Written by one of the most distinguished historians of medieval Europe, this volume is important for four reasons. First, it brings together and presents in a coherent, wide-ranging argument a great deal of the recent research on the southern Netherlands by French, Dutch, Belgian and German scholars; some of this work has been hidden in local or regional publications. Secondly, the book mobilizes the discoveries and insights not just of a diversity of historians (political, religious and agrarian as well as urban), but of archaeologists and numismatists. This gives a methodological richness to the study and puts it at the forefront of writing in the field. Thirdly, Professor Verhulst offers a powerful critique of much of the earlier writing on the rise of European cities in the high Middle Ages. In particular, the influential views of Henri Pirenne, a previous professor at Ghent, are finally given a decent funeral. Rather than being the flagship of European long-distance trade, as Pirenne argued, the major towns of the southern Low Countries had a much more complex evolution. Enjoying only limited continuity from the Roman era, their upsurge from the ninth century owed much to the patronage of increasingly buoyant abbeys and churches. In the next century there was the further stimulus provided by the backing of the Count of Flanders and by the breakdown of the manorial system. Growing regional market activity and the drift of industrial crafts to towns provided a springboard for the surge of long-distance trade.

The fourth reason for the importance of this book is that it focuses on one of the two most developed and successful urban networks in medieval Europe – along with that of northern Italy.