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The fair face of Flanders
illustrated, cover not so good / omslag onfris / / Belgian history / Engels / English / Anglais / Englisch / hard cover / dust jacket / 16 x 24 cm / 284 .pp /
- GenresNonfiction
284 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1969
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April 28, 2020Earnest and well intentioned, but to me this book felt old fashioned particularly for 1969 . Although in the introduction Carson takes a lyrical tour of Flanders her book is a limping walk through the history of the region, at first concentrating on the medieval county of Flanders then adding to that some scraps about neighbouring Brabant before excitedly considering all of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century and finally in her last chapter discussing Belgian history but with a focus on the Dutch speaking inhabitants. The fair face of Flanders then is a look at its wrinkles and laughter lines, with an account of how its nose got broken and when several teeth were knocked out. If I was giving star ratings, I'd put it in the two to three star range, the kind of thing that a school might give out on prize giving days (assuming schools still do things like that).
Curiously to my mind the author assumes near zero knowledge of the history but seems to assume that cultural figures need no introduction or context. So when she mentions a writer or an artist or a composer she does not give their dates, nor suggest a work that they are famous for or even mention a place that they are closely associated with . There is a section on late medieval and renaissance culture (pp. 140-155) but aside from that her history is almost entirely an old fashioned kind, great men and battles, oddly there are no beguines in this book though they were a distinctive part of medieval religious life in the low countries (and the Rhineland to some extent). I found it oddly statist too - while in her introduction she points out the pride that everybody in Flanders has for their native topolect and locality, in her history she praises the opposite - any move to centralisation and all destruction of local institutions . There is the occasional lovely detail for instance that the word Borse derives from the family of Van der Beurse whose Bruges house was a lodging and meeting place for foreign merchants who struck deals there (p.93) in the medieval period.
She's a bit over wrought to my mind - eg the architects optimism and broadmindedness evidenced in late Gothic buildings she says leads me to think 'come on Carson, surely some of them were pessimistic and narrow minded', but perhaps she liked to keep things simple. My sense was that she was writing as a non-specialist and that she was strongly derivative, the section on Charles V, Phillip II , and William of Orange seemed to me to draw suspiciously strongly on Wedgwoods's 1944 William the Silent.
Her English very odd in places - eg mysterious chip potatoes (p.7), which left me wondering when the more familiar usage of 'chips' first occurred in English, after some thought I remembered at least one use of chips in The Road to Wigan Pier, which leaves me wondering if the book had been translated into English, if it suffered from an opinionated but ignorant editor , or if Carson herself was just weird. From her surname I thought that maybe she was from Ulster , but ever correct Wikipeadia says that she was born near Plymouth, no doubt they speak funny down there in the dim and distant deep far west, but I had never expected that they might habitually say Embarras du choix rather than an embarrassment of choice . Names are partially anglicised too so we get John van Eyck ( but not John from Eyck).
She hacks up her subject into five parts, an introduction, 9th century to 1384 precisely, 1384 to 1555 , 1555 to 1794 , and 1794 to the date of publication.
At first I was amused by her periodisation , I felt that a more normal approach to the modern period might be to start from the end of WWII, or maybe WWI, possibly even the establishment of Belgium in 1830, but that last chapter won me over and I found it the best of the whole book and it raised my opinion of the volume - a four star chapter. It felt to me quite carefully neutral, at least on issues of language and collaboration, but left me with a feeling of the depth, even the historical depth of aggrieved feelings between the French and Dutch speaking communities, arguably Carson might have made more of the role of popular culture in developing and entrenching regional differences but perhaps I mentioned Carson's approach is a bit old fashioned - ain't no popular culture here.
Curiously to my mind the author assumes near zero knowledge of the history but seems to assume that cultural figures need no introduction or context. So when she mentions a writer or an artist or a composer she does not give their dates, nor suggest a work that they are famous for or even mention a place that they are closely associated with . There is a section on late medieval and renaissance culture (pp. 140-155) but aside from that her history is almost entirely an old fashioned kind, great men and battles, oddly there are no beguines in this book though they were a distinctive part of medieval religious life in the low countries (and the Rhineland to some extent). I found it oddly statist too - while in her introduction she points out the pride that everybody in Flanders has for their native topolect and locality, in her history she praises the opposite - any move to centralisation and all destruction of local institutions . There is the occasional lovely detail for instance that the word Borse derives from the family of Van der Beurse whose Bruges house was a lodging and meeting place for foreign merchants who struck deals there (p.93) in the medieval period.
She's a bit over wrought to my mind - eg the architects optimism and broadmindedness evidenced in late Gothic buildings she says leads me to think 'come on Carson, surely some of them were pessimistic and narrow minded', but perhaps she liked to keep things simple. My sense was that she was writing as a non-specialist and that she was strongly derivative, the section on Charles V, Phillip II , and William of Orange seemed to me to draw suspiciously strongly on Wedgwoods's 1944 William the Silent.
Her English very odd in places - eg mysterious chip potatoes (p.7), which left me wondering when the more familiar usage of 'chips' first occurred in English, after some thought I remembered at least one use of chips in The Road to Wigan Pier, which leaves me wondering if the book had been translated into English, if it suffered from an opinionated but ignorant editor , or if Carson herself was just weird. From her surname I thought that maybe she was from Ulster , but ever correct Wikipeadia says that she was born near Plymouth, no doubt they speak funny down there in the dim and distant deep far west, but I had never expected that they might habitually say Embarras du choix rather than an embarrassment of choice . Names are partially anglicised too so we get John van Eyck ( but not John from Eyck).
She hacks up her subject into five parts, an introduction, 9th century to 1384 precisely, 1384 to 1555 , 1555 to 1794 , and 1794 to the date of publication.
At first I was amused by her periodisation , I felt that a more normal approach to the modern period might be to start from the end of WWII, or maybe WWI, possibly even the establishment of Belgium in 1830, but that last chapter won me over and I found it the best of the whole book and it raised my opinion of the volume - a four star chapter. It felt to me quite carefully neutral, at least on issues of language and collaboration, but left me with a feeling of the depth, even the historical depth of aggrieved feelings between the French and Dutch speaking communities, arguably Carson might have made more of the role of popular culture in developing and entrenching regional differences but perhaps I mentioned Carson's approach is a bit old fashioned - ain't no popular culture here.
July 15, 2020
The first part of the book is much more elaborate than the second half. You already need a good background knowledge of the history of Flanders to keep up with all the names and family links that play an important role up until the Habsburg period.
May 2, 2025
Zeer vlot geschreven algemene geschiedenis van Vlaanderen. Een beetje verouderd en een beetje te veel gefocust op politieke ontwikkelingen, maar nog steeds uitstekende lectuur. Ook mooi door de keuze om veel fotomateriaal in te voegen!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews