Accountable Language: Holding Medieval Governors and Officers to Account in Flanders

This article calls for a comprehensive approach to medieval accountability. It combines digital text analysis with Critical Discourse Analysis, offering new insights into the words that counts, societal elites, local governors, and the middling sort used to hold rulers, governors, and officers to account in fifteenth-century Flanders. Although accountability is a modern and abstract concept, the belief in the responsibility, answerability, and liability of governors and officers was a crucial aspect of political life in the fifteenth-century county of Flanders. Moreover, this belief was articulated through concrete and consistent vocabularies, phrases, and discursive registers, forming what can be termed a medieval language of accountability. Spoken across various social strata, this language represents a truly omnipresent and omnidirectional phenomenon.