Political Ideology and the Rewriting of History in Fifteenth-Century Flanders

Medieval views on rulers from the past were often politically instrumentalised in the service of contemporary interests. In the recent historiography on medieval Flanders, the reconstruction of how ‘historical truth’ changed over time to cater for topical needs has primarily been examined from the perspective of ‘social’ or ‘communicative’ memories, which were orally transmitted over a short period of time. This line of research followed the dominant ‘communicative memory’ – paradigm. However, historians have paid far less systematic attention to the question how urban elites and state officia... Mehr ...