The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (61 page)

15
Wim de Clercq, Jan Dumolyn and Jelle
Haemers, ‘“Vivre noblement”: Material Culture and Élite Identity
in Late Medieval Flanders’,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
38,
1 (2007), pp. 1ff.

16
Letts,
Travels of Leo of
Rozmital
, pp. 45–7.

17
Belozerskaya,
Rethinking the
Renaissance
, pp. 151–4.

18
Charles Narrey (tr.),
Albrecht
Dürer à Venise et dans les Pays Bas
(Paris, 1866), p. 104 for
‘red’; p. 107 for price; p. 111 for Bruges; p. 117 for ‘colour of
lead’; on the ultramarine see Stan Hugue,
Albrecht Dürer: journal de
voyage aux Pays-Bas
(Paris, 2009), p. 79, for a fuller text. Dürer did not
pay cash, so the price is a bit subjective.

19
Filip Vermeylen, ‘The Colour of
Money: Dealing in Pigments in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp’, in J. O. Kirby
Atkinson (ed.),
European Trade in Painters’ Materials to 1700
(Leiden, 2010), pp. 356ff.

20
Margaret L. Koster, ‘Italy and
the North: A Florentine Perspective’, in Till-Holger Borchert,
The Age of
Van Eyck
(Bruges, 2002), p. 79.

21
Catherine Reynolds, ‘The
Function and Display of Netherlandish
Cloth Paintings’, in Caroline Villers (ed.),
The Fabric of Images: European Paintings on Textile Supports in the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
(London, 2000), p. 91.

22
Paula Nuttall, ‘Panni dipinti
di Fiandra: Netherlandish Painted Cloths in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, in
Villers,
Fabric of Images
, p. 109.

23
Il Riposo di Raffaello Borghini
 … (Florence, 1584), pp. 579–84;
Lucia Meoni,
La nascita dell’arazzeria medicea
(Florence, 2008), pp.
34, 78 for hunts; p. 27 for Medea; p. 82 for Time; p. 66 for Samuel.

24
Michael Baxandall,
‘Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-Century MS. of
De Viris
Illustribus
’,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes
27 (1964), p. 102.

25
Borghini,
Riposo di Raffaello
Borghini
, pp. 326–7.

26
Guicciardini’s Account of the Ancient Flemish School of Painting
(London, 1795), pp. 3–4.

27
Giovanna Sapori,
Fiamminghi nel
cantiere Italia 1560–1600
(Milan, 2007), p. 10 (author’s
translation).

28
Till-Holger Borchert and Paul
Huvenne, ‘Van Eyck and the Invention of Oil Painting: Artistic Merits in Their
Literary Mirror’, in Till-Holger Borchert,
The Age of Van Eyck: The
Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting 1430–1530
(Bruges,
2002), pp. 221, 225.

29
Faith Wallis,
Medieval Medicine:
A Reader
(Toronto, 2010), pp. 351–4.

30
Peter van den Brink, ‘The Art
of Copying’, in Peter van den Brink (ed.),
Brueghel Enterprises
(Maastricht, 2001), pp. 13ff.; p. 44 for grandmother.

31
Valentin Vazquez de Prada,
Lettres marchandes d’Anvers
(Paris, 1960), vol. I, p. 112, for
opened; pp. 124, 133 for credit; p. 132 for Ducci.

32
De Prada,
Lettres
marchandes
, vol. I, p. 19.

33
Sheilagh Ogilvie,
Institutions
and European Trade: Merchant Guilds 1000–1800
(Cambridge, 2011), pp.
368–9.

34
On the influence of the Bourse, see
Krista de Jonge, ‘Bâtiments publics à fonction économique à Anvers au XVIème
siècle: l’invention d’un type’, in Konrad Ottenheym, Monique
Chatenet and Krista de Jonge (eds.),
Public Buildings in Early Modern
Europe
(Turnhout, 2010), pp. 183ff.; on the siting of the Bourse, see
Jochen de Vylder, ‘The Grid and the Existing City’, in Piet Lombaerde
and Charles van den Heuvel (eds.),
Early Modern Urbanism and the Grid
(Turnhout, 2011); on
the Bourse and the
city, see Konrad Ottenheym and Krista de Jonge, ‘Civic Prestige: Building the
City 1580–1700’, in Konrad Ottenheym and Krista de Jonge (eds.),
Unity and
Discontinuity: Architectural Relationships between the Southern and Northern Low
Countries (1530–1700)
(Turnhout, 2007), pp. 232–4.

35
For the Alleynses and the structure
of art dealing, see Filip Vermeylen,
Painting for the Market
(Turnhout,
2003), esp. pp. 70–77.

36
De Prada,
Lettres
Marchandes
, vol. I, pp. 122–3.

37
Hernando de Frias Cevallos to Simon
Ruiz, 16 March 1564, in de Prada,
Lettres marchandes
, vol. II, pp.
11–12.

38
Frederic Schiller (tr. A. J. W.
Morrison),
History of the Revolt of the Netherlands
(New York, 1860), pp.
189–94.

39
G. D. Ramsay,
The Queen’s
Merchants and the Revolt of the Netherlands
(Manchester, 1986), pp.
183–90.

40
See Jonathan I. Israel,
The Dutch
Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806
(Oxford, 1995), for
excellent summaries of Antwerp’s fate, esp. pp. 185, 413–14.

41
The best source on Stevin is J. T.
Devresse and G. Vanden Berghe,
‘Magic is no magic’: The Wonderful
World of Simon Stevin
(Southampton, 2008).

42
Paul Arblaster,
Antwerp and the
World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of the Catholic
Reformation
(Leuven 2004).

43
For a discussion of the development
of the ‘fact’, see Barbara J. Shapiro,
A Culture of Fact: England
1550–1720
(Ithaca, 2000).

44
Frank Lestringant (ed.),
Le
Théâtre des Cruautés de Richard Verstegan
(Paris, 1995).

45
On Stevin’s international
influence, see Ron van Oers,
Dutch Town Planning Overseas during VOC and WIC
Rule 1600–1800
(Zutphen, 2000); for the notes on buildings, see Charles van
den Heuvel,
De huysbou
, a reconstruction of an unfinished treatise on
architecture, town planning and civil engineering by Simon Stevin (Amsterdam,
2005).

46
Xinru Liu,
Ancient India and
Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges
AD
1–600
(New
Delhi, 1988), pp. 8–11.

47
Jon Solomon, ‘The Apician
Sauce’, in John Wilkins, David Harvey and Mike Dobson (eds.),
Food in
Antiquity
(Exeter, 1995), p. 128n.9.

48
Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne
(eds.),
Francis Bacon: The New Organon
(Cambridge, 2000), p. 44, XLVIII,
for ‘unthinkable …’; p. 69, LXXXIV, for ‘disgrace to
mankind’.

A thousand years and a hundred kingdoms
is far beyond the competence of just one writer; which is why this book owes
everything to the help of others – to texts which set me thinking, to the people who
suggested, corrected, interpreted and encouraged, and to the institutions that made
the work possible. The problem now is: how to share any credit due without sharing
the blame, because the latter belongs to me alone.

I would never ask them to admit
paternity, but my ideas owe much to Stéphane Lebecq’s work on Frisia; to
Rosamond McKitterick’s studies of history, memory, writing and reading; to
James A. Brundage’s magisterial account of the start of the legal profession;
to Joel Kaye’s
Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century
; to
Judith M. Bennett’s work on plague and labour laws; to Tine de Moor and Jan
Luiten van Zanden on ‘girl power’; and Marina Belozerskaya’s
brilliantly revisionist view of Flanders in the Renaissance. They started me
thinking, but that is where their responsibility ends. From there on, I owe this
book also to the hundreds of specialists who make it possible to generalize, from
the editors of the
Monumenta Germaniae Historica
in the nineteenth century
to twenty-first-century archaeologists whose papers, monographs and reports gave me
raw material. Endnotes are nothing like enough to settle debts like these.

I am especially grateful to the people
without whose help I would have known less, made more mistakes and gone down many
more dead ends. I thank: Simon Bailey; Esther Banki; Rachel Boertjens; Gerhard
Cadee; John Carey; Alan Coates; Bernadette Cunningham; Pieterjan Deckers; Geir Atle
Ersland; Linn Kjos Falkenberg; Piet Gilissen; Rob van Ginkel; Matthew Goldish; Irene
Groeneweg; Gitte Hansen; Harald Hansen; Peter Henderikx; Joe Hillaby; Brian
Hillyard; Susan Hitch; Neil Jones; Ephraim Kanarfogel; Espen Karlsen; Willem Kuiper;
Rune Kyrkjebø; Carolyne Larrington; Moira Mackenzie; Martin Maw; Roy Meijer; Thomas
McErlean;
Bernard Meijlink; Liesebeth
Missel; Tore Nyberg; Aslaug Ommundsen; Hilde van Parys; Anna Petre; Marnix Pieters;
Michael Prestwich; Julian Reid; Anna Sander; Caroline van Santen; Dagfinn Skre;
Målfrid Krohn Sletten; Peter Doimi de Frankopan Subic; Filip Vermeylen; Ed van der
Vlist; Yvonne de Vroede; and Anne Winston-Allen.

The librarians of the University of
Amsterdam have treated me with such unfussy generosity for years that I cannot
imagine working without their help any more. I thank the Bodleian Library in Oxford,
the library of St John’s College, Oxford, the Warburg Institute of the
University of London and the Wellcome Library in London, the Openbare Bibliotheek in
Bruges, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague and the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France in Paris (not least for the inconvenient charm of working at the Richelieu
site). I owe much to the library of the University of Bergen, to the Special
Collections of St Andrew’s University, to the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin,
and to the Staatsbibliothek in Munich for the online version of the
Monumenta
Germaniae Historical
, which has made wonderfully accessible what used to be
dusty and time-consuming. David Rymill at the Hampshire Record Office and Malcolm
Boyns at the Warwickshire Record Office were very helpful. I thank the Alumni Office
of the University of Oxford for access to JSTOR. And the best of bookshops helped
enormously; I’m grateful to the wonderful Athenaeum and the knowledgeable men
at Architectura et Natura in Amsterdam, and the indispensable Oxbow Books in
Oxford.

I also needed more immediate help and I
could depend on the prodigious skill of Mary Boyle, who mined brilliantly for the
more obscure materials. Verity Allen helped greatly at the start.

The pictures in this book, in the order
they appear, are:
Vikings
from a 1130 ms. of the
Life of St
Edmund
, The Pierrepoint Morgan Library, copyright © Photo SCALA, Florence,
2014;
scribe
from the 1121
Liber Floridus
in Ghent
University Library;
finger counting
from a French collection on
computus
around 1100, copyright © The British Library Board;
court scene
from the 1480
Histoire de la Toison
d’Or
in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France;
images of
fishing
from Olaus Magnus:
Historia de gentibus
septentrionalibus
(Rome, 1555), the Bridgeman Art Library;
Hansa harbour
from the Hamburg Staatsarchiv, the 1497
Van
Schiprechte
;
road building
from Jean de Guise,
Chroniques de Hainault
, in the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique;
art-dealing
from a painting around 1590 by François Bunel II,
in the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague;
bathhouse
from
a 1470 edition of Valère Maxime,
Faits et dits mémorables
in the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France;
the sea monster
from a
thirteenth-century manuscript, MS Ashmole 1511, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the
toy sea monster
was made for an Antwerp parade and drawn for
Joannes Bochius,
Descriptio Publicae Gratulationis
(1594, also in the
Bodleian). I am very grateful to everyone – librarians and photographers alike – for
their help in making these images available; and to Huw Armstrong for his help in
the research.

Along the way my old Oxford college, St
John’s, gave me a room while I was digging in the Bodleian, and David and
Joyce Robinson were the kindest of hosts in Edinburgh. In Amsterdam, the people at
Résidence Le Coin must sometimes have wondered if I was ever going to leave, and
still they smiled; I thank Corina, Rik, Dimitri, Jesse and the others for their
kindness, and their coffee. My good friends Emma, Peter and Alfred Letley, Lynda
Myles, Sharon Churcher, Wesley van den Bos, Mickle O’Reilly and Penny Morley,
and Lidewijde Paris cheered me on, especially in the last stages when the
circumstances turned dark.

You might never have read this book
without the zest and attention of Venetia Butterfield at Viking in London, alongside
Jillian Taylor, who steered and nursed the book to publication, and Ellie Smith,
Mark Handsley and Emma Brown, whose care improved everything. The maps are the work
of the brilliant Phillip Green. I owe the cover to John Hamilton’s eye. The
index was made by Douglas Matthews. And the book might not have been begun, let
alone finished, without three men. David Godwin, my most humane and ruthless agent,
staged a resurrection for me; I am very grateful, but then David is becoming famous
for miracles. Will Hammond, who commissioned the book at Viking and guided it along
was clever, exact, supportive and properly sceptical about
any date I typed; I owe the book to all his enthusiasm
and his care. And my partner, John Holm, made the book possible because he makes my
life possible. I would mention the dogs, but I’m told it is now considered bad
form to thank dogs and professors on the same page …

London, 17 March 2014