This article charts the long-term development of seigneurial governance within the principality of Guelders in the Low Countries. Proceeding from four quantitative cross-sections (c. 1325, 1475, 1540, 1570) of seigneurial lordships, the conclusion is that seigneurial governance remained stable in late medieval Guelders. The central argument is that this persistence of seigneurial governance was an effect of active collaboration between princely administrations, lords, and local communities. Together, the princely government and seigneuries of Guelders formed an integrated, yet polycentric, state. The article thereby challenges the narrative of progressive state centralisation that predominates in the historiography of pre-modern state formation.

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I would like to thank my colleagues at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. Special thanks goes out to Iason Jongepier and GIStorical Antwerp II (University of Antwerp/Hercules Foundation). I also wish to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments. Funds This article was written as part of a project financed by The Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO), entitled The town in the countryside. Textile production and town-countryside relations in the Flemish Westland (15th-16th centuries), supervised by professors Tim Soens and Peter Stabel at the University of Antwerp. The final draft was completed while working on the project STATE-Lordship and the Rise of the State in Western Europe, 1300-1600, funded by the European Research Council. Biography Jim van der Meulen recently finished his PhD at the University of Antwerp in late 2017, which focussed on the interaction between town and countryside in western Flanders in the late Middle Ages. He is currently affiliated with a project at Ghent University as a post-doctoral researcher, about state formation and seigneurial lordship in the duchy of Guelders.

City's institutions, economy and wealth were not destroyed by the disaster. However, the financial aspects of the Fire and specifically the Corporation's defaulting on its debt have not been fully examined yet. The late seventeenth century is considered to be a period in which sovereigns, city-states and others experimented with new instruments of public credit to support their strategies of borrowing, but as the authors show, the Corporation drew on well-established instruments, private, short-term, interest-bearing deposits, to meet the financial challenges of rebuilding their part of the City. The Great Fire placed a heavy burden on the Corporation already known for its deep financial troubles. Because it did not adapt to new financial opportunities and relied on its reputation based on meeting repayments, the financial consequences for this urban institution were dramatic.

In this essay, we call for a new approach to representative assemblies of early modern Europe and beyond. While there are vast national historiographies on their legal constitutional structure, little effort has been made to reconstruct the cultural and transnational dimension of such bodies, a phenomenon we describe as 'parliamentary culture'. We argue that there is much to be gained from an investigation of the culture surrounding these bodies-how they influenced and shaped political behaviour and were shaped by it, and how they were embedded into the thought of their time and period-and from seeing them as part of a set of common European traditions of political negotiation and consent. We suggest an interdisciplinary and collaborative agenda for that investigation that might lead beyond Europe too, into some of its colonies, where Europeans also encountered other traditions of negotiated discussion and agreement.