Beyond the façade Town halls, publicity, and urban society in the fifteenth-century Low Countries

Town halls are well-known remnants of late medieval urban society. Research has often focused on the buildings’ exteriors, and their expression of the cities’ autonomy and economic prosperity. Yet less was known about the daily usage of the buildings and only scarce attention has been paid to the voices and acts of urban inhabitants inside these buildings.
My research looks behind town hall façades and presents a social history of these buildings, in particular of those in fifteenth-century Aalst, Ghent, Gouda, Leiden and Haarlem. It shows how town halls were busy and multifunctional public spaces – housing urban governance, public services, and the urban law court – frequently visited by different people. There, the municipalities communicated to urban society, and vice versa. Publicity was a key aspect in the shaping of town halls’ material and social environments. Magistrates tried to regulate communication flows, access, and behaviour, in order to control legal and political procedures, and thus their legitimacy. Other urban dwellers, with their own strategies and interests, challenged these boundaries.
This research deploys a micro-spatial and multidisciplinary perspective. It focuses on specific spaces and interaction within and analyses e.g. city accounts, court records, as well as paintings. The project shows how the usage, publicity and symbolic meaning of town halls was negotiated by many people, and thus represented the social, legal and political values of late medieval urban society as whole.