Memory, social mobility and historiography. Shaping noble identity in the Bruges chronicle of Nicholas Despars († 1597)

This article focuses on the issue of nobility as a memorial practice in the premodern era. It challenges the popular assumption that the nobility was largely defined by a shared social memory, that is, the collective remembering of which lineages were considered to have noble blood and who had supposedly mastered the noble lifestyle since time immemorial. In this contribution, it is argued that there was a structural field of tension between this noble culture of remembrance and the considerable rate of renewal in the social composition of the nobility. Noble ranks were constantly replenished by newcomers, who had to inscribe themselves in collective consciousness as a noble lineage. The case-study of Nicholas Despars, a sixteenth-century chronicler who belonged to a recently ennobled family of Bruges spice merchants, shows that historiographical writings were often used to influence the public perception of such families. Because this functional approach of premodern elites towards their own past often included the manipulation of archival records, the memorial practices of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nobility has led to a distorted view on important aspects of late medieval society in recent historiography.