This thought-provoking volume explores how city dwellers in north-west Europe used historical writing to frame and organize their urban world. The volume's strength lies in its inclusive approach to what constitutes urban historical writing. The authors throughout eschew the traditional focus on the texts of ‘official’ or ‘typical’ civic chronicles usually compiled and edited in the nineteenth century, instead favouring a broader range of sources, textual and visual, including (among others) heraldic manuscripts and personal copy-books, printed broadsheets and calendars, and a wide variety of administrative material and ephemera. In a stimulating introduction, Jan Dumolyn and Anne-Laure van Bruaene expand on this point, positing that ‘urban historiography’ in the late medieval and early modern period was not defined by any fixed textual format, socio-political focus or material form. They go on to argue that incorporating a broader range of materials into the study of urban historiogaphy not only increases the sources available to scholars interested in the topic, but sheds new light on how city dwellers compiled, wrote and presented their histories and made sense of their place and that of their community in the world.
Tomaszewski's contribution focuses on the compilation and editing of the so-called Basler Chroniken (Basel Chronicles). In doing so, he draws attention to the often heavy-handed role editors of German civic chronicles in the nineteenth century could take when fashioning their manuscripts into a printed edition reflective of their own ideals and aims, and the issues this raises for scholars today. Ina Serif draws attention to the malleability of chronicle material, explaining how the chronicle of Jakob Twinger, traditionally seen as a quintessentially ‘Strasbourghian town chronicle’ authored by a resident of Strasbourg and focused on events concerning the city, was circulated, copied and reworked by writers and scribes across the Upper Rhine region and beyond. Jenine de Vries summarized the different forms of historical writing that took place in English cities, offering some tentative comparisons with contemporary Flemish chronicles, while Paul Trio delves into the records in Ypres to highlight the familial links that tied together three writers who chronicled events between 1366 and 1433. Laura Crombie's close reading of Jehan Nicolay's Calender of the War of Tournai, an eyewitness account of the warfare that enveloped his city in 1477–8, offers insights into how a contemporary made sense of the horrors of war, including the violent capture and treatment of prisoners, the terror inspired by artillery attacks and outbreaks of sexual violence.
Tineke van Gassen's study highlights how the Diary of Ghent, a historiographical work that covers events in the city in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, drew its origins from diplomatic dossiers and memoranda prepared by community leaders. Similar themes emerge in Peter Bakker's contribution, which argues that the two town chronicles produced in Kampen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries grew likewise out of civic administrative records and diplomatic memoranda. Bram Caers and Lisa Demets explore chronicle writing in Bruges and Mechelen, and how differing chronicle traditions within these individual cities reflected deeper political and diplomatic divisions amongst the leading citizens. Marcus Meer's article is particularly engaging, highlighting the important role that heraldic illustrations and illuminations played in two Augsburg manuscripts containing historical content. As Meer demonstrates, the insertion and use of heraldic arms was no decorative or passive exercise, but communicated particular interpretations of the past and present to its viewers. It was, in effect, a form of ‘visual rhetoric’ vital to establishing and expressing identity and status in patrician circles, and therefore worthy of more scholarly attention than it currently receives. Louise Vermeersch, lastly, focuses on date-chronicles and calendars bearing historical annotations produced in Calvinist Ghent in the later 1500s. Her contribution underlines how they spread news of recent events – notably the atrocities committed by Spanish armies in the ongoing religious wars – reflecting the concerns and interests of their urban readers and highlighting how printers could tailor the content and tone of their prints in line with their intended readership.
The volume leaves significant portions of the ‘northwest Europe’ in its title untouched – Denmark, Norway, Scotland, Ireland and central and southern France, for example – but this can be forgiven: tackling a topic as rich as urban historical writing in civic centres across such a diverse region lies clearly beyond the scope of a single volume. The detailed index will aid the focused reader in navigating the contents efficiently and the quality of the volume's production is high, with quality images in several of the chapters making possible the closer analysis of civic imagery and visual culture. In the final analysis, the volume does a fine job at introducing a diverse range of sources in dialects of Middle Dutch and Early New High German (as well as French materials in Crombie's contribution) to an Anglophone readership (all source quotations deployed in each chapter are helpfully translated into English), and brings to light important and understudied materials that will be of interest to scholars interested in historical writing and historiography, memory studies, medieval and early modern civic culture and urban life. We can hope that future research in the field follows this volume's example, and approaches the topic with the same clarity in aim, method and presentation.
