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Preparing food has always been a crucial element in the maritime industry as crews needed to be fed at regular intervals. Moreover, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the emergence of steamships challenged the traditional system of catering on board. The kitchen staff grew with the size and complexity of new vessels, not in the least due to the growth of passenger transport. However, cooks are often neglected as a professional group in maritime historiography, even though their work was essential for both crews and passengers. To uncover how maritime labour was subject to change when ships became more advanced and complex workplaces, there is a growing consensus among scholars to incorporate understudied labour groups. The paper aims to examine how developments in the maritime industry affected the profession of cook in terms of working methods and status, while analysing their profiles provides more insights into geographical backgrounds, ages and career prospects. In sum, this paper makes theintersection between changes in the maritime industry and its impact on maritime labour more explicit.

What was the role of energy in shaping modern economies and fuelling the transition to sustained economic growth? In the historiography on the industrial revolution, the transition to fossil energy carriers plays a central role. Despite recent efforts to gather new empirical evidence, long-term comparative studies on energy transitions and their economic impact before and during the first industrial revolution remain rare. As a contribution to this literature, this article presents new quantitative data on energy consumption from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in the Low Countries. To explore differences in the chronology and impact of energy transitions, we compare the total levels of energy consumption, the energy mix, and the prices of fuels between two cities in the northern and southern Low Countries: Leiden and Ghent. This analysis enables us to explore more clearly which factors played a key role in the interaction between energy, economic growth, and industrialisation. The transition towards a cheap-energy economy in Holland was associated with economic growth, but not with mechanisation. On the other hand, the rapid mechanisation process in Ghent was associated not with a cheap-energy economy (relative to that of Leiden), but more specifically with a cheap-coal economy.

Per capita meat consumption in post-industrial countries is higher today than it has been ever since the transition of hunter-gathering to agriculture, while attitudes toward meat production and animal killing have become increasingly characterized by moral ambiguity and disgust. To contribute to our understanding of the genesis of this meat paradox, this study analyses how mid-nineteenth-century Belgian meat retailers constructed the image of their product. Analyzing 54 porcelain cards, uniquely early pictorial business cards used to advertise, shows how they constructed a very specific image of meat and its production process, an image in which meat itself was almost wholly absent. As shifts in the production process removed the animals behind the urban meat supply further and further from urbanites’ sight, meat retailers deliberately called upon images of idealized healthy living animals in profoundly natural settings. Reminders of the brutal production process were avoided at all costs. Rather, meat retailers sold the idea of meat consumption as intricately linked to a romanticized pastoral life, where animals lived free from human constraints or instrumentalization. This highly paradoxical “naturalisation” process, cutting out all human intervention in the production of meat, still serves to underpin important cultural aspects of the meat paradox today

Commensality – the act of eating together – and its social effects of creating or reinforcing social groups has been studied extensively. In life aboard ships, in particular, eating together is attributed a key role in reflecting and thereby enforcing the professional hierarchies deemed fundamental to the functioning of the ship. However, transgressions of these commensal rules and customs have often been overlooked. Taking the eighteenth-century Ostend Company based in the Southern Low Countries as a case, this article argues that commensal deviations were possible for a variety of reasons, ranging from a means of disciplining crew members to signalling discontent and waging power struggles. Nevertheless, transgressions were temporary: regardless of the success in attaining the envisaged goals, the commensal structure was quickly restored. Thus, rather than threatening the social hierarchy vital to the ship’s functioning, this article argues that these deviations helped sustain it by providing outlets for tensions before more serious challenges to on-board hierarchy could arise. Commensaliteit – het gebruik om samen te eten – en de sociale gevolgen hiervan, zoals het creëren of versterken van sociale groepen, zijn uitvoerig bestudeerd. Vooral in het leven aan boord van schepen wordt aan gezamenlijke maaltijden een sleutelrol toegekend: ze weerspiegelen en bevestigen de professionele hiërarchieën die cruciaal zijn voor het functioneren van het schip. Overtredingen van deze commensale regels en gewoonten zijn tot heden echter weinig bestudeerd. Dit artikel neemt de achttiende eeuwse Oostendse Compagnie, gevestigd in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, hiervoor als casus en betoogt dat afwijkingen van de regels om gezamenlijk te eten verschillende doelen hadden zoals het disciplineren van bemanningsleden, het signaleren van ontevredenheid of het voeren van machtsconflicten. Deze overschrijdingen waren tijdelijk van aard en de commensale structuur werd steeds snel hersteld. Dit artikel betoogt dat deze afwijkingen geen bedreiging voor de sociale hiërarchie aan boord vormden, maar juist bijdroegen tot het in stand houden hiervan en als uitlaatklep voor spanningen fungeerden zodat ernstigere uitdagingen voor de machtsverhoudingen aan boord konden worden voorkomen.

This book is about the often-ignored spatial dynamism of pre-modern towns: the interaction between city life and urban space, as it was adapted to new conditions, slowly or more radically. The spatial development within cities is the response to social-economic processes and political decisions, but is at the same time determining these processes. In this volume the morphology of cities is analyzed on different levels of scale: from the individual cadastral plot, to the urban block, the neighbourhood, and the city as a whole. The chapters in this book analyze the development and management of urban space from a long-term comparative perspective, combining case studies and insights from a range of cities from all over Europe. Several contributions deal with the impact of major events on the urban tissue: disasters such as fires or wars; expropriation or redevelopment projects directed by urban governments; religious change such as the Dissolution in the UK, the secularisation of religious complexes during the Reformation, and the expansion of convents during the Counter-Reformation. Other chapters focus on slow transformations that are visible on neighbourhood and plot level. This book is written from a comparative perspective that takes into account path-dependency: pre-existing power relations, ideology and mentality, the resilience of property structures, the impact of building regulations, subsidies or the working of the real estate market had different outcomes for different social groups and determined the evolution of neighbourhoods. Although this volume focuses on pre-modern towns, the analyses of past processes offer important insights to evaluate urban planning today and its possible effects in the future.

Heidi Deneweth investigates urban transformations in Bruges between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the moment when Antwerp and Amsterdam took over its leading position in international trade and finance. Bruges was not a city in decline, but in contrast to rapidly growing cities, it did not require any major changes to its existing urban layout during the following centuries. Still, multiple adaptations of plot structures initiated by private owners considerably altered the built space and social topography of the early modern city. Deneweth demonstrates how the city’s changing position within its urban network, growing inequality, the impact of the real estate market, speculation, and building regulations had different effects for different social groups, resulting in the divergent evolution of specific neighbourhoods.

This is the introduction to the volume

ust like today, the late medieval period knew many challenges caused by climate change and diseases. The Little Ice Age, starting in the fourteenth century, and the famines and diseases that followed left their marks on past European populations, which are still visible today in the human skeletal remains. The influences of these potential stressors on human skeletons from the late medieval population from Ypres, Belgium, is assessed via stable isotope and osteological analyses. Ypres, rapidly growing into one of the biggest cities in Europe during the thirteenth century, was struck by social polarisation, conflicts, proletarianization, and famines. As a result, the booming city once known for its cloth industry, started to decline during the fourteenth century and provides a good opportunity to study the dynamics of densely populated urban centers during such tumultuous times. Preliminary results from the stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes (δ13C & δ15N) analyses seem to indicate some levels of physiological of stress with higher δ13C & δ15N values observed in some of the individual’s ribs compared to the femurs, suggesting they may have suffered from malnutrition or even starvation. The stable isotope results occasionally match pathological changes. One individual in particular displayed enamel hypoplasia, cribra orbitalia, and vitamin D deficiency and had high δ15N values in the ribs (14.1‰), reinforcing the possibility that inhabitants of Ypres suffered from starvation. This presentation provides more insights into how bioarchaeology can help research the health status in Ypres during its rise and decline in the late medieval period.

In the 1730s, the Austrian Netherlands (eighteenth century Belgium) faced the devastating effects of the Great shipworm epidemic. Shipworms are marine wood scavenging molluscs that use their shells to eat their way into submerged wood. Due to the changing environmental conditions (temperature, salinity, …) at that time, the shipworm population exploded along the West-European coast. Within a few years the wooden flood protection structures protecting the low-lying Flemish coastal plain were damaged beyond repair. Adoption of new technologies was successful in safeguarding the embankments, but conflicting interests with the governing elites provoked a political deadlock ultimately resulting in the collapse of the Slyckens locks. The ensuing popular anger – together with other political and economic developments – played an important role in toppling the ruling elites in the county of Flanders in 1754. The following enlightened reforms, backed by Vienna and Brussels, had a decisive and positive impact on both the Flemish waterway and flood protection system. As a consequence of this a new ecosystem emerged which reduced the shipworm’s reproductive capacities.

This article examines the locus of care of the elderly in the cities of Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent at the end of the eighteenth century by investigating the circumstances of their decease. The article uses a cross-sectional analysis of the municipal death registers of 1797 to shed light on the informal networks and formal provisions that surrounded the urban elderly (aged 60 years and older) during their last days and shortly after their death. By evaluating the roles of hospitals and private houses as places of death and the presence of family and neighbours as witnesses, the article assesses both formal and informal channels of support. In addition, the article examines how the locus of care correlated with marital status, socio-economic position and migration background.

Over the past decades, legal historians have become more cautious when it comes to rules that in the Middle Ages and the early modern period were defined as ‘(old) customs’. Earlier optimistic appraisals as to the age of such rules have been challenged. This article argues that efforts of debunking should be combined with a more thorough analysis of the legal consciousness of past societies. It proposes to look at old municipal private law, not as a set of rules fixed by tradition, but rather as a malleable body of norms. The symbolic qualities of law were such that renewal and rephrasal could be combined with an ideology of conservation. It was perfectly possible for administrators to promote new rules as being a part of an ‘age-old law’ of the city or the land, without breaching the implicit conventions as to the qualities of law. However, as will be demonstrated further, there were limits to the agency of administrators in this regard. The codes as to the features of law marked boundaries that had to be taken seriously.

Oxygen isotopes in biological apatite are commonly used as a proxy in mobility studies to identify ‘locals’ vs. ‘non-locals’ and, as a further step, to possibly identify compatible regions for those individuals that are characterized as ‘non-locals’. However, factors like temperature, warmer vs. colder climatic phases, air pressure, altitude, cooking practices..., affect δ18O values rendering interpretations difficult. Different methods to identify outliers within a population have been proposed and include 3*MAD or Turkey IQR, and most studies primarily base their ‘non-local’ oxygen interpretations on the offsets with expectations compared to oxygen isotope maps. However, recent oxygen results from Belgium highlight potential issues using these maps. Oxygen isotope results measured on tooth enamel carbonates from different Flemish cemeteries (Koksijde, and Ypres) ranging from the early till late medieval period are inconsistent with the existing oxygen isotope maps. Ranging up to -3.4 ‰ (VPDB), the δ18O values observed in these 2 sites are among the highest in Europe. The exact reason for these differences with the rest of north-western Europe *remain unclear. We argue that methodological issues can be ruled out as the results from samples from other locations in Europe, prepared with the same pre-treatment and measured in the same lab during the same runs, are compatible with the oxygen isotope maps. Further research is needed to understand the reasons for the large difference in oxygen isotope ratios between Belgian populations and the rest of Europe. The implications of these findings could significantly impact mobility studies within Europe and their interpretations.

Transport history has developed in close association with urban network theory. However, this association has often remained implicit and not conceptualised. This article starts from an overview of the historiography on urban networks to question the limitations of historical urban network theory by highlighting the connection between an incomplete mapping of hinterlands and the prevalence of a neo-Christallerian model in the interpretation of their network shape. The concept of the “urban logistic network” is proposed as an alternative historical approach that focuses on the interaction between urban systems on the one hand, and transport and mobility on the other hand. In particular, it enables to clarify the conflated concepts of gateways and hinterlands and constructs a taxonomy that allows the examination of network patterns on a variety of geographical scales. It also identifies the variety of network shapes that are created in urban systems by different logistic connections.

Food labelling is a tool to inform consumers about the specifications and characteristics of a product. Additionally, labels display information about traditionality and naturalness, of which the meaning is highly subjective. There is a paucity of research examining attributes both of tradition and naturalness. In this study, traditionality was assessed by a model that included temporal, geographical, know-how, and cultural components. Naturalness was evaluated based on bio/organic elements, 'free-from' claims, and natural ingredients. Therefore, a content analysis tool was developed to analyze and score labels of fermented meat products, which generated insights in the key label characteristics of tradition and naturalness. The degree of tradition and naturalness was the average of their subdimensions which were scored based on the displayed elements. A higher degree of tradition and naturalness was linked to higher prices. Fermented meat labels were found to be strongly embedded in 'authenticity', and less in naturalness, an element more attractive for private labels than for branded products.

During the early medieval period (5th–9th century CE), the North Sea coastal societies were involved in long distance maritime trade relations, which resulted in a pronounced mobility of individuals throughout the North Sea area. This work presents the first isotope data from human remains on diet and mobility from early medieval Belgian coastal populations. A total of 23 out of 51 excavated individuals from the archaeological site of Koksijde, Belgium (7th–8th century AD), was selected for isotope and elemental analyses (δ13Ccol, δ15N, δ18OP, δ13Cap, δ18OC, 87Sr/86Sr and [Sr]). The high δ15N values of part of the individuals buried at Koksijde indicate that high trophic level ranked fish was included in their diets, suggesting an intensive exploitation of marine food sources. The δ18O values are not compatible with the predicted ‘local’ values while the strontium isotope ratios have values close to that of seawater (0.7092). Either the actual oxygen isotope values in early medieval Belgium are offset by 1 or2‰ compared to the current meteoric water predictions, or the population came from somewhere else. Whether or not this was linked to the population's mobility is difficult to assess based on their δ18O and 87Sr/86Sr values. Nonetheless, the study of the population at Koksijde provides new insights into the lives of the early medieval coastal Belgian societies.

In the course of the sixteenth century, in the Low Countries maritime law was changing. At first, damages caused during maritime transport ("averages") were compensated on the basis of customs of limited scope and calculation, starting from "facts and figures". From the 1550s onwards, legal scholars developed new views; they revised norms, some of which came from below, while others were imposed by the sovereign. Both in legislation and in jurisprudential commentaries, the Roman rules of general average were revived. The legal authors made use of a more principled, humanistic method of interpretation. Their views did not contradict mercantile opinions; instead, merchants called for necessary adjustments of the law. The changes in doctrine and legislation responded to developments in the organization of the maritime industry. Although the legal scholars could have doubts about the older rules and how to reconcile them with a principled approach, their contribution to updating the rules was crucial.

The central town squares of the medieval towns in the Low Countries are considered to be the theatres of late medieval urban identity and are not rarely associated with the origin of the towns, or at least their glory as merchant towns in the past. In reality, these emblematic places have often complex biographies, in which selected memories were attributed to them in different historical contexts. In this paper, we will explore how these changing townscapes interacted with the social agents at their medieval origins. We will use both archaeological data as well as historical writings in order to reconstruct their biographies and show how their development was not path-dependent but followed deliberate strategies

The complaint that litigation was unreasonably complex and costly was commonly voiced across early modern Europe, and has often been espoused by historians. However, scholars also emphasise that litigants were not necessarily the passive victims of impenetrable layers of litigation simply concocted at the whim of legal professionals. Therefore, this article assesses the cost of litigation in the way it was really used, notably in the Franc of Bruges (Brugse Vrije, in today Belgium) during the eighteenth century. Many cases did not go beyond the early phases, leading us to conclude that initial costs provide an accurate impression of the price actually paid by many litigants, amounting to roughly one month’s income from skilled labour. Also, most cases that ended in the early phases of proceeding, took progressively less time to reach a conclusion.

The composition of the political elites in sixteenth-century Ghent, one of the political and economic centres of the county of Flanders, changed from a relatively open elite group that included representatives from the craft guilds into a compact, aristocratic class. This article analyses the reasons for this transformation. First, the number of office-holders in the city council declined and power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller political elite because of interventions in the urban political framework by the Habsburg authorities in the wake of a fiscal rebellion (1537–40) and a Calvinist takeover of power (1578–84). Secondly, the once dominant position of the craft guilds on Ghent's two benches of aldermen was weakened by institutional reforms, a Catholic backlash against Calvinism and an economic recession. Thirdly, the growing wealth gap between rulers and the ruled, coupled with an influx of noblemen into Ghent City Council, gave urban politics a more aristocratic character. Consequently, a series of interconnected changes gave rise to a trend towards oligarchy and aristocracy on the city's benches of aldermen.

This article assesses the wide range of experiences of illegitimacy in eighteenth-century Antwerp. It exposes many instances of pauper agency, yet also cautions against simply assuming that all single mothers were similarly forceful in their dealings with illegitimacy. Four key factors affected the options a single mother had at her disposal in dealing with illegitimate pregnancy: the way poor relief was organised, the relative accessibility of judicial processes, the administrative settings, and the prevailing ideas about illegitimacy and morality among the general community. The article shows how these factors changed in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, impacting on the strategies that single mothers could adopt.

This special issue highlights the interactions between diplomats and wider audiences in their host country during the seventeenth century. The dynamic and complex relationships between diplomats and foreign audiences in the early modern period have remained somewhat under the radar. While concepts such as “soft power”, “cultural diplomacy”, and “public diplomacy” have been developed by scholars of international relations in the twentieth century to describe and analyse twentieth-century realities, we argue that early modern historians can draw inspiration from these concepts to start answering the questions how, why, and when different European states and their representatives addressed foreign audiences abroad. Taking such an approach will expand our understanding of the strategies and tools diplomats had at their disposal to engage with different audiences. We conclude this approach has the potential to open new avenues of research into the history of symbolic communication, news, public opinion, as well as early modern international relations.

This article argues that Rembrandts legal dealings with regard to his ‘bankruptcy’ in 1656 usually did not go beyond the norms of his days and that the artist was well aware of the legal rules. This follows, for example, from the assignment of his house to his son Titus a month before he filed for the cessie van goede. This assignment must be considered as a promise rather than a conveyance which implies that it was probably not intended as a deflection of creditors. The same goes for the cessie itself. When filing for cessie Rembrandt knew that he was able to retain control and that there was a chance that the house was not sold publicly. This invites for an appraisal of Rembrandt not only as entrepreneur in an economic sense, but also as a legal actor manoeuvring through the law.

Across the medieval and early modern eras, new rulers were celebrated with increasingly elaborate coronations and inaugurations that symbolically conferred legitimacy and political power upon them. Many historians have considered rituals like these as irrelevant to understanding modern governance - an idea that this volumes challenges through illuminating case studies focused on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Habsburg lands. Taking the formal elasticity of these events as the key to their lasting relevance, the contributors explore important questions around their political, legal, social, and cultural significance and their curious persistence as a historical phenomenon over time.

In Europe, an increased use of lead (Pb) is observed from the early medieval period to the late medieval period as evidenced by historical research and the recovery of a large range of lead and lead-coated objects during excavations. These include lead pipes used for water distribution, different roofing materials, Pb-glazing used on different vessels, and other everyday household goods. How this increase in Pb use in the late medieval period impacted the health remains unclear but it is likely to have influenced both the humans and the environment. By investigating Pb-concentrations in human remains, it might become possible to shed light on human health and even mobility between societies with higher or lower lead concentrations. Our study focuses on the Pb concentrations in the skeletal remains of the late medieval city of Ypres (13th- 14th century) and the early medieval population of Koksijde (7th-8th century), to investigate if in-vivo exposure to Pb can be detected. Traditional Pb measurements onarchaeological remains focus on enamel rather than on bone apatite due to the possible post-mortem exchange of Pb with the soil. However, as dental enamel only represents a childhood signal, the lifestyle during adulthood often remains vague. In this study, using micro–X-ray fluorescence, we explore the Pb concentrations in bone material of twenty-five individuals from the population of Ypres by comparing them with twenty individuals from the early medieval site of Koksijde where exposure to anthropogenic Pb would have been minimal. The application of an aluminium (Al) 630 μm source filter during the semi-quantitative element mapping, instead of traditional mapping without filters, allows for the detection of Pb by reducing the X-ray signal for light elements such as P and Ca. A clear difference in Pb concentrations is observed between Koksijde and Ypres, with the latter site being significantly more enriched. In addition, our pre-liminary results show intra-site variations for Ypres and raises the question if these differences could be caused purely by post-mortem processes or (partly) by in-vivo exposure to lead.

Short introduction of the making-of the Liber amicorum for Pierrick Pourchasse.

The introduction of this issue devoted to the history of coastal environments proposes to go beyond the ‘great divide’ between land and sea, which still largely shapes the field of environmental history, and to rethink their interactions within the framework of a ‘terraqueous’ environmental history. The coasts are a privileged terrain for tackling this dichotomous vision. Because they are the hybrid product of natural and social dynamics, their study allows us to historicise and contextualise the construction, both materially and symbolically, of the existing boundaries between land and sea. It furthermore allows us to show the always liminal, shifting and permeable character of the coast, which functions more as an interface than as a border. Finally, because of their position on the edge, coasts have a ‘mirroring’ power which invites us to pay more attention to the symmetry between land and sea.

This special issue highlights the interactions between diplomats and wider audiences in their host country during the seventeenth century. The dynamic and complex relationships between diplomats and foreign audiences in the early modern period have remained somewhat under the radar. While concepts such as “soft power”, “cultural diplomacy”, and “public diplomacy” have been developed by scholars of international relations in the twentieth century to describe and analyse twentieth-century realities, we argue that early modern historians can draw inspiration from these concepts to start answering the questions how, why, and when different European states and their representatives addressed foreign audiences abroad. Taking such an approach will expand our understanding of the strategies and tools diplomats had at their disposal to engage with different audiences. We conclude this approach has the potential to open new avenues of research into the history of symbolic communication, news, public opinion, as well asearly modern international relations.

This article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries betweenc. 1350 andc. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.

Current historiography endorses a narrative that the political elite of pre-industrial gateway cities became more ‘open’ in the wake of efflorescence and that their city councils became populated with merchants. Yet, according to the existing literature, Antwerp challenges this narrative, as the influx of merchants was very limited during late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when Antwerp transformed from a medium-sized Brabantine city into the leading economic centre in western Europe. Moreover, scholars disagree on whether the economic expansion had any impact at all on the composition and profile of Antwerp's political elite. By analysing the social composition of the city council and how this evolved from the beginning of Antwerp's commercial expansion around 1400 until its apogee around 1550, I revisit the question whether Antwerp constitutes an exception to the established pattern of elite formation in gateway cities and, if so, why.

The origin, rise, and dynamics of coastal trade and landing places in the North Sea area between the sixth and eighth centuries must be understood in relation to how coastal regions and seascapes acted as arenas of contact, dialogue, and transition. Although the free coastal societies of the early medieval period were involved in regional to interregional or long-distance trade networks, their economic agency must be understood from a bottom-up perspective. That is, their reproduction strategies must be studied in their own right, independent from any teleological construction about the development of trade, markets, or towns for that matter. This means that the early medieval coastal networks of exchange were much more complex and diverse than advocated by the simple emporium network model, which connected the major archaeological sites along the North Sea coast. Instead, coastal and riverine dwellers often possessed some form of free status and large degrees of autonomy, in part due to the specific environmental conditions of the landscapes in which they dwelled. The wide estuarine region of the Low Countries, between coastal Flanders in the south and Friesland in the north, a region with vast hinterlands and a central position in northwestern Europe, makes these developments particularly clear. This chapter thus pushes back against longstanding assumptions in scholarly research, which include overemphasis of the influence of large landowners over peasant economies, and on the prioritization of easily retrievable luxuries over less visible indicators of bulk trade (such as wood, wool, and more), gift exchange, and market trade. The approach used here demonstrates that well-known emporia or larger ports of trade were embedded in the economic activities and networks of their respective hinterlands. Early medieval coastal societies and their dynamics are thus better understood from the perspective of integrated governance and economy (“new institutional economics”) in a regional setting.

This article explores the participation of immigrants, or people born outside the kingdom, in urban politics in later medieval England. It demonstrates that the nationality of these newcomers was of only secondary importance. What mattered most was whether immigrants’ economic and political interests aligned with those of the civic political elites. If they did not, aliens’ nationality could be mobilized to exclude them from urban politics. If, however, immigrants’ activities complemented those of the urban elites economically and politically, they had every chance to engage with all aspects of civic political life and be elected into the highest civic offices.

This working paper explains the appearance of the unlikely alliance between Delors, Kohl, Thatcher and Mitterrand behind the Single European Act (1986). As the first major revision of the Treaty of Rome (1957), the Act kickstarted the relance of European integration after a prolonged period of Eurosclerosis in the 1970s, that ultimately cumulated in the foundational Maastricht Treaty. We establish that although the focus on, more often than not, stereotypical characterisations of the four leaders – consisting of a French socialist, a virulent anti-federalist British neoliberal, a committed leftist European and a German Christian-Democrat – is to a certain degree important, one has to look at more structural and global trends to explain the genesis of the Act. Neoliberal globalisation and the dawn of the Second Cold War are singled out as the most important trends that shaped and interacted with the European policies of the four main actors. In trying to deal with them, they found an appropriate framework in the Single Market Programme, their lowest common denominator for European Integration. Lastly, we emphasise the fact that the alliance was an unbalanced one, which helps us explain how Thatcher was pressured into compromise. Junior partner in the coalition, Commission President Delors, is described as a visionary pragmatist who understood the institutional constraints he faced.

To many, the government-mandated quarantine measures of the last few months may have seemed unprecedented and unparalleled. Remaining indoors, staying distanced from friends, loved ones, and even strangers on the street, planning grocery shopping ahead of time like a military operation and being constantly aware of your surroundings was draining and definitely not what we’re used to. The notion of these regulations as purely modern is, however, inaccurate. The same is true of the image often portrayed in popular culture of medieval Europe as a filthy hotbed of disease governed by superstition. In fact, medieval cities throughout Europe had many regulations regarding public hygiene that were strictly and regularly enforced with a view towards preserving the maiori sanitate hominum (the people’s greater health). The Vrije Universiteit Brussel has recently launched a new interdisciplinary research project, the Make-Up of the City, to provide an in-depth analysis of the inhabitants of Ypres through time. The project will run from 2019 to 2024. It will supplement the limited historical information on medieval Ypres with archaeological data from the burial record. We will analyse the skeletal remains of over 1,200 individuals who lived and died between the 12th and 16th centuries, shedding light on the health, diets, and geographic origins of the city’s population with a particular focus on the health of medieval urban-dwellers.

Objectives: The Falys–Prangle-method assesses age-related morphological changes to the sternal clavicle end (SCE), enabling the observation of mature adults from the 5th decade onwards in unburnt human skeletal remains. The aim of this study is to investigate the applicability of the Falys–Prangle-method on burnt human remains. Materials and methods: Fifty-two SCE of 40 cremated individuals (out of 86) from the William M. Bass collection of the Forensic Anthropology Center (Knoxville, Tennessee) of known age-at-death and sex are available for assessment. Surface topography, porosity, and osteophyte formation are evaluated, after which the calculated composite score is associated with the corresponding age range as described by Falys and Prangle. The method is also applied on an archaeological case study from Oudenburg, Belgium, dating to the Roman period. Results: The assessed age ranges strongly agree with the true age ranges (α = 0.828), suggesting the Falys–Prangle-method to be applicable on burnt human remains. The case study from Oudenburg yields markedly improved age-at-death estimates, significantly enhancing our understanding of the age distribution within this community. Discussion: Information on age-at-death is key in the construction of biological profiles of past individuals. The mature adult is often invisible in the archaeological record since most macroscopic age estimation methods do not distinguish beyond 46+ years old. Our study stresses the usefulness of a large-scale application of the Falys–Prangle-method, which will increase the visibility of mature adults, especially in archaeological burnt human skeletal collections, where such information is, at present, extremely difficult to obtain., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published