The Fabric of the City: A Social History of Cloth Manufacture in Medieval Ypres, by Peter Stabel:Book Review

The city of Ypres is primarily known today as one of the principal theatres of the First World War. To medievalists, however, the city is famed as one of the foremost industrial centres of Europe. In the precociously urbanised southern Low Countries, the cities of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres emerged as three giants in a network of many smaller urban settlements between 1100 and 1300. Yet whereas medieval Bruges and Ghent have been the subject of a plethora of monographs, Ypres has always been the odd one out; so much so, that one would struggle to fill a shelf with academic books devoted to the medieval city. This is due in part to the First World War, during which the city’s archives were almost completely destroyed. As proven by Peter Stabel, though, this is no excuse, as the efforts of historians and archivists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century ensured the continuous availability of a wealth of source material which has begged for systematic scrutiny for more than a century.