Civil society in late medieval and early modern Mechelen. The development and function of urban club life, 1400-1800

This research projects wants to examine the field of independent citizens, free of traditional societal powers such as the economic market and the central state. Recent studies indicate that this development of the European civil society can only be understood from a historical perspective, but most historians of the early modern period still believe that the club life of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was the cradle of this civil society. The consequences of this new chronology are important. It means that not the secular associations of the Enlightenment but the Christian corporations of the middle ages were crucial in the existence of a civil society. Needless to say, that this new perspective dramatically changes our understanding of the importance and evolution of the civil society in Europe. The political culture ¿ which flourished in this civil society according to several studies ¿ will be at the heart of our analysis. Indeed, several sociologists have claimed that a dense associational life ¿ which is more or less the same as a dynamic civil society ¿ goes hand in glove with the rise of a democratic political culture. This contradicts with traditional visions on the political elites of the late medieval and the early modern times. Numerous studies have pointed at the oligarchic and closed character of most urban governments in the Low Countries. Next tot this, historical research showed that the craft guilds did not promote political participation. These conclusions suggest that the influence of late medieval and early modern civil society was rather small. Therefore, this research project will investigate how the long tradition of civil society and associational life in early modern Europe influenced political participation and democratization. We will look at the evolution of the civil society in a particular city in the Netherlands, namely Mechelen. This was a middle-size city situated in the heart of the Low Countries which could be representative for other towns in the Southern Netherlands. Mechelen did not fundamentally differ from other neighbouring cities in the Antwerp hinterland. The population of the city rose from 15.000 inhabitants during the middle of the fourteenth century to 30.000 inhabitants two centuries later. The demographic evolution changed completely after 1530. This was due to the departure of the Court of Margaret of Austria, the economic reversion and the Dutch Revolt (1566-1609). The population recovered during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it never exceeded 20.000 inhabitants until the end of the Ancien Regime. The investigation of one city should enable us to formulate more precise conclusions about the long term developments and to investigate different aspects of our subject. Of course, we will also make comparisons with other well studied cities in the Low Countries (i.e. Antwerp, Amsterdam, Gent, 's-Hertogenbosch and Zwolle) and look at the developments in other European regions.

Keywords:SOCIO-CULTURAL HISTORY, CIVIL SOCIETY

Disciplines:History