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The Dutch Revolt (c. 1568-1648) led to the establishment of a new state in the northern provinces of the old Habsburg Netherlands. This new polity confronted intense hostility from Habsburg dynastic interests. It sustained itself militarily against these interests, and extended its power globally. In addition it developed a remarkable and wealthy mercantile culture. However configurations of power in the new state differed radically from those within the surrounding monarchies, and its political texts remain problematic. Thus there is no dynamic political theory to match the reality of its might. However, one of the remarkable features of its culture was the unprecedented output of pictorial art, including thousands of political prints. Therefore, this thesis addresses the issue of power in the Republic on the basis of pictorial evidence, using a combination of three routes. First, instead of examining evidence made up of texts, it was decided to use a range of political imagery, largely political prints, to serve as primary sources, inverting the usual practice of alluding to images from an argument based on texts. Second, there is a requirement upon historians for a systematic approach to primary sources, allowing argument to be tightly referenced. However, imagery is not subject to the usual methods (footnoting chapters and pages for example), so a methodology was developed which incorporates digitally modelled representations of the prints. This was based upon work undertaken by Gerhard Jaritz at the Instituts für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit in Austria. Thirdly, prompted by the doubts of several scholars about the utility of conventional political theories in the context of the Dutch Republic, the work of Michel Foucault, in particular his prescription for the study of power, has been adapted and used as an analytical framework in which to discuss the sources. The thesis demonstrates the systematic exploitation of pictorial sources in the context of historical study. It demonstrates the advantages and limitations of digital models and computer analysis. On the basis of these novel methodologies, the thesis summarises a thorough exploration of a range of political imagery. It also highlights the extraordinary success of a particular image of the Revolt, the Tyranny of Alva. On the basis of the evidence examined, it also demonstrates that there was a profound antipathy towards monarchic, 'top down1 power in the early Republic, and argues that power there was more easily diagrammed than textualised.

This thesis explores space and gender in twenty-three Latin saints’ vitae from the thirteenth-century Low Countries. In the midst of urbanisation and rejuvenating apostolic zeal, the vitae emerged from a milieu in which groups of women who were unable or unwilling to pursue a traditional religious vocation chose to live a vita mixta, a combination of the contemplative and active life, while remaining in the world. Recent scholarship has moved away from viewing the women through the lens of institutionalisation. However, continued focus on the women’s ecclesiastical status and the labels used to describe them has implicitly maintained a lay/monastic binary, in which the women are compared against the monastic paradigm. The twenty-three vitae under examination detail the lives of both women and men (whose vitae offer a comparison) from different backgrounds and vocations. This wide-ranging selection of texts allows for a broad comparative textual analysis in order to consider where and how the women and men enacted solitary piety and communal devotion. Taking geometric space as its organising principle the thesis considers the dominant cultural configurations of space and its fluidity, noting how space could be transformed to suit the spiritual needs of individuals and groups. Solitude could be achieved in a variety of different settings from the bedchamber to wilderness while spaces such as streets, windows and cells could facilitate communal devotion. This connected women and men from different religious backgrounds. There are some surprising finds: in the vitae entry points such as windows and doors were fundamental to womens’ communal piety and women sought solitude in the wilderness more frequently than their male counterparts. Uncovering women from the shadows of male-authored texts remains a pertinent issue in histories of medieval women. Ultimately, this thesis’ adoption of a spatial framework provides a different avenue to explore the vitae and primarily the women described within.

Through contemplation, and the practice of actions with religious meaning, faith is taught and reinforced. Beliefs that conflict with the established teaching of a religious group are sometimes ruled by it as heretical. Effective in countering heresy are religious practices that would not be performed by those deemed heretical. The practices indicate those who are orthodox and safeguard them from accusations of heresy. Catharism was an expanding heretical sect in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, enticing adherents away from the Roman Catholic Church, rejecting the Catholic sacraments and holding to a dualistic theology. Through the study of eleven hagiographies (idealized biographies of saints) this thesis identifies and examines sixteen attributes of people who lived in the southern Low Countries, corresponding with contemporary Belgium and northeastern France. We show how these attributes aided the Catholic Church’s struggle against Catharism through the confirmation, dissemination, and distinction of orthodoxy, while serving to nullify heterodox suspicion of the hagiographical subjects.

Decades of burgeoning humanism, intensifying lay piety, and an increasing anticlerical sentiment, paved the way for Martin Luther's reforming message when it reached the Low Countries in 1519. As ruler of the territory, Charles V resolved to curb the spread of heterodoxy via the promulgation of a series of anti-heresy edicts. Increasing in severity throughout his reign, these edicts gradually removed the prosecution of heresy from the jurisdiction of the church, placing it squarely under the control of secular officials. The success of Charles's religious legislation was therefore contingent upon the cooperation of primarily local, secular rulers. But municipal officials and their subjects viewed Charles's anti-heresy legislation as an unwelcome encroachment on their local autonomy, and a disturbing manifestation of the emperor's centralizing ambitions. Consequently, they formed a resolute front of determined resistance to the imposition of Charles's religious policies throughout his reign. This study examines the motivations underlying this opposition, as well as the specific ways in which such resistance manifested itself.Chronologically, the study addresses the years of Charles's reign (1515-1555) and geographically, the duchy of Brabant. This region, in the southern Low Countries (the modern-day borderland of Belgium and the Netherlands) was home to some of the most important urban centers in Europe. In the chapters that follow, the major Brabantine cities of Antwerp (the most lucrative commercial metropolis of the period), Leuven (home to the Catholic university and an important center of Roman theology), and Brussels (seat, after 1531, of Charles's central administration) will be examined in terms of their role in the religious controversy of the period, and the reactions of their inhabitants to the edicts promulgated by Charles.The anti-heresy edicts of Charles V represent one of the earliest attempts of a European ruler to establish a governmental policy for treating religious difference. This examination of the responses to these legal innovations provides not only a more detailed understanding of struggles for political autonomy, but a more nuanced view of belief and heterodoxy in this crucial period in the history of the early modern Low Countries.

This dissertation explores how alabaster funerary sculptures and tapestries created complex and multifarious alliances between the Habsburgs and members of the high nobility. It proposes that the Habsburgs and the nobility negotiated their relationships with one another through commissioning and displaying works of art that used particular materials, iconographies and styles referencing the politically potent and culturally significant heritage of the Burgundian dukes and the ancient Roman emperors. The alabaster sculptures and tapestries discussed in this two-part study were instrumental in defining and redefining, establishing and renewing these relationships. Part one is devoted to alabaster funerary sculpture in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Habsburg domain. The origin of great interest in alabaster, together with black marble (black limestone), was the Carthusian monastery, the Chartreuse de Champmol, near Dijon, which had housed the tombs of Philip the Bold, and of John the Fearless and his wife, Margaret of Bavaria. The tombs of the Burgundian dukes became a model for funerary monuments in alabaster of other members of the family and later also for the Habsburgs, including Margaret of Austria, who governed the Low Countries as regent after the death of her husband, Philibert II of Savoy (1480-1504). The tombs of Margaret of Austria, Philibert of Savoy, and his mother, Margaret of Bourbon in a monastery in Brou were intended to assert Habsburg-Savoyard alliance in a region equally desirable to the French for fulfilling their royal ambitions. Following the alabaster and black marble examples in Dijon and Brou, the tombs of Guillaume I de Croÿ and Marie de Hamal, and of Cardinal Guillaume II de Croÿ, originally in Heverlee, near Leuven, were located in a Celestine monastery church that served as a dynastic mausoleum for the noble family. The tombs of the Croÿs offer insight into the extent to which the nobles historically exercised power in the courts of Burgundy and Habsburg, even influencing Margaret of Austria to include all’antica elements in the alabaster funerary monuments and altarpiece in Brou that are otherwise designed in late flamboyant Gothic style. Part two is devoted to exploring tapestries in the Burgundian and Habsburg collections from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century. Members of the Burgundian and Habsburg families were key players in the development of the tapestry industry in the Low Countries, regulating tapestry production and trade. As an important part of the rulers’ self-fashioning, tapestries were collected, used as gifts, or hung during important occasions. To demonstrate how tapestries were used in a particular setting, I discuss the Seven Deadly Sins set and one tapestry from the History of Scipio Africanus series, both in the Habsburgs' collection, that were displayed during the imperial festivities at Binche and Mariemont in 1549. I examine how these tapestries as well as the specific activities that occurred in front of them and the particular viewers who witnessed and participated in these activities effectively and affectively communicated Habsburg propaganda to the elite local audience, and thereby helped to encourage their loyalty and support.

The Cabinet of Count Charles Cobenzl lies at the heart of the Hermitage Museum, forming the core of the collection of Old Master Drawings. Yet despite perpetual references to him as ‘grand collectionneur’, no study of Cobenzl’s collecting has ever been undertaken. Nor, in the absence of prosopographical studies of art production or collecting in the Austrian Netherlands in the middle of the eighteenth century, or indeed of other individual collectors, has it been possible to set him in a ‘collecting context’. Bringing together the works of art themselves and Cobenzl’s abundant correspondence, this thesis assesses what he owned, how and why he acquired it, the political and intellectual framework for his collecting and how he perceived the objects in his possession. Looking at Cobenzl’s roles as public figure and private collector, it shows how the latter fits into the context of the former, his collecting rooted firmly in his ambition to revive the economy and the arts of the Austrian Netherlands, in his own ambiguous status and his conflicts with the Governor, Charles de Lorraine. The battle for both real and perceived superiority was played out in many different parts of Cobenzl’s professional and private life, and he used display – the adornment of his home and his person and his collecting – as part of a play for social prestige. Cobenzl used objects as a discrete assertion of both intellectual and aesthetic superiority. This thesis proposes that Cobenzl’s transformation into a collector of drawings was an example of his perspicacious identification of emerging trends that could be turned to advantage, economic or prestigious, public or personal. He was drawn by the status of drawings, perceived as accessible only to those of greater refinement and understanding, as something elite, less accessible than the collecting of paintings. The direct and specific stimulus for his emergence as a collector of drawings lay in the provenance of two large groups of works he was offered, which permitted him to assert a very specific link to the past. It suggests that Cobenzl adopted not only the drawings, but also their histories, to negotiate social position and identity, within the context of his pragmatic utilitarianism. This egocentric study also provides the foundation for a preliminary attempt to create a context for Cobenzl’s collecting of drawings, within his circle, in the Austrian Netherlands overall, and, through analysis of his collecting practices, in the wider European context.

The history of the British Army in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is generally associated with stories of British military victory and the campaigns of the Duke of Wellington. An intrinsic aspect of the historiography is the argument that, following British defeat in the Low Countries in 1795, the Army was transformed by the military reforms of His Royal Highness, Frederick Duke of York. This thesis provides a critical appraisal of the reform process with reference to the organisation, structure, ethos and learning capabilities of the British Army and evaluates the impact of the reforms upon British military performance in the Low Countries, in the period 1793 to 1814, via a series of narrative reconstructions. This thesis directly challenges the transformation argument and provides a re-evaluation of British military competency in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and the Sack of Antwerp (1576), two of the most notorious massacres of the 1570s, were of international consequence in a confessionally-divided Europe. This thesis offers a comparative analysis of the Elizabethan political and print responses to both atrocities, evaluating to what extent and in what ways each shaped the increasingly Protestant political character of the period. It compares strands of argument aired by Elizabethan councillors, courtiers, military commanders and clerics, in contrast with the content of contemporary news pamphlets, to establish whether there was any overlap between the parameters of political debate and topical print. It investigates whether, and on what occasions, statesmen or figures associated with the court may have sought to confessionalise public opinion via the production of printed news. Analysing often overlooked printed sources, the thesis focuses on aspects of content and contexts of production. It considers the kinds of comment expressed on the massacres per se and in relation to: the nature of the wars in France and the Low Countries; Elizabeth’s foreign and domestic agendas; the compound significance of her gender, the unresolved succession and her realm's vulnerability to foreign invasion; and providential discourses concerning God’s favour and protection. These lines of enquiry throw up some insights into changing English attitudes towards the Catholic crowns of France and Spain and key figures abroad. Finally, the thesis reaches some broader conclusions regarding the development of an increasingly militant Anglo-Protestant nationalism in the mid-Elizabethan period.

Au XIIIe siècle, les premières mulieres religiosae fondent un phénomène spirituel dont l’ambigüité préoccupe autant les contemporains qu’il interroge les historiens des béguines et plus largement de l’Église médiévale et des femmes. À travers un corpus de Vitae et d’exempla provenant ou traitant des Pays-Bas méridionaux, cette thèse souhaite renouveler la question du rôle de ces dévotes atypiques dans une démarche comparative fondée sur l’analyse d’hommes et de femmes pieux, menant une vie religieuse, dans ou en dehors d’une communauté, permettant ainsi de convoquer les acquis de l’histoire du genre pour éclairer cette réflexion. La première partie de l’étude s’attache à déconstruire les topoi de la sainteté mystique pour mettre au jour les rebuffades dont les mulieres religiosae ont été les victimes jusqu’à l’exclusion sociale. Néanmoins, cette mise à l’écart est contredite par les hagiographes eux-mêmes qui brossent dans le même temps le portrait de femmes œuvrant dans le siècle. La première partie de ce travail ouvre l’analyse sur les modalités d’insertion sociale développée par et autour des mulieres religiosae. Économiquement, politiquement et surtout spirituellement, en raison de leur sainteté, elles participent activement au monde et s’insèrent dans différents réseaux, dont un bilan sériel permet d’appréhender la richesse. Ces éléments permettent d’étendre la recherche au fonctionnement de ces sociabilités. En prenant appui sur une analyse sémantique, il s’agit de saisir leurs principes de mise en œuvre, articulée autour de la caritas, ainsi que leurs limites qui sont de plus en plus visibles après la deuxième moitié du XIIIe siècle. / In the thirteenth century, the first mulieres religiosae founded a spiritual phenomenon whose ambiguity preoccupied the contemporary as much as it fascinates the historians of the Beguines and more broadly those interested in studying the relationships between women and the medieval Church. Through a corpus of Vitae and exempla originating or dealing with Southern Low Countries, this thesis aims to renew the question of the role of these atypical devouts, in a comparative approach based on analysis of pious men and women, leading a religious life, in or outside of a community, thus enabling the use of the knowledge acquired by gender history to enlighten this exposé. The first part of this study focuses on the deconstruction of the topoi of mystical sanctity to uncover the troubles which mulieres religiosae fell victims, leading to social exclusion. However, this marginalization is contradicted by the hagiographers themselves, who paint at the same time a portrait of women fully integrated in their century. The first part of this work opens the analysis of the means by which social integration is developed, by and around mulieres religiosae. Economically, politically and especially spiritually, because of their holiness, they participate actively in the world and are part of different networks, whose richness can be assessed through a detailed summary. These elements extend the scope of the research to the workings of these social interactions. Building upon a semantic analysis, it aims at grasping their principles of implementation, centered around the caritas, while the limits of these networks are becoming more visible after the second half of the thirteenth century.