The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  1 Jos de Smet, ‘Een Aanslag tegen het Brugse Begijnhof’, Biekorf 27 (1971), pp. 33–7 for the text of the court judgment on which this is based; I am very grateful to Willem Kuiper and Lidewijde Paris for their help with the translation. Cf. Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries 1200–1565 (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 71–2.

  2 For travel speeds on horseback, see Norbert Ohler, The Medieval Traveller (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 97ff.

  3 Marcel de Fréville, Les Quatres ges d’homme de Philippe de Navarre (Paris, 1888), vol. I, 25, pp. 16–17.

  4 Quoted in Bernard McGinn, ‘Meister Eckhart and the Beguines in the Context of Vernacular Theology’, in Bernard McGinn (ed.), Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics (New York, 1994), p. 1.

  5 Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, 2004), pp. 66–8.

  6 Jean Bethune de Villers (ed. and tr. Emilie Amt), Cartulaire du Beguinage de Sainte-Elisabeth à Gand (Bruges, 1883), in Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe (New York, 1993), pp. 263–7.

  7 Simons, Cities of Ladies, p. 139.

  8 Eileen Power (tr. and ed.), The Goodman of Paris (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 138ff.

  9 Hans Geybels, Vulgariter Beghinae (Turnhout, 2004), p. 151.

  10 Shennan Hutton, Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent (New York, 2011), p. 125.

  11 Simons, Cities of Ladies, pp. 73–4, 188nn.71–3.

  12 Ibid., p. 123 for satire; p. 80 for carnival; p. 124 for etymology.

  13 Ibid., pp. 63–4.

  14 See David Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, pp. 207–8, under Gertrude of Nivelles.

  15 Life of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, line 527, in Jennifer N. Brown (ed.), Three Women of Liège (Turnhout, 2008), p. 50.

  16 Saskia Murk-Jansen (tr.), in Hadewijch and Eckhart, in McGinn, Meister Eckhart, p. 23; cf. Amy Hollywood, ‘Suffering Transformed’, in McGinn, Meister Eckhart, pp. 87ff.

  17 Life of Christina Mirabilis, in Brown, Three Women, pp. 223, 227, 230; p. 65, lines 276, 284, for living as a man; p. 74, lines 472ff., for Jutta.

  18 Marie d’Oignies, in Brown, Three Women, p. 57 for married; pp. 36, 47 for childhood; pp. 64–6 for cord; p. 81 for husband; p. 98 for ‘hard heat’.

  19 For virgin birth and virtues, see Osbert of Clare’s letters to Adelidis and to his nieces in Vera Morton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Guidance for Women in Twelfth-Century Convents (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 23, 116.

  20 Life of Christina Mirabilis, in Brown, Three Women, p. 256 for end of world.

  21 I Timothy 4: 1–3.

  22 Marie d’Oignies, in Brown, Three Women, p. 104 for lepers; p. 106 for relatives.

  23 Ibid., p. 107, I, 454, for deference; p. 112, I, 563, for cleanness.

  24 Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, 2004), pp. 117–19.

  25 Ibid., p. 74.

  26 Simha Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 112–17.

  27 Ellen E. Kittell, ‘Guardianship over Women in Medieval Flanders: A Reappraisal’, Journal of Social History 31, 4 (1998), pp. 897–930, and James M. Murray, Bruges, Cradle of Capitalism 1280–1390 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 306–26.

  28 Elizabeth Lamond (tr.), Walter de Henley: Husbandry … (London, 1890), p. 75.

  29 Hutton, Women and Economic Activities, pp. 119–20.

  30 Kittell, ‘Guardianship over Women’, p. 912.

  31 Frederick Pedersen, Marriage Disputes in Medieval England (London, 2000), pp. 153–6.

  32 Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’, Economic History Review 63, 1 (2010), pp. 5–6. This and Kittell, ‘Guardianship over Women’, are the backbone of my argument here.

  33 Anthony Musson, ‘Images of Marriage, a Comparison of Law, Custom and Practice in Medieval Europe’, in Mia Korpiola (ed.), Regional Variations in Matrimonial Law and Custom in Europe 1150–1600 (Leiden, 2011), p. 140.

  34 Philippe Godding, ‘La Famille dans le droit urbain’, in Myriam Carlier and Tim Soens (eds.), The Household in Late Medieval Cities: Italy & Northwestern Europe Compared (Leuven, 2001), p. 34.

  35 P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Household and the Organization of Labour in Late Medieval Towns: Some English Evidence’, in Carlier and Soens, Household in Late Medieval Cities, p. 65.

  36 For discussion, see Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 104–7.

  37 Ibid., p. 94.

  38 Samuel K. Cohn Jr, ‘Two Pictures of Family Ideology Taken from the Dead in post-Plague Flanders and Tuscany’, in Carlier and Soens, Household in Late Medieval Cities, pp. 170–73.

  39 Kittell, ‘Guardianship over Women’, p. 911.

  40 Ramon A. Klitzike, ‘Historical Background of the English Patent Law’, Journal of the Patent Office 41, 9 (1959), pp. 622–3.

  41 James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 1998), p. 294 for Gross.

  42 Stephan R. Epstein, ‘Labour Mobility, Journeymen Organisations and Markets in Skilled Labour in Europe 14th–18th Centuries’, in Mathieu Arnoux and Pierre Monnet (eds.), Le Technicien dans la cité en Europe Occidentale 1250–1650 (Rome, 2004), pp. 251–67.

  43 Richard L. Hills, Power From Wind: A History of Windmill Technology (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 36–9.

  44 Karel Davids, ‘Innovations in Windmill Technology in Europe c1500–1800’, NEHA Jaarboek 66 (2003), pp. 47–51.

  45 De Moor and Van Zanden, ‘Girl Power’, pp. 23–4.

  46 John W. Baldwin, ‘Consent and the Marital Debt’, in Angeliki E. Laiou (ed.), Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies (Washington, 1993), p. 266 for Héloïse; p. 262 for orgasm; p. 269 for Aristotle; p. 263 for Ovid.

  47 The text of ‘Eleanor’s’ examination is in Ruth Mazo Karras and David Lorenzo Boyd, ‘“Ut cum muliere”: A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London’, in Louise O. Fradenburg and Celia Freccero (eds.), Premodern Sexualities (New York, 1996), pp. 111–12.

  48 Amt, Women’s Lives, pp. 211–22.

  49 James A. Brundage, ‘Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law’, Signs 1, 4 (1976), esp. p. 841; Amt, Women’s Lives, pp. 210–13; Bjorn Bandlien, ‘Sexuality and Early Church Laws’, in Per Andersen, Mia Münster-Swendsen and Helle Vogt (eds.), Law and Private Life in the Middle Ages (Copenhagen, 2011), p. 200.

  50 Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, p. 134.

  51 See the miniature in Valère Maxime, Faits et dits mémorables (1475), reproduced in André Vandewalle (ed.), Les Marchands de la Hanse et la banque des Médicis (Oostkamp, 2002), p. 88.

  52 Malcolm Letts, Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures 1435–1439 (London, 1926) p. 199 for bathing; p. 200 for girls; Malcolm Letts, The Travels of Leo of Rozmital through Germany, Flanders, England, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy 1465–1467 (Cambridge, 1957), p. 31; Murray, Bruges, pp. 340–43.

  53 Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘Bishop, Prioress, and Bawd in the Stews of Southwark’, Speculum 75, 2 (2000), passim.

  54 Judith M. Bennett, ‘Writing Fornication: Medieval Leywrite and Its Historians’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6, 13 (2003), pp. 146, 147, 155.

  55 Benjamin B. Roberts and Leendert F. Groenendijk, ‘“Wearing out a pair of fool’s shoes”: Sexual Advice for Youth in Holland’s Golden Age’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, 2 (2004), p. 145.

  56 Etienne van de Walle, ‘“Marvellous secrets”: Birth Control in European Short Fiction 1150–1650’, Population Studies 54, 3 (2000), pp. 325, 323.

  57 Augustus Borgnet (ed.), B Alberti Magni Opera Omnia, vol 5: De mineralibus, book II, tract II (Paris, 1890), p. 39b for jasper; pp. 42b–43a for oristes.

  58 John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 1
04 for monastic recipes; p. 111 for pseudo-Bede; pp. 114–15 for Bishop of Rennes; pp. 116–17 for Hildegard.

  59 Jean-Louis Flandrin, ‘Contraception, mariage et relations amoureuses dans l’Occident chrétien’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 24, 6 (1969), esp. pp. 1374–5; pp. 1386–7 for Sanchez.

  11. THE PLAGUE LAWS

  1Samuel K. Cohn Jr, ‘Epidemiology of the Black Death and Successive Waves of Plague’, in Vivian Nutton (ed.), Medical History Supplement 27 (London, 2008), Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, pp. 79, 81, 83, 89.

  2 Friedrich W. Brie (ed.), The Brut or the Chronicles of England (London, 1906), ch. 228, pp. 301–3.

  3 Georges Vigarello, Histoire des pratiques de santé (Paris, 1999), pp. 51–4.

  4 Henri H. Mollaret, ‘Les Grands Fléaux’, in Mirko D. Grmek (ed.), Histoire de la pensée medicale en Occident, vol. 2: De la Renaissance aux lumières (Paris, 1997), p. 256.

  5 Adolf Hofmeister (ed.), Die Chronik des Mathias von Neuenburg (Berlin 1924–40), chs. 114–17; p. 263 for ships; p. 265 for blaming the Jews; p. 270 for flagellants.

  6 See Timothy R. Tangherlini, ‘Ships, Fogs and Travelling Pairs: Plague Legend Migration in Scandinavia’, Journal of American Folklore 101, 400 (1988), pp. 176ff.

  7 Daniel Antoine, ‘The Archaeology of “Plague”’, in Nutton, Pestilential Complexities, pp. 101ff.

  8 Quoted in Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 196.

  9 Michael McCormick, ‘Rats, Communications and Plague: Toward an Ecological History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, 1 (2003), p. 23 for repopulation; p. 22 for predators.

  10 Rosemary Horrox (tr. and ed.), The Black Death (Manchester, 1994), p. 170, from Bodleian MS Digby 176, folios 26–9.

  11 Ann G. Carmichael, ‘Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague 1348–1500’, in Nutton, Pestilential Complexities, pp. 17–52.

  12 Christiane Nockels Fabbri, ‘Treating Medieval Plague: The Wonderful Virtues of Theriac’, Early Science and Medicine 12, 3 (2007), pp. 247ff.

  13 William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine (Princeton, 1996), pp. 148–51.

  14 Bruce M. S. Campbell, ‘Ecology v. Economics in Late Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century English Agriculture’, in Del Sweeney (ed.), Agriculture in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice and Representation (Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 76–7.

  15 Jane Welch Williams, ‘The New Image of Peasants in Thirteenth-Century French Stained Glass’, and Bridget Ann Henisch, ‘Farm Work in the Medieval Calendar Tradition’, in Sweeney, Agriculture in the Middle Ages, p. 299 for glass; pp. 310–16 for attitudes to work.

  16 A. V. C. Schmidt (ed. and tr.), William Langland: Piers Plowman (Oxford, 1992), pp. 67–74.

  17 Judith M. Bennett, ‘Compulsory Service in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present 209 (2010), pp. 7ff., is the basis of my story here; cf. Samuel Cohn, ‘After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes towards Labour in Late Medieval Western Europe’, Economic History Review 60, 3 (2007), pp. 457ff., and John Hatcher, ‘England in the Aftermath of the Black Death’, Past and Present 144 (1994), pp. 3ff.

  18 In Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Health Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe 1500–1700 (London, 1997), see Thomas Riis on ‘Poor Relief and Health Care Provision in Sixteenth Century Denmark’; Hugo Soly on ‘Continuity and Change: Attitudes towards Poor Relief and Health Care in Early Modern Antwerp’; Robert Jütte on ‘Health Care Provision and Poor Relief in Early Modern Hanseatic Towns: Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck’; and Paul Slack on ‘Hospitals, Workhouses and the Relief of the Poor in Early Modern London’.

  19 Charles F. Mullett, ‘Plague Policy in Scotland 16th–17th Centuries’, Osiris 9 (1950), pp. 436–44.

  20 John Booker, Maritime Quarantine – the British Experience c1650–1900 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 17–18.

  21 Paul Slack, ‘The Response to Plague in Early Modern England: Public Policies and Their Consequences’, in John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds.), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 168–77.

  22 Booker, Maritime Quarantine, pp. 1–4; John Warrington (ed.), Diary of Samuel Pepys (London, 1953), vol. I, entry for 26 November 1663, p. 461.

  23 Barbara E. Crawford, ‘North Sea Kingdoms, North Sea Bureaucrat: A Royal Official Who Transcended National Boundaries’, Scottish Historical Review 69, 188 (1990), pp. 175ff.

  24 Henry S. Lucas, ‘John Crabbe: Flemish Pirate, Merchant and Adventurer’, Speculum 20, 3 (1945), pp. 334ff.

  25 Andrew R. Little, ‘British Seamen in the United Provinces during the Seventeenth Century Anglo-Dutch Wars: The Dutch Navy, a Preliminary Survey’, in Hanno Brand (ed.), Trade, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange: Continuity and Change in the North Sea Area and the Baltic c1350–1750 (Hilversum, 2005), pp. 78, 79, 81, 85.

  26 Ibid., p. 88.

  27 Warrington, Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. I, entry for 14 June 1667, pp. 485–6.

  28 S. C. Lomas (ed.), Memoirs of Sir George Courthop (London, 1907), pp. 109–10 for Geneva; p. 132 for Malta.

  29 H. C. Fanshawe (ed.), The Memoirs of Ann Lady Fanshawe (London, 1907), pp. 87–90; p. 31 for son’s name.

  30 Antoni Mączak, Travel in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 112–15.

  12. THE CITY AND THE WORLD

  1 Paul Murray Kendall and Vincent Ilardi, Dispatches with Related Documents of Milanese Ambassadors in France and Burgundy 1450–1483 (Athens, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 200–201.

  2 Bernard Aikema, ‘Netherlandish Painting and Early Renaissance Italy: Artistic Rapports in a Historiographical Perspective’, in Herman Roodenburg (ed.), Forging European Identities 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 110–20.

  3 The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors (The Donne Triptych) in the National Gallery, London.

  4 Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance: Burgundian Arts across Europe (Cambridge, 2002), passim, but p. 132 for music.

  5 Malcolm Letts (ed. and tr.), The Travels of Leo of Rozmital through Germany, Flanders, England, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy 1465–1467 (Cambridge, 1957), p. 54 for hair; pp. 1–2 for biography; p. 23 for nuns; p. 27 for dishes; p. 28 for zoo and treasury; p. 37 for drunk; p. 36 for wrestling; pp. 29, 35 for candlelight.

  6 Margit Thøfner, A Common Art: Urban Ceremonial in Antwerp and Brussels during and after the Dutch Revolt (Zwolle, 2007), pp. 13–17.

  7 Gilles de Bouvier dit Berry (ed. E. T. Hamy), Le Livre de la description des pays (Paris, 1908), p. 47 for Flanders; p. 106 for Holland.

  8 Malcolm Letts, Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures 1435–1439 (London, 1926), p. 200 for ‘oranges’, ‘famine’; p. 198 for Bruges; p. 203 for Antwerp.

  9 Raymond van Uytven, ‘Les Autres Marchandises à Bruges’, in André Vandewalle (ed.), Les Marchands de la Hanse et la banque des Médicis (Oostkamp, 2002), p. 73.

  10 Giovanna Petti Balbi, ‘Bruges, port des Italiens’, in Vandewalle, Marchands de la Hanse, pp. 58ff.

  11 Alastair Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence in Antwerp’s Golden Age (London and Oxford, 2001), pp. 9, 26.

  12 Letts, Pero Tafur, p. 194 for ‘majesty’; p. 199 for ‘gallows’.

  13 Kendall and Ilardi, Dispatches with Related Documents, vol. 2, pp. 228–9 for ‘dishes’; pp. 348ff. for ceremonies; p. 394 for organization.

  14 Robert Peterson (tr.), Giovanni Botero: A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificence and Greatness of Cities (London, 1606), p. 51; Delle cause della grandezza e magnificenza delle città appeared in Italian in 1588.

  15 Wim de Clercq, Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘“Vivre noblement”: Material Culture and Élite Identity in Late Medieval Flanders’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, 1 (2007), pp. 1ff.

  16 Letts, Travels of Leo of Rozmital, pp. 45–7.

  17 Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance, pp. 151–4.

  18 Charles Narrey (tr.), Albrecht Dürer à Ven
ise et dans les Pays Bas (Paris, 1866), p. 104 for ‘red’; p. 107 for price; p. 111 for Bruges; p. 117 for ‘colour of lead’; on the ultramarine see Stan Hugue, Albrecht Dürer: journal de voyage aux Pays-Bas (Paris, 2009), p. 79, for a fuller text. Dürer did not pay cash, so the price is a bit subjective.

  19 Filip Vermeylen, ‘The Colour of Money: Dealing in Pigments in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’, in J. O. Kirby Atkinson (ed.), European Trade in Painters’ Materials to 1700 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 356ff.

  20 Margaret L. Koster, ‘Italy and the North: A Florentine Perspective’, in Till-Holger Borchert, The Age of Van Eyck (Bruges, 2002), p. 79.

  21 Catherine Reynolds, ‘The Function and Display of Netherlandish Cloth Paintings’, in Caroline Villers (ed.), The Fabric of Images: European Paintings on Textile Supports in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London, 2000), p. 91.

  22 Paula Nuttall, ‘Panni dipinti di Fiandra: Netherlandish Painted Cloths in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, in Villers, Fabric of Images, p. 109.

  23 Il Riposo di Raffaello Borghini … (Florence, 1584), pp. 579–84; Lucia Meoni, La nascita dell’arazzeria medicea (Florence, 2008), pp. 34, 78 for hunts; p. 27 for Medea; p. 82 for Time; p. 66 for Samuel.

  24 Michael Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-Century MS. of De Viris Illustribus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964), p. 102.

  25 Borghini, Riposo di Raffaello Borghini, pp. 326–7.

  26 Guicciardini’s Account of the Ancient Flemish School of Painting (London, 1795), pp. 3–4.

  27 Giovanna Sapori, Fiamminghi nel cantiere Italia 1560–1600 (Milan, 2007), p. 10 (author’s translation).

  28 Till-Holger Borchert and Paul Huvenne, ‘Van Eyck and the Invention of Oil Painting: Artistic Merits in Their Literary Mirror’, in Till-Holger Borchert, The Age of Van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting 1430–1530 (Bruges, 2002), pp. 221, 225.

  29 Faith Wallis, Medieval Medicine: A Reader (Toronto, 2010), pp. 351–4.

  30 Peter van den Brink, ‘The Art of Copying’, in Peter van den Brink (ed.), Brueghel Enterprises (Maastricht, 2001), pp. 13ff.; p. 44 for grandmother.

  31 Valentin Vazquez de Prada, Lettres marchandes d’Anvers (Paris, 1960), vol. I, p. 112, for opened; pp. 124, 133 for credit; p. 132 for Ducci.