摘要：
In a recent bestselling history entitled Belgium: a History without a Country, published in 2012, the Belgian historian Rolf Falter argues that Belgium, while having a rich history spanning back many centuries, only became a true country in the political sense of the word rather recently. Thus, unlike some other, more recent countries which may be called “countries without a history” as they are young and not characterized by a very long history, Belgium, which was fought over time and again by all the major European powers since the early Middle Ages, is in some ways a history without a country. In other words, it is a complex network of intersecting historical narratives which, while culturally fascinating, only very belatedly resulted in a modern national identity. The purpose of this talk is to examine this argument on the basis of some cases studies of a number of major cities whose origins can be traced back to the Flanders of the Middle Ages: Courtray, Bruges, Ypres, Lille (Rijsel) and Tournai (Doornik). The main focus will be surviving examples of the architecture, painting and religious institutions of these cities in the oft contested borderland between France and Belgium.
