Hello,
Recently I've gone on a Wikipedia binge on the history of the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th century; the Burgundian Netherlands and the Spanish Netherlands up until the Fall of Antwerp.
I'm especially fascinated by the culture that developed in booming cities such as Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent, with the various celebrated painters from Jan Van Eyck to Bruegel the Elder, the Franco-Flemish school of composers, the chambers of rhetoric that sprung up in the big cities during the 15th century, the scientific and philosophical exploits of Erasmus, Vesalius, Mercator etc. And I'm especially interested in the socio-economic conditions that made this possible: booming trade, the life of the urban merchant class, courtly patronage etc. But I would also be interested in the life of the common folk, folk mythology and stories etc.
Can anyone recommend a good history book on this particular area and period? Doesn't matter if it's in Dutch, English or even French. (And if there's good historical fiction in this particular setting, I'd like to hear it!)
If you have access to an academic library, start with Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance: Burgundian Arts Across Europe. She dives into the material culture world of the late medieval Low Countries, showing that the classical revival "Renaissance" in Italy was a compartmentalized phenomenon; the major and more influential cultural swelling of the time was a deeply medieval blossoming of arts, music, literature, and court culture emanating from Burgundy.
(And it's much more fun and nice to read than something like Nijsten's In the Shadow of Burgundy, which has the added bonus of costing $100)
Johann Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages also spends a good deal of time in Burgundy, and would be quite affordable. The big caveat here is that the book is OLD, like 1919 old. Huizinga had the insight already of late medieval culture as spiraling and intensifying what had come before, rather than stagnating and fading ("autumn" as in a bountiful harvest), and the book offers a lot of detail on that culture. What Huizinga doesn't bring is an understanding of the meaning or reason for this; he sees it ultimately as a problem without a solution, too heavy a focus on the material and physical rather than ideas and forward motion. (Caroline Walker Bynum's Christian Materiality is, in essence, the scholarly explanation for everything Huizinga writes about in Autumn, but it's not really focused on Burgundy).
One book that might interest you is John Van Engen's Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Late Middle Ages. The Devotio moderna was an epoch-marking religious movement emanating from the Low Countries from the 1380s; why I think you'll be interested in this particular book is how Van Engen roots Modern Devout spirituality and institutional growth in Dutch and Low German urban social and economic conditions.
Martha Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550, is a more focused socio-economic study that comes from the perspective of women/marriage/family at the heart of the story of the Low Countries' legal transformation in light of its increasingly cosmopolitan economy.
Juliet Barker and Richard Barber's Medieval Tournaments, thanks to the distribution of the sources they use (and which existing sources are particularly rich, it must be said), also gives some great insight into the goings-on of Burgundian court culture.