Guilds in late medieval and early modern Western Europe provided political representation for the urban working middle classes by linking craft membership, citizenship and political participation. Historians have traditionally argued that the decline of guilds from the seventeenth century onward resulted from Enlightenment thought, free-market ideology and socio-economic processes such as deskilling and proletarianization, which shifted political rights from corporate bodies to individuals. This lecture argues that these transformations were part of a broader transformation in the rationality of governance. While policy making increasingly substituted abstrahating forms of expertise such as statistics and administrative knowledge for values such as civic virtue, the link between artisanal know-how and political status, which had long underpinned the political inclusion of artisan in the (urban) body politic, disappeared.
Prof. Bert De Munck (1967) is a full Professor at the History Department of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, teaching ‘Early Modern History’, ‘Theory of Historical Knowledge’, and ‘History of Science and Society’. He is member of the Centre for Urban History, Antwerp, and board member of the Antwerp Urban Studies Institute. His research is at the intersection of social history, urban history and the history of knowledge, with a focus on solidarity, craftsmanship and the evaluation of skills and knowledge. His publications include Guilds, Labour and the Urban Body Politic: Fabricating Community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300-1800 (Routledge, 2018) and How the World Turned into a Laboratory: The Long Road to the COVID-19 Pandemic (Ethics Press 2025). Bert De Munck is the PI of the Horizon Europe project “Tracks4Crafts: Transforming crafts knowledge for a sustainable, inclusive and economically viable heritage in Europe”.
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