Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, Communes and Conflict: Urban Rebellion in Late Medieval Flanders. Ed. Andrew Murray and Joannes van den Maagdenberg. Historical Materialism Series 289. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023, hardback, 470 pp.

For the last twenty-five years, Belgian historians Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers have been major scholars in the flowering study of medieval social conflict. In the 2000s, along with Vincent Challet, Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Patrick Lantschner, Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, Christian Liddy, Andy Wood, and others, Dumolyn and Haemers have advanced new perspectives on pre-modern popular politics and revolt in Western Europe, and have expanded our understanding of this history to include at the center those outside of the aristocracy – craftsmen, merchants, artisans – who were vital and active participants, and whom previous historiographical traditions tended either to downplay or romanticize. This book is a collection of some of the best articles that Dumolyn and Haemers have written in this compelling scholarly moment, a sort of ‘Greatest Hits’ which serves as an essential guide to the evolving history of late medieval Flanders, of course, but also to the comparative history of social conflict, urban life, and the historian’s craft.