Debating Good Governance. The Added Value of a Cross-Contextual Analysis for the Study of Late Medieval Political Thinking.
(2023) Good Governance in the Late Medieval City (1200-1600) — Location: Utrecht (1.February.2023)
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- Abstract
- What did ‘good governance’ mean in the late medieval period? This paper argues for a cross-contextual analysis to answer this question. Although medieval political thought was originally studied from a more theoretical point of view, the research field has gained several diverse perspectives in the last years. Historians have not only investigated the ideas of various social groups but have also done so by means of increasingly diverse sources. While some researchers have already started to combine different perspectives, most studies still limit themselves to one social group, source type, community, case study or political idea. To study how fifteenth-century political ideas inspired negotiations on good governance, I study a wide variety of sources ranging from literary works or juridical treatises to privileges, petitions, letters and so on. Taken together my source-corpus spans the period between 1400 and 1520 and originated in social contexts such as the court of the Burgundian Dukes, courtrooms, town halls, and the houses of craft guilds. By means of this broad perspective, I argue that patterns of expectations existed in political thinking about good governance. But patterns were not carved into stone. By additionally zooming in on a local context, this paper makes clear that social groups continuously talked about patterns of expectations to achieve contemporary goals. I assert that the ‘patterns’ and ‘context-bound expressions’ of late medieval political thinking were not only inextricably connected, but also mutually reinforcing. Inspiring ideas remained inspiring because they were adaptable and expected.
- Affiliations
KU Leuven Research Group of Medieval History
Citations
De Boodt, M. (2023). Debating Good Governance. The Added Value of a Cross-Contextual Analysis for the Study of Late Medieval Political Thinking. Good Governance in the Late Medieval City (1200-1600), Utrecht.