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Keywords :
crafts, guilds, Luxemburg, Late Middle Ages; Network Analysis
Abstract :
[en] The PhD thesis seeks to explore the social structure of the craftsmen of the town of Luxembourg in the 14th and 15th centuries, employing a fourfold perspective: Based on the municipal account books, guild statutes, and the documents of local religious institutions, which contain information on the townspeople’s loans, it analyses the crafts’ institutional framework, their economic conditions, their individual public influence as well as their social relations.
The first part of the thesis examines the guilds of medieval Luxembourg and the different functions they fulfilled within urban society, more precisely: their handling of commercial regulations, of apprenticeship and female work, their religious and military activities as well as their political participation and cultural orientation.
Thereafter the financial condition of the individual trades is explored by evaluation of a tax list, the artisans’ activities on the local bond market and their investments in the rent of urban revenues.
The third chapter takes a closer look at craftsmen who came into prestigious positions in the town government. Apart from analysing their individual, social and professional background it also determines whether certain guilds provided more prestige and political influence than others. By comparing the situation before and after the year 1443, the chapter furthermore asks whether Philip of Burgundy’s conquest of the town and its subsequent integration into the Burgundian Netherlands led to a change in the guilds’ distribution of power.
The fourth and last part examines the social relations of Luxembourgian craftsmen. Through application of the method of Social Network Analysis on a dataset of hundreds of individuals it investigates the correlations between a person’s trade and their choice of neighbourhood or of marriage and business partners. Thus the research does not only contribute to the exploration of the social structure of a middle-sized town, but also to the mechanisms which came into effect in the formation of medieval urban societies.
