Traditional historiography, largely going back to Henri Pirenne's work, usually stresses the differences between town and countryside. This approach led to a division into the disciplines of urban and rural history, concerning matters of food supply, migration to the towns, and urban investment in rural property. On these topics an economic and demographic analysis has been dominant until now. The rural element was considered mainly by Malthusian and Marxist research as the most decisive. But recent international literature has demanded more attention for the urban side of this general economic process. This renewed interest is clearly shown by examples from the Italian peninsula, in particular in various studies by the English historian Stephan Epstein (London School of Economics), who has recently published the synthesis Freedom and Growth. The rise of states and markets in Europe 1300-1750 (LSE/Routledge, London/New York, 2000).

The first research module of the project under consideration aims at identifying the exact position in this process of the cities and towns in the Low Countries, and more in particular in the urbanized core regions Flanders, Brabant and Holland. This study will be carried out in close dialogue with foreign researchers: S. Epstein himself had many valuable contacts with the actual IUAP participants (Boone and Stabel) and with the new partner, the university of Leiden (Blockmans), while working on his synthesis. Elements in this process of identification will include the construction of urban space and the shaping of the urban region, where cities and towns had political, economic and cultural control, the development of integrated market systems, and the elites, who were settled in both town and countryside and who helped to propagate not only economic, but also cultural integration.

In the ULB-team, Claire Billen is a renowned specialist on the history of the countryside and of landscape management. She will focus on the aspect of the urban region. Research by Chloé Deligne (graduated in May 2001) deals with the basin of the rivers Scarpe (in Walloon-Flanders) and the Zenne (Brabant and Hainaut). She has demonstrated how urban control of the waterways was crucial for the development of urban markets, and, more generally, even for the towns themselves. The importance of this essential element for urban supply remained a continuing concern for all political powers (both cities and princes). This created a very sophisticated system of institutional means of controlling and managing space. It is striking how the control of supply routes such as roads and waterways even today still leads to very similar developments.

Waterways were not only crucial for urban supply, they also provided transport facilities and energy (various types of water mills). It is no surprise, therefore, that the presence of water influenced the location of urban property in the countryside, and that it also determined the use of water in rural and urban communities. Highly speculative exploitation of specific sites and regions is a clear indicator of such processes (fishing grounds, drainage of marshes, construction of mills). In the IUAP project the methodological experience of this valuable research by Ch. Deligne will be put to use. Attention will be paid to the basin of the Zenne, Dijle and Henne. In addition to Claire Billen, Michel de Waha (ULB) will also closely collaborate in this project.

Furthermore, this project will treat not only the study of urban networks and the control of river networks, but also the internal water system of cities. The following hypothesis can already be formulated. The way the use of and access to water was structured in cities is a fine indicator for the balance of power in the urban communities. A second hypothesis deals with the gradual control of the water supply in cities. Urban regulation, management of urban space and large scale works of infrastructure have had a decisive impact on the development of the urban landscape. The developments of specific town quarters and of concentrations of population - often decided by the way specific occupational groups could achieve necessary access to water supplies - , and the integration of quarters and urban settlements have clear consequences for the social geography of towns and cities, and hence for the shaping of urban identity. Specific amonuments and central focal sites in the urban fabric, for example Mountains, bridges, mills etc., respond to an economic logic, but they are also visual elements of image-building. This will provide a close link with the other research modules in the various IUAP-centres.

The second team involved in this research module is located at the university of Ghent. This team has an extensive experience in research on urban space (see the session on urban space organised by the Ghent phase IV team at the biannual conference of the European association of Urban historians in Venice, published by M. Boone and P. Stabel in the IUAP series on urban history, Leuven 2000). M. Boone will continue this line of research (participation in the ESF-program on cultural transfers in Europe 1400-1700 B. Blondé, the UFSIA-partner, has also joined this program). Boone studies the relation between town and countryside, with a particular focus on cultural exchange. The action of social and political elites active in both town and countryside will be the starting point of this research. Prosopographical methods, will be used. Recent research formulates the problem of urban nobility (see the PhD thesis at the university of Ghent by Jan Dumolyn, May 2001, which was the result of a VNC-project of which M. Boone, W. Prevenier, W. Blockmans and H. Symoens were supervisors). This phenomenon, until now mainly associated with the large Italian cities, was neglected in Belgian historiography. The central question is whether these elites, who had their basis of power in both town and countryside and who were highly involved in the service of the central authorities, helped the prince to control urban ambition and independence.

These elites, however, also had an important cultural influence. Another research line in Ghent, prepared in the VNC-project on the chambers of rhetoricians in the Low Countries (supervised by H. Symoens in Ghent and M. Spies in Amsterdam) by Anne-Laure van Bruaene (whose promotion is expected in 2003) can serve as a starting point for the formulation of further research hypotheses. The rhetoricians have been considered as the ultimate expression of urban culture, but it seems that from the fifteenth-century chambers were active not only in towns, but also in many villages. Contacts between these chambers on the occasion of regional and interregional competitions created tight ritual networks between towns, semi-urbanized settlements and villages in one of the most densely urbanized regions of Europe. A first hypothesis may try to explain that this unique cultural pattern was created by the dynamic process of urbanisation and urban networks. A second hypothesis can be formulated that the main function of these networks was the promotion of the fiction of social and political harmony in this region fraught with strong social, economic and political tension. The fact that these institutions were valued by the prince is proved by the fact that in the late fifteenth century in particular they were integrated into efforts to unify the cultural life in the Low Countries. The cohesion of these networks, therefore, was also decided by general political and economic developments. The IUAP-program aims at building on these research results and wants to look at cultural relations between town and countryside and at the differentiated cultural experiences in large cities, in smaller towns and in villages. In particular, cases in Brabant and Flanders will be looked at, but there will be, of course, opportunities for comparative research because of the existing VNC-project and because of the actual research by E. Lecuppre-Desjardin at the University of Ghent on the cultural public display of urban identity in towns of Walloon-Flanders and Hainaut. She pays a lot of attention to comparable literary societies in French-speaking parts of the Low Countries. Subjects treated are the culture of competition among rhetoricians and other ritual societies (archers guilds, etc.), the dispersion of specific devotional practices and the development of a common language.

The third team in this research module is the team at the University of Leiden (W. Blockmans). It will focus on developments in the county of Holland, more particularly the role of elites which were active in both town and countryside. Historians have paid a lot of attention in the past decades to the role of elites using prosopographical methods. This has resulted in an impressive series of PhD studies (Brand, Damen, Cools and Le Bailly in Leiden, Boone, Carlier and Dumolyn in Ghent). But prosopography also has its limits. In order to define populations, historians needed to rely on formal criteria, in this way creating artificial boundaries between various elites, which were not always present in fifteenth and sixteenth-century society. Hence the relations among these different elites remain partially out of the picture. In this project, these particular relations will be focused on. Princes influenced the political and social life in cities and in rural communities, not only by way of their local representatives (bailiffs and sheriffs), but also in more informal ways. Conversely, local communities tried to influence central policies. Negotiations between the various representative bodies and the prince or his representative are the most visual element in these relations. In this field ample research experience can be round in the various centres (Blockmans, Boone). But local elites also tried to influence the princely entourage with gifts and presents. Sometimes informal ties were created between influential aristocrats and cities, and noblemen could become important spokesmen for urban interests. The relations between urban elites and the aristocracy could take on very different shapes, but they were present almost everywhere in the late medieval Low Countries. They can be studied wherever continuous series of accounts have been preserved. The example of 's Hertogenbosch (Bois-le-Duc) in Brabant, although not thoroughly studied, already shows that such a research project should focus, more than has been possible in prosopographical research, on the cultural interaction between members of the local, regional and national elites. Links with the more culturally oriented members of the Ghent-team (Syrnoens, Van Bruaene) and with the Antwerp-team which discusses the role of the middle classes in urban society, e.g. in 's Hertogenbosch (Blondé, Marnef, are clear and mutual contacts will be very valuable in the course of the project.
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In the wake Norbert Elias' theories (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, 1939, but only actualised and influential in the 70s and 80s of the 20th century), history has paid a lot of attention in the past decades to the civilising process, whereby codes of behaviour and values gradually are interiorised, partly because of the monopoly of violence achieved by the central authorities. In order to grasp the latter process, repression of violence and behaviour are scrutinized, as are the various ways of punishing and criminalizing certain kinds of behaviour. These general patterns (as developed amongst others by R. Muchembled in his L'invention de l'homme moderne. Sensibilités, moeurs et comportements collectifs sous l'ancien Régime, 1988 and Le temps des supplices. De l'obéissance sous les rois absolus XVe-XVIIIe siècles, 1992) can only be applied with great difficulty to the densely urbanised Low Countries. Neither the chronology nor the versatility of political and juridical power (princes, cities, ...) allow such an exercise.

The UFSIA-team, directed by B. Blondé and G. Marnef, will carry out their own research, but this will be very complementary to that of the Brussels-team. They will start from the difficulties inhering in an explanation of the homme moderne as being sui generis. Their research will deal with the growing metropolis of Antwerp in the 16th century (which has not been studied in a thorough manner yet) and with the cities of Mechelen and 's Hertogenbosch. The study of probate inventories, which has been carried out in Antwerp for the 17th and 18th centuries, opens up new possibilities of research for this earlier period. Findings about the early 17th century suggest indeed that the agent of change in the European model of civilisation should not be sought in a coalition of absolutist states and the counter-reformation (see the paradigm of Konfessionalisierung), but rather that the invention of the modem man with the implication of changing values and norms, is the result of late medieval and 16th-century urban society. It is a paradox that these cultural aspects of 16th-century society with the exception of the process of criminalizing poverty-- have not been investigated for the core of urban society. From this point of view an ambitions approach to criminality is inevitable. Charting crimes against property, violence and other forms of criminality will contribute to a better understanding of the development and the perception of general social problems and of changing values, which were circulating in the cultural and social networks of Brabantine cities. Series of archival documents (sheriffs' accounts) and sources and methods of micro-history (letters of remission, files of judicial trials) will be combined to achieve these ambitious research goals.

The Ghent-team as well will pay attention to criminality and the regulation of behaviour. M. Boone already has had experience in this field while working on the repression of sodomites in late medieval Bruges. This approach does not study criminality only for its own sake-, it also wants to place this phenomenon in a larger context of antagonism between the cities and the prince, as both authorities have interests to defend in maintaining or achieving control of behaviour and conflict management. The impact of a cultural dimension is also very obvious.

One of the most challenging and controversial points of view on these matters is undoubtedly that of Herman Pleij, who, inspired by Elias, points at the role of a cultural offensive by the bourgeoisie as a catalyst for change. Bourgeois elites, which cultivated a very particular utilitarian and mercantile system of values, wanted to rid themselves, once they consolidated a position of power, of uncivilised and unproductive behaviour by formulating ordinances, by institutionalising a culture of festivities and by creating an aggressive propaganda in print and literature. The most crucial instrument of this civilising process, according to Pleij, was the chamber of rhetoricians. The latter formulated, as no other, rules of behaviour. Current research (by AL Van Bruaene, UGent) attributes a much more socially diversified character to the chambers than Pleij does and suggests that their codes of behaviour were much more aimed at avoiding conflict in the closed circles of the chamber. This could also very well be the case for the shooting guilds and the fraternities. This casts doubts on the whole civilising process. But questions remain unanswered concerning regulation of behaviour in fraternities, chambers of rhetoricians, shooting guilds and last but not least craft guilds the latter seem to have focussed more on the behaviour of their members in the public arena, as suggested in recent research by Stabel and Carlier, whether it influenced general opinions about norms and values or whether it was the result of changing opinions. A consistent sample spread over a long period of normative sources of the different institutions can provide an answer to this issue. This research, thus, will also help to reassess Elias' model.
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The attention of historical research in the past years has moved from the identification of social structures to the representation and communication of social status (Blockmans and Janse, Showing status: representations of social positions in the Late Middle Ages, Brepols, Turnhout, 1999, a volume to which various former and current members of the IUAP-project have contributed). Subjects such as the representation of cities and urban elites through iconography and historiography, and the construction of urban identity and public space through public ritual from religions processions to urban revolts, link up with older anthropological research by historians like Richard Trexler. For the Low Countries the pioneering work of the American historian Peter Amade (Realms of Ritual. Burgundian ceremony and civic life in late medieval Ghent, Ithaca/London, 1996), who was closely associated with the Ghent-team, needs to be mentioned. Historical research is completed by the work of literary historians on the function of literature in the late medieval city and the development of bourgeois mentality in the process (H. Pleij). important elements are therefore present, but the concept of urban culture has not been defined sharply. Compared with German and in particular Italian research traditions, a lot of work on the creation of urban identities still needs to be done. Very promising in this respect is the study by AL Van Bruaene (De Gentse memorieboeken als spiegel van stedelijk historisch bewustzijn (14de-16de eeuw), Gent, 1998, which in 2000 won the five-yearly prize of urban history, prix Anton Bergman of the Académie royale). With members of the current IUAP-team Van Bruaene participated in a conference organised by the German Historical Institute in Paris with the collaboration of the Mission historique française in Göttingen in April 2000 on Memoria, Communitas, Civitas. Mémoire et consciences urbaines en Occident à la fin du moyen âge (the proceedings will be published in the Beihefte der Francia).

The Ghent-team with AL Van Bruaene will try to mend the above-mentioned gap in historical research. The starting point is the way in which the city and specific urban groups represent themselves formally and explicitly, and doing so define themselves and their community in relation to others. In particular the religiously inspired notion of urban collective honour which has been demonstrated in the current research on rhetoricians-- must be scrutinised by an analysis of literary (plays, chronicles) and non literary texts (urban administration). Conflicts in which urban honour was at stake should be inventoried, assessed and confronted with recent studies on individual, family and corporate honour.

A second research line will deal with the role of fraternities, chambers of rhetoricians and shooting guilds in the shaping of a collective urban identity. There is no doubt that these voluntary corporations were involved in various public functions like devotional practices, charity, maintaining public order, public ritual inside and outside the city etc. Membership could play a crucial role in socialising individuals and interiorising an urban habitus. This process involved the introduction of manners, the creation of social networks and the acceptance of public functions (links with research module two are apparent). If one considers a fraternity, a chamber or a shooting guild as a microcosm, questions can be asked whether these institutions offered similar or divergent models of reality and whether the models in their turn influenced reality (according to the theories of Clifford Geertz). Current research has shown how the early chambers of rhetoricians offered their members the opportunity to express their individual identity apart from their social status, by stressing that strange mixture of social contact and competition. The question remains, however, whether the chambers were socially mixed or whether membership and the intensity of participating in prestigious events were related to social status. As a hypothesis, one can argue that these corporations became more hierarchical and closed societies in the course of the 16th century under the influence of economic, social, political and religion tension, but that they did not necessarily become more elitist.

A third line of inquiry plans to assess the identity of those groups actively involved in the shaping and representation of collective identity in general and of urban identity in particular in the Burgundian and Habsburg Low Countries. Networks of chroniclers, artists, rhetoricians, printers and humanists were formed in order to shape urban and princely self-representation (triumphal entries, pageants, chronicles, iconography, ... ). They specialised in symbolic communication, but they were not necessarily limited only to one repertoire. Who took key positions in these networks, where were these people recruited, which repertoire was used? Were there changes, and if so, what changes took place in the course of the 16th century? This line of approach will shed light on the problem of a more elitist public culture in the 16th century. Recent research on the iconography of urban pageants may cast doubts on this thesis. Another phenomenon that modifies a growing elitist tendency is broader urban historical consciousness, as it is shown in the wide distribution of handwritten urban chronicles. The distribution in print of popular regional chronicles in the first half of the 16th century made this genre even more accessible and stimulated historiography by the urban middle classes (see Van Bruaene 1998).

The collaboration of historians and literary historians has already shown more than satisfactory results and allowed a new orientation for research. This is less true for the collaboration of historians and art historians on medieval urban history. Still the interaction between the two disciplines has improved and the IUAP-conference in October 2001 in Marche-en-Famenne strives to stimulate this process. Hence it is logical that the new project aims at integrating iconographic sources and the contextual information these may provide in the research theme of urban representation. The Royal Library of Belgium can play an important part in this research because of its rich collection of (Burgundian) manuscripts. Conservator B. Bousmanne is ideally placed to supervise such research. The representation of cities will provide the first line of approach: not the idealised city, but the city as an economic, political and administrative reality will be focussed on. This study must, of course, start from a thorough methodological and typological inquiry into various collections of the BR and elsewhere. Essential is the contextual information of the image (relation to the text and to its surroundings in their turn determined by the text). The few studies on the relation between image and text do not go beyond a thematic description. A second line of approach, closely linked to the first, is an assessment of patrons and owners of manuscripts, who often belonged to urban elites, who with respect to society as a whole can be considered as intermediary groups. Special attention will be paid not to princes and their courtly entourage, whose patronage is already well charted, but to civil servants, merchants, members of the lower nobility, most of them imbedded in urban society and who have made their contribution to the shaping of urban identity. Which texts circulated among these middle groups and how do they reveal their cultural identity? These questions link up with earlier research lines of historians and literary historians; however, they add the visual element of iconographic sources. The same research must also include the relation with the artisanal networks of producers of manuscripts and illuminations. Bousmanne's study on the workshop of Willem Vrelant (Brepols, Turnhout 1997) guarantees a strong commitment in the project.
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Structural urban history has been enriched during the last decades by a remarkable input of social and cultural history and by the methods of historical anthropology. In this approach in particular urban middle groups will be investigated, because they have been relatively neglected in historiography and because these groups had, probably as no other, a strong commitment to new cultural developments. Various partners will be involved in studying the middling sort of people (J. Barry). Thanks to prosopographic research a method which already allowed for the attainment of remarkable results (Greve, Carlier, Boone) we are able to achieve a better understanding of the nature and structure of the civil servants and the tertiary sector and of the artisanal elites.

A first research team which will work on this synthesis is located at UFSIA (Blondé, Marnef. Research into the structural history of the Brabantine towns has a longstanding tradition in Antwerp. But surprisingly some essential problems have not been solved. The debate on standards of living is characterised by a deep gap between the Van der Wee and the Scholliers-Soly tradition. The difference lies not so much in calculations of purchasing power and living standards, but more in the importance of the urban middle class in this debate. The pessimistic Soly-Scholliers tradition sees a growing polarisation. There are, nonetheless, clear indications of a prospering group of middle classes (active in cultural and religions affairs) that played a creative role in Brabantine urban society (research by Marnef and by Monique Weis, ULB-FNRS, who can be involved in the IUAPresearch because of her expertise in relations between Catholics and Protestants). In contrast to foreign historiography, research on middle groups in 16th-century urban society is still in its infancy, despite very promising studies (for example by J. Dambruyne, FWO-researcher at the university of Ghent).

Brabantine urban society is characterised by remarkable diversity and by very divergent economic and social developments. The causes and consequences of the economic development of the Brabantine urban network have already been looked at in the past years (Van Uytven, Blondé) and they reveal divergent economic fates and hence very divergent social contexts. The city of Mechelen, for instance, was an example of royalty to the prince and of social stability. In Antwerp, and even stronger in 's Hertogenbosch, there was chronic, and sometimes even very violent social tension. But, in general, questions regarding the impact of fast and unequal urban growth on the urban social fabric remain unanswered. Not only tension and conflict, but also the daily practice of living together in a 16th-century town (codes of honour and disgrace), the construction of social networks (from pubs to shooting guilds) should be looked at. Both for Antwerp and 's Hertogenbosch literary sources and art history provide information for the study of bourgeois culture (linking up this module with the previous ones). Mechelen has a special position as it had specific court and residential functions. Research will concentrate on the period 1500-1580. A representative sample of 16th-century probate inventories will be examined and the project will offer an important contribution to the above-mentioned problem of standards of living of Brabantine urban middle groups.

The other research teams will develop similar issues concerning specific groups of urban middle classes. The ULB-team (Cl. Billen) will follow research lines in the study of urban finance (the ULB has a longstanding tradition of financial research, see N-M Arnould, Ph. Moureaux etc.). The professional moneylenders and the world of credit in the 13th and 14th century will be considered in the research of D. Kusman, who has already published very promising work on the activities of Lombard and Piemontese bankers in the cities of Flanders, Brabant and Hainaut. These professionals of credit were oriented towards consumer credit and had a central function in urban society. Their role will be compared with a prosopographical analysis of local moneylenders in this crucial period for the history of urban finance. This very mobile group of moneylenders allows scholars to investigate patterns of urban networks in the various principalities under scrutiny. The role of family and other solidarities will also be considered, in another context however, than was the case in the IUAP-conference family and household (Ghent, 2000; the proceedings will be published by M. Carlier and T. Soens). But also the triangle prince-financiers-cities, a traditional topic in urban history, will appear in this study (Kusman has experience of Italian, German and English archives). Cl. Billen, M. de Waha, D. Guillardan (ULB) and M. Boone (Ugent) are already involved in this research.

The team at the Royal Library (B. Bousmanne and A. Kelders) will deal with production and consumption of manuscripts in an urban environment (see module 3) and will highlight the role of the artisanal workshop and those groups in urban society who could afford these manuscripts. This research will have an important gender-related aspect, which is also present in the research of Th. de Hemptinne (Ugent) on women writers and libraries owned by women in the Low Countries.
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