Books on the History of Flanders and Brabant
Histories of Flanders or Brabant do not feature prominently in Emmanuel Ximenez's library, which is otherwise well stocked with historical texts. Most of the items listed in this category were older but popular studies that had seen a number of reprints. The library's Ducum Brabantiae chronicon, for example, was published in Antwerp in 1600, but earlier versions with slightly different titles had appeared in Antwerp and Leuven since 1526. Written by Adrianus Barlandus, a Leuven professor and protégé of the Burgundian and Habsburg rulers, the study covered the history of the Dukes of Brabant and received much scholarly attention. Both Ludovico Guicciardini and Justus Lipsius referred to Barlandus in their respective works on similar topics; Lipsius's Lovanium, for instance, relied heavily on Barlandus's work. The Forestiers et contes de Flandres, written by Cornelius Martin and illustrated by Pierre Balthasar, and which had been frequently reprinted in Antwerp from 1570 onwards, also counted among the library's popular historical works. This French text outlining the history of the counts of Flanders appeared in highly prestigious editions decorated with attractive engravings. Among the other texts in this rubric are Plantin's 1595 edition of Bochius's description of Archduke Ernest's Joyous Entry into Antwerp in 1594, Franciscus Sweertius's Monumenta sepulchraria […] ducatus Brabantiae (Antwerp, 1613), which offered a compendium of the funerary monuments of Brabant's leading families, and David Lindanus's De Teneramundae libris tres, a history of Dendermonde that was published in Antwerp in 1612. Interestingly, Lipsius's description of Leuven, published in 1605, was filed in the section of Lipsiana, rather than as a work of historiography. The fact that this book was shelved among the works of Justus Lipsius rather than the category of "Historici et humanistici" might be symptomatic of the Ximenez family's more limited interest in the historiography of their adopted country. The collection did not include the more recent historical-topographical surveys written by, for instance, Jean Baptiste Graymaye, or Laurens van Haecht Goidtsenhoven's Dutch translation of Barlandus's work, published in Antwerp in 1603, which was dedicated to one "Edvardus Ximenes Pereda, merchant of the celebrated merchants' town of Antwerp" - possibly Duarte, the brother of Emmanuel Ximenez.
Literature
Esser, Raingard. The Politics of Memory: The Writing of Partition in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
