De stedelijke elite en het Brabantse platteland in de zestiende eeuw

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous winter scenes depict rural or semi-urban scenes, with townsmen and villagers in close interaction. They were created in the intersection of urban and rural social environments. Many of his patrons came from the urban commercial and financial elite, but were closely related to the countryside for various reasons. They often acquired landed property in the countryside, and at the same time, noblemen from rural origins settled in the city. To them, landed property and seigniorial rights were not only a profitable investment. They also provided social prestige. The urban economy of cities such as Brussels and Antwerp were closely related to their surrounding countryside. The countryside provided food and a series of essential raw materials for the urban market. This led to close ties between the rural and the urban world, with people migrating between town and country, but also moving on a daily basis between the city and the surrounding villages. This contribution looks into these interactions on different levels: economic relations, lordly estates, rural residences and the so-called villa rustica or suburbana, and finally the phenomenon of rural life as a cultural paradigm, the idea of the countryside as a locus amoenus.