesson to Charles's I 5 I 5 entry into Bruges: only ceremonies in which townspeople voiced dependence and subjection received public commemoration. The turmoil in Ghent in I 5 I 5 never earned a booklet. Moreover, Charles's swift reaction to political unrest there reveals a firm Habsburg policy to give not one inch to traditional claims associated with Flemish citizenship and labor. The officials of the Habsburg state, building an international empire, could no longer tolerate the complex web of reciprocal rights and privileges between princes and townspeople wrapped up in Flemish definitions of citizenship and law. For the Habsburgs to accord political autonomy within Flanders would hardly mesh with a world empire that soon would stretch from the Americas to Asia. Habsburg absolutism, undergirded by Roman legal principles, ineluded few, if any, concessions to local political rights. 32 A complex map of local sovereignties and local cultures was reconstituted as a vertical hierarchy between a single emperor and his state subjects. Changes in political perception and behavior, of course, are not just measured in semantics. Political texts will not reveal an absolute shift from a medieval lexicon of citizenry to an early-modern lexicon of subjection. In fact, as Quentin Skinner so capably argues, even in Renaissance Italy the rhetoric of civic liberty in the late fifteenth century did not exclude concessions to princely authority. 33 In Flemish cities in general and Ghent in particular, with no tradition of civic humanism, detecting changes in language is all the more difficult. To grasp fully the new culture of urban subordination

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The New Public Order to the state we must ask how the cultural and political practices that Burgundian princes once deemed tolerable were increasingly considered illicit. The haggling between Charles V and Ghent's aldermen over political oaths and the insurrection of the weavers was a cogent sign that as late as I 5 I 5, politically active Gentenars claimed their traditional privileges of citizenship. Charles V's sharp response was a clear restatement of Ghent's political subordination, a reaction that promised little room to maneuver. Although this debate between Ghent and the Burgundian state over the limits of urban rights was as old as the I452-53 war, Habsburg absolutism increasingly narrowed the possibilities for compromise. With past experience as a guide, Gentenars considered it a right to contest restrictions on urban privileges, deeming this not at all incongruent with traditional obligations to their count. After all, Burgundian public culture in the fifteenth century had cultivated flexibility; for urban power, however problematic, created the retinues of townspeople to legitimate Burgundian authority. The quest for urban support was no less immediate for the Habsburg Burgundians, but that need would not tolerate an uncircumscribed civic sphere. Streamlined political institutions, the building blocks of monarchical authority, depended on a rigorously controlled public space.

Ritual and Rebellion: Ghent, 1539 The strong currents of antagonism feeding political relations between Gentenars and the Habsburg Burgundians created a climate ripe for a showdown. In I539long-simmering tensions exploded in a major political revolt. Significantly, the turmoil was not simply limited to the high world of politics; for it began, almost imperceptibly, with a festive competition among city rhetoricians. Here was the ultimate sign of the irreconcilability of Ghent and Charles V: city rhetoricians tinged with a hint of insubordination. The very proximity of festive and political trouble was enough now to unravel, finally, the political and cultural codes that had been basic to relations between Ghent and the Burgundian state since the late fourteenth century. But how could rhetoricians have proved troublesome? The answer rests in part on the difficult gray zone the rhetoricians inhabited between urban and state constituencies. Never the perfect ritual eli-

The New Public Order ents of Burgundian princes, rhetoricians at times celebrated state power but were just as ready to advance their own urban interests. In contrast to archers and crossbowmen, the rhetoricians maintained a sharp distinction between their own interurban celebrations and their work on behalf of the state. Yet despite this division of ritual labor, rhetoricians forcefully articulated an urban agenda, one especially apparent in their regional poetry competitions. To the Habsburgs, even this kind of ceremony was rife with problems. What finally compromised the rhetoricians in the eyes of the state, however, was not their ritual style. Instead, it was the arrival of Protestantism in the southern Low Countries by the third decade of the sixteenth century. When Protestant sentiments gained currency in urban drama, the threat the rhetorician confraternities posed to Habsburg leadership changed from potential to real. 34 Large drama and poetry competitions among city rhetoricians had flourished since the end of the fifteenth century, but Ghent's senior confraternity, De Fonteine, had curiously resisted hosting such events.35 Now, the double benefit of a stronger grip on city ritual and warmer relations with the aldermen no doubt convinced the Fonteinists to propose a festival early in January 1539. Official Habsburg permission came quickly after Ghent's aldermen promised a competition satisfactory to both municipal and state interests. Above all, the festival would honor the Peace of Nice in June 1538 between Charles V and Francis I; but, according to the aldermen, it would also stimulate "trade and livelihood" in Ghent. Without hesitation, Charles V issued a letter of approval through his sister Mary of Hungary, regent of Flanders, on February 3, 1539. 36 The formula for the celebration presented by the Fonteinists and aldermen-international peace and municipal profit-shrewdly linked the art of rhetoric to economic and political realities. Town leaders designed a ceremony whose stated goal was to bolster Ghent's sagging economy, to bring attention to the city's continued importance, and to celebrate Habsburg politics. But for the festival to meet all these ends, it had to satisfy a number of different players-visiting rhetoricians, foreign guests, state officials, and town merchants among others. The pledge to fulfill both civic and state needs created the all-too-familiar dilemma of balancing local priorities against outside demands. 37 Although preparations went smoothly-by March 4, 1539, at least eight city messengers were crisscrossing the Low Countries issuing invitations-problems nonetheless arose. 38 First, a concerted effort

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The New Public Order by Ghent's rhetoricians to win the help of the city's guildsmen to defray costs failed to procure the desired amount of money. 39 But more important, a fine issued by the aldermen against local rhetorician Willem Polgier on February 28, 1537, had affected all subsequent rhetorician activity in Ghent. Because Polgier had composed a lewd song with religious verse, the aldermen had proclaimed their right to approve and censor all future work of the rhetoricians. 40 This strong response to a single incident was an earnest warning to all city rhetoricians that their privileges did not give them free reign. Thus the anti-clericalism that had begun to crop up in drama throughout the Low Countries by rpo had prompted the first general concern among city fathers about the behavior of rhetoricians. 41 Despite these problems, Ghent's rhetorician festival opened on April 20, r 539, with a refrain competition held among nineteen confraternities, fifteen from Flanders, three from Brabant, and one from Hainault. 42 Each confraternity came to Ghent to compete in three different categories of verse: didactic poetry, comic poetry, and love poetry. This initial gathering served as a prelude to the central festival held June 12-23, but it also had independent importance. The competition's comic pieces, in particular, offer a rich index of urban taboos and values. Asked to define who in the world displayed the most folly, the rhetoricians responded with poems that poked fun at all behavior that violated civic norms of thrift, sobriety, and upright living. Salacious old men, worldly clerics, public drunkards, carefree carousers, unruly children, misanthropic misers, and overzealous pilgrims-these examples of impropriety were targets for the rhetoricians' barbs. 43 The spoofs suggested a social order of men in charge, women and children as subordinates, and all passions firmly in check. The rhetoricians even pondered the relations between the sexes. In the didactic poems, several confraternities worried that women, by virtue of their craftiness and sexuality, exercised too powerful an influence over men. 44 The refrain festival firmly endorsed an urban moral order of patriarchal authority and soberminded decency. Disorderly women and children might imperil the social fabric, as did misers and drunkards, but such social criticism was both expected and accepted in a world in which burgher prejudices defined the civic boundaries. Criticism of clerics and established religious practices, however, were another matter, one that raised suspicion. Despite its potential for controversy, the open mockery of religious practices during the refrain competition became more pronounced

The New Public Order six weeks later when the confraternities regathered in Ghent to begin the morality plays. On Sunday June I, I539, an array of processions into the city opened the central part of this rhetorician festival. No good description exists of the retinues of civic poets and actors as they entered Ghent, though a city ordinance reveals that rhetoricians in each entry train performed drama along the festive route. 45 In all likelihood, the processions wound through central Ghent before they ended at the town hall on the Hoogpoort in front of a platform seating Ghent's aldermen. 46 De Fonteine awarded prizes for the best entries. Thieles confraternity won first place, followed by Antwerp in second and Oudenaarde in third. Each retinue comprised more than just a group of city rhetoricians. Thielt's rhetoricians, for example, marched with their aldermen, all outfitted in official liveries of green with the city's flag held aloft, a clear symbol of their political unity and civic identity.'7 Oudenaarde's rhetoricians also paraded with a sizable number of the town's "nobles, burghers, and merchants," sporting orange-and-red liveries with white plumes atop their hats. 48 The splendor of the entry ceremonies was followed by a round of drama that started on June 3 with performances by the confraternities' official fools. 49 In addition, between June 4 and I I each confraternity held ceremonies to present its flag to Ghent's aldermen and top rhetoricians. 50 These rituals of presentation ended the visiting confraternities' ceremonial welcome into Ghent. The gift of the flags to Ghent's Fonteinists and aldermen cemented a ritual bond between guests and hosts, but its more important purpose was to foster deference to Ghent's politicians and poets. The rhetoricians began the centerpiece of the festival, the morality plays, once the flag ceremony ended. Between June I2 and 23, the confraternities offered their allegories on a stage in front of the town hall.S 1 Each confraternity had been asked to prepare pieces to respond to De Fonteine's question: What is a dying man's best consolation? Part of the genre of the ars moriendi, the topic invited all rhetoricians gathered in Ghent to ponder the relations among faith, good works, and salvation. Although most of the allegories stayed within orthodox boundaries, several criticized those who sought comfort in relics, feast days, prayers to the saints, and the like. 52 Although scholars will forever debate whether these morality plays were heterodox, what matters is that the Habsburg authorities clearly found them disturbing. 53 On October 6, I539, Adolf vander Noot, chancellor of Brabant, warned the regent of Flanders, Mary of

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The New Public Order Hungary; that the Ghent plays, now published, were "full of evil and abusive doctrines and seductions, espousing Lutheranism. " 54 His advice did not go unregarded. An imperial edict of September 22, 1540, prohibited the circulation of Joos van Lambrecht's 1539 edition of the Ghent plays. 55 The fear of Protestantism was no doubt one reason for banning the r 5 39 plays, but Ghent's rhetorician festival infuriated imperial officials for a second important reason. Ghent's aldermen had been embroiled in a tax dispute with the regent of Flanders, Mary of Hungary; since 1537. Their obstinate refusal to consent to the regent's levy on the Members of Flanders, based in part on the argument that Ghent suffered grievously from economic hard times, began a bitter political dispute with Habsburg officials that provoked an enormous political upheaval. 56 The very richness of the rhetorician festivalthe money expended and the attention paid to Ghent's honor-thus raised questions about the city's political commitment to Habsburg rule. Pierre du Breul, fiscal general of the Parlement of Mechelen, loudly condemned Gentenars on March 6, 1540, for withholding money from the emperor's coffers while they generously funded their rhetorician festival. 57 Pondering the causes of the devastating political revolt that began in Ghent in August 1539, du Breul concluded that "this festival was the beginning of the aforesaid commotion." 58 He was not alone in his opinion. Richard Clough, an English charge d'affaires in Antwerp in r56r, wrote in a letter about a local rhetorician festival that the Ghent celebration of r 5 39 "was one of the prynsypall occasyons of the dystrouccyon of the towne of Gantt. "'9 Sixteenth-century writers' perceptions of a connection between Ghent's rhetorician competition and its political turmoil has not convinced historians. But to take du Breul's and Clough's words at face value, the rhetorician festival did contribute to Ghent's woes in 1539, not only because of its Protestant tinge but also because it exalted Ghent's power at the expense of imperial wealth. Had not the Fonteinists promised a celebration to honor both state and civic interests? Instead they presented a clear and singular affirmation of Ghent's world of urban ritual. In a troubled political climate, the energy and money devoted to this celebration of the municipal landscape worked against Habsburg needs. Lavish processions and tableaux vivants that trumpeted urban might only succeeded if they played to the political sensibilities of the state. Pleading poverty and displaying opulence sent Habsburg authorities a mixed message. Significantly, it was this same sense of civic entitlement among

The New Public Order Gentenars that turned the financial dispute with Mary of Hungary into a political crisis. 60 Since April I6, I537, when Ghent's Collatie had offered the regent of Flanders men instead of money to help in Charles V's campaign against the French army, the aldermen had bitterly asserted to Habsburg authorities their right to withhold financial help. 61 Thus the political ill will between the Habsburg regent and her most intractable city shadowed Ghent during the rhetorician festival. Later in the summer, on August I 7, just two days after aldermen were selected for the new political term, the confrontation took a new turn as several city guilds, including the millers, the cordwainers, the old shoemakers, the smiths, and the shipmakers, demanded the right to chose their own deans, a right proscribed by the I492 Peace of Cadzand and the I5I5 Calfvel issued by Charles V after the weavers' revolt. 62 The guildsmen's anger was obviously fueled by economic misery, their wrath directed as much against Ghent's aldermen as against Habsburg authorities. While in an act of desperation the guildsmen contested the Calfvel, they also demanded the arrest of the aldermen who in I 53 7 had first negotiated with Habsburg officials Mary of Hungary's request for money. Many were convinced that these aldermen had secretly accommodated the regent's needs in explicit violation of their mandate. On August I9, most of the city's guildsmen gathered, armed, in their guild houses, threatening a takeover of the city. On August 2I, after securing control of all Ghent's gates, the rebellious party triumphed in Ghent's Collatie and appointed a committee of nine men to administer city affairs. 63 The weavers' and lesser guildsmen's success ushered in a period of political chaos in which former aldermen either fled the city or faced imprisonment and during which Gentenars vigorously restated their traditional urban privileges. 64 Unlike the Ghent War of I452-53, however, the rebels could not muster the appearance of a united front; there were no great rallies with banners and workers on the Vrijdagmarkt through which to mold a new political profile. Therevolt was more desperate than previous insurrections and involved many unincorporated workers, known as creesers (criers), without formal political credentials. 65 To an anonymous observer from Lille, Ghent experienced the classic world turned upside down: the revolt inspired by well-to-do townsmen threatened "to make the rich poor, and the poor rich. " 66 The poor laborers and petty guildsmen at the core of this rebellion clearly dreamed of recreating a vanished world of local autonomy

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The New Public Order and economic abundance. In a final effort to undermine state control of their affairs, these desperate Gentenars resorted to arms, political rumors, and public violence. It should come as no surprise that in their public actions the rebels made every effort to challenge those economic and political restrictions to which they attributed their present hardships. To forge a new future clearly required Gentenars-the guildsmen in particular-to abrogate the specific laws curtailing their political authority. But it also required them to reimagine the past as an unblemished golden age of historical rights to legitimate their present grievances and actions. The issue of urban privileges, so basic to the public behavior of Ghent's guildsmen, offered just the pivot point for a reworking of the past and present. As during the Ghent War of 1452-53, these privileges assumed an enormous ritual significance during the fall of r 539· As the writer from Lille observed, at the onset of the political unrest the rebels had openly displayed their historical privileges "with great solemnity, all loudly and clearly shown and read to the people." 67 Only this time, the sacred legitimacy imparted to these parchments caused a scandal in the city. On July 8, the weavers and lesser guildsmen assembled in the Collatie had first demanded that all such privileges be translated in Flemish. But on July 23 there arose among these same men the intimation that the Belfry's archives, which housed these precious documents, had been secretly violated. 68 Rumors circulated that certain aldermen had absconded with a so-called Purchase of Flanders, a document once secured in a dice game from a count of Flanders which purportedly gave Gentenars the inviolable right to refuse all taxes. 69 Throughout the fall, the legend of the Purchase of Flanders provided just the symbol of moral and political legitimacy defiant guildsmen needed: because it was never found, the missing Purchase proved that the city's past had been altered and then misrepresented. 70 Because it decreed Ghent's financial autonomy, the Purchase validated the rebels' grievances, becoming both a pretext for action and an excuse to settle old scores. The retired alderman and former head dean of the lesser guilds Lieven Pyn, who had participated in negotiations with the Habsburgs in 1537, was executed on August 28, 1539, in part because guildsmen accused him of having secretly entered the city archives to meddle with the documents it housed. 71 Historians of the Ghent revolt have considered the incident of the Purchase of Flanders the embarrassing credulity of simple folk, of marginal importance to the politics of the rebellion. But later depositions of leaders of the revolt show that belief in the Purchase of

The New Public Order Flanders had no specific social basis; none other than Lieven Borluut, a member of Ghent's patriciate, delivered speeches in front of the city's Belfry proclaiming the Purchase's importance. 72 Further, the Purchase, though never seen or produced, was central to the political imagination and behavior of defiant Gentenars. It offered the guildsmen in particular a transcendent historical truth, a liberty to embolden their public actions. The incident in fact confirms the extent to which traditional claims of urban privileges still shaped the political and public world of Ghent's guildsmen. To legitimate the Purchase of Flanders, as well as all the other real historical liberties of Ghent, involved not only inflating past rights but also disputing current political impediments. The specific target of much of the guildsmen's vituperation was the hated Calfvel of rsrs. Early in the conflict, on August 21, weavers and lesser guildsmen had demanded in the Collatie that Gentenars abrogate the Calfvel in a ceremony of ritual destruction, a point they vigorously debated with their head deans, aldermen, and Ghent's bailiff on September 2/3 Against their superiors' objections, the majority of delegates agreed to the public nullification of the despised decree, to take place at Ghent's town hall on September 3· If, according to Georges Chastellain, Charles the Bold's public laceration of Ghent's charter of self-governance in 1469 was this duke's most outstanding "magnificence," then the ceremonial shredding of the Calfvel in Is 40 was the townspeople's last great response of deftance/4 The anonymous author from Lille described with awe what transpired: The treaty was placed on a bureau in Ghent's town hall before the aldermen, the head deans of the lesser guilds and the weavers, several citizens, and anyone else who desired to come. The head dean of the lesser guilds cut through the treaty with the blow of a knife; the head dean of the weavers did the same, as did the First Alderman of the upper bench [the law alderman] and First Alderman of the lower bench [the estate alderman]. Thus accomplished, the treaty, all ripped up, was given to the great number of Gentenars who wanted to do the same to it. With remarkable pluck, they immediately seized the treaty and tore it. up into a thousand pieces, both the seal and the parchment, as if they were frenzied and without logic. 75

After the treaty's destruction, some jubilant guildsmen continued to shred the scraps of parchment with their teeth while others paraded about with pieces of it tucked neatly into their hats. 76 The jubliant crowd obviously equated the laceration of the hated

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The New Public Order treaty with its actual legal nullification; because it disappeared into hundreds of little pieces, the Calfvel simply no longer existed. Moreover, the physical violence to which it was subjected-the shredding and tearing with teeth and knives-purposely mocked the treaty's inviolability. and demonstrated the power of Gentenars to overturn the forced limitation of their cherished rights. Those who proudly displayed ragged pieces on their hats reinforced their sense of victory with a new badge of identity. Now destroyed, the Calfvel's fragments became a part of the symbolic arsenal of defiance. 77 The abrogation of the Calfvel, like the invention of the Purchase of Flanders, fed the rebellion by providing concrete symbols around which opposition could coalesce. But the autumn of discontent in Ghent, like most revolutionary situations, was short lived and ill equipped to deal with powerful adversaries. Most seriously, the rebellion deeply antagonized the Habsburg emperor. After several efforts to intervene failed to resolve the crisis, Charles V decided on September 30 to begin a long journey northward from Spain to settle affairs in Ghent. Officials in Ghent first reacted to the news of his trip with disbelief, then with panic. 78 On January 8, 1540, delegates in the Collatie decided to send a party of twelve Gentenars to meet the emperor in Valenciennes. 79 Three days later, members of the Collatie carefully instructed its ambassadors on how to present themselves before their feared lord. Be sure to kneel in deference, they were reminded, to convey "honor, submissiveness, and reverence." 80 This tardy lesson in political etiquette-so much a part of diplomacy in the Burgundian Netherlands-failed to appease the emperor. On February 4, Charles entered Ghent at the head of five companies of soldiers only after four thousand of his German foot soldiers had secured control of the Vrijdagmarkt. The city's political leaders tried their best to treat this dreaded arrival as just another foyeuse entree, offering the emperor street decorations and even the keys to the city. But as the author from Lille keenly observed, "This was not an entry of great pleasure for them, but rather one of fear and sadness." 81 The enormous procession of thousands of military men, their weapons, and their baggage portended the harshness of the emperor's punishment. Although Ghent's aldermen, guild deans, and patricians pleaded with officials of the Habsburg court to respect their political liberties, Charles V quickly set about correcting the political disorder in his native city. On March 17, he had nine leaders of Ghent's insurrection executed. 82 On April 24, work began on a new citadel to

The New Public Order stand as an imperial bulwark against further unrest. The emperor's men chose the Seigneury of Sint-Baafs, which flanked Ghent across the Scheidt on its eastern border, as their prized site. With vengeance, they razed to the ground the abbey of Sint-Baafs, along with the seigneury's towers, gates, and its church of the Heilige Kerst. The Benedictine monks, who had gained the status of canons in r 53 7, were then transferred to the central parish church of Sint-Jan, now rechristened as the church of Sint-Baafs. 83 Never before had a prince, in his capacity as count of Flanders, so altered the physical, religious, and political topography of Ghent. To dismantle and abolish the powerful Benedictine abbey and its village ripped into Ghent's public fabric and altered the city's sacred geography. Yet the emperor decided to go even further. On April 29, at the Burgundian court in Ghent, he confronted an assembly of kneeling aldermen, guild deans, and patricians to pronounce thirty-five formal charges against them. He then demanded the confiscation of all city privileges and weapons along with all the goods, rents, possessions, and munitions of Ghent's weavers and fifty-three lesser guilds. 84 The following day the emperor issued a written constitution for Ghent that forever abolished the division of the city into Three Members; restructured Ghent's guild community into twenty-one corporations; replaced Ghent's Collatie with a new assembly whose delegates included aldermen and forty-two representatives from the city parishes; stipulated the selection of city aldermen by Habsburg magistrates on May ro; and reiterated in the strongest terms possible the aldermen's loss of regional economic and political autonomy. 85 This direct assault on Ghent's privileged position in the Burgundian Netherlands irrevocably stripped its political elite of their power. But Charles's sentence also attacked the most cherished behaviors and symbols of the city's Three Members. Public ritual in late-medieval Ghent enacted the prerogatives of the patricians, the weavers, and the fifty-three guilds and encoded their political ambitions. As the emperor and his men understood in light of past punishments of Ghent, institutional and political reform worked best if it directly challenged basic public prerogatives. Ghent's new constitution, therefore, struck at two of the city's most important festivals: the Saint Lieven celebration and the Night Watch procession. Without the division of Ghent into its Three Members, the Night Watch procession, which showcased the combined military might of Ghent's guild communities, lost its purpose and was, by consequence, abolished. The Saint Lieven procession, always a barometer

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The New Public Order of social unrest, was now forbidden to exit Ghent, the holy relic being henceforth restricted to the newly named church of Sint-Baafs in the city center. 86 The restructuring of Ghent's public world even questioned the ways in which Gentenars regulated time: the emperor required his men to remove the city's work clock from the Belfry. 87 Its very existence stood for local political defiance. Nicknamed Roland, this bell had regulated the rhythm of labor in Ghent and summoned assemblies of workers on the Vrijdagmarkt. 88 Taking down the clock, with its personal name-as if it were animate-symbolized the Habsburgs' fervent wish to rid themselves forever of the public codes that had traditionally undergirded Ghent's regime of the Three Members. 89 The use of physical destruction as a tool of coercion was crucial to the emperor's attempt to recast civic behavior. Apart from the Seigneury of Sint-Baafs, no less than eight gates on all sides of Ghent were torn down, as well as the Rodetoren (Red Towert located to the northeast of the abbey of SintBaafs.90 Although very important gates such as the Waalpoort and the Percellepoort-gates that had in the past served as points of entry for Burgundian princes-remained intact, Ghent lost several of its most visible demarcations of urban space. To demolish a gate was to assert in the most direct way the right to shape civic boundaries. Like Philip the Good in 145 3, Charles V resorted to this tactic both to claim authority over urban turf and to humiliate those who in ordinary times policed it. 91 The emperor's punishment treated urban time and space not only as fixed entities but as political and social expressions of Ghent's culture. The financial and institutional changes the Habsburg state imposed thus incorporated a fundamental remapping of the civic world. When these developments are considered alongside the earlier erosion of the ritual liberties of all but the most privileged festive confraternities, the degree of change in ·Ghent is easily comprehended. The new political era was especially different because so much of the formal identity of Ghent's elite townspeople had been rooted in their assertion of traditional liberties, the texts of which were now confiscated. Even that hostile chronicler of the political upheaval of 1539, the anonymous author from Lille, felt a pang of melancholy as he reported the emperor's harsh punishment of the Gentenars "because they loved and esteemed their privileges more than anything else." 92 Denied those urban liberties that made possible their urban culture, many citizens, the influential guildsmen in

The New Public Order particular, could only watch as their cultural and political universe crumbled under Habsburg authority. THE turmoil that began in Ghent during the summer of 1539 ended on May 3, 1540, with Gentenars once again on their knees beseeching political absolution for their misdoings. Like his Burgundian predecessors, Charles V had demanded an honorable amend as part of the terms of the peace he imposed on Ghent. 93 But this time, the rite of subjection was to occur neither in Brussels nor outside Ghent's walls, but at Ten Walle, the Burgundian court in the center of the city. Charles had insisted that the ceremony take place outside, in the courtyard, because, in the words of the Lille chronicler, "The emperor wanted every one to know and see it, as an example and for memory. " 94 The amend indeed fulfilled this imperial wish to create a spectacle of lasting importance. What better example exists of the conjunction of city and court in the Burgundian state than the sad procession of aldermen, guild deans, guildsmen, and indigent laborers that departed Ghent's town hall on Monday afternoon, May 3, 1540? Bearing the stigma of lese majesty, the retinue of Gentenars headed for the Burgundian court, now packed with spectators, local and foreign alike, gathered to witness their public submission. 95 Despite their collective punishment, Ghent's townsmen were not without distinctions of social rank in this ritual farewell to their late-medieval political culture. In fact the order and dress of each political penitent had been carefully prescribed by the emperor's men, in their determination at once to affirm the city's political divisions and to distinguish levels of complicity in the rebellion. 96 Ghent's aldermen; all its lesser guild deans and officials, with six men from every corporation; and the head dean of the weavers, with fifty of his men, all marched attired in fine black robes, heads bare. By contrast, fifty creesers, the petty laborers who had so frightened authorities during the revolt, joined the procession in nothing but their white undergarments, forced to walk barefoot with iron halters around their necks. 97 Clearly the political actions of the poor Gentenars who lacked formal political status had earned the severest rebuke from their lord because they had dared to transgress several political boundaries. Still, all the assembled men were forced to kneel together before Emperor Charles, his sister Mary of Hungary, and their assembly of courtiers and advisers, implicated as fellows criminals for their polit-

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The New Public Order ical misdeeds. What then followed was typical of an honorable amend: a rueful plea for forgiveness by one of Ghent's jurists, a flood of tears from the sorrowful Gentenars, then the offer of reconciliation by the merciful emperor, "who preferred mercy to the rigor of justice. " 98 Once abased before their secular prince, these Gentenars regained the status of dutiful subjects in this carefully staged morality play. Arranged according to rank, they were nevertheless shamed as one political body. The political abasement of the defeated townsmen was the denouement not only of a bitter recent season of political unrest but of more than a century and a half of formal relations between the often querulous commune of patricians, merchants, guildsmen, and day laborers and the ever-changing but privileged Burgundian state. It had been a difficult relationship conducted in a public world that both defined the boundaries of city and state and gave form to their leaders' difficult encounters. City and state, far from being two distinct spheres, both belonged to a public culture in which an intricate geometry of relations intermeshed urban and state actions much as it constructed institutional and economic networks. The history of relations between the Burgundian state and Ghent in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries offers a portrait of political antagonists whose systems of public representation drew necessarily and at times unevenly upon one another, often at a tremendous social and political cost. In addition, it suggests that both state and municipal authorities used their relationship to one another to hone their own respective power bases. For Burgundian rulers, power was affirmed, consolidated, and even maximized through the prism of urban acclaim, even if this involved confronting such difficult cities as Ghent. For civic leaders, local authority depended on negotiating the limits of sovereignty with the state. Nor were these forms of social and political validation fixedi for they demanded constant exchanges to satisfy social networks and political exigencies. After 1540, political relations between Ghent and Habsburg authorities continued to draw on rituali for no political system can empty itself of symbolic idioms. But the May 3 atonement decisively ended that remarkable late-medieval period in the history of the Burgundian Netherlands and, with it, the official culture of urban citizenry. With the regime of the Three Members at an end, Ghent's rhetoricians facing censure, and the city's privileges confiscated, Ghent became just one more territory to the Habsburgs, a city subordinate to a broader international empire. The coalition of patricians,

The New Public Order weavers, and lesser guildsmen who had so successfully governed Ghent had fashioned a dynamic public culture that fused an almost parochial boosterism with a contested involvement in state affairs. Their last great submission before the emperor whose birth they had greeted with ritual enthusiasm decisively canceled the urban privilege to which they had so tightly clung. They were abased on local ground in the center of Ghent, but at Ten Walle, the court's domain, enacting a dramatic contraction of municipal into sovereign space. Out of this enclave of Burgundian exclusivity, the defeated citizens of Ghent emerged as mere subjects of Habsburg absolutism.

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The Historical City

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Visitors to Ghent today will have a bard time finding the few remaining fragments of Ten Walle but will not have to look far to marvel at the physical and cultural pillars of the city's great late-medieval period. That much of the architecture and layout of medieval Ghent is left intact in the city's center owes as much to strategies of cultural remembrance as it does to the fortunes of time. Ghent today is scarcely separated from Brussels, capital of the European Community; and that city has been transformed in rhythm and character by nineteenth-century industrialization and late-twentieth-century immigration and technological change. But tourists in Ghent will encounter at every turn the commemoration and marketing of the hallowed period of the van Arteveldes and the Three Members. An imposing statute of Jacob van Artevelde now dominates the Vrijdagmarkt; visitors scramble around the upper perimeter of the Belfry to hear presentations, in the language of their choice, on the great clock Roland and on the historical power of Ghent's guildsmen and patricians. At the local beerhouse Hopduvel, choices include Gentse Tripel, featuring a birdseye view of the city's medieval spires on the bottle, or Stropken, foregrounding an illustration of dangling nooses in front of the Gravensteen, a playful allusion to the r 540 honorable amend. Although Ghent today is a small European city boasting a diverse community, its cultural custodians have carefully located the city's importance in a repackaging of its medieval past, with much emphasis on its townspeople's fabled inde210

The Historical City pendence. Even the new multiauthored history of Ghent is tellingly entitled Ghent: Apology of a Rebellious City. 1 Although much of the fixing of Ghent's official memory in its premodern past has to do with the hope of preserving Flemish identities in a rapidly homogenizing mass culture, the appeal of the medieval period, and especially guild life, has resonated in many different directions and to a range of people. The important socialist movement (Vooruit) in early-twentieth-century Ghent also recuperated much from the van Artevelde and Burgundian period; it is no accident that Flemish socialists built one of their formidable workers' halls on the Vrijdagmarkt, with its ineradicable history of guild agitation. For a whole host of recent and contemporary townspeople, no matter what the current civic climate, their fundamental historical orientation is the long summer of Ghent's late-medieval splendor. I too have used this chapter of Ghent's past as an intellectual compass and point of departure. In this book, I have tried to pinpoint the social location of an important segment of Burgundian public spectacle and set about that task by keying such historical enactments to an urban grid, arguing that no matter how independent the Burgundian state might seem, its power was fixed in civic grooves. The civic world, in turn, was a culture whose tempo responded to a Burgundian presence. Cities like Ghent had a public world whose ritual, though often purposefully masking social tensions, was very much propelled by an ever-changing and antagonistic historical dynamic between city and state. The stock of symbols and actions that such a knotty relationship produced proved critical to the Burgundian period, so much so that they bequeathed to future generations the stuff of new cultural and political movements. That the rise and fall of Ghent as a semiautonomous urban regime has then become a set of historical events told, interpreted, and refashioned over centuries is no small indication of its absolute centrality in the history of the Burgundian Netherlands. I am quite aware that my own recounting of this narrative is but part of a larger and thriving cultural production. The many ways in which Ghentish and Burgundian symbols have been made and remade by everybody from Flemish socialists to the tourist industry also drives home the mindful reality that ritual is, after all, about people in specific contexts who actively create meaning through the deployment of symbols. Although there is a tendency to see public ritual as a highly aestheticized, doggedly standardized set of behaviors, it is important to take stock of the point

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The Historical City made by both Jonathan Z. Smith and Catherine Bell that, in the final analysis, "ritual is work." 2 These two anthropologists mean, in the best sense, that ritual is a kind of social action; in addition, they suggest that the traditional categories for thinking about ritual have often obscured the fact that it involves people and their labor. This point is all the more important here because Ghent was a city of workers, and its formal guild life dominated official public activity. So, too, this point is essential insofar as I have adopted the critical stance that the symbolic is not external to reality but is, rather, the thing itself. Although such a theoretical perspective questions a base/superstructure division of society and culture, it does not dismiss the means by which symbolic action becomes embedded in material relations of power that pattern its production. I have been especially keen to flesh out, where sources permit, the social and political fabric of public spectacle, trying to pinpoint not just the symbols themselves but their relationship to those who wield them, the broader relations of power out of which they are spun, and the specific historical moment from which they arise. In the end, it is neither a system of social consensus nor one of social control that the history of the public ritual of Ghent and the Burgundian state uncovers. If it is now commonplace to see ritual and symbols as too polyvalent and slippery to work with such precision, there is still a need to grasp how these social forms operate and how they in particular work both to construct a public arena and to set clearly recognized boundaries. The ritual of the past can best be revealed in a social and historical context in which its enactment is seen as both local and contingent, however formidable that task may be. Social and political communities do, after all, make use of symbolic action for reasons that, while broadly pitched, are often very group specific. Grand theoretical constructs of ritual will always be wrecked on the shoals of local history. The case of Ghent and the Burgundian state has shown that no matter how internally diverse, townspeople and court officials actively shaped a social profile through their public ritual. As part of an established political dynamic, these enactments mattered: they publicly dramatized social classifications and offered, through ceremony, an opportunity for the intricate rivalries, allegiances, and bonds that joined social groups to one another, and city to state, to be confronted. Such ritual, then, was not a temporary diversion but a sharp intervention into social and political relations; these dramas of power doubled as vehicles for negotiation. Ritual did not so much

The Historical City channel or dissipate conflict as recast it into a privileged moment in the public eye where it could be bracketed, worked through, even at times disguised, but certainly not swept furtively aside. The spectacle of the Burgundian state was thus both a way of detailing its fledgling power and a device for engaging political and social questions with friends and foes alike. So too with the community of Gentenars, who saw their public world undergo rapid shifts owing to the growth of Burgundian power. The dizzy bricolage of symbols and formal behaviors Huizinga charted long ago takes on new meanings when we read it through the prism of social and political location. As the specific case of Ghent suggests, the supposed autumn of Low Country culture was nothing more than the richly textured peak of a public world patterned by subtle networks and explosive exchanges between townspeople and their Burgundian rulers.

2

r3

Notes

Introduction r. Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, 3:205-15; also recounted in Alienor de Poitiers, Les honneurs de la cour, 2:210. 2. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study in the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Dawn of the Renaissance; cf. the longer Dutch original, Herfsttii der middeleeuwen: Studie over levens-en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en viiftiende eeuw in Frankriik en de Nederlanden. Huizinga closely supervised the 1924 English-language abridgment of his work. On Huizinga, see the critical appraisal by W. E. Krul, Historicus tegen de tijd: Opstellen over ]even en werk van f. Huizinga. Huizinga's neglect of important court traditions in the medieval Low Countries has been corrected by Frits Pieter van Oostrom's fundamental Court and Culture: Dutch Literature, I350-I450. 3· On Huizinga and the ideas in his 1919 classic, see F. W. N. Hugenholtz, "The Fame of a Masterwork"; Rosalie Colie, "Johan Huizinga and the Task of Cultural History"; and Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France, and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages, 2-12. On Huizinga's broader theoretical contributions, see Robert Anchor, "History and Play: Johan Huizinga and His Critics"; Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture: Voltaire, Guizot, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset, 208-46; and Krul, Historicus tegen de tiid, esp. 208-39. 4· Much of the impetus for the link between history and anthropology came, on the one hand, from the explosion of interest in the last thirty years in writing history from the "bottom up" and, on the other hand, from the softening of disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences; see Jim Sharpe, "History from Below." Early calls to draw together history and anthropology included practitioners of both disciplines; see Keith Thomas, "History and Anthropology," and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Anthropology and History. For developments in the 198os, especially the powerful interest in text and discourse, see Lynn Hunt, "History, Culture and Text," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The

New Cultural History,

1-22.

5. On Pirenne's fundamental contribution to Low Country history, see Bryce

Lyon, Henri Pirenne: A Biographical and Intellectual History.

2!5

2r6

Notes to Pages 3-8 6. Burgundian patronage of late-medieval Low Country music is especially significant; see Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges. 7. Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, 9· 8. I borrow the phrase from Paul Rabinow, "Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology." For a lively debate over the socialhistorical grounding of symbols, see Roger Chartier, "Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness," and Robert Darton, "The Symbolic Element in History." 9· Otto Cartellieri, The Court of Burgundy. Cartellieri adopts Huizinga's general cultural analysis yet focuses specifically on the court itself. 10. One of the earliest works is James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough. Fundamental is a work that followed Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages, A.M. Hocart, Kingship, but also his Kings and Councilors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society. Some historians of medieval kingship, however, did parallel this anthropological tradition; see Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Medieval Ruler Worship and The King's 1Wo Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology; Percy Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik: Beitriige zu ihrer Geschichte vom dritten zum sechzehnten [ahrhundert; and Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges: Etude sur le caractere surnaturel attribue ii la puissance royale, particulierement en France et en Angleterre. I r. WimP. Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Burgundian Netherlands, 223. For an interesting rejoinder, see David M. Nicholas, "In the Pit of the Burgundian Theater State: Urban Traditions and Princely Ambitions in Ghent, 1360-1420." 12. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Geertz's widely hailed The Interpretation of Cultures has had a fundamental impact on cultural historians. 13. Geertz, Negara, 122. 14. Ibid, 13. 15. Ibid. Other cross-disciplinary studies of royal ritual, developing similar questions about politics, power, and symbolism, include David Cannadine and Simon Price, eds., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, and Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages. r6. In what follows, I do not try to distinguish in definition between ritual and ceremony but, rather, consider ceremony part of a spectrum of ritual acts. The vexing problem of a standard definition of ritual is well known. David I. Kertzer has recently cast the term broadly as "action wrapped in a web of symbolism"; see his Ritual, Politics, and Power, 9· But I prefer Catherine Bell's caution that standard definitions of ritual fail to encompass its manifold dimensions as social action; see her Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. For the problem of definition, see also Jack Goody, "'Against Ritual': Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic." 17. In this endeavor I was greatly influenced by scholarship on urban public life in Renaissance Italy, e.g., Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence; Ronald F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence; Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice; and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. For the gender divisions in urban public life, see the evaluation of Renaissance Venice by Dennis Romano, "Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice," and Philippe Braunstein and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Florence et Venice: Les rituels publiques a l'epoque de la Renaissance." r8. For the influence of Burgundian ritual on the courts of early-modern Europe, see Michel Mollat, Genese medievale de la France moderne, XNe-XVe siecle, !73; Bernard Guenee, L'Occident aux X!Ve et XVe siecles: Les etats, 148- so; and L. Pfandl, Philipp II, 120-57·

Notes to Pages 9- I 2 r Court, State, and Ceremony 1. Chastellain's eleven "magnificences" can be found in Oeuvres, 5:505-6. Chastellain's life spanned the major events of fifteenth-century Burgundy; he died just two years before the death of Charles the Bold. Appointed the official historiographer of the Burgundian court in 145 5, Chastellain became Burgundy's most renowned chronicler. Although his writings covered the period from 1420 to 1474, only fragments for the years 1418-22, 1431-32, 1451-61, and 1464-70 have survived. Kervyn de Lettenhove's eight-volume edition of Chastellain's work remains standard but is not without serious problems. For an analysis of Chastellain's writing, see Jean-Claude Declos, Le temoignage de Georges Chastellain; for the style of Burgundian literature in general, Jean Rychner, La litterature et les moeurs chevaleresques ii la cour de Bourgogne. 2. The best introductions to Burgundian political history remain the biographies of the four Valois dukes by Richard Vaughan-Philip the Bold: The Formation of the Burgundian State, fohn the Fearless: The Growth of Burgundian Power, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Power, and Charles the Bold: The Last Duke of Burgundy-and his Valois Burgundy. Two recent syntheses by Wim P. Blockmans and Walter Preverner, In de Ban van Bourgondie and Burgundian Netherlands, focus less on biography and more on social and economic structures. 3. Vaughan, Charles the Bold, 151-52, on the quest for a renascent Lotharingia; W. P. Blockmans and Prevenier, De Ban, 155-71, for the continuity of the Burgundian state. 4· Figures from W. P. Blockmans and Prevenier, De Ban, 105-6. The percentage of urbanization of Low Country territories c. 1470 is revealing: ranging from 45 percent for the county of Holland and 36 percent for the county of Flanders, to a middling range of 31 percent for Brabant, 30 percent for Hainault, and 22 percent for Picardy. For a detailed survey, see also Wim P. Blockmans, G. Pieters, Walter Prevenier, and R. W. M. van Schalk, "Tussen crisis en welvaart: Sociale veranderingen, 1300-1500," in D. P. Blok, Walter Prevenier, and D. J. Roorda, eds., Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 4:42-86. Still fundamental is Henri Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, esp. vols. 1-2 for the medieval period. s. Vaughan, fohn the Fearless 14-28, 153-72. On the early itineraries of the first two dukes of Burgundy, E. Petit, Itineraires de Philippe le Hardi et de fean sans Peur, dues de Bourgogne, r363-r4r9. The demands made by Flemish political leaders to John the Fearless in the spring of 1405 during his entry ceremony into Ghent are collected in Philippe Blommaert, "Inhuldiging van Jan Zonder Vrees, als Graaf van Vlaenderen, te Gent in het jacr 1405." The residency demand was uppermost: the political leaders argued that John must reside in Flanders and, when absent, leave his wife in charge; see 89. 6. Pirenne, Histoire, 2:1-133; and David M. Nicholas, Town and Countryside: Social, Economic, and Political Tensions in Fourteenth-Century Flanders. On the development of representative institutions, see Walter Prevenier, De Leden en de Staten van Vlaanderen, r384-I405. For a comprehensive survey, see David M. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders. 7· Pirenne, Histoire, 2:102-29; Nicholas, Town and Countryside, 175-200. The literature on Artevelde himself is considerable: see Hans van Werveke, facob van Artevelde; HenryS. Lucas, The Low Countries and the Hundred Years War, r326-r347 and "The Sources and Literature on Jacob van Artevelde"; Patricia Carson, fames van Artevelde: The Man from Ghent; and David M. Nicholas, The van Arteveldes of

Ghent: The Varieties of Vendetta and the Hero in History, which deromanticizes both

Jacob and Philip van Artcvelde. For the Artevelde legend, sec J. Vermeulen, "De groei en de bloei van de Arteveldefiguur in de Vlaamsche volksziel."

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Notes to Pages

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8. Vaughan, Philip the Bold, 138-39; W P. Blockmans and Prevenier, De Ban, 2731; Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, 332. For a survey of Flemish representative institutions and their development, see Wim P. Blockmans, De volksvertegenwoordiging in Vlaanderen in de overgang van middeleeuwen naar nieuwe tijden, TJB4-TS06. 9· The two principal studies of the Burgundian court, Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages and Cartellieri's Court of Burgundy, treat its culture as politically innocent. W P. Blockmans and Prevenier, Burgundian Netherlands, 214-25, begins a reinterpretation of Burgundian ceremony; see also Werner Paravicini, "The Court of the Dukes of Burgundy." ro. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, focuses on the French court of the ancien regime; Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 7-9. rr. See Ronald G. Asch, "Court and Household from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries," in Ronald G. Asch and A. M. Birke, eds., Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. r4so-r6so, 1-38. 12. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 135; Werner Paravicini, "Die Residenzen der Herzoge von Burgund, 1363-1477·" 13. Marc Boone, M. C. Laleman, and Daniel Lievois, "Van Simon 'sRijkensteen tot Hof van Ryhove: Van erfachtige lieden tot dienaren van de centrale Bourgondische staat." 14. De Maech died in 1468, having obtained the office of councillor of the Council of Flanders; see Marc Boone, "Lauwereins de Maech." 15. Marc Boone, "Gautier Poulain." For the evolution of the office of the receivergeneral of Flanders, see Ellen E. Kittell, From Ad Hoc to Routine: A Case Study in Medieval Bureaucracy. 16. Figures from Paravicini, "Court of the Dukes of Burgundy," 76. Paravicini is editing the Burgundian court's ordinances, which will enable detailed prosopographical studies of the court's composition; see "Die Hofordnungen Herzog Philipps des Guten von Burgund. Edition 1, Die Hofordnungen Herzog Johanns fur Philipp, Grafen von Charolais, von 1407, 1409, und 1415"; "Die Verlorene Hofordnung von 1419/r421: Die Hofordnung von 1426/r427"; "Die Hofordnung fiir Herzogin Isabella von Portugal von 1430"; "Die Verlorenen Hofordnungen von 1431lr432: Die Hofordnung von 1433 "; and '"Ordonnances de l'h6tel' und 'Escroes des gaiges': Wege zu einer prosopographischen Erforschung des Burgundischen Staats im fiinfzehnten Jahrhundert." 17. Paravicini, "Court of the Dukes of Burgundy," 78; C. A. J. Armstrong, "Had the Burgundian Court a Policy for the Nobility?" in England, France, and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century, 224-25; Werner Paravicini, "Soziale Schichtung und Soziale Mobilitiit am Hof der Herzoge von Burgund." r8. Werner Paravicini, "Expansion et integration: La noblesse des Pays-Bas ala cour de Philippe le Bon"; see esp. 313 table r. 19. Olivier de LaMarche, "L'estat de la maison du due Charles de Bourgoingne, dit le Hardy," in Memoires d'Olivier de LaMarche, 4:2-20. See also Paravicini, "Court of the Dukes of Burgundy," 72. 20. Quoted in Paravicini, "Court of the Dukes of Burgundy," 72, from de La Marche, "L'estat," Memoires, 4:40. 21. For birthing rituals, see de Poitiers, Les honneurs de la cour, 238-52, and for death rituals, 252-57. 22. G. Soldi Rondini, "Aspects de la vie des cours de France et de Bourgogne par les depeches des ambassadeurs milanais, seconde moitie du XVe siecle," 210. 23. De LaMarche, "L'estat," Memoires, 4:4. By 1474, public audiences were held only once a week; Paravicini, "Court of the Dukes of Burgundy," So. 24. De LaMarche, "L'estat," Memoires, 4:4-7; Chastellain, Oeuvres, 5:369-70. 25. De LaMarche, Memoires, 4:21-48. Poison testing and the ceremonial covering

Notes to Pages IJ-26 of dishes were reserved for certain court elite; see de Poitiers, Les honneurs de la cour, 207, 259-60. On the ritual significance of feasting in medieval culture, see Carol Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. On the importance of banquets to Renaissance culture, Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance. 26. De LaMarche, "L'estat," Memoires, 4:21-48. 27. Ibid., 32. 28. For an introduction to the interpretative possibilities of public ritual see, Richard C. Trexler, ed., Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 3-16, and Public Life in Renaissance Florence, xviixxvi. Lynn Hunt has popularized the term political culture to characterize political behavior and ritual in her Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. 29. A growing scholarly literature focuses attention on the many roles the body played in political and cultural life, with attention to sex, gender, age, and comportment; for an introduction, see the three-volume collection edited by Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, Fragments for a History of the Human Body. On body metaphors and postures in the medieval world, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans ]'Occident medieval. 30. On jousts, see Cartellieri, Court of Burgundy, II9-64. On the Feast of the Pheasant, see the contemporary descriptions in Mathieu d'Escouchy, Chronique, 3:n6-237; de La Marche, Memoires, 2:348-78; and Agathe Lafortune-Marte!, Fete noble en Bourgogne au XVe siecle: Le banquet du Faisan, r454. For entry ceremonies, see Chapter 5 and Jesse D. Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy: Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, 1419-1477." 3 r. Georges Dogaer, Flemish Miniature Painting in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, for examples of presentation scenes. See Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274-1422, on how history molded images of royal power in the Grandes Chroniques de France; on presentations and homages, see esp. 15, II7-2I. 32. On the Privileges of Ghent and Flanders (Austrian National Library, MS 2583), see Elisabeth Dhanens, "Het Boek der Privilegien van Gent," and Ulrike Jenni, Otto Piicht, and Dagmar Thoss, Die illuminierten Handschriften der 6sterreichischen Nationalbibliothek, flomische Schule, 23-34. 33· W Jappe Alberts, ed., Dit siin die wonderliicke oorloghen van den doorluchtighen hoochgheboren prince, Keyser Maximiliaen: Hoe hii eerst int land quam. Ende hoe hii vrou Marien troude, 50. For an analysis of the chronicle in general, Beatrijs van Vlaenderen, "Verhalende bronnen en mentaliteitsgeschiedenis: Het voorbeeld van een anonieme, ongedateerde kroniek over de jaren 1477-1482: 'Die wonderlijcke oorloghen van Keyser Maximiliaen.'" I am grateful to Walter Prevenier for calling this passage to my attention. 34· Napoleon dePauw, ed., Middelnederlandsche gedichten en fragmenten, 1:403. 35· For Isabella's voyage from Portugal to Flanders and her processional train, see "Relation de l'ambassade envoyee par Philippe-le-Bon en Portugal, pour demander en mariage et epouser, en son nom, !'infante Isabella, ainsi que du voyage, de l'arrivee, et de la reception de !'infante en Flandre: Octobre 1428-janvier 1430," in L. P. Gachard, ed., Collection de documents inedits concernant l'histoire de la Belgique, 1:63-91, and, for Margaret of York's entry and the subsequent wedding festivities, de La Marche, Memoires, 4:95-144. For a general description, Vaughan, Charles the Bold, 48-53· 36. Eric Bousmar, "La place des hommes et des femmes dans les fetes du cour bourguignonnes: Philippe le Bon-Charles le Hardi." 37· De Poitiers, Les honneurs de la cour, 2:232-52. The treatise was written c. 1484, its author awash in nostalgia for the halcyon days of Valois Burgundy. 38. Joseph Calmette, The Golden Age of Burgundy, 228, on the court of love. On

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Notes to Pages 26-30 the "Empire of Women," Eustache Deschamps, "De l'empire des femmes," in Poesies morales et historiques d'Eustache Deschamps, 31-32. 39· Quoted in Cartellieri, Court of Burgundy, 103. 40. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 42-43. Anthropologists have long recognized the prominence of clothing in the production and presentation of the political self; see Justine M. Cordwill and Ronald A. Schwarz, eds., The Fabric of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment. On the radical change in fashion in late-medieval court circles, J. Quicherat, Histoire du costnme en France, 205-59; and Paul Proust, "La naissance du costume masculine moderne au XIVe siecle." 41. For details on costume and court life from the period, see Fram;:oise Piponnier, Costume et vie sociale: La cour d'Aniou, XIVe a XVIe siecle, and for Burgundy, Jeanne Bayle and Michele Beaulieu, eds., Le costume en Bourgogne de Philippe le Hardi ala mort de Charles le 'lemeraire. 42. For a summary, H. Wescher, "Fashion and Elegance at the Court of Burgundy," with detailed explanations in Bayle and Beaulieu, Costume en Bourgogne; see also Cartellieri, Court of Burgundy, 72-73. 43· De LaMarche, Memoires, 2:345. 44· Chastellain, Oeuvres, 4:77. 45· De LaMarche, Memoires, 2:354. 46. Ibid., 4:183. 47. The impact of Burgundian court ceremony on the Flemish cities has never been thoroughly studied, but for a beginning, see Frans de Potter, "Schets eener geschiedenis der gemeentefeesten in Vlaanderen," and for Bruges, Albert van Zuylen van Nyevelt, Episodes de la vie des dues de Bourgogne a Bruges. 48. For the best account of the 1430 wedding, see Jean LeFevre, Chronique, 2:15874. For the 1468 wedding, Vaughan, Charles the Bold, 48-53; de LaMarche, Memoires, 4:95-144, and Description inedite des fetes celebrees aBruges en I468; Jean de Haynin, Memoires, 2:17-62; and Francis Salet, "La fete de la Toison d'Or et le mariage de Charles le Temeraire: Bruges, mai-juillet 1468." 49. The Ghent entry is explored in full in Chapter 5· The best description of it is the anonymous Flemish account collated in KV 2:212-63 based on BUG HS 590. so. On 1445, see de La Marchc, Memoires, 2:83-104, and MB 1:221. Additional information on city payments in SAG 400/I6, fols. 25or, 278v, 279V, and 28or. For the 1470 tournament, see Olivier de LaMarche, "Traicte d'un tournay tenu a Gand par Claude de Vauldrey, Seigneur de l'Aigle, l'an 1469 (vs)." For supplementary information from city accounts, see SAG 400/22, fol. 128r-v. 51. Chastellain, Oeuvres, 5:246. 52. On the offering of gifts at Burgundian entries, see Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy," 69-73, and Bernard Guenee and Fram;:oise Lehoux, Les entrees royales franr;aises de 1328 a I5I5· For de Commynes's quote, Philippe de Commynes, Memoires, I: 14. 53· Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy," 106 and 107-8 table 3·3· 54· "Die ontfankenisse des hertoghen in die stadt van Gentte," in G. Degroote, ed., Blijde Inkomst: Vier Vlaams-Bourgondische gedichten, 11-14. 55· Both Huizinga and Cartellieri downplayed the Burgundians' grab bag of historical stagings as the heritage of medieval court chivalry and dismissed it as elite fantasy; see Waning of the Middle Ages, esp. 93-107 on the knightly ethos, and Court of Burgundy, 75-96 on chivalry and 119-63 on tournaments and court festivals. 56. For the Alexander tapestries, see Florens Deuchler, ed., Die Burgunderbeute und Werke Burgundischer Hofkunst, 170-73 and plate no. 31; for the duke as divine lord, see KV 217-20; and for the Joust of the Golden Tree at the 1468 Bruges wedding, see above note 48. 57· Jeffrey Chipps Smith, "Portable Propaganda: Tapestries as Princely Metaphors at the Courts of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold."

Notes to Pages 30-34 58. The pas are discussed widely in Burgundian chronicles. The best summary of the most important jousting cycles for fifteenth-century Burgundy is Cartellieri, Court of Burgundy, II9-34· Studies of particular jousts include Alice Planche, "Du tournoi au theatre en Bourgogne: Les Pas de la Fontaine des Pleurs a Chalon-surSa6ne, 1449-1450," and Jennifer R. Goodman, "Display, Self-Definition, and the Frontiers of Romance in the 1463 Bruges Pas du perron fee." 59· J. Gairdner, ed., The Paston Letters, 2:317; on the pm:"d'armes, see also Vale, War and Chivalry, 67-68. 6o. SAG 400/22, fol. 128r-v. 61. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 137-39, and M. Brunet, "Le pare d'attraction des dues de Bourgogne a Hesdin," with information based on account books of repairs. 62. An early study of the Burgundian period in Flanders recognized the extent to which the political legitimacy of the former hinged on city regimes; see Paul Fredericq, Essai sur le role politique et social des dues de Bourgogne dans les Pays-Bas. For a handy sketch of the boundaries of the urban culture of Low Country cities, see Raymond van Uytven, "Scenes de la vie sociale dans les villes des Pays-Bas du XIVe au XVIe siecle. 11 63. "Comment les Roys et les Princes ne doivent estre communs ne familiers avec leurs subgiez, et les causes pourqouy," in Deschamps, Poesies morales, 4-5. 64. Ghillebert de Lannoy, Instructions d'un jeune prince, in Oeuvres, 345-425. On the "miroirs du prince" genre within which this particular text is located, see Jacques Krynen, L'empire du roi: Idees et croyances politiques en France, XIIIe-XVe siecle, esp. 170-204. 6 5. De Lannoy, Oeuvres, 349· 66. For the four virtues, ibid., 353, and on justice, 355· 67. Ibid., 361. 68. Ibid., 372. 69. Ibid., 350. yo. Chastellain, Oeuvres, 6:416; La Marche, Le livre de l'advis gaige de bataille, 45; Jean Molinet, Chroniques, 3:99. On the estates ideology and its impact on Burgundian writers, see Johan Huizinga, "Uit de voorgeschiedenis van ons nationaal besef," in Verzamelde werken, 2:102, and in general, Georges Duby, Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du feodalisme. 71. For love of subjects for prince and prince for subjects, Declos, Le temoignage, 144-48. 72. P. Champion, ed., Les cent nouvelles nouvelles; and for an introduction to the Burgundian pardon letters on which some tales are based, see Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Documents nouveaux sur les moeurs et le droit de vengeance dans les Pays-Bas au XVe siecle, 564-601; M. Pineau, "Les lettres de remission lilloises 11 ; and Marc Boone, "Want remitteren is princelijk: Vorstelijk genaderecht en sociale realiteiten in de Bourgondische periode. 11 For the political and narrative strategies embedded in such pardon letters, Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France, and Claude Gauvard, "De Grace Especial": Crime, etat, et societe en France ala fin du Moyen Age. 73. Quoted in Huizinga, "Uit de voorgeschiedenis," in Verzamelde werken, 2:146. 74· Christine de Pisan quoted in ibid., 146-47, from her Livre des fais du sage roy Charles, and insulting names, ibid. Late-medieval and early-modern Dutch texts confirm the mocking of Flemish cities and villages by nicknames that referred to rustic manners; see Jules de Saint-Genois, "Surnoms et sobriquets donnes aux villes et villages de Flandres. 11

75. Noel Du Pire, ed., Les faictz et dietz de Jean Molinet, 1:156.

y6. De Commynes quoted in Huizinga, "Uit de voorgeschiedenis, 11 in Verzamelde werken 2:145; Chastellain, Oeuvres, y:r6o, and on Flanders, 306. On Chastellain's origins in Ghent, see Daniel Lievois and Graeme Small, "Les origines gantoises du chroniquer George Chastelain, ca. 1414-ca. 1441. 11

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Notes to Pages 37-4I 2.

The Civic World of Ghent

I. On the Ghent rebellion of I379 to I385, seeR. Demuynck, "De Gentse oorlog, 1379-1385: Oorzaken en karakter," and Angeline van Oost, "Sociale stratifikatie van de Gentse opstandelingen van I379-I385." 2. On the reorientation of Ghent's economy in the fourteenth century, see David M. Nicholas, The Metafnorphosis of a Medieval City: Ghent in the Age of the Arteveldes, IJ02-I390. For the new growth in Ghent's textiles, see Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, 378-80, which argues for a rebound that lasted until I42o; and Marc Boone, "L'industrie textile a Gand au Bas Moyen Age ou les resurrections successives d'une activite reputee moribonde," I5-58. Boone makes the case for a more robust cloth industry in fifteenth-century Ghent than typically has been assumed. 3. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 1-16, and Town and Countryside. For a survey of medieval Ghent, Victor Fris, Histoire de Gand, esp. 59-104, and Hans van Werveke, Gand: Equisse d'histoire sociale. For a recent consideration of the city's medieval period, see Ludo Milis, "De middeleeuwse grootstad," and Marc Boone and Walter Prevenier, "De 'stad-staat' droom." 4· Figures in Boone and Prevenier, "De 'stad-staat' droom," 81. For a full discussion of population figures, see Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 17-40. Nicholas's population estimate is lower than those accepted by Belgian scholars: in I357, he calculates a population of 5o,ooo, a figure he cuts to 25,000 by 1385. 5. Fris, Histoire de Gand, 52; Nicholas, 7bwn and Countryside, I I 2. 6. Fris, Histoire de Gand, 59-93; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 206. 7· Boone and Prevenier, "De 'stad-staat' droom," 85-90. 8. Eustache Deschamps, Fausse ville de Gand, in Jean Froissart, Oeuvres, ro:488. 9· Nicholas, Van Arteveldes, portrays the two van Arteveldes as acting within their local familial and political networks, guided less by principles than by ambition and vengeance. 10. Froissart, Oeuvres, 10:19-20. The Tournai conference (March 31 to April 6, 1382) is discussed in Nicholas, Van Arteveldes, 169. 11. Froissart, Oeuvres, 10:I54-55· A record of banishments issued by the city aldermen for the late-fifteenth century includes punishments of exile meted out for insults such as "rebels, villains, and hicks"; 11 dogs and rebels"; and "criers and rebels who prefer to stand on the public market and shout and rebel." Thus aldermen eschewed insults that portrayed Gentcnars as dangerous; see SAG 2I2!r, fol. 57V, December II, 1481; fol. 1o8r, April 6, I493; and MB 1:322, December I I, I481. I2. Nicknames in de Saint-Genois, "Surnoms et sobriquets," 13, and in SAG, Nota's Van Werveke, no. 340, based in part on Edward de Deene's sixteenth-century poem, Mijn langhen Adieu. I3. Boone and Prevenier, "De 'stad-staat' droom," 81. 14. Marc Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, ca. I384-ca. 1453: Ben sociaal-politieke studie van een staatsvormingsproces, 33-48. 15. Ibid., 79, and Marc Boone, "Openbare diensten en initiatieven te Gent tijdens de late middeleeuwen, 14de-rsde eeuw." For patronage and graft, see his "Dons et pots-de-vin, aspects de la sociabilite urbaine au Bas Moyen Age: Le cas gantois pendant la periode bourguignonne." I6. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, 309. I?· Van Werveke, Gand, 36-37; W P. Blockmans and Prevenier, Burgundian Netherlands, I36-4o. I8. For Boudewijn vander Lucre's poem, see the critical edition by J. Reynaert, "Boudewijn vander Luere en zijn 'Maghet van Ghend.'" By the late-fourteenth century, Ghent's heraldic symbol depicted the virgin of Ghent taming the lion of Flanders; see Joris De Zutter, Het Wapen van Gent, 2I-35· 19. Froissart, Oeuvres, Io:so-s I.

Notes to Pages 4I-46 20. For Philip's entry and conduct in Ghent, ibid., 53-54. For events, see Nicholas, Van Arteveldes, 174-75. On May 2, 1382, the militia of Ghent marched on Bruges during the Procession of Holy Blood. Louis de Male escaped from Bruges to Lille, and van Artevelde and Peter van den Bossche assumed control of Bruges. Philip van Artevelde proceeded to Ypres on May 24-25 and returned to Ghent on June 9· 21. Nicholas, Van Arteveldes, 33· 22. For the classic study of Ghent's patriciate, see Frans Blockmans, Het Gentsche stadspatriciaat tot omstreeks r302. 23. Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 47· 24. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, 146. 25. On the language problem, see C. A. J. Armstrong, "The Language Question in the Low Countries: The Use of French and Dutch by the Dukes of Burgundy and Their Administration," in his England, France, and Burgundy, 189-212. 26. Here I follow Trexler, Public Life, on the public world as primary; determinate, and multivalent, and Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, on the importance of conflict and power to public life, 77-101, 125-50. For the civic world of the southern Low Countries, see Marc Boone and Walter Prevenier, "Les villes des Pays-Bas meridionaux au Bas Moyen Age: Identite urbaine et solidarites corporatives." 27. I have followed Nicholas's valuable social geography of fourteenth-century Ghent in Metamorphosis, 67-107, and Marc Boone, Machteld Dumon, and Birgit Reusens, Immobilienmarkt, fiscaliteit en sociale ongelijkheid te Gent, r483-rso3, for the late-fifteenth century. On the development of the two Benedictine abbeys, see the recent summary of the considerable literature by Georges Declercq and Adriaan Verhulst; "Het vroeg-middeleeuwse Gent tussen de abdijen en de grafelijke versterking," and Paul Trio, "Volksreligie als spiegel van een stedelijke samenleving: De broederschappen te Gent in de late middeleeuwen, 12de-16de eeuw," 2:1-81. This part of Trio's study is as yet unpublished. For the development of parishes, Johan Decavele, "Gand." 28. Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 180-81; DB I:IO-II, 18-19. On Ghent's confraternities, see Paul Trio, De Gentse Broederschappen, u82-r58o and Volksreligie als spiegel van een stedelijke samenleving. 29. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 67-97; Boone, Dumon, and Reusens, Immobilienmarkt, esp. 222-45 on Ghent's social structure in the late fifteenth century. 30. On the weavers, their social geography; and the role of the wijken, see Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, p-63. 31. On the real estate market, see Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 107-19, for the fourteenth century; and Boone, Dumon, and Reusens, Immobilienmarkt, 241-45. On houses, Frieda van Tyghem, "Dominanten in de middeleeuwse stadskern," and Anne Duhameeuw, "De hoge middeleeuwen," in Beatrix Baillieul and Anne Duhameeuw, eds., Ben stad in opbouw: Gent voor r540, 129-33. 32. Van Tyghem, "Dominanten," 38-39; A. van Lokeren, "Lacour du prince a Gand, 1231-1835"; Beatrix Baillieul, Marc Boone, R. de Herdt, and Frieda van Tyghem, "De late middeleeuwen," esp. 159 and 296-300; Marc Boone and Therese de Hemptinne, "Espace urbain et ambitions princieres: Les presences materielles de l'autorite principiere dans le Gand medieval, 12 siecle-1540." Ten Walle was remodeled during two major "building campaigns" between 1422 and 1429, after a damaging fire, and between 1441 and 1446. 33· Baillieul, Boone, de Herdt, and van Tyghem, "De late middeleeuwen," esp. IS053· 34· Ibid.; and van Tyghem, "Dominanten," 33-35.

35. For' a preliminary explanation, see Boone and Prevenier, "Les villes de Pays-Bas

meridionaux," 36-29; for more, see Chapter 5 below. 36. Geert van Doorne, "Architectuur als visuele taal van de stedelijke cultuur," in Decavele, Gent, 373-89, esp. 373-82.

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Notes to Pages 46-49 37. For a map of the mendicant establishments in late-medieval Ghent, see Walter Simons, Bedelordekloosters in bet graafschap Vlaanderen: Chronologie en topografie van de bedelordenverspreiding voor r350, I95· On the mendicant orders in Flanders, see his Stad en Apostolaat: De vestiging van de bedelorden in bet graafschap Vlaanderen, ca. 1225-ca. I350. 38. On the Kouter, see Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 84-85, and Frans de Potter, Gent van den oudsten tijd tot heden: Geschiedkundige beschrijving der stad, 3:319. On the Koornmarkt and tournaments, de Potter, Gent, 3:89-95, with evidence from city accounts. 39· The best discussion of the Vrijdagmarkt as a forum for public assembly remains de Potter, Gent, 3:248-332; based largely on city accounts and narrative sources, it is not without mistakes. 40. J. Vuylsteke, Uitleggingen tot de Gentsche stads-en baljuwsrekeningen, I28oIJI5, 203-4. I explore this tradition more fully in Chapter 4· 41. On the koninkstavelrijen, see Boone, Dumon, and Reusens, Immobilienmarkt, 97-IOI. 42. On the captaincy in Ghent, see David M. Nicholas, "The Governance of Fourteenth-Century Ghent: The Theory and Practice of Public Administration," esp. 236. 43· Napoleon de Pauw; ed., Cartulaire historique et genealogique des Artevelde, 226-2 7 for Jacob van Artevelde and 3 5 r for Philip. 44· Ibid., 22 7. 45· See, for instance, Philip van Artevelde's justification for killing his opponent Gilbert de Grutere, dean of the lesser guilds, during a Vrijdagmarkt rally before assembled townspeople on January 30, 1382, in ibid., 351. 46. Hans van Werveke, "Het ambachtenwezen te Gent," in Miscellanea Mediaevalia: Verspreide opstellen over economische en sociale geschiedenis van de middeleeuwen, 392-96, and his Gand, 54-55; Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, 309-12. 47· On the relationship between guilds and public life, see Felix de Vigue, Moeurs et usages des corporations de metiers de la Belgique et du Nord de la France, esp. 7783, and his Recherches historiques sur les costumes civils et militaires des gildes et des corporations de metiers and, in general, Jacques Heers, "Les metiers et les fetes medievales en France du Nord et en Angleterre." 48. For the work clock, de Potter, Gent, 1:522-23, with excerpts from city accounts; for the guild ordinances, 2:548 for the goldsmiths and 7:522 for tapestry weavers. In general on division of time, with a consideration of Ghent, see Jacques Le Goff, "Le temps du travail dans la 'crise' du XIVe siecle: Du temps medieval au temps moderne." 49· For the 1297 charter, see A. E. Gheldolf, ed., Les coutumes de la ville de Gand, r:483-84, and Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 140-45, for an overview. so. Martha Howell, "Citizenship and Gender: Women's Political Status in Northern Medieval Cities." For the shifting fortunes of women and work in late-medieval and early-modern northwestern Europe, see her Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities. 5 r. David M. Nicholas, The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth-Century Ghent, r8-28; see also his remarks in Medieval Flanders, 314-16. p. Nicholas, Domestic Life, 99-roo. Many guilds had restrictive clauses with respect to the involvement of wives or widows in guild life. In the fifteenth century, the butchers forbade their wives from entering the Meat Hall during the selling days, and the 1350 statute of the tapestry weavers allowed only widows of guildsmen the right to membership, rendered void upon remarriage, and explicitly forbad the same for masters' daughters. See de Potter, Gent, 2:5 54 for butchers and 7:520 for tapestry weavers. On domestic servants in Ghent, seeM. Danneels; "Quelques aspects du service domestique feminin a Gand, d'apres les manuels echevinaux des Parchons, 2eme moitie du XVe siecle."

Notes to Pages 50-52 53· On women as members of confraternities, see Trio, De Gentse Broederschappen, for a repertorium of confraternities. For the presence of women in the I458 entry, KV 2:2I9-20, 228-29, and 248-5 I. For the I470 joust, see Olivier de La Marche, "Traite d'un tournay tenu a Gand par Claude de Vauldrey, Seigneur de 11\i.gle, l'an 1469 (vs)." 54· See Herman Pleij, ed., Op belofte van profijt: Stadsliteratuur en burgermoraal in de Nederlandse letterkunde van de middeleeuwen, 25-45, on the principal themes of urban literature, and his De sneeuwpoppen van I 5 I r: Stadscultuur in de late middeleeuwen, 328-36. 55. Jan de Weert, Niwe Doctrinael, in Philippe Blommaert, ed., Oudvlaemsche gedichten der Xlle, Xllle, en XIVe eeuwen, 3:84-85, 88, 92-93. See also the image of women in art and proverbs explored by Myriam Greilsammer, L'envers du tableau: Mariage et maternite en Flandre medievale, esp. I 17-24. On the sexual themes of late-medieval Low Country literature, see Petty Bange, "Voorstellingen over seksualiteit in de late middeleeuwen." 56. Karl Crabbe, "Verbaal geweld in de late middeleeuwen: Gent, I350-I5oo," 3537. I thank Karl Crabbe for allowing me to consult his unpublished work. On the positive evaluation of bastards at the Burgundian court, see M. E. van den Heuvel, "De verdediging van bastaarden door Olivier de la Marche, een vijftiende-eeuwse Bourgondische hoveling." 57. SAG, Nota's Van Werveke, no. 372, April 4, I36o. 58. For the I485 regulation, see SAG 400/29, fol. 2I7V, "ghepubliert ... dat alle kinderen deser stede wesende hoven der oudde van I2 jaere heml. verdrighen souden achter straten te houpelen up den correctie van scepenen." For the several more substantial subsequent regulations, especially in the magistral records, see SAG 93BB, fol. 25r, February 6, I504; SAG 400/39, fol. 76v, 1508; SAG 93BB, fol. 27r, January 3I, IS08; SAG 93BB, fol. I85r, July IS, I534; SAG 93BB, fol. 234v, February 8, IS38; SAG 93BB, fol. 254r, December 24, I539, with direct mention of benderijen, or "gangs"; and MB 2:221, July 20, I542, prohibiting youth from making street fires during celebrations. 59· On youth in literature, see Herman Pleij, Het Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit: Literatuur, volksfeest, en burgermoraal in de late middeleeuwen, 38-40, and for Willem van Hildegaersberch's Van den ouden ende van den jonghen, Blommaert, Gedichten, 3:II on youth. For an excellent analysis of Hildegaersberch's urban themes, see Theo Meder, "Willem van Hildegaersberch: Spreker tussen hof en stad," esp. I 55-56 on the importance of the burgher elite in urban government. 6o. Ghent's festive life has never been fully studied, but for an introduction, see Frans de Potter, "Schets eener geschiedenis," in addition to the uneven references to festivals in his eight-volume Gent, and most important, Boone and Prevenier, "Les villes de Pays-Bas meridionaux," esp. 32-39. Paul Trio's catalog of processions based on ecclesiastical account books can be found in his "Volksreligie," vol. 2, as yet unpublished. Jacques Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux en Flandre a la fin du Moyen Age, 246-67, discusses Flemish processions; Katelijne Geerts, De spelende mens in de Boergondische Nederlanden, summarizes the world of games. For a discussion of the changes in festive structures for the southern Netherlands from the early-mod.ern to the modern period, see Hugo Soly, "Openbare feesten in Brabantse en Vlaamse steden, 16de-I8de eeuw"; Robert Muchembled, "Contacts sociaux et rituels"; and Paul Vandenbroeck, "Culture urbaine: Unite apparente, discorde sous-jacente." The literature on the archers, crossbowmen, and rhetorician confraternities is vast. For an introduction to all three, see Raymond van Uytven, "Volksvermaak en feestvieren in de

steden."

6r. For the use of religious rites and symbols in public affairs, see Paul Rogghe, "Gent in de XIVe en XVe eeuw: Geloof en devotie, kerk en volk." For the role of the mendicant orders in city affairs, see Simons, Stad en Apostolaat, 229-32. On the use

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Notes to Pages 53-56 of devotional objects in the southern Low Countries, with special attention to the pietii, see Joanna E. Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pieta and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries, c. 1300-c. r6oo. 62. Trio, "Volksreligie," 2:31. 63. Ibid., 63-64 and 125-26. The phenomenon of cross processions is surveyed in Ursmer Berliere, "Les processions des croix banales." For a case study, Nikolaus Kyll, Pflichtprozessionen und Bannfarten im westlichen Teil des alten Erzbistums Trier. 64. Trio, "Volksreligie," 2:39-42 for the vita of Amalberga and 2:44-47 for the vita of Godewale; for the two processions, see 2:58-62 and MB 1:318. On the confraternity, see Trio, Gentse Broederschappen, 23-28. This prominent confraternity dated back to the late twelfth century and was divided into "inside" and "outside" chapters, probably referring to a distinction between members who lived within the abbey's jurisdiction and those who lived in Ghent proper. 65. The best contemporary sketch of the procession is by Trio, "Volksreligie," 2:87-123. See also Charles-Louis Diericx, Memoires sur les lois, les coutumes, et les privileges des Gantois, depuis ]'institution de leur commune iusqu'iz la revolution de ]'an 1540, 2:391-403, with some of the most important archival documents. The procession has also been discussed in Frans de Potter, "De St.-Lievensprocessie uit Gent naar Houtem," and his "Schets eener geschiedenis," 5 r- 58; J. Gessler, "De aloude bedevaart naar Sint-Lievens-Houtem"; and Prosper Claeys, "La procession de HautemSt.-Lieven," in Pages d'histoire locale Gantoise, r:r14-21. 66. The two best descriptive sources for the structure of the procession are the anonymous account by a Lille author in L. P. Gachard, ed., Relation des troubles de Gand sous Charles-Quint, 102-7, and the material contained in the accounts of the sacristan of Sint-Baafs's abbey in RAG Kro672, 1488-89, fols. 6v-16v; called to my attention by Paul 1l:io and Maurits Gysseling. For a thorough discussion of the document, see Trio, "Volksreligie," 2:93 n. 249. For the statute of the Saint Lieven's confraternity, see RAG K8o65, fols. rr-5r. 67. 1l:io, "Volksreligie," 2:74-77 and 87-89. 68. Ibid., 92 and excerpts from the stadsrekeningen for the years 1336-37 and 1340-41 inn. 247. 69. The route can be partially ascertained in RAG Kro672; see also Trio, "Volksreligie," 2:104-5· 70. Trio, "Volksreligie," 2:109; Gachard, Relation des troubles, ro6. 71. Henri Nowe, "Gentse voorgeboden op de St.-Licvensbedevaart." 72. Hilda Johnstone, ed., Annales Gandenses, 14. 73· SAG roS/2, fol. 32v. 74. Text in Diericx, Memoires, 2:392 n. r. 75· Text in ibid., 2:399-401 n. I. 76. Gachard, Relation de troubles, 106. For a description of the events of 1467, see Chapter 5 and Peter Arnade, "Secular Charisma, Sacred Power: Rites of Rebellion in the Ghent Entry of 1467." 77· Trio, "Volksreligie," 2:207-ro, for the church of Sint-Jacob. Good summaries of the Corpus Christi procession are contained in Marcus van Vaernewijck's chronicle of the Time of Troubles in Ghent, Van die beroerlicke tijden in die Nederlanden en voornamelick in Ghendt, 5:231-32 and 4:u6-r8, which describe a general procession with the host through the city. 78. SAG 178/5, dated August 19, 1456. 79. Georges Espinas, Les origines du droit d'association dans les villes de ]'Artois et de la Flandre Franr;:aise jusqu'au debut du XVIe siecle, 2:379. 8o. SAG 172, no. 2, fol. 5r-v; dated June 12, 1430. I thank Marc Boone for providing me with this copy of the original, SAG 172, no. 12/4, damaged in part. Sr. SAG 93QQ, fols. 3r-4r.

Notes to Pages 56-59 82. As described in Trexler, Public Life; Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice; and Edward Muir and Ronald F. E. Weissman, "Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence." 83. Veurne's invitation solicited cities to compete for the best stagings during the procession, "daer toe zonden ze door gansche Vlaenderen een geschrifte ende plakkaten uut ... aldaer spelewijs eerelickst ende devotelickst een figure uut oude ende nieuwe testament, de histoire van de Heilige Kruys verheffinge, 11 quoted in Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux, 256. 84. For expenditures, see Marc Boone, Geld en Macht: De Gentse stadsfinancien en de Bourgondische staatsvorming, I384-I453, 94-98. For the procession, see de Potter, "Schets eener geschiedenis," 56-58; Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux, 250-52; and Alfred Cauchie, La grande procession de Tournai. On Ghent, Henri Nowe, "DeGentenaars en de processie van Doornik, 11 and Marc Boone, "Les Gantois et la grande procession de Tournai: Aspects d'une sociabilite urbaine au Bas Moyen Age." Annual expenditures listed in Ghent's city accounts under Dit es de cost van onser vrouwen feesten te Dornicke in SAG 400 reveal the level of Ghent's participation. 85. Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux, 250-52; Cauchie, La grande procession, I?; and, in general, Jean Dumoulin and Jacques Pycke, eds., La grande procession de Tournai, esp. 43· 86. On the "confnSrie des Damoiseaux," seeM. Houtart, "La confrerie des Damoiseaux." 87. Figures based on the examination of city accounts in Nowe, "De Gentenaars, 11 I5-I6, though Trio has disputed Nowe's assertion that the Ghent confraternities of Our Beloved Lady had anything to do with the Tournai procession; see his "Volksreligie,11 4:750-51. For the Ghent procession with the reliquary, begun at 4:ooA.M., seeS. Boyton, Jean Dumoulin, and Jacques Pycke, "Une realite religieuse, 11 in Dumoulin and Pycke, La grande procession, 29. 88. On the frocken for Ghent officials, see Nowe, "De Gentenaars, 11 24, and Boone, Geld en Macht, 94, and his "Les Gantois et la grande procession de Tournai," 54· The quote is from Nowe, 16, "La vierge peut demeurer nue, Cest an n'aura robbe Gantoise.11 On the contribution of a dress by the Burgundian dukes, de Potter, "Schetseener geschiedenis, 11 I02 n. I, and Jean Dumoulin, "Le culte de Notre Dame a la Cathedrale de Tournai," esp. 295 on Ghent's cappe. 89. The contracts for the circulation of relics are transcribed in Alfons van Werveke, "Het Verhuren van reliquieen in de XVe en in de XVIe eeuw, 11 in which the faarregisters of Ghent's aldermen record contracts for the "bootscepe 11 and "queste ende fiertele" of the saint, the former referring to the right to circulate the saint's relics and the latter to the confraternal order and saint's reliquary. For Saint Anthony in particular, see ibid., 74-75. Saint Anthony's. relics were not rented out but rather carried by the brothers of Belle's hospice. Further information on the Anthony procession for Ghent is contained in the city accounts, for which see SAG Nota's Van Werveke, no. 194; Trio, "Volksreligie," 2:255-57; and the description of the procession in van Vaernewijck, Beroerlicke tijden, I :64-65, which mentions the regular competition among youth groups for the right to carry the saint's relics out of Ghent to Sint-Amandsberg. A civic ordinance in 1459 in SAG 301/45, fol. 85v, policing the behavior of the city's "conincxkinderen," an urban group that performed various menial jobs for the city, demonstrates that the procession was not without problems of misbehavior. 90. For a general introduction to the carnival season in early modern Europe, see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 178-204; and Samuel Kinser, Rabelais's Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext, esp. 46-58. For the Netherlands, Pleij, Ret Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit. For Ghent, see Lod Lievevrouw-Coopman's useful "Dertienavond in het Gentsche." For a rare fifteenth-century city ordinance prohibit-

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Notes to Pages 59-64 ing the use of masks outside of Holy Innocents' Day and Epiphany and prescribing orderly behavior, see the December 24, 1429, ordinance in SAG 108/2, fol. 95v. The 1337 ordinance is found in Napoleon dePauw, ed., De Voorgeboden der stad Gent in de XIVe eeuw, 8. 9I. Although the earliest clues about the nature of Ghent's carnival are those few fourteenth- and fifteenth-century ordinances cautioning against gambling, masking, and uncontrolled behavior during the winter street festivities, the best evidence of what transpired is from a city decree in 1527 and from a related series of earlier regulations that begin in 1494. Pieced together, these documents allow a fair picture. For the February 18, 1527, ordinance, see SAG 93BB, fols. 92v-94r, and for earlier ordinances, fol. 2rr, 1494; fol. 24r, December I?, 1501; and fol. 59r, February 152I. 92. For the processional route of the "incomste" of the carnival emperor and his train, see the detailed description in SAG 93BB, fol. 93r-v. Cf. MB 2:68. 93· SAG 93BB, fol. 24r, December I?, 15or. In 1521 it was decreed that the lords of carnival and others should beg neither food nor money from others. See SAG 400/43, 1521, fol. 8sr. Cf. the 1527 ordinance that proscribed the begging of food, SAG 93BB, fol. 93v. 94· On city subsidies, see de Potter, "Schets eener geschiedenis," 176. 95· On the singing of illicit songs, see SAG 93BB, 1494, fol. 2rr, "werden ooc scamde laudlied ende andere lieden"; on unfurled banners, ibid., "dat onder tdecsele van dat de vastelavondheeren uutghesteken hebben huere bannieren omme wat feesten te houden," and similarly, SAG 93BB, fol. 24v; December I?, rsor. 96. For reference to a "jonghe prins van Verckensmaert," see MB 2:78 for 1528. 97· See Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 144-50, with the classic formulation by Max Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. The controversy over the political and cultural meanings of carnival in traditional European society is explored by Burke, Popular Culture, 199-204. 98. For a summary, see the description by the anonymous Lille author in Gachard, Relation des troubles, 83-86; Alfons van Werveke, "Het Auweet, de groote parade van Halfvasten voor 1540"; and Boone, "Openbare diensten," 10r. 99· For the ordinance of the carpenters, see SAG 190/r, no. 1, Dit es de ordinanche hoe de temmerliede van Ghent sullen te alfvasten waken ende auweet doen, February 6, 1415. On dress, fol. sv. roo. Gachard, Relation des troubles, 84. ror. See the reconstruction based on city accounts by A. van Werveke, "Het Auweet," 257-58, and the overview of the Ghent fair in Prosper Claeys, "La foire de la rni-careme, la foire du mois d'aofrt, ou 'bijlokefoore,"' in Pages d'histoire locale Gantoise, 3:145-64. The first explicit permission for the Ghent fair is Philip the Good's for 145 5; Victor Fris, ed., "Nieuwe oorkonden betreffende den opstand van Gent tegen Philips den Goede," BMGOG 7 (1906), 192-98. The 1401 city accounts list payments for "menestrelen, sanghers, dichters ende speellieden ghegheven in hovesscheden, die t'Alffastenen songhen, pepen ende dichten in Schepenecamere, 12 s. gr.," in A. van Werveke, "Het Auweet," 259. 102. A. van Werveke, "Het Auweet," 263-65, for an estimate of the number of guildsmen. The best description of the procession is Gachard, Relation des troubles, 84-86. 103. See SAG 108/2, fol. 78r, March 20, 1419; and ibid., fol. nor, March I?, 1433. 104. SAG 301/45, fol. 8sv, March 23, 1459. 105. For Burgundian visitors, see A. van Werveke, "Het Auweet," 265. 106. DB 2:224, and Fris, Histoire de Gand, 142. 107. Davis, "The Reasons for Misrule," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 97-123.

Notes to Pages 65-68 3. Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige 1. For the most famous depiction of a shooting confraternity, see Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt: The Nightwatch. 2. For the lack of evidence about most confraternities in Ghent's public life, see Trio, "Volksreligie," 4:749-53. Throughout this chapter, I have translated the Dutch schuttersgilden, as "shooting confraternities." I have followed the definition of a confraternity as a voluntary association, under devotion to a patron saint, and guided by a set of rules, which meets regularly to pursue common interests. For a discussion of standard definitions of European confraternities, Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century, 23-32. 3· The shooting confraternities were not the only manifestations of the civic need to harness princely symbols and titles, only the most startling. Both Bruges and Ghent had jousting companies and celebrations where townsfolk mimicked royal behavior. For a preliminary survey; see Claude Fouret, "La violence en fete: La course de l'Epinette a Lille a la fin du Moyen Age." 4· Numerous local histories are devoted to the study of military confraternities. The most general remains Theo Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen der spatmittelalterlichen Schiitzengilden, with an appendix of some of the most important statutes (Ghent not included). Older and less useful are L. A. Delauny, Etude sur les anciennes compagnies d'archers, d'arbaletriers, et d'arquebusiers, and A. M. C. van Asch van Wijck, De schut of schuttengilde in Nederland. For a slim overview of their festive life, Marc De Schrijver and Christian Dothee, Les concours de tir a l'arbalete des gildes medievales, and van Uytven, "Volksvermaak" and "Scenes de la vie sociale." Archers and crossbowmen were the elite defenses of many northwestern European cities and legally obliged to serve both city regimes and local princes, but they did not alone staff city militias. Most cities, including Ghent, mandated the participation of all male citizens in matters of defense. Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 142-59. 5. Ghent's staunchly elite crossbowmen confraternity boasted on the first page of its late-fifteenth-century membership register that it harkened back to 1016 and the reign of Baldwin IV. This is, however, more wishful projection than reality; for no single confraternity has strong evidence of eleventh-century origins and participation in the crusades. See BM, Register der doodschulden, G. 12.608, title page. This register lists the names of confraternity members for the period 1468-1796. 6. Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 37-49, 50-57. At the beginning of the fourteenth century there were already shooting confraternities in such important cities as Brussels, Louvain, and Ypres; by the end of the fifteenth century, they had reached the northern Netherlands and even the Baltic. 7. De Vigue, Recherches historiques sur les costumes civils et militaires des gildes, 34-38; and on Ghent, Jules Huyttens, "Recherches sur !'organisation militaire de la ville de Gand, au Moyen Age." Fourteenth-century muster roles for the city militia, used by historians to calculate Ghent's population, are r~vealing: in 1340, for instance, Ghent's militia was comprised of 32.02% weavers, 23.25% fullers, 9.83% men from other textile guilds, and 68.2% men from the smaller guilds; Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 17. 8. Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 143-46, for a variety of examples. See esp. Frans de Potter's calendar of activity for Ghent's Saint George confraternity, Jaarboeken der Sint·Jorisgilde van Gent; For Bruges, Henri Godar, Histoire de la gilde des archers de Saint Sebastien de la ville de Bruges, esp. 50-65, and Joseph van Praet, Jaerboek der keyzerlyke ende koninklyke Hoofd-Gilde van den edelen ridder Sint[oris in den ouden have binnen der Stad Brugge. On the siege of Calais, see Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, 327-28; this was the last time a joint Flemish militia would take to the field together.

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Notes to Pages 68-7I 9. Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 236-38. 10. For the Saint George confraternity, see de Potter, faarboeken, a near exhaustive collection of the crossbowmen's archival documents, and his Gent, 2:107-225, 52043; Josee Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis van het oude Sint-Jorisgilde te Gent, vanaf de vroegste tiiden tot r887; and Paul Voituron, Notice sur le local de la confrerie de Saint-Georges a Gand, I38I-1796. On the Saint Sebastian confraternity, de Potter, Gent, 4:352-403, 585-99. On the Saint Anthony confraternity of arquebusiers, Ferdinand van der Haeghen, Histoire de la gilde souveraine des couleuvriniers, cannoniers, et arquebusiers dite chef-confrerie de Saint Antoine ii Gand, and his faerboek van het souveraine gilde der kolveniers, busschieters, en kanonniers; this confraternity was chartered as a "ghesellen userende ende berninnende de conste vanden engienen ende instrumenten van oorloghen." II. For the Saint George charter, see BUG G. 3018/3, and for Saint Sebastian, BM, Privilegieboek, no. 1059, fols. rr-6r, published also in de Potter, Gent, 4:585-89. 12. See Maurice Keen, Chivalry. 13. BUG G. 3018/3, Ordonnantie vande schutterye der stede van Ghendt. Poincten ende Artyclen, gemaekt ende geconcipieerd bij Deken ende Proviseerders, in Ordonnantie van de cavolotters der stede van Ghendt. The crossbowmen were prohibited from insulting one another. 14. Voituron, Notice sur le local, 6. See Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 15-18, and de Potter, faarboeken, 235, who both believe the complex housed a hospital. 15. Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 12. r6. On the mural, see Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 12, and on the ordinance (undated) from the Witteboek, see the transcription in de Vigne, Recherches historiques, 18-19, "Eerst dat niement so wie hi zy edele of onhedele en trecke noch en puere noch en logiere voor Sente Joris banniere den bannieren van Vlaenderen, ende van der stede van Ghend." Ghent's "Quarter" stretched over Eastern Flanders and was subordinate to the town's economic and military power since 1343· For a thorough discussion, see Nicholas, Town and Countryside, 152-72, and Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 191-97. 17. De Potter, Jaarboeken, 19 n. I. r8. The practice site is mentioned in the city accounts, see de Potter, Gent, 4:355 n. 3· 19. BM, Privilegieboek, no. 1059, fol. rv. 20. For the expenses and fees required, see ibid., no. 1059, fols. 2v-4r. Each archer paid eighteen schillings parisian when he entered the confraternity, six schillings parisian when he married, and left the confraternity at least twenty-four schillings parisian upon his death. The confraternity's livery was also of special significance: archers had to wear it for a two-year period in public processions and were penalized if they sold or lost it before receiving a new one. Furthermore, confraternity officials had the right to resolve all conflicts among the archers. 21. On membership, ibid., no. 1059, fol. 2v. For insults, see ibid., fol. 3v. 22. Ibid., no. 1059, fol. 5r. 23. Ibid., no. 1059, fol. rov. 24. Ibid., no. 1059, fol. 9r. 25. Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 44· 26. Voituron, Notice sur le local, 3· 27. De Potter, Jaarboeken, 24. 28. Vaughan, Philip the Bold, 19. Philip also participated in a shooting contest at Ypres in 1375, where he wore the Yprian crossbowmen's livery. For a general summary of aristocratic membership in shooting C'.;'nfraternities, Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, n8-2o. 29. Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 34-39. 30. BM, Register der doodschulden, G. 12.608, and the summary of membership categories in Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 38-39.

Notes to Pages 7I-75 3 r. SAG, 155/1, bundle 22, Inschrijvingsboek ende doodschuldboeken, fols. 2r-8v. 32. For Saint George, see Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 38-39. In general, Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 297-300. 33· SAG, 155/I, bundle 22, Inschrijvingsboek ende doodschuldboeken, last three folio pages. 34· De Potter, Gent, 2:200 n. I, a weekly mass sung "aile weken up den eersten weerckenden dach naer den sondach, in lavenesse ende over de ziel van hem, zijne broeders, ende van aile den guldebroeders ende guldesusteren." 35· De Potter, faarboeken, 238-39. 36. Youth groups in the public life of medieval and early-modern European cities evoke growing scholarly interest; see Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 97-I23; Trexler, Public Life, 367-99, and "De la ville a la cour: La deraison a Florence durant la Republique et la Grand Duche"; Robert Muchembled, "Les jeunes, les jeux, et la jeunesse en Artois au XVIe siecle," and "Des jeunes dans la ville: Douai au XVIe siecle"; Jacque~ Rossiaud, "Fraternites de jeunesse et niveaux de culture dans les villes du Sud-Est ala fin du Moyen Age"; and Ilaria Taddei, Fete, jeunesse et pouvoirs: l'Abbaye de Nobles Enfants de Lausanne. 37· For a quick mention of youth groups, Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 293-97. As Reintges notes, youth group statutes often do not formally define conditions for membership. A few cities, e.g., Leiden, mention that no one over eighteen is eligible for membership, but this too is rare. Youth groups even included married members and women (extremely rare), as was the case at Dusseldorf. Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 59, mentions that in Ghent the crossbowmen restricted membership in their youth group to those eighteen and under, but I can find no documents in Ghent that reveal age requirements. 38. For the Saint George youth group, see de Potter, faarboeken, 232-34, and Diericx, Memoires, 2:91-93. For Saint Sebastian, Diericx, Memoires, 2:204-9. 39· SAG, 301/34, fol. 139r, dated July 30, 1438, transcribed in part in Diericx, Memoires, 2:91 n. r. 40. De Potter, Gent, 2:219. 41. De Potter, Jaarboeken, 233. 42. SAG, 301/34, fol. 8rr, dated January I6, I438, published in part by de Potter, Gent, 4:395 n. 2. For the rental of property, see BM, Priviligieboek, no. I059, fols. I6vI7V, also discussed by de Potter, Gent, 4:395-96. 43· SAG 301/40, fol. I6sr, dated May 25, I451, and published in de Potter, Gent, 4:399 n. 1. 44· Document in Diericx, Memoires, 2:207 n. r. 45· SAG 30I/39, fol. 63r, dated January 6, 1449, and transcribed in part in Diericx, Memoires, 2:2o6 n. 1. 46. SAG 301/49, fol. I9r, dated December IS, 1467. 47· Ibid., fol. I9r, with disobedience referred to as "hoverhoericheden" and the boys admonished, "obedieren sal huerlieder vors. ghegheven dekin, ghelijc zij dat van ouden tijden ghedaen hebben." For a related precedence dispute, fol. nov, June 14, 1468. 48. BUG Archie£ Sint-Jorisgilde, G. I9580/9, in Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 6r. 49· L. Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaire des archives de la ville de Bruges: Section premiere, Inventaire des chartes, 4:457. so. For the I469 petition and the ducal response, see Espinas, Les origines du droit d'association, 2:129-30, and Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 293-94. 5I. The aldermen rendered the decision to incorporate the former into the latter on January 12, IS67; for the legal act, see de Potter, Gent, 2:2I9 n. r. p. David M. Nicholas, "Crime and Punishment in Fourteenth-Century Ghent." 53· A 1529 inventory of jewels owned by Ghent's junior crossbowmen illustrates

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Notes to Pages 75-80 the material wealth of these younger favorites of the city elite. A golden popinjay and golden necklace worn by the junior "king" during his term are among the items listed, which include a host of silver scales and devotional objects. See SAG, unnumbered series, Sint-Jorisgilde, bundle 7, no. 7, Inventaris vanden juweelen toebehoorende den jonghen guide van Sente Jooris binnen deser stede bij Jan Vander Biest dekin vanden zelven guide Ghelevert Lieven Damas dekin ancommende Papenvastenavond I 528 (I 529 ). See also the transcription in Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 62-82, and partial transcription in de Potter, Gent, 2:540-42. 54· On the acquisition of the Cloth Hall, see the documents assembled by Voituron, Notice surle local, I2-I7; de Potter, Gent, 2:203; and Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 46. On the confraternity house, Voituron, ibid., 34· 55· SAG 30II22, fol. IOII, August 6, I4I3, transcribed in part in de Potter, Jaarboeken, 3 8 n. I. 56. SAG 301/23, fol. 138r, June 3, 1416. The confraternity scheduled elections for May, which preceded the annual shooting of the popinjay on the first Sunday in June, and agreed to fund three masses each week at their hospital in the Overschelde and one at their chapel. City officials guaranteed the crossbowmen gifts of meat and fish during carnival and at Easter. 57· SAG 301/25, fol. 75r, February 7, I4I9, transcribed in de Potter, Jaarboeken, 41 n. I. The measure was taken because "so cleene menichte van ghesellen daghelicx den boghe anthieren ende so selde vergadren, met schietene ende andersins." The Sunday fund for drink was upgraded to three pounds groot a year. 58. Ibid. 59. SAG 301/27, fol. 82v, April 17, 1423, published in part by de Potter, Gent, 2:521-26, and discussed by Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 43-44, and Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, JI5-16. 6o. SAG 301/27, fol. 82v. 61. Ibid. The aldermen also required officials to register the enrollment of members in two new books, one guarded by themselves and the other by the confraternity's dean or secretary. 62. Ibid. 63. In 1452, the Saint Sebastian archers in Bruges were referred to as "arehiers van minen heere," and "van onsen gheduchte heeren archiers"; see Godar, Histoire de la gilde des archers, 97. 64. These feast days are listed in a charter requiring the participation of former confraternity administrators in these celebrations; see BM, Privilegieboek, no. 1059, fols. 24r-2sr, dated April 24, 1464. 65. SAG 301/27, fol. 82v. 66. BM, Privilegieboek, no. 1059, fol. IOr. Two jugs of wine each were offered to the junior confraternities. 67. For general information on these competitions, see de Schrijver and Dothee, Les concours, and Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 300-307. 68. Most historians are content to view the importance of such activity as twofold: a willful promotion of athletic conduct and an attempt by city regimes to enshrine their proud burgher culture; see Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, 300-307; de Schrijver and Dothee, Les concours; and van Uytven, "Scenes de la vie sociale," I?-18. 69. For a fascinating study of the use of social groups in diplomacy, see Ragnar Numelin, The Beginnings of Diplomacy: A Sociological Study of Intertribal and International Relations. For a stimulating introduction to the role of exchange in human society, see Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. 70. It is not insignificant that a student of Low Country ceremony was a pioneer in the study of play behavior; see Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. For an assessment of Huizinga and a treatment of play behavior by anthropologists, see David Laney and Allan Tindall, eds., The Anthropological

Notes to Pages 80-83 Study of Play: Problems and Prospects, esp. 1-50 on theories of play. For a more direct treatment of the political underpinnings of play, Ted C. Lewell, Political Anthropology, 104-8. A typology of game activity for the southern Low Countries during the Burgundian period is offered in Geerts, De spelende mens in de Boergondische Nederland en. 71. de Sehrijver and Dothee, Les concoms, 2, with a chronological list of competitions in the appendix. 72. SeeR. Chalon, "Lettres d'invitation envoyees par les arbaletriers de la ville de Mons." This trend of inviting only walled and incorporated cities continued into the fifteenth century and became a regular requirement for invitation; see de Schrijver and Dothee, Les concours, 9· 73· Chalon, "Lettres d'invitation," 453· 7 4· Ibid., 45 5· 75· For the letter of invitation, see Gachard, Documents iw3dits, 1:II8-27. For chronicler information, see the examples and summary in Jules de Saint-Genois, "Fetes d'arbaletriers a Tournai en 1394 en 145 s,'' with information on the celebrated 1455 competition too. 76. De Saint-Genois, "Fetes d'arbaletriers,'' 41. 77. Gachard, Documents inedits, r:122-23. 78. Ibid., r:123. 79· Ibid., r:II9. So. De Saint-Genois, "Fetes d'arbaletriers," 45-46. Much has been written about the origins of Low Country theater societies among the shooting confraternities; for a clear statement of this very credible thesis, with a fine bibliography, see G. Jo Steenbergen, Het landjuweel van de rederijkers, 46-57. 81. Both Ghent's crossbowmen and its archers were often on the road, with major shooting matches every two to four years. They were not held concurrently. In I 404 the crossbowmen appeared at Mechelen, in 1408 at Oudenaarde, in 1414 at Kortrijk, and in 1416 at Ypres. The archers, in contrast, appeared at Tournai in 1413, at Ypres in 1414, at Louvain in 1416, and at Menen in 1418. For lists, see de Potter, Gent and faarboeken. De Potter drew his evidence from payments to the shooting confraternities listed in city accounts. The letter of invitation for the 1404 competition in Mechelen has survived. No less than forty-six confraternities competed. See Eugeen van Autenboer, Volksfeesten en rederijkers te Mechelen, 1400-16oo, 79-85, one of the finest sources on festive life in a Low Country city. Further documents on later shooting competitions in Mechclen are in Jules Vannerus, "Trois documents relatifs aux concours de tir a l'arbalete a Malines en 1458 et en 1495." 82. A chronicle of the nearby abbey of Ename summarizes this competition and is excerpted in P. J. van der Meersch, "Kronyk der Rederykkamers van Audenaerde," 380-83. For the letter of invitation, see the transcription in Ed van Cauwenberghe, "Notice sur les confreries de Saint Georges," 279-83, and the brief sketch in Marcel van Lauwe, "De Rederijkerskamers van Oudenaarde." For Ghent's participation, see de Potter, faarboeken, 31-33, with a list of cities. 83. J. van der Meersch, "Kronyk," 381, "Ende daer waren 44 steden ter scutterien; ende dacr scoeter twee sdaechs. Ende die van Gent wonnen den uppersten prijs." 84. Ibid., "Ende den grave Jan van Vlaendren, Hertoghe van Bourgondie, ende mijn gheduchte Vrauwe, zijn wij£, waren beede ter scutterie. Ende den grave Jan scoet metter stede van Audenaerde, ende noch menich edelman, die in die guide van St. Joeris te Audenaerde was. Ende den grave Jan moeste selve zijnen boghe draghen up zijnen hals." 85. For incomplete lists, see Reintges, Ursprung und Wesen, u8-2o, and de Schijver and Dorthee, Les concours, 4-5. 86. Van Cauwenberghe, "Notice," 287. 87. For the 1440 competition, see its description in BUG G. 6II2, Dit es den bouc

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Notes to Pages 83-86 vander scutterie toebehoorende Pieter Polet ende zijnder lwerrie ende dat vanden voetboghe van mijnen heere den edelen rudder Sint forijs int gulden te Gent and what follows below. The manuscript, evidently compiled from the confraternity's archives, also contains information about the 1498 competition. For a full description of the latter, with transcription of the confraternity's account book for the affair, see SAG r 55/I, Rekening des schietspel van Sint-Joris; Prudens van Duyse, "Het groot schietspel en de rederijkersspelen te Gent in Mei tot Juli 1498"; and further discussion in Chapter 6 below. For an overview of the Tournai competition, de Saint Genois, "Fetes d'arbalCtriers," 46-5 5, and the description in Chronique des Pays-Bas, de France, d'Angleterre, et de Tournai, in J. J. De Smct, ed., Corpus Chronicorum Flandriae, 3:529-37. 88. For the unrest in Brugcs and Ghent in the 1430s, see Vaughan, Philip the Good, 73-97; and for Ghent in particular, Fris, Histoire de Gand, u8-24. For the rebellions against Maximilian of Austria and Philip the Fair, Fris, Histoire de Gand, 150-62, and in general, Wim P. Blockmans, ed., "Autocratic ou polyarchie? La luttc pour le pouvoir politique en Flandre de 1482 a 1492, d'apres des documents inedits." 89. BUG G. 6112 was prepared in the 1490s by the Saint George confraternity brother Pietcr Polet, evidently from the archival holdings of the confraternity itself. 90. Fris, Histoire de Gand, us- I?; Vaughan, Philip the Good, 86; Boone and Prevenier, "De 'stad-staat' droom," 96. 91. For a summary of events, see Vaughan, Philip the Good, 85-92, particularly for Bruges. For Ghent, Fris, Histoire de Gand, u8-24; Victor Fris, ed., Documents Gantois concernant la levee du siege de Calais en 1436; and Boone and Prevenier, "De 'stad-staat' droom," 99· 92. Vaughan, Philip the Good, 87-92. On economic and political conditions, see W Blockmans and Prevcnier, In de Ban, 82-90. Unrest in Bruges was particularly severe, and Philip the Good himself was nearly killed when he visited the city to quell unrest on May 22, 1437. For the punishments imposed on Bruges in February 1438, see Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaires des chartres, 5:136-58. 93· BUG G. 6II2 provides the best information about the competition. Those pages concerning the 1440 competition have been summarized and transcribed in part by de Potter, faarboeken, 61-98, marred by errors, and Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis, 83-106, who follows the text more accurately. In what follows, I refer to the manuscript itself. 94· BUG G. 6II2, fols. 1ov-nr, issued at St. Orner. 95· Ibid., fol. rov. The natural disasters of 1438-39 are touched upon in Wim P. Blockmans, "The Social and Economic Effects of the Plague in the Low Countries, 1349-1500." 96. BUG G. 6112, fols. 1ov-rn. 97· BUG G. 6112, fol. rr, "Dit naervolghende waren de personen die de last van de schietspele hadden. Eerst 12 personen die de eerste ordonnancien ende beginsel waren omme te ordonncren de manier van spele, de prijsen endc al dies daer aen cleefde ende dit bij bevele van scepenen van beede banken ende beede de dekenen ende waer men tghelt vinden zoude." This is followed by the list on fol. rv. 98. Ibid., fol. rv. 99· Ibid., fol. rr. 100. Ibid., fol. 16r for a list of the tax revenues. See also Boone, Geld en Macht, for an analysis of Ghent's traditional revenues. 101. BUG G. 6112, fols. rv-2!, with a list of names following. For the actors, see ibid., fol. 2r, "Item 6 speellieden elc hadde een abyt vandc levereyen." 102. Ibid., fol. 2v. 103. Ibid., fol. 3r for the names. On Sersanders, see Victor Fris, "Daneel Sersanders," Bibliographie Nationale, 22:280-84, and Chapter 4 below on the Ghent War. 104. BUG G. 6rr2, fol. 3v. 105. Ibid., fol. 3V-

Notes to Pages 86-95 Io6. Ibid., "Item vanden wasse dat men huerbuerde int scepenhuus te wetene aile avonde 10 kerssen up de rade daer de juweele stonden voor tscepenhuus zo coste elc pont vanden groten kerssen ontrent 7 gr. zes miten min." 107. Ibid., fols. 6v-ror for the Dutch original and fols. 22r-26v for the French translation. In what follows I refer to the Dutch version. 108. Ibid., fols. 6v-7r. 109. Ibid., fol. 7r for the safe-conduct. no. Ibid., fol. 7r-7v. I I r. Ibid., fol. 8r-8v for the prizes listed. I I 2. Ibid., fol. Sr. I I 3. Ibid., fol. 9r. II4. Ibid., fol. 4V, "Item men verboot tafelscoolen ende dobbelscoolen den tijt vanden scietspele lane gheduerende." II 5. Ibid., fol. 9V. II6. Ibid., fols. 17r-2ov for the messenger books. On Jan Maeyaert's reception, see fol. 19v for Amsterdam and Amersfoort and fol. 2or for Liege. For other cities, see fol. 20r-V. II?. Ibid., fol. 17r, "Eerst tgulde van ons gheduchten heere ende prinche: een scale weghende 4 onchen r 7 ingels." 118. Ibid., fols. nv-13r for the entries. On the messengers and the route followed, see fol. 2 rr. I 19. Ibid., fol. I IV. 120. Ibid., fol. 13r. I2I. Ibid., fol. 13v. 122. Ibid., fols. 12V-13r. 123. Ibid., fol. 14v. I24. Ibid., fol. 5r. 125. Ibid. 126. Docu1nent in de Potter, Jaarboeken, 90 n. r. 127. BUG G. 6rr2, fol. 7V, "Waert zo dat onsen gheduchten heere ende prince bij zijnre gracien gheliefde te scietene ofte zendene zinen gulde van zinen hove met eenen heudelic omme te scietene dat zij onghehouden zullen werden van incommene ende van lotene maer zullen moghen scieten te wat tijden ende daghen hemlieden ghelieven zal binner der feeste gheduerende." The crossbowmen from the Burgundian group are listed in fol. 37V. 128. Ibid., fol. 5V, "Item den vierden prijs die van Curtrijcke ende daer scoot onse gheduchte heere ende prince mede." I29. SAG 400/r5, 1439-40, fol. 202r-v. For other costs of the competition, see ibid., fols. 274V-275r, "Uitghegheven van zekeren costen ende ghyften die gedaen ende ghegheven sijn int schietspel vanden grooten heere Sente Jooris." 130. SAG 400/I5 1439-40, fol. 302r, "Item ghegheven onsen gheduchten heere ende prince eenen caproen metten borduere van den gulde den grooten heere Sente Jooris en de van makene 20 s. gr." I31. Historians have often adopted this inversion paradigm while underscoring the multiplicity of political and social possibilities it involves. See, in particular, YvesMarie Berce, Fete et n!volte: Des mentalites populaires du XVIe au XVIIIe siecle; Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule" and "Woman on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 97-151; and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans: De la chandeleur au mercredi des cendres, 1579-I580.

4· The Public World of Revolt and Submission r. The Ghent Collatie included ten delegates from the city's patricians; the head dean of the weavers, delegates selected from the twenty-three weavers' quarters and

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Notes to Pages 95-97 the five minor trades controlled by the weavers; the head dean of the lesser guilds; the fifty-three deans of the lesser guilds; and the city magistrates; see Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 28-33; and W Blockmans, De volksvertegenwoordiging, 84. 2. De LaMarche, Memoires, 2:84. The event began on December II, 1445, and culminated four days later in a tournament jousted on the Vrijdagmarkt. The Burgundian ceremonies were so brilliant that de La Marche noted "a great number of people on the streets and throughout the city" jostling one another for a glimpse of the celebrations. 3· W. Blockmans and Prevenier, In de Ban, 67-90. 4· Vaughan, Philip the Good, 306-7; Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 33·

5. The Collatie episode was the first step in an escalation of hostilities that finally led to war between 1452 and 1453. The conflict has attracted the attention of anumber of historians. Early attempts to offer a summary include Philippe Blommaert, La guerre de la ville de Gand contre le due de Bourgogne, and H. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Histoire deFlandre, 4:350-497. More recent studies include Vaughan, Philip the Good, 303-333; Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 226-35, on the legal and political issues; W Blockmans, De volksvertegenwoordiging, 3 5 3-6 3; and Michele Populer, "Le conflit entre Gand et Philippe le Bon: Propagande et historiographic." Victor Fris produced numerous articles and editions of documents about the conflict; see his "Een strijd om het dekenschap te Gent in 1447,'' "La conspiration de Pierre Tyncke a Gaud en 1451," "Oorkonden betreffende den opstand van Gent tegen Philips den Goede," "Nieuwe oorkonden betreffende den opstand van Gent tegen Philips den Goede," "Bewijsstukken betreffende den opstand van Gent tegen Philips den Goede," "La bataille de Gavere, 23 juillet 1453," and his evaluation of the vernacular sources available to study the war, "Onderzoek der bronnen van den opstand der Gentenaars tegen Phiiips den Goede, 1449-53." 6. For the full address, see DB 1:57-68. Perhaps the most valuable overview of the Ghent War is this anonymous chronicle compiled by an official in Ghent, who augmented his scrupulous account of the events of 1449-53 with most of the diplomatic documents central to the conflict. The edition of this so-called diary was prepared in 1841 by A. G. B. Schayes but was reproduced in the superior two-volume edition by Fris. Because of the Dagboek van Gent's detail and breadth, I have drawn on it extensively throughout this chapter for evidence and arguments. The relative merits of the other vernacular accounts are discussed by Fris, "Onderzoek der bronnen," and Populer, "Le conflit entre Gand et Philippe le Bon." 7- DB 1:57-58. 8. DB 1:68. For other local accounts, see MB 1:232 and KV 2:1u, which begins a reticent summary of the Ghent War apparently written by a Gcntenar. 9· Throughout this chapter I refer to the political actions of Ghent's "guildsmen." Though sources on the Ghent War are plentiful, none gives any specific information about which guilds were in the forefront of the conflict, nor does any reveal which factions among guildsmen animated city politics during the period of fighting. To the contrary, though there is some indication of factionalism, our sources, Burgundian and Flemish, are remarkable for suggesting a unity among the rank-and-file of Ghent's weavers and fifty-three lesser guilds. In fact, Ghent's power-sharing arrangement among patricians, weavers, and the lesser guilds remained essentially intact during even the most radical phase of the war, a point I discuss later. Although we should maintain a healthy skepticism about the supposed unanimity among Ghent's urban corporations, because our sources rarely speak in terms more specific than "neringen," "ambaehten," and "volk," I have used the appropriate English translation, referring, where possible, to individual guilds or other political and social groups. ro. E. P. Thompson has studied for a later period the fundamental importance of

Notes to Pages 98-wo invocations of custom to the political actions of nonelites; see his Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. II. W Blockmans and Prevcnier, In de Ban, 67-82; Vaughan, Philip the Good, 3034· 12. Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 36-48. 13. DB I:69. For the duke's complaint, see the text of Philip the Good's address to Ghent's deputies in Jan van den Vivere, Chronyke van Gent, 12. The Dagboek differs from the ducal version in suggesting that the proportional arrangement of the two benches was upset in 1449 when the ducal commissioner Pieter Baudins placed the butcher Lievin van den Pale in a position reserved for a patrician; sec DB r:n. For the withdrawal of ducal officers, see also KV 2:u-r2. 14. For an acute statement of how public interaction and symbolic behavior shapes political and social life, see Ronald F. E. Weissman, "Reconstructing Renaissance Sociology: The 'Chicago School' and the Study of Renaissance Society," and "The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Social Relations, Individualism, and Identity in Renaissance Florence." rs. For the debate over citizenship, see Fris's introduction to the DB r:r8-19, 3034; and Vaughan, Philip the Good, 311. For the constitutional and political importance of Ghent citizenship, with attention to the Ghent War, sec Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, I7o-8r, and Johan Decavele, "De Gentse poorterij en buitenpoorterij." For a comparative overview; see Philippe Godding, Le droit prive dans les Pays-Bas meridionaux du r2e au rBe siecle, 56-61. For a broader survey of citizenship and the critical role of urban guilds in determining medieval and earlymodern civic definitions, see Anthony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present. r6. For the debate, see DB r:85-99. See also the letter drafted by Ghent's aldermen and deans to Philip the Good's representatives before July 27, 1450, in Fris, "Oorkonden betreffende den opstand," 65-67. I?. Ghent's right of exclusive jurisdiction, except in cases of homicide, manslaughter, and arson, was one of the city's most formidable privileges. Exclusive of the "free cities" of Bruges, Ypres, Lille, and Douai, this right protected Gentenars from criminal prosecution outside the city. This privilege, coupled with freedom from tax levies not specific to Ghent, and the work opportunities that prevailed in the city, made for a powerful incentive to gain citizenship. For a summary, see Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 171; and Nicholas, Town and Countryside, 70. I8. DB I:87-88. 19. A related and much more contentious issue was the fate of external citizens !buitenpoorterij). The major Flemish cities all had citizens who lived outside their confines but still enjoyed the fiscal and legal rights of the urban centers. Such a phenomenon obviously hindered tighter Burgundian control over Flemish subjects and hence became a source of much consternation to the dukes, especially since large Flemish cities counted a number of nobles and merchants among these absentee citizens. By August 12, 1450, the duke translated his discontent over this issue into law; ordering his administration to punish any abuse of Ghent's privilege of external citizenship. See Nicholas, Thwn and Countryside, 222-49, and Medieval Flanders, 36366; Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, I?6-8I; and J. Verbeemen, "De buitenpoorterij in de Nederlanden." The Yprian chronicler Olivier van Diksmuide claimed Ghent's number of non-resident citizens was as high as five thousand in 1432, roughly 10 percent of the city's estimated population; Boone, ibid., 178. 20. For the 1431 effort, see Gheldolf, Les coutumes de la ville de Gand, r:6o4-ro, for the text of the city decree; Nicholas, Town and Countryside, 225; and Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, !72-73. 2r. DB r :88-90. First, city officials promised that an outsider could acquire citizenship only if he or she showed support from the Gentenar with whom he or she

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Notes to Pages roo-I04 cohabited. This promise presumably referred to those who moved to Ghent for reasons of marriage or kinship. Second, foreigners who came to Ghent on their own would have to present town aldermen with a certificate from their parish priest. City authorities would register newcomers upon presentation of this document and require them to hold "an open house" in Ghent for the prescribed period of one year and a day so that immigrants would maintain a household in the city. Those who were not able to afford a "house" would have to do the same with a room. 22. DB, I:88. 23. DB, I:89. 24. For fourteenth-century examples of labor immigration, see Nicholas, Town and Countryside, 222-25. Nicholas stresses that Ghent's officials imposed little restriction on migration to the city. 25. DB I:I05-I2; for the accusation of lordship, IIO-II, "Ende hoven desen ende jeghen onsen dane ende wille, so houde zy, besitten ende ghebruken onse voorschrevene stede van Ghend, ende draghen hernlieden als heeten van diere, ende mesleeden ende bedrieghen ons aerme vole ghelyc als 'toft hemlieden toebehoorde." 26. DB I:Io5, III. 27. DB I:I37-I40, I42-45, based on confessions extracted during imprisonment. See also Vaughan, Philip the Good, 3 I I, and in particular, Fris, "La conspiration de Pierre Tynck a Gand en I45I." 28. DB I:II2. 29. On July 28, I45I, representatives in the Collatie decided to send a delegation, made up of twelve patricians, twenty-seven weavers, and a single representative from every lesser guild, to meet Philip at Dendermonde. The group from Ghent conferred with Philip two days later and was overwhelmed by a storm of protest from the duke. See DB I:II3-24 and Fris, Histoire de Gand, II3. On the delegation, see SAG 400!I7, fol. I06V. 30. Although the prince refused to visit Ghent because Sersanders, Sneevoet, and de Pottere, "were more lords than he," his sovereign bailiff had come to the city on August 3, I451, to promise forgiveness for the three men if they appeared before Philip at Dendermonde; see DB I:I25-26; Vaughan, Philip the Good, 3II; and Fris, HisWire de Gand, I29. 31. DB r:r25-26; see also KV 2:II2. 32. DB I:I97; Vaughan, Philip the Good, 3I3. 33· DB I:I28-29. 34· DB I:I29, "Ghy, slapscheten van Ghendt, Die nu hebben 't regiment, Wy en zullen 't hu nyet meer ghewaghen, Maer zullen 't eenen nyeuwen Artevelt claghen." 35· DB I:129-31; KV 2:II4. 36. DB I:ISI. 37· DB I:I32-34· 38. DB I:rs5-57· 39· DB I:r58. 40. DB I: I 58, "Item, tsdysendaechs den r6 novembre, zo trac men in de wapene ter maerct met tsheeren bannieren achtervolghende, hoewel datter noch geen heere en was, der stede bannieren ende alle d'andere bannieren achtervolghende, paeysivelic ende broederlic ende zonder eeneghe offentie, omtrent den II huercn van den daghe." 41. DB I:I68, "Naer der handt hebben dzelve inzetenen ter maerct gheweest met 't 's Heeren banniere, der stedc banniere van den ambachte ghemeenlic, paeysivelic, zonder yement yet te mesdoene oft eeneghe foortsche, overdaet of ruuthede up eeneghe personen oft up hare goedynghe te orbuerne." 42. Cf. the use of flags in the 1378 Ciampi revolt in Florence in Richard C. Trexler, "Follow the Flag: The Ciampi Revolt Seen from the Streets," and his Public Life, 43444· On the use by minor guildsmen of flags that were not their own, as a means of

Notes to Pages I04-9 lending legitimacy to their insurrection, see "Follow the Flag," esp. 356-71; the parallel with Ghent is striking. 43· DB 1:165-71; KV 2:116. 44· DB 1:171. 45· DB 1:175, "ende ooc dat in onse macht nyet es langher 't vole te beleedene." See 174-77 for the full letter. There is, unfortunately, no further information about the social background of these protestors. 46. DB 1:177. 47· DB 1:179, on the aldermen's plea, "Voort ghaven scepenen te kennene dat zy gheconcipiert ende gheraempt hadden een advys daer up elc wel trecken mochten te weercke ende gaen uuter wake." See also Vaughan, Philip the Good, 312-13. 48. DB 1:183-86; KV 2:116-17; SAG 40o!Iy, fol. 197r-v. 49· Nicholas, Van Arteveldes, 3; Fris, Histoire de Cant, 63, 71, 96, 121. For a discussion of the fourteenth-century office of the captain in Ghent, see also Nicholas, "Governance of Fourteenth-Century Ghent," 236. What follows is based in part on my "Crowds, Banners, and the Marketplace: Symbols of Defiance and Defeat during the Ghent War, 1452-1453." 50. For studies of crowd behavior in early modern Europe, see George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution, and The Crowd in History, 1730-1848; E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century"; and Davis, "Rites of Violence," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France 15287. For a theoretical consideration of the multivocality of crowd behavior, see Suzanne Desan, "Crowds, Community, and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis." 5 r. De Vigne, Recherches historiques sur les costumes civils et militaires, 48-69. For the best depiction of a fifteenth-century guild flag, see below, Figure 8. 52· Johnstone, Annales Gandenses, 18. 53· Ibid., 32. 54· For an account of this remarkable incident, see Froissart, Oeuvres, ro:178-8r, and Henri Nowe, Les baillis comtaux de Flandre: Des origines ii la fin du XNe siecle, 233-34. On the civil war that raged in Flanders between 1379 and 1385, see Demuynck, "De Gentse oorlog, 1379-1385." 55. The flag desecration was not limited to symbols of royal or comital authority. During a battle between Ghent's and Bruges's militias on November 5, 1380, the men from Ghent captured and then threw to the ground the banner of Bruges's goldsmiths; see Froissart, Oeuvres, 9:352. 56. Forthe tapestry weavers, see de Potter, Gent, 7:522; see also Vuylsteke, Uitleggingen tot de Gentsche stads-en baljuwsrekeningen, 203-4. For the belt makers, see SAG r62, no. r, article 9, fol. 3r, in de Potter, Gent, 1:559. For the woodworkers, see ibid., 5:643, issued during the deanship of Jan van Zeveren, who served 1458-66. 57· See the text in Gilliots-Van Severen, Inventaire des archives de la ville de Bruges, 4:14-16; see also Victor Fris, Het Brugsche Calfvel van I4D7-I4II and Vaughan, John the Fearless, 26-2 7. 58. For the 1438 treaty's restriction on banners, see Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaire des archives de la ville de Bruges, s:rso-sr. 59· Ibid. During the summer revolt of the Ciampi in Florence in 1378, the city government on August 30 tried to destroy the solidarity of the Ciampi by removing their guild flags and causing them to reassemble under ward flags; see Trexler, "Follow the Flag," 383-87. On neighborhood and social solidarities forged during the Ciampi revolt, see Trexler, "Neighbours and Comrades: The Revolutionaries of Florence,

1378."

6o. The act is dated May 15, 1430; SAG 93bis, Witteboek, fol. 204v. 61. DB 1:184.

239

240

Notes to Pages

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62. DB I:I86-8y. 63. DB r:r8y. 64. DB I:I8y-88; KV 2:II8. 65. For the banishments, see DB r:2n-r6. 66. DB 1:284-97 for the list. Ghent's city accounts for the financial year 1452/53 record the renting of fugitives' and enemies' houses; see SAG 400/I7, fols. 29II-294V, Ontfanc van huus hueren van diversschen huusen verhuert inden name vanden voorstede toebehorende vianden ende fugitiven persoonen der voors. stede van hueringhe van meersschen landpachte ende anderssins also hiernaer verclaert staet. See also fols. 34H-350r. 6y. DB I:I90. 68. DB I: 192, "want zekerlicken hy es een goet natuerlick prince ende dueghdelick. ... Ende also van ons als warachteghe ghetrauwe subjecten ende ondersaten." 69. DB 1:195, "Item, tdonderdaeghs den 9 dach van decembre, trocken de hooftmannen, scepenen van beede de bancken, beede de dekenen ende uut elcker bannyere eenen persoon ter Prevylege." On the archives, which Gentenars referred to as "the privileges," see Baillieul and Duhameeuw, Ben stad in opbouw, 153. yo. On the Tooghuis, see de Potter, Gent, 3:305-7, 328-32. 71. For this remarkable event, see Marc Boone, "Particularisme gantois, centralisme bourguignon, et diplomatie fran~ais: Documents inedits autour d'un conflit entre Philippe le Hardi, due de Bourgogne, et Gand en I40I." 72. On words as a form of power, see Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds., The Social History of Language, I-20; and more generally on the contribution of poststructuralists, Diane Macdonell, Theories of Discourse. For the power of texts to govern social transformation, and on the importance of shifts in vernacular language to signal that transformation, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages." 73· Chartier, "Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness." 74· DB 1:196. 75· DB I:I96-200. y6. DB r:204-10. For summaries of these conflicts, see Fris, Histoire de Gand, II5-24. 77· DB I :201-3, 204, 207-8, for references to riot and rebellion esp. 207. y8. DB 1:224. 79. DB 1:225, "Omme te vindene manyere ende onderwys ten fyne dat de goede lieden van deser stede nu ter maerct zynde, hemlieden voughen mochten omrne te scheedenen van der zelver maerct, elc in 't zyne, ende om te doene elc zynen oorbuer, neerrynghe ende proufyt, anziende datter menich schamel man es zeer soberlic ghegoedt, dien dat grootelic van noode ende te doen ware dat hy zyne neerrynghe ende profyt dade omme zyn wyf ende zyn kinderen ghevoedt te wesene, alzoo 't van nodes

es."

8o. DB 1:227. On koninkstavelrijen, see Fris, Histoire de Gand, 129. 81. DB 1:228. See also, KV 2:122. 82. KV 2:122. 83. DB 1:229, "het en zal zyn by wille, wetene, advyse ende consente van hu allen ghemeenlic." 84. DB I:23I. 85. DB 1:239, 251, 284; and DB 2:20, 37, 46-47, 177. See also KV 2:123, 125, 127, 155-56. 86. DB, 1:262-63. 87. SAG 156, no. I, Register van de wijsdommen der dekens, fol. nor-"' noted also in Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 233. I have been unable to trace the reasons behind the dean's insubordination. 88. Fol. nor, "Jacop ter maerct wesende ende hem ghevrach ghedaen zijnde bij

Notes to Pages II3-I6 eenighen oft hij om zijn baniere niet gaen en soude, seide neen, hij en was ter plaetssen daer hij leven ende sterven wilde bij den welken openbaerlijc blijct dat hij ende zijn gheselscip dat met hem ter maerct commen was in meeninghen waren faiten te doene up de goedwillende deser stede, also oec datte te vullen bleec ter stont de banieren ter maerct commen wesende, daer af groote bloedsturtinghe af ghescepen was te commene ende de destructie van deser stede, hadden de quaetwillende van hueren meeninghen moghen vulcommen, dies zij bij der gracien Gods niet en deden." 89. For the punishments, see fol. I rov. I thank Marc Boone for sending me a correction of this transcription. 90. DB 2:46-47. The party from Sint-Pieter and the Overschelde was known as the Gezellen der Grone Tenten, whom the Ghent historian Victor Fris described as partisans of Ghent who wreaked havoc in the surrounding areas; see his Ben Gentsche hoofdman der rsde eeuw, Jan de Vas, 8-ro. 91. DB 1:303-04 for a description of the performance, confirmed by an entry in the city accounts, SAG 4001!7, fol. 163r, "Item ghegheven bij laste van denzelven hooftmannen den 21 dach in Spooracle den ghesellen van Maeswalle dit tspel van eenen waghen speelden van 20 dach in dezelve maend." On vander Luere, see Reynaert, "Boudewijn vander Luere en zijn 'Maghet van Ghend.'" 92. Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, 2:362; Vaughan, Philip the Good, 312-13. 93· Michael Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Later Middle Ages. 94· In March 1452, Philip ordered a blockade of Ghent and the arrest of any citizen found outside the city. In response, the captains requested assistance from other local communes, but few explicitly offered their support and some-Bruges, for exampleeagerly sided with the Burgundians. See DB 1:305-18 for Ghent's letters to towns in its Quarter, dated March 24, 1452. For Bruges's letter to Ghent, see DB 2:1-2, dated March II, 1452, and 1:321-23, dated March 28, 1452. For the blockade of Ghent, 1:300-305. On March 31, Philip circulated a virtual declaration of war against Ghent, requesting vassals and "loyal subjects" to assist him in reducing the city "to obedience and humility toward us"; see Gachard, Documents inedits, 2:96-III, for the letter. 95· For a discussion of Ghent's appeals to other cities, see Populer, "Le conflit entre Gand et Philippe le Bon," 108-9. 96. DB 2:15; KV 2:135. 97· DB 2:38; Fris, Ben Gentsche hoofdman. 98. DB 2:46-47; Fris, Ben Gentsche hoofdman, ro. 99. For the text of the cease-fire, see DB 2:67-70. On the intervention of Charles VII and the French ambassadors, see Vaughan, Philip the Good, 323-26; Fris, Histoire de Gand, 132; and Marc Boone, ed., "Diplomatie et violence d'etat: La sentence rendue par les ambassadeurs et conseillers du roi de France, Charles VII, concernant le conflit entre Philippe le Bon, due de Bourgogne, et Gand en 1452." Many of the letters exchanged during negotiations can be found in Kervyn de Lettenhove, Histoire de Flandre, 4:506-40. roo. The treaty, announced at Lille on September 4, resulted from negotiations, mediated by Louis de Luxembourg, Louis de Beaumont, Guy Bernard, and Jean Dauvet, that had lasted most of that summer. For the text of the treaty and the position of Burgundian negotiators, see Boone's edition, "Diplomatic et violence d'etat," based on ARA, Tresor de Flandre, rst ser., no. 2223. The edition is paraphrased by many contemporary chroniclers, including de LaMarche, Memoires, 2:283-85, and Chastellain, Oeuvres, 2:334-40. IOI. Boone, "Diplomatic et violence d'etat," 47-54. 102. At Lille in early August 1452, Burgundian officials again made the accusation that Ghent's captains fancied themselves lords; see ibid., 34, "et en demonstrant leur mauvaise et dampnable voulente qui estoit de le vouloir faire mourir avec monseig-

241

242

Notes to Pages II6-2o neur de Charrolois son filz et tous ceulz de sa compaignie en entencion de applicquer et usurper a eulz Ia seigneurie de toutle pais de Flandres et d'en demourer seigneurs." For the ritual theatrics of the treaty, see 16-20. 103. At an early stage, for example, the Burgundian party suggested a simple enough solution: "that Ghent be razed, destroyed, demolished, and reduced again to an empty space to be plowed, cultivated, and worked, never again to be rebuilt or inhabited"; see Boone, "Diplomatic et violence d' ctat," 3 5. For the rhetoric of mercy as a political tool of late-medieval monarchs, see Claude Gauvard, "L'image du roi justicier en France a la fin du Moyen Age, d'apres les lettres de remission." More fundamental for an earlier period is Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Social Order in Early Medieval France. I04. Boone, "Diplomatic et violence d'etat,'' 35· The gates are specified in the final treaty issued on September 4, I452; see 47· For information on the gates, see Claeys, "Les anciennes portes de la ville de Gand," in Pages d'histoire locale Gantoise, 2:1633; and Maurits Gysseling, Gent's vroegste geschiedenis in de spiegel van ziin plaatsnamen, 67-68, 77. 105. Boone, "Diplomatic et violence d'etat," 35-37. 106. Ibid., 36. 107. Ibid., 36-37. On these guilds, see Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 280-86, and Baillieul and Duhameeuw, Ben stad in opbouw, r65-289. Apart from this one reference, sources provide no specific information about the role of the construction guilds during the captains' regime. 108. Boone, "Diplomatic et violence d'etat," 42. 109. Ibid., 42-43. On inserting humiliation permanently into civic life, see Richard C. Trexler, "Carrere La Terra: Collective Insults in the Late Middle Ages." r 10. Boone, "Diplomatic et violence d'etat," 47-54. I r I. J. B. Cannaerd, Bydragen tot de kennis van het oude strafrecht in Vlaenderen, 136; Petit-Dutaillis, Documents nouveaux, 79-83. In the county of Holland in 1359, an amend imposed on the townsmen of Delft included a separate ceremony of townswomen begging the countess's mercy; van Oostrom, Court and Culture, 5· For northem France, sec Gauvard, "De Grace Especial," 127-28, 228, 232, 569, 718, and esp. 745-49. On political humiliation in tenth- and eleventh-century France, see Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor, 185-87. II2. Fris, Histoire de Gand, 61; Vuylsteke, Uitleggingen tot de Gentsche stads-en baliuwsrekeningen, r86, for the demand, "Voort es gheordoneert, dat die vorseide goede lieden van Ghent sullen commen buten poerten van Ghent, ter welker poerte dat miin heere sal willen, tsjeghen hem barevoet ende bloetshovende, ende al de clergie, religieuse ende andre, sullen commen met haren crusen ende met haren processien, ende daer sullen de goede lieden vorseit bidden mijn heere omoedeleke dat hi hem vergheve de overhorichede, die sij tsjeghen hem daden up den vorseiden dach." II3. See Froissart, Oeuvres, 10:19-20. II4. The peace treaty, dated March 4, 1438, is found in full in Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaires des archives, 5:134-58. II5. Ibid., 145. This opening is followed by a demand that the supplicants, hands clasped, publicly exclaim their guilt and their need for princely grace. The citizens of Bruges then had to request the duke to enter their city, then ceremonially surrender the city's keys to him. n6. See the accounts by Enguerrand de Monstrelet, La chronique d'Enguerrand de Monstrelet, 5:445-46, and William Vorsterman, Dits die Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen, fol. 1o6r. The latter author suggests there were some 1400 men who submitted before the duke. u7. DB 2:51-53. u8. Boone, "Diplomatic et violence d'etat," 28.

Notes to Pages

I20-27

II9. These arguments, the Burgundian countercharges, and Ghent's responses can be found in some detail in DB 2:105-53. 120. DB 1:176-77; KV 2:159. 121. R. Gauthier, "Documents inedits sur la bataille de Gavere et la capitulation de Gand, 22-23 juillet 1453"; Fris, Histoire de Gand, 133-35, and "La bataille de Gavere"; Vaughan, Philip the Good, 330-32; KV 2:191-93. 122. For the text, see Gachard, Documents inedits, 2:143-56, from Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris (MS Baluze, 967 53). 123. Ibid. For the indemnity and the economic havoc it imposed, sec Boone, Geld en Macht, 60-71. On the White Hoods, infamous since the late fourteenth century, Boone, "Openbare diensten," 82, and Nicholas, Metamorphosis, 10. 124. Gachard, Documents inedits, 2:152-53 (MS Baluze, 96753). On July 24, 1456, Philip allowed city officials to cease closing the Heuvelpoort because it was discovered that that gate was, in fact, not the point of exit for the attack on Oudenaarde. The Lievcnspoort was substituted; see DB 2:182-83 and SAG charter no. 625. 125. Gachard, Documents inedits, 2:149-50, "Offrent pa, par leurs hoofmans, eschevins et doyens, avec ceulx qui vicndront audevant de mondit Sr. ou de monsr. de Charrolois son filz, pour crier mercy, ilz feront porter leurs bannieres, les presenteront a mondit Sr., et les lui rendront pour en faire sa voulente, en signe et pour partie de la rcparacion de l'offense que ceulx de Gand ont commis en eslevant et portant contre lui icelles bannieres." · 126. Ibid., 2:151-52. On the plea in French: "et tous se mettront a genoulx devant mondit Sr. ou mondit Sr. de Charrolois, et eulx estans en l'estat dessusdit diront ou feront dire haultement, par la bouche de l'un d'eulx, en langaige fran~ois, 'que fausement et mauvaisement, et commc rebellcs ct desobcissans, et en entreprenant grandement a l'encontre de mondit Sr. et de son auctorite et seignourie, ils se sont mis sus en armes, ont cree hoofmans, et couru sus mondit Sr. et ses gens, et lui ont fait et commis pluseurs invasions et voyes de fait; qu'ilz s'en repentent, et en requierent en toute humilite mercy et pardon a mondit Sr.' Et, ce fait, tous ensamble, ct a une voix, crieront 'mercy' a mondit Sr., et lui requerront pardon, grace et misericorde." 127. For descriptions, see DB 2:179; KV 2:210-II; MB 1:242; de LaMarche, Memoires, 2:330-32; Chastcllain, Oeuvres, 2:389-90; and Jacques Du Clercq, Memoires, 2:147-49· 128. De LaMarche, Memoires, 2:330. 129. Chastellain, Oeuvres, 2:389. 130. On this miniature, see Dhanens, "Het Boek der Privilegien," 107; Jenni, Piicht, and Thoss, Die illuminierten Handschriften, 28. 131. Dhanens, "Het Boek der Privilegien," 107. 132. Chastellain, Oeuvres, 2:389-90; see also de LaMarche, Memoires, 2:330-32; and KV 2:210-11.

5· Unity into Discord: The Entries of I458 and r467 r. Late-medieval and Renaissance entry ceremonies have received considerable attention. For northern Europe, see Josephe Chartrou, Les entrees solennelles et triomphales ala Renaissance. 1484-15 51; Guenee and Lehoux, Les entrees royales fran(:aises; Lawrence M. Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance and "The Medieval Entry Ceremony at Paris"; Jean Jacquot and Elie Konigson, eds., Les fetes de la Renaissance; Sidney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy; and Roy Strong, Splendour at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power. For the Low Countries in particular, Hugo Soly, "Plechtige intochten in de steden van de Zuidelijke Nederlanden tijdens de overgang van middelceuwen naar nieuwe tijd: Communicatie,

243

244

Notes to Pages

I27-29

propaganda, spektakel," and John Landwehr, Splendid Ceremonies: State Entries and Royal Funerals in the Low Countries, ISIS-I79I. For the Burgundian Netherlands, Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy." 2. The entry figure is from Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy," app. r, first calculated at 132. I thank Dr. Hurlbut for updating his ongoing research for me. 3· Jacques Du Clercq, quoted in Chastellian, Oeuvres, 3:35 n. 1. 4· For an art-historical overview of the entry, see Dhanens, "De Blijde Inkomst van Filips de Goede in 1458 en de plastische kunsten te Gent"; Jeffrey Chipps Smith, "Venit nobis pacificus Dominus: Philip the Good's Triumphal Entry into Ghent in 1458"; and Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy," 222-57. See also Emile Varenbergh, "Fetes donnees a Philippe-le-Bon et Isabelle de Portugal a Gand en 1457." Varenbergh's account is based on a French translation of an unpublished sixteenthcentury copy of the Flemish Kronyk van Vlaenderen, BUG MS 433. He dated the entry according to fifteenth-century usage, with Easter beginning the new year. The most comprehensive primary account of the 1458 entry can be found in KV 2:212-55, based on BUG MS 590. Other valuable considerations include MB 1:249-50 and Chastellain, Oeuvres, 3:396-416. The entry is discussed briefly in an unpublished fifteenth-century manuscript erroneously attributed to Enguerrand de Monstrelet; see Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, MS Fran~ais nos. 2678 and 2679, Chroniques, fols. 393r-396r, called to my attention by Elizabeth Dhanens. A close copy of the text can be found in Jean Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 3:80-89. For the entry's costs, see SAG 400/r9, fols. 26v-28v. 5· The 1467 entry has received the attention of some historians; see J. J. Steyaert, "Oproer te Gent in het jaer 1467,'' but replete with mistakes; Fris, Histoire de Gand, 138-42, and "La restriction de Gand, 13 juillet 1468"; and Arnade, "Secular Charisma, Sacred Power." The best sources for the entry are the account by the Burgundian chiOnicler Georges Chastellain in his Oeuvres, 5:249-79, and an eyewitness account by Pieter van de Letuwe, a magistrate from Ypres, published as "Rapport van den ghonen dat ghedaen ende ghesciet es ten bliden incommene van den grave Kaerle." For other excellent accounts, see DB 2:205-8 and KV 2:257-63. See also de Commynes, Memoires, 1:u9-21, and Nicolaes Despars, Chronijcke van den Jande ende graefscepe van Vlaenderen, 4:1-8. 6. On the unique qualities of Burgundian first visits, sec Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy," 23-86. 7- Froissart, Oeuvres, ro:447-51. 8. Blommacrt, "Inhuldiging van Jan Zonder Vrces, als Graef van Vlaenderen." 9· Chastellain, Oeuvres, r:67; Vaughan, Philip the Good, 3· 10. Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy," 51 r. On Burgundian street theater, see George R. Kernodle, "Renaissance Artists in the Service of the People: Political Tableaux and Street Theaters in France, Flanders, and England." 12. Guenee and Lehoux, Les entrees royales, 1-17; Bryant, King and the City, 2264. On the classical period, see Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity; Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West, and Sabine G. MacCormick, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity. For similar trends in Italian cities in the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Bonner Mitchell, The Majesty of the State: Triumphal Progesses of Foreign Sovereigns in Renaissance Italy; 1494-I6oo. 13. Bryant, King and the City, 21-42; Elie Konigson, "La cite et le prince: Premieres entrees de Charles VII." 14. Bryant, King and the City, 207-9. So important were customary rights to Low Country entry ceremonies that Brabant's bedrock charter of liberties, conferred in 1356 by duke and duchess Wenceslaus and Joan during their civic entries, was called "Blijde lnkomste," or "Joyous Entry"; see Bryce Lyon, "Fact and Fiction in English and Belgian Constitutional Law."

Notes to Pages

I29- 34

15. A fifteenth-century cartulary, the Witteboek, in SAG 93bis, fols. 216r-217r, describes the structure of an entry ceremony in Ghent, and the oaths required. Philip Wielant, a celebrated Ghent jurist in the late Middle Ages, confirms this structure in his Recueil des antiquites de Flandre. For an excellent description of an entry ceremony that charts its structure, see G. Bertrandi, Inauguratio illustrissimi et serenissimi Principis Caroli Hispaniarum Principis Comitis Flandriae celebrate Gandavi 3 martii IS IS, BUG G. 14238. The structure described in Bertrandi's account does not dramatically differ from Froissart's description of Philip the Bold's entry in 1386. 16. In rare instances, ordinary citizens did form part of the welcome parties in other Low Country cities; see Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy," 106. I?· SAG 93bis Witteboek, fol. 2I?r; Wielant, Recueil des antiquites, 95-96. Froissart's description of Philip the Bold's first entry into Ghent confirms that the Burgundians followed this format from the outset of their rule; see Oeuvres, 10:447sr. 18. On the role of Sint-Pieter's abbey in the entry ceremony, see Gabriel Celis, "Eenige aanteekeningen over de blijde inkomsten der graven van Vlaenderen in de Sint-Pietersabdij," and the excellent description in Bertrandi, Inauguratio illustrissimi, BUG G. 14238, fols. 3r-sv. For the oath, SAG 93bis, Witteboek, fol. 216v, in a Flemish translation, and Wielant, Recueil des antiquites, 96. 19. SAG 93bis, Witteboek, fol. 216v; Wielant, Recueil des antiquites, 96. 20. SAG 93bis, Witteboek, fol. 216v; Wielant, Recueil des antiquites, 96-97. 21. Nicholas, "In the Pit of the Burgundian Theater State," 273-75; see also Boone, Geld en Macht, 67. 22. For the effect of the reparations, 2oo,ooo golden ridders in 145 3, increased to 30o,ooo, but reduced in 1455, see Boone, Geld en Macht, 60-67, yr. 23. Two princesses, however, had visited Ghent in 1456: the countess of Charolais, Isabella of Bourbon, and the wife of Adolf van Kleef; see Dhanens, "De Blijde Inkomst," 59· 24. The negotiations are discussed in Chastellain, Oeuvres, 3:396-411. Ghent's city accounts reveal that one of Ghent's ambassadors, Lodewyc Steenmare, was paid on April 18 for the two days he spent at Bruges; see SAG 400/18, fol. 373v. 25. Chastellain, Oeuvres, 3:396. My thanks to Jesse Hurlbut for helping me with this passage. 26. Ibid., 3:398-99. 27. Ibid., 3:4or. 28. Ibid., 3:402. 29. Ibid., 3:404. 30. Ibid., 3:405-6. 3 r. Ibid., 3:407. 32. Ibid., 3:408-9. 33· Ibid., 3:410. 34· Ibid., 3:410-1!. 3 5. Ibid., 3:41 I. 36. This primary account of the 1458 entry is in KV 2:212-55. For an inventory and study of the various Kronieken van Vlaanderen, see Veronique Lambert, Chronicles of Flanders, I20o-Isoo: Chronicles Written Independently from 'Flandria Generosa'. 37. KV 2:242; Chastellain, Oeuvres, 3:112, for the ducal party. Chastellain also mentions that approximately two hundred archers accompanied the Burgundian party, but he does not specify their origin. There is no record of the participation of either of Ghent's shooting confraternities. See also DB 2:185 and Chartier, Chronique, 3:8o8r. 38. KV 2:213. 39. KV 2:212. Cf. MB 1:249-50; Du Clercq, Memoires, 3:19.

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Notes to Pages I34-38 40. Chastellain, Oeuvres, 3:413. The Kronyk van Vlaenderen, however, does not mention handing over keys. Philip's 1440 entry into Bruges paralleled the Ghent entry in both structure and purpose and in many ways served as a blueprint for 1458. The same KV 2:105-rr offers an excellent description. See also a related text in Vorsterman, Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen, fols. 105v-1 rr. On the surrendering of keys during Burgundian entries, which seldom occurred, see Hurlbut, "Ceremonial Entries in Burgundy," 127-28. All accounts of earlier Ghent entries, including the protocol laid out in the Witteboek, SAG 93bis, fols. 216r-1yr, and in Wielant, Recueil des antiquites de Flandre, do not mention the surrender of keys as standard to entries in Ghent. 41. On gates and keys and on a Florentine example of tearing down urban property for a foreign dignitary, see Trexler, Public Life, 306-10. Unlike the Florentines, however, Gentenars, if Chastellain's report is accurate, surrendered gate and keys together, surely a sign of absolute submission. 42. KV 2:214. Cf. Du Clercq, Memoires, 3:18, which relates that the whole official delegation knelt before Philip. See also Chartier, Chronique, 3:217. 43. KV 2:214-16; Chastellain, Oeuvres, 3:41; MB 1:250. 44· For the art-historical value of the tableaux, see Dhanens, "Blijde Inkomst." The emergence of neighborhood festive societies in Ghent during the fifteenth century is difficult to trace. I treat the development of literary confraternities in Chapter 6. 45· KV 2:2r8-r9. See also Chartier, Chronique, 3:82-82. The Caesar motif was wholly appropriate. Not long thereafter, ca. 1468, the court procured four tapestries depicting the exploits of the Roman emperor, including one of an entry into a city; see Deuchler, Die Burgunderbeute, 170-73. 46. KV 2:217. 47· KV 2:219-20. 48. KV 2:229. 49· For the political implications of representations of the female body in earlymodern Europe, see Philippe Perrot, Le travail des apparences au les transformations du corps feminin, XVIIe-XIXe siecle. On erotic symbolism in particular, Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic. For several theoretical considerations, S. Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. 50. W Montgomery Watt, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe. For a powerful examination of the West's past and present assumptions and perceptions about the Orient, see Edward Said, Orientalism. On fuly 4, 1460, when the Franciscan Ludovico da Bologna passed through Ghent in the company of ambassadors from Georgia, Trebizond, and Anatolia, citizens noted the men's "exotic" dress and manners; see Anthony Bryer, "Ludovico da Bologna and the Georgian and Anatolian Embassy of 14601461," esp. 192. See also DB 2:191-93. 51. KV 2:229-30. 52. KV 2:215, 220-21, 229. 53· KV 2:222-25; Paul Bergmans, "Note sur la representation du retable de l'Agneau Mystique des van Eyck, en tableau vivant, a Gand en 1458"; L. Maeterlinck, "Une oeuvre de van Eyck mimee a Gand au XVe siecle." 54· KV 2:231-32 for the text. 55· KV 2:232-55. 56. KV 2:232-33. 57· For prizes awarded and the participation of Oudenaarde, see KV 2:255. See also SAG 400!r9, fol. 271. The Dutch word gheselschepe can be translated as "society" or "company" and here refers apparently both to unincorporated festive groups and to legally incorporated literary confraternities. For the history of the latter in Ghent, see Chapter 6. The literature is vast; see, e.g., Henri Liebrecht, Les chambres de rhetorique, and f. f. Mak, De rederijkers. Unlike the rhetoricians, the neighborhood societies appear irregularly in Ghent's city accounts, and little can be gleaned from the scant material about their activity.

Notes to Pages I38-47 5S. KV 2:233-36. 59· The decorations are described in KV 2:236-47. 60. Ibid. Typical was the broker guild's scaffold on the Vismarkt: four stories high, with some twenty-eight torches, and covered with black and gray cloth. The scaffold displayed the Burgundian pennant, "richly made by painters," KV 2:237. Compare the bakers' scaffold on the Korte Munte: four stories high, with thirty-one torches, and covered with black cloth. Both the guild's and the duke's arms were prominently displayed; KV 2:23S-39. 6r. KV 2:23S-4o. 62. Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, 79· 63. KV 2:24S-51. 64. Ibid; for the musical instruments, see esp. 250-51. 65. KV 2:254. See also SAG 400!I9, fol. 27r. 66. KV 2:254. Elizabeth Dhanens has located a 140S reference to a certain Jan de Cuelneere, from Bruges, in Ghent's painters' guild. He was perhaps a relative of the playwright; see "Blijde Inkomst," 63 n. 24. 67. KV 2:255. Unfortunately, the text of this play has not survived. 6S. Ibid. 69. KV 2:256; Jean Chartier, Chronique, 3:S9, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Fran