Drawing on a wealth of new source material from the Low Countries, this book offers a new approach to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period by providing an alternative interpretation to the predominantly Italo-centric perspective of the current literature, and its concomitant focus on style and on Vitruvian theory.

This collection of essays, the third in an integrated series of three and focused on the literacies of nuns in medieval Europe, brings together specialists working on diverse geographical areas to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts nuns read, wrote, and exchanged from the eighth to the mid-sixteenth centuries.

Through an in-depth analysis of humanist historiography from the Low Countries, this book demonstrates the crucial importance of the Middle Ages for a political rhetoric in which the self-presentation of the historian and the definition of their homeland played a key role.