The idea of ‘the Renaissance’ covers a whole cluster of great European transitions and revolutions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: the great advances of art and learning in Italy, the scientific revolutions from Copernicus to Galileo, the Turkish conquest of Byzantium, Columbus's successful crossing of the Atlantic, the invention of movable type printing, the various initiatives towards an anti-papal reformation of Western Christianity from Jan Hus to Martin Luther. All these are loosely grouped around the vague but indispensable concept of a European Renaissance. That term evokes not just progress or even revolutionary innovation but rediscovery: a rebirth, a reawakening, and more specifically a re-acquaintance with the learning and culture of classical antiquity. In the eyes of intellectuals from the period, they participated in a reclassicization of Europe after the previous chivalric-Gothic centuries.

However, the Renaissance involved not only a new ideal of ‘the grandeur that was Rome’; it also brought into fresh circulation the misgivings that Rome had about itself, and the mixed feelings with which Rome regarded primitive tribes outside its frontiers. The Renaissance not only rediscovered classical civility, but also classical primitivism. For the civilizations of Greece and Rome had their own ‘discontents’: misgivings about the decadent over-refinement found in the city, nostalgia for an arcadian existence in the countryside, close to nature, as expressed by in bucolic poetry or Virgil's Georgics. In certain Roman sources, such ‘back-to-nature’ primitivism could lead to a backhanded appreciation even of the barbaric tribes of the north. And this, in turn, when translated into the frame of reference of early-modern Europe, would lead to a new form of tribal nomenclature and self-identification in the emerging states of the period.

Gauls, Belgae and Goths at universities and councils

The Low Countries – a set of lordships including, among others, the duchy of Brabant and the counties of Flanders, Holland, Zeeland and Hainault, between them covering much of the present-day Benelux – were called ‘Low’ from the more elevated perspective of the heartland of Burgundy. The dukes of Burgundy acquired these Pays-Bas in the early fifteenth century, as part of their great expansion, which for a while looked as if it might lead to the establishment of an independent Middle Kingdom between France and Germany.