Antwerp in the Renaissance

Edited by Bruno Blonde Edited by Jeroen Puttevils

Book cover: Antwerp in the Renaissance

Extent: 350 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Early Modern & Renaissance Studies

Series: Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)

Series volume number: 49

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(October 2020)

ISBN: 9782503588339

Price: $125.00

In stock

Antwerp in the Renaissance offers new research results and fresh perspectives on the economic, cultural, and social history of the Antwerp metropolis in the sixteenth century.


This book engages with Antwerp in the Renaissance. Bringing together several specialists of sixteenth-century Antwerp, it offers new research results and fresh perspectives on the economic, cultural and social history of the metropolis in the sixteenth century. Recurrent themes are the creative ways in which the Italian renaissance was translated in the Antwerp context. Imperfect imitation often resulted from the specific social context in which the renaissance was translated: Antwerp was a metropolis marked by a strong commercial ideology, a high level affluence and social inequality, but also by the presence of large and strong middling layers, which contributed to the city’s ‘bourgeois’ character. The growth of the Antwerp market was remarkable: in no time the city gained metropolitan status. This book does a good job in showing how quite a few of the Antwerp ‘achievements’ did result from the absence of ‘existing structures’ and ‘examples’. Moreover, the city and its culture were given shape by the many frictions, and uncertainties that came along with rapid urban growth and religious turmoil.

  • Edited by Bruno Blonde
  • Edited by Jeroen Puttevils