"Dat Arnemuden sal wesen een stadt.": Stadsstichting en stadswording in de zestiende eeuw

Abstract

Summary of the PhD thesis “‘That Arnemuden shall be a city’. The foundation of cities and urban development in the sixteenth century” From the sixteenth century onwards a new thinking emerged on the ideal city and civic community. Increasingly, cities were designed consciously with the goal to enhance prestige and create prosperity. This process of bringing into practice ideas about the ideal city, can be reconstructed in great detail from the surviving city archives of the port town of Arnemuiden in the Dutch province of Zeeland. The place was incorporated as a city by William of Orange in 1574. This small city provides an ideal case for an in-depth study of the process of ‘making of a city’ in early modern Europe. This PhD thesis analyses the political, economic, social-cultural and geographic aspects of the making of early modern cities using a wide variety of written, visual, surviving artifacts and archeological sources. On the basis of this in-depth study of the available information for the city of Arnemuiden, a model was developed that represents the phases and steps through which a place could become a respected city. This model can now be applied to the further study of city formation and urban development in the Low Countries from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries.