THE MAKE-UP OF THE CITIES

The medieval Low Countries (roughly what is now Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and northern France) played an essential role in the transition from agrarian societies to the predominantly urban world we live in today. Cities in this area developed earlier and had more impact on political, economic and social transformations than urban centres in most other parts of Europe. Scholars worldwide have studied medieval urban life in this area since the 19^th century, but have failed to answer questions about some of its most crucial aspects, largely because of a tradition of working in isolated disciplines on the same problematic datasets. The earlier Make-Up of the City project demonstrated that we can come to new insights into the Low Countries’ urban past by adopting a transdisciplinary ‘science of the past’ approach. Its focus on one medieval city, however, raised questions about the representativeness of its findings.

The new Make-Up of the Cities project explores the diversity of the urban experience in the Low Countries, broadening the scope from three large cities (Ieper, Brugge, and Gent) and two smaller towns (Nieuwpoort and Poperinge). The project team, made up of geochemists, archaeologists, human anatomy specialists, and historians at VUB, will draw on the macroscopic osteological study of the skeletal remains of city-dwellers to revisit historical and archaeological assumptions about life in medieval cities, compare present-day health patterns with historical ones, and design methodologies suited for tackling future transdisciplinary studies.