International Solidarity in the Low Countries during the Twentieth Century. New Perspectives and Themes Ed. by Kim Christiaens, John Nieuwenhuys, and Charel Roemer. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2020. vii, 320 pp. Ill. € 104.95. (E-book: € 104.95.)

Abstract

and prices in the grain markets. Instead, the author seems content to point out how, in the first half of the sixteenth century, this type of insurgency increased in frequency and intensity compared to his previous late medieval survey. The arithmetic balance between convergences and differences from late medieval popular protests seems to favour the former (p. 177). Cities continued to be the main site of revolts, and their leaders continued to be from popular or at least nonaristocratic backgrounds. The goal of most of the protests was not religious but political: to obtain a hearing or even representation in order to influence the financial, economic, and management decisions of the city, with particular regard to the hegemonic role of the nobility, the management of taxes, and food resources. This was sometimes at the cost of invoking the intervention of foreign powers and the enemy. Women and the merchant class played a new and more important role there, and protests were more keenly felt and conducted with greater awareness and strategic capacity. Compared to the premodern model of popular protest drawn by academics, according to which popular uprisings before the nineteenth century were almost always caused by subsistence crises, had leaders who came from the upper classes, and resulted exclusively in failure, Cohn identifies a significantly higher degree of political awareness, strategic autonomy, and success. The author’s final chapter is likely to be the one most debated; it is one with which I substantially agree. The underlying instance of the popular protests in the halfcentury of the Italian wars reveals a perhaps only barely conscious demand for the enlargement of power, through which they revived “the ideals and democratic practices of the communal period”. The growth of aristocratic regimes in this period nullified any possibility of realizing such ideals, yet the ideas of broader political representativeness and the morality of social and political equality, thanks in part to these protests, continued to work their way deep into European societies. They were not an invention of the nineteenth century, and its antecedents should not be sought solely in the age of revolutions.