Adel en nobiliteringsprocessen in het laatmiddeleeuwse Vlaanderen: een status quaestionis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.5216Keywords:
nobilityAbstract
Nobility and processes of ennoblement in Late Mediaeval Flanders: a state of the art
In the county of Flanders, the later Middle Ages should not be considered simply as a period of general crisis for the nobility as an evolving class. Instead, we might call it a time of intensive renewal, accelerated mobility and diversification. The background of these developments was a threefold dialectic: the late mediaeval crisis of feudalism (which brought about a sharp deterioration of noble rent income), social and economic urban development in Flanders and, last but not least, the Flemish-Burgundian state formation process. Specifically, the latter factor has been taken into account in this article as a creative force in the renovation of the nobility. This process was accompanied by a concentration of surplus extraction on the 'state' level, resulting in what we might call ‘state feudalism’. For the traditional nobles, obtaining a political position in the county was now only possible through princely service. On the other hand, political functions and offices offered urban and rural, non-noble, political elites opportunities for gradual ennoblement. Of course, other factors too were involved: the acquisition of seigniorial power, noble alliances and ‘living like a nobleman’. Consequently, these two aristocracies (traditional nobles and political elites of the Burgundian State) merged to a certain extent, eventually resulting in a 'new' noble class, anticipating the ‘noblesse de robe’ of the modern period. For a particular family, this process of ennoblement could take several generations. In a European perspective, the redefinition and revitalisation of this ‘nobility’ as a traditional ruling class in feudal society is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, the high degree of urbanisation in Flanders gave this process a distinct character.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c) Authors are permitted to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
Authors are explicitly encouraged to deposit their published article in their institutional repository.