Innovation and Medieval Communities

The creation of new things and the destruction of old things is a principle of capitalism and apparently well known to us. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter expressed this in the formula of "creative destruction". In this way, destruction is not a defect of market activity, but the necessary consequence of something new coming into being. If we accept this logic, which contrasts every general gain with a concrete loss, as one of the contradictions of the capitalist economy, well studied for the 19th and 20th centuries, we must admit that medieval culture also demonstrated its mastery of the art of the paradox when the question of innovation is raised. Indeed, dynamics of the relationship between old and new are not, by the focus on technical and industrial progress or digital change, specific to modernity and postmodernity. Cultural change characterises all cultures, although the characteristics and perceptions differ. This is particularly true for times of cultural change, which must not be reduced too quickly to the epochal change of Antiquity-Middle Ages-Modern Times. The European Middle Ages between 13^th and 15^th century exhibits such dynamics of old and new and therefore offers the possibility of tracing them analytically. In this context, the long-held image of an epoch in which all change was slowed down or prevented can be rejected. On focusing on problem solution and conflicts, the studies gathered in this collective book provide a variety of strategies which can be qualified as new on the basis of the use of reflections, materiality, technical solutions, sciences or innovative methods. Different combinations are conceivable, from the new as an impulse for change, to the use of the new to preserve the old state, and even to the rejection of the new. In this way, by looking through the mirror of the past, this book also contributes to a differentiated view of innovation in our contemporary societies.

Introduction

Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Lille University, IRHiS) & Nils Bock (Münster University)

Part 1. Mastering Innovation: Communities and Individuals

Municipal law in the monastery. On becoming and being citizens in the later Middle Ages.

Anne Diekjobst (Kiel University CAU)

Burghers’ reactions to new town books in Southwestern Germany

in the Late Middle Ages.

Olivier Richard (Fribourg University)

Innovation and ways of relating to time in memory writings by German townspeople at the dawn of the Early Modern Period.

Aude-Marie Certin (Haute Alsace University)

Innovation in the Great Municipal Charter of Paris (1416)

Boris Bove (Rouen-Normandie University)

Part 2. Technological innovation at the heart of the circulation of knowledge and political intentions

Innovations catalysed by the papal court and the reconfiguration of local communities in and around early 14th-century Avignon.

Valérie Theis (ENS Ulm, Paris)

The dukes of Burgundy’s Trésor de l’Épargne and reactions to it within princely administration.

Rudi Beaulant (Franche-Comté University)

Technological innovation, social identities and the Dynastic State. Gunpowder Artillery in the Burgundian Polity (late 14^th- early 16^th c.)

Michael Depreter (University of Oxford)

Innovation and migration: The Economic impact of immigrant craftspeople in Late Medieval England

Bart Lambert (Vrije University of Brussels)

Social incentives for innovation in Flemish artistic workshops: Social Network Analysis in late medieval art production

Joannes Van den Maagdenberg (UGent-ULB-Fondation Périer-d’Ieteren)

Plague Policies in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries: Duplication, adaptation and Integration.

Claire Weeda (Leiden University)

Part 3. Think different: pioneering ideas from artists and scholars

Ecclesiological Innovations in the days of the Reform Councils of the Fifteenth-Century.

Bénédicte Sère (Paris Nanterre University)

Mediaeval sacred song: creative impulses and innovation in repertoire, musical notation and transmission.

Kristin Hoefener (University Nova of Lisbon, Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical)

"A desire to see more clearly": theological device and sociological innovation of scholars in thirteenth-fifteenth centuries

Antoine Destemberg (Artois University)

Van Eyck’s Fictive Frames and Reinventions of Memorialisation

Andrew Murray (The Open University)