Between 1300 and 1600, only the Italian city-states could rival the artisanal industries, commerce, and artistic production of the southern Low Countries. This is common knowledge to anyone familiar with the history of art.

Its medieval townscape is still visible to the foreign visitor in popular historic Belgian cities such as Bruges, Brussels, Ghent, and Antwerp. Equally famous are the region’s visual artists of the so-called Northern Renaissance: Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, and Peter Paul Rubens, not to mention lesser-known female artists like Clara Peeters.

It is less well known that between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, there was a very high frequency of popular collective action in principalities like the County of Flanders, the Duchy of Brabant, and the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. Indeed, fourteenth-century Flanders was probably the preindustrial region with the highest intensity and frequency of workers’ protest and civil warfare.