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On Wednesday 3 December, Gertrude van de Ketterij will defend her PhD dissertation ‘"Dat Arnemuden sal wesen een stadt." Stadsstichting en stadswording in de zestiende eeuw.’ In her dissertation, Van de Ketterij develops a model that demonstrates how a settlement could grow into a fully recognised city in the early modern period.

Arnemuiden as an example of urban development

From the sixteenth century onwards, a new way of thinking emerged on the ideal city and civic community. Increasingly, cities were designed consciously with the goal to enhance prestige and prosperity. This process of bringing into practice ideas about the ideal city, can be reconstructed in great detail from the surviving city archives of the port town of Arnemuiden in the Dutch province of Zeeland. The place was incorporated as a city by William of Orange in 1574. 

Arnemuiden provides an ideal case for an in-depth study of the process of ‘making of a city’ in early modern Europe. In her dissertation, Van de Ketterij analyses the political, economic, social-cultural and geographic aspects of the making of early modern cities using a wide variety of written and visual sources (such as paintings and maps), as well as surviving artefacts and archeological sources. 

The model of city formation

Van de Ketterij analysed all available data relating to the founding and development of Arnemuiden as a city. Based on this material, she developed a model that outlines the phases and steps through which a place could become a fully recognised city according to early modern standards.

According to her model, an early modern city was defined not primarily by its population size or economic development, but by its possession of city rights and other legal privileges. This model can now be applied in further research on processes of city formation and urban development in the Low Countries from roughly the twelfth to the seventeenth century.