At Home in Renaissance Bruges: Connecting Objects, People and Domestic Spaces in a Sixteenth-Century City

Despite the rapid growth of material culture studies over the past decades, the history of the domestic interior in pre-modern Europe has been explored only to a limited degree. Renaissance Italy and the Golden-Age Dutch Republic are relatively well-mapped islands in this unknown ocean, but any venture outside of these regions is almost by default a welcome addition to our knowledge. This was true for Renata Ago’s analysis of inventories from seventeenth-century Rome in Gusto for Things in 2013, and it is again for Julie De Groot’s newly published At Home in Renaissance Bruges.1 In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the southern Netherlands were a wealthy urbanized area and a center of art and culture, yet compared to Italy in the same period, little has been published about the material accoutrements of people’s daily lives. Like Ago’s book, De Groot’s is based on inventories, and again like Ago’s, it focuses not on the well-researched households of the elite, but on those of the middling classes of craftsmen, functionaries, and merchants. Exceptionally, however, De Groot has not chosen a city in its glorious heyday as her subject, but one that was in a slow state of decline. While once a crucial node in the European trade network, Bruges had lost its position to Antwerp by 1500. As De Groot shows, the resulting economic downturn was not as severe as past scholarship assumed, but there was nevertheless a gradual decrease of industry and trade, a loss of international connections, and an exodus of merchants and skilled artisans, including painters. Thus, At Home in Renaissance Bruges allows an unusual peek into the homes of a city that was still of substance but had effectively been reduced to a middling position in its own right, following the fashions of Antwerp rather than setting trends for others.