BiblioVault - Books about Flanders

Bruegel, or the Workshop of Dreams

A Novel

Claude-Henri Rocquet

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Claude-Henri Rocquet—poet, playwright, and critic—has marshalled the full range of his talents to create a dazzling historical novel about the artist Peter Bruegel the Elder. To the few facts we have—Bruegel died in 1569 around the age of fifty; he lived in Antwerp and in Brussels; his work was much admired—Rocquet adds his own speculations on the sights, smells, and textures of Bruegel's world, on the artist's innermost feelings and intimate conversations, on his spiritual life and its possible translation on the artist's canvas.

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Galbert of Bruges and the Historiography of Medieval Flanders

Jeff Rider

Catholic University of America Press, 2009

Edited by two of the world's most prominent specialists on Galbert today, Jeff Rider and Alan V. Murray, this book brings together essays by established scholars who have been largely responsible for the radical changes in the understanding of Galbert and his work that have occurred over the last thirty years and essays by younger scholars.

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God's Scribe

The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges

Jeff Rider

Catholic University of America Press, 2001

Intended as a companion volume to the De multro, the book provides an outline of the Flemish crisis of 1127-28 and summarizes what is known about Galbert. It traces the elaboration of the De multro from a set of wax notes to a nearly completed chronicle.

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The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565); and Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572)

Dominicus Lampsonius

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022

Among the earliest written texts on the history and theory of Netherlandish art, these two key writings are now available together in an English translation.

Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist. This neo-Latin account of the life of the painter, architect, and draftsman Lambert Lombard of Liège offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art, emphasizing Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as a teacher.

This volume offers the first English edition of The Life of Lambert Lombard, complemented by a new translation of the inscriptions Lampsonius composed to accompany the Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572), a cycle of twenty-three engraved portraits of Netherlandish artists developed in collaboration with the print publisher Hieronymus Cock.

Together, The Life of Lambert Lombard and the Effigies established frameworks for a distinctly Netherlandish history of art. Responding to a growing sense of Netherlandish cultural and political identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, these texts proposed a critical alternative to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and its Italian model of art historical development, celebrating local ingenuity and skill. They remain the starting point for any history of the northern Renaissance.

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The Marriage Exchange

Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550

Martha C. Howell

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Medieval Douai was one of the wealthiest cloth towns of Flanders, and it left an enormous archive documenting the personal financial affairs of its citizens—wills, marriage agreements, business contracts, and records of court disputes over property rights of all kinds.

Based on extensive research in this archive, this book reveals how these documents were produced in a centuries-long effort to regulate—and ultimately to redefine—property and gender relations. At the center of the transformation was a shift from a marital property regime based on custom to one based on contract. In the former, a widow typically inherited her husband's property; in the latter, she shared it with or simply held it for his family or offspring. Howell asks why the law changed as it did and assesses the law's effects on both social and gender meanings but she insists that the reform did not originate in general dissatisfaction with custom or a desire to disempower widows. Instead, it was born in a complex economic, social and cultural history during which Douaisiens gradually came to think about both property and gender in new ways.

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