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The early modern book economy thrived on a system of bartering, swapping printed sheets for printed sheets or other valuable bookish material. Widely discussed as Tauschhandel in the context of the Frankfurt Book Fair, this practice continued to flourish in the Low Countries during the seventeenth century as the fair's popularity declined. This article examines the bartering practices between the Officina Plantiniana in the city of Antwerp, the best-documented print business of the handpress era, and merchants and booksellers in its northern neighbour Amsterdam. While the output of the Plantin presses is well studied, its input, including maps, lottery tickets, reams of high-quality French and Dutch paper, and even luxury objects such as sugar and globes, has gone unrecognised. Ultimately, I argue that Dutch sellers were motivated to barter with the Officina by their superior access to books, paper, and other luxury goods, and their robust professional and personal networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gin is far more than just a juniper-flavored alcoholic beverage distilled or infused with botanicals. This spirit boasts an incredibly rich (albeit tumultuous) cultural and social history, and its identity has shifted considerably over the centuries. Born as a medical treatment in the eleventh century, rising in popularity, especially in the Low Countries and in Germany, between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and held up as a material signifier of Englishness by the end of the seventeenth century, gin spawned a plague in England as the country transitioned to an era of modernization. It subsequently evolved from a symbol of English hegemony during colonialism to the spirit that is shaping the contemporary global drinking culture more than any other today. In this essay, we retrace the history of gin from the beginning to the present and recount how this spirit became a marketplace icon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution offers a series of thoughts on new directions which social and economic history in the Low Countries m ight take. The field faces im portant challenges: source digitization, automatic handwriting recognition and digital methods of analysis. Somewhat ironically, social and economic history has received renewed interest afterthe 2008 financial and economic crisis.This crisis has fuelled research into inequality and capitalism and has forced economics as a discipline to question itself. One answer to the crisis of economics is to include more economic history. This essay emphasizes the fact that social and economic history is a house with many rooms and explicitly encourages social and economic historians to be inspired by other scholars, whetherthey be other historians or social scientists. One way to go forward m ight be the inclusion of insights from behavioral economics and the history of emotions which could lead to a fuller and more realistic analysis of the decisions individual historical actors took. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new dataset and w eb application 'Coin p roduction in th e Low Countries: fo u rteenth century to the present' provides scholars w ith user-friendly access to m intm asters'accounts going back to th e M iddle Ages. They give insight in to the productio n o f legal tender (w ithin the Low C ountries and occasionally elsewhere as well), and provide access to such variables as regional p roduction figures and coin d e ¬ nom inations. This data article provides an in tro d u ctio n to the sources as w ell as the dataset, and suggests how th e latter m ig h t co n trib u te to new research into long-run econom ic and social history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is there new to say on the Low Countries and transatlantic relations during the Cold War? How do recent trends in Cold War research open up uncharted areas to explore these relations from new angles and perspectives? With attention shifting to cultural, global, transnational and multi-centric approaches to the international history of the twentieth century, it would seem that the transatlantic is long passé as a primary frame of reference. As the first special issue in this series claimed (The Low Countries and Eastern Europe during the Cold War), existing scholarship on the Benelux nations has tended to emphasise the ‘loyal ally’ thesis, the uniqueness of small states among larger powers and the importance of traditional diplomacy. With this special issue, a set of articles has been brought together that open up new ways to consider the changing relations both within and between the Benelux nations and their Western allies during the Cold War. As a starting point, it takes the dual approach of the Benelux nations as both actors in the Cold War and as sites where Cold War dynamics were played out and influenced local political and social outcomes. By applying such a structure-agency approach, new perspectives on the importance of the Cold War for Benelux history, and the relevance of the Benelux for Cold War history, can be mapped out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The essay discusses the history of social status and nobility in Flanders by considering fifteenth-century record keeping, focusing on the circa 1480 manuscript produced by John, lord of Dadizele, who lived near the towns of Ypres and Courtrai. The manuscript collected documents relevant to the author's autobiography and genealogy and detailed circumstances related to his activities as a military leader, landowner and noble, and courtier.

From the late middle ages onwards, many regions of western Europe experienced heightened inequality in the distribution of land via consolidation of property in the hands of interest groups. What happened to those unfortunate rural people who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? Commonly a connection has been drawn between land accumulation and population decline or stagnation in the countryside, yet this outcome was not always inevitable, as demonstrated in this article. While land consolidation was sometimes the motor setting in motion outward migration to the cities, for example, this comparative study shows that some rural societies were better 'set up' to retain their landless populations than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the role that urbanization and plague may have played in changes in life expectancy amongst artists in the Low Countries who were born between 1450 and 1909. Artists can be considered to be representative of a middle-class population living mostly in urban areas. The dataset was constructed using biographical information collected by the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague, the Netherlands. As early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, life expectancy at age 20 amongst the artists had reached 40 years. After a substantial decline in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, when plague hit the region, life expectancy at age 20 began to rise again, and this upward trend accelerated after 1850. The life expectancy of female artists commonly exceeded that of males, and sculptors had better survival prospects than painters. In comparison with elite groups in the Low Countries and elsewhere in Europe, life expectancy amongst the artists was rather high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quantification of material culture can make a significant contribution to the answering of social and behavioural questions. However, especially in continental Europe, this aspect of pottery studies remains understudied. In the following article, a status quaestionis of the quantification of post-medieval ceramics in the Low Countries is given. The author hopes to stimulate methodological and theoretical debate by comparing several available methods, using an 18th-century deposit from the abbey at Clairefontaine, Belgium. In so doing, some important insights are obtained into the relative merits of different quantification systems, and recommendations are made for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since Putnam (2000) made social capital a concept that should be mourned for its decline in the USA, researchers and policy makers in some western countries have adopted it as a solution to what they believe to be the failed practices of multiculturalism. Instead of preserving their individual cultures and traditions, critics would have them build social capital by bridging to people and institutions in their new countries and adopt the ‘shared values’ of the host countries and become ‘integrated’. This study, based on a study conducted in the Netherlands in 2006, and supplemented with survey findings from Flanders at the same time, examines whether this perspective is accurate, focusing on women migrants who live in the Low Countries (Netherlands and Flanders in Belgium), of the networks they have built or not and the reasons for that, and of the role of media and the internet in that process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]