programme and abstracts - Alamire Foundation

ABSTRACTS
HANNO BRAND
Hanse Research Centre – Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, NL
The Hanseatic Legacy: trade, town life and culture
Although the Hanseatic League was one of the most elusive of
all early maritime empires, it is very difficult to asses its cultural
coherence. Hanseatic culture has been regarded as a spin-off
effect of intense commercial exchange in a period which lasted
mote than five centuries, in which the League enfolded form a
loose community of individual merchants into a league of towns
with impressive political influence and commercial endeavour.
Although, as most and for all the historical architecture in
former Hanseatic towns suggests, the League left a cultural
imprint on North-western European cities, is also clear that
Hanseatic merchants played only a limited role in shaping a
Hanseatic civilization. Its commercial network and its ships that
plied the waters of the Northern seas were the carriers of
knowledge, art, architecture and music which spread through its
cities. Hanseatic culture was, however, not a export product but
the result of exchange between the regions along the shores of
the Northern Seas. It was not contained to the Hanseatic region
but bears many Flemish, Dutch and Scandinavian influences.
Nor can we assume that the area between the western Low
Countries and the modern Baltic states were part of one clearly
defined cultural landscape. Modern research in fact suggests that
the Hanse did not show a specific uniform cultural identity
within the limits of its own region, but that it was shaped abroad
within the limits of the foreign offices. Still no one will neither
deny the existence of a similar language in the Hanseatic area,
nor the formation of a similar commercial identity or the rise of
a hanseatic town landscape which showed many common
characteristics. This paper will address the Hanse’s cultural
ambiguity from a political, economic and cultural perspective. It
is an attempt to show that the League, though being a very loose
network of towns and merchants, owed much of its unity
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