The beguine movement is in many ways one of the most remarkable movements in the history of the Low Countries; the impetus for the movement as a whole still remains to be explained. Factors such as the sex-ratio, diminished access to convents, and the religious revival of the late Middle Ages...

In this paper we address several issues, all with the underlying intention of refining and reorienting the nuclear-hardship-debate. There is a need for such reorientation of the debate as several indicators show that the long-term outcome of this process towards a society built upon nuclear...

In the past decades, numeracy has taken an increasingly important place in the study of human capital formation, as well as in literacy studies and studies on formal education and book production. In order to understand levels of education, scholars have recently tried to develop new ways to...

In this article we offer a broad explanatory framework for the divergence in the development of institutions for collective action, in particular commons, in Eastern and Western Europe. The latter area was particularly early with the development of collective arrangements of natural resource...

In this paper we contribute to literature on human capital formation by investigating age references on early-modern portraits from the Low Countries. We use the very popular aetatis formulae to estimate to what degree sitters to portraits were able to give their age in an accurate way. This...

The study of the ages women marry and the age gap between husband and wife is well accepted by social-economic historians and demographers as it is highly associated with the growth of a population. There is however another reason for studying marriage patterns, that of female agency. Young...

In this paper we analyse the functioning of private capital markets in Holland in the late medieval period. We argue that in the absence of banks and state agencies involved with the supply of credit, entrepreneurs access to credit was determined by two interrelated factors. The first was the...

Our article aims to detect differences in behaviour towards the capital and land market of households of different sizes and levels of income. Participation in markets for real estate, capital, and ships was considerable, not only among middling and elite groups but also among the poor. Large...