Abstract:The Royal Library of Belgium holds three peculiar cityscapes of the city of Mechelen that have not been studied in any detail before. They show the city in two of its most distressful moments: the Spanish (1572) and English (1580) furies, both gruesome episodes in the Dutch Revolt. The present article is a first attempt to place the cityscapes in a wider context. It provides an overview of the history of the city of Mechelen in the late sixteenth century and then moves on to a closer study of the cityscapes in question. By looking at contemporary sources of a similar nature (cartography, printed depictions of the Revolt) and by sketching the outlines of the contexts in which these sources were produced and circulated, it hopes to provide new insight into the cityscapes under scrutiny, as well as to the function of similar sources in the post-Revolt Low Countries.

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Because of an almost exclusive attention to literature in print, early modern manuscripts have until now failed to attract the scholarly attention they deserve. Literary historians of the Early Modern period have only very recently turned to manuscripts, studying for example how they functioned within circles of collective readership (e.g. rhetoricians), how they materialise social networks (e.g. alba amicorum), or provide opportunity to appropriate and alter canonical texts for individual audiences (e.g. chronicles). A genre that so far has not attracted as much attention in Dutch scholarship as it has abroad, is theatre. There are some individual case studies on theatre manuscripts from the Early Modern period, and theatre texts preserved in manuscript have been edited, but so far, no one has questioned the role of manuscript as a medium in early modern theatre practice. Working towards a typology of early modern Dutch theatre manuscripts, this contribution is the first comprehensive attempt to chart various types of codices with Dutch theatre texts, and their respective functions and contexts of usage. The analysis is based on theatre material preserved in the Royal Library of Belgium, but has implications for theatre manuscripts generally, and for our understanding of theatre practice in the Early Modern period, especially in the southern Low Countries. INTRODUCTION: EARLY MODERN MANUSCRIPTS When asked what they imagine a 'manuscript' to be, people will either think of the lavishly illustrated handwritten codices of the Middle Ages, or of modern texts intended to be printed-preliminary drafts, so to speak, that were often discarded when the text acquired its 'definitive' form, in print. In the common imagination, the printing press seems to have wiped out the manuscript as a medium for literary expression. To a certain extent, this harsh divide between a literary world before and after the general availability of printing, persists also in scholarship. While we are very well aware of the wealth of medieval manuscripts preserved in institutional collections, through catalogues and online directories, and while initiatives to disclose printed heritage are abound, there is still a lot of work to be done on © FHG Gold Open Access-Creative Commons CC 4.0: BY-NC license johanna ferket & bram caers 8

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The Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels is the custodian of two intriguing fifteenthcentury manuscripts that contain part of the fourteenth-century Brabantine chronicle Brabantsche yeesten, by the Antwerp council clerk Jan van Boendale (IV 684 and IV 685). One of them contains no less than 69 illuminations, while the other was obviously intended to be illustrated in the same way, but never was. They are the only medieval manuscript version of the chronicle to ever have been illustrated, making them popular among medievalistst studying the Duchy of Brabant. Surprisingly, very little scholarly work has been done on the illuminations as such, and the manuscript context in which they are found. We also see that a handful of illustrations return time and again in scholarly publications, while others are less known. Now that the Library has digitised the manuscripts and made them available online, we provide an updated description and an annotated list of illustrations, with an index of persons and places depicted. We hope to provide scholars easier access to this rich collection of illustrations, which is of interest not only to medievalistst studying Brabant, but to medievalists studying western Europe generally.