Abstract
The History of Brabant Unfolded. Die alder excellenste cronyke van Brabant and the Brabantine View of the Past in the Year 1500 Die alder excellenste cronyke van Brabant, an incunable published in Antwerp in 1498, was written by an anonymous compiler, and consists of two parts. The first parts contains
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the lives of saints and religious associated with Brabant. The second part contains the actual chronicle; here the history of the dukes and duchy of Brabant is described from the creation of the world to the end of the fifteenth century. This section includes a fold-out sheet of some two metres long on which the genealogies of the kings of France and the dukes of Brabant have been depicted. The genealogy also registers the names of a large number of saints, with special emphasis on saints from Brabant. This fold-out sheet, a visualisation of the history of Brabant and a summary of the chronicle as a whole, has been the starting-point for a study of the sense of history in Brabant in the year 1500 as expressed in the words of the compiler. The most striking of the significant emphases that the compiler introduced in the Brabantine view of history, is doubtlessly the extension of the history of Brabant with the lives of its saints. From the perspective of the compiler Brabant's history was shaped not only by its dynasty, but also by its saints and believers. An investigation of the fold-out sheet and the text of the chronicle shows that the compiler felt particularly sympathetic towards the French monarchy. It is shown that the dukes of Brabant have for many centuries been closely related to the high dynasty of the divinely anointed French kings. A striking divergence between the fold-out sheet and the chronicle text concerns Brabantine prehistory. In the chronicle the history of Brabant is told from Adam and Noah, but on the fold-out sheet the genealogy begins much later, not until the year 380 A.D., with a certain Ansises, the first Christian prince to rule over Brabant. The compiler does not want to depict the history of Brabant on the fold-out sheet until the arrival of an exclusively Christian dynasty. By preferring Christian Ansises as the founder of the ducal dynasty the compiler distinguishes himself from all other historiographers in Brabant. It appeared that the compiler attempts to bring his chronicle into line with the writing of the history of Brabant as it was practised in the second half of the fifteenth century in those monasteries in Brabant that belonged to the congregation of Windesheim. A painstaking reading of the chronicle reveals the likelihood that the author should be placed in these or in closely related monastic circles. Die cronyke may be characterized as conservative historiography in which a markedly spiritual-national consciousness is manifest. In the first appendix (on cd-rom) the text of the chronicle is made available in the form of a first transciption.
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