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he anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers described “honor” in 1965 as a universal concept, common to diverse individuals, societies, and civilizations .1 Honor may well be a universal concept: it is fundamentally colored by typical cultures,periods,social,and gender groups.David Gilmore discovered that fascinating similarities in the concept of honor could be found in various societies that border on the Mediterranean.2 For him it is clear that in that world honor is a male attribute: the reputation of men before their peers depends largely upon the sexual behavior of the women in their family.3 But this anthropological thesis has, at least for early modern Spain, been disputed by the historian Scott K. Taylor, who claims that men’s honor did not depend exclusively upon the sexual reputation of female kin but also revolved around competence in craft or office, credit-worthiness and debt relationships, and performance in the rough-andtumble rites of male sociability.4 Yet the geographical specificity still seems to be a valuable argument. That consideration was the core of Pierre Bourdieu’s study of the notion of honor (the nif ) in the North-African Kabyle society.5 A more recent case is the fascinating thesis of a different culture of honor in the North and the South of the United States by Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen, who were convinced that the genesis of the typical Southern honor culture should The Notions of Honor and Adultery in the Fifteenth-Century Burgundian Netherlands Walter Prevenier 259 T 1 Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” p. 21. 2 Gilmore, Honor and Shame, p.16. 3 Gilmore, Honor and Shame, pp. 3–4. 4 Taylor, Honor and Violence. 5 Bourdieu,“From the ‘Rules’of Honour,”pp. 10–15. One of the specific themes is the obligation of family members to defend the honor of each member against all outsiders. be linked to the presence there of a herding economy.6 In conclusion, the key notions seem to be culture, geography, economy, and sociability. Both the urban and the courtly culture in the Burgundian Netherlands cultivated strong networks with cities and courts abroad that may have been responsible for a typical cosmopolitan society,permissive on ethical issues such as adultery, prostitution, and other forms of illicit sex.This tolerance may have been the background for a specific notion of honor.7 Cosmopolitanism was certainly setting the tone in places with many foreign merchants, artists, and members of the fifteenthcentury ducal court, patricians of Brussels and Mechelen,8 as well as in economic centers such as Bruges, with a large presence of international businessmen and clergymen, mostly male singles, and so the obvious market for local prostitutes.9 Dishonor for the Duped Husband A first fact about adultery in the Burgundian Netherlands is the perception of this action as a source of profound humiliation and extreme dishonor for the duped husband.Contemporaries considered the male victim to be obsessed by the shame of being incapable of exacting aggressive revenge on his spouse’s lover. If vengeance took the form of homicide, for which the perpetrator could be sentenced to death, or to perpetual banishment, the uncontrollable outburst of anger, the so called chaude colle, was often used as a successful argument to introduce a pardon application at the administration of the duke of Burgundy for “honor killing,” in line with the tradition at the French royal court.10 Chaude colle may often have been more a ritualized and codified cliché than a tool of clever defense lawyers.A workable cliché, however, easily becomes a social reality. Princes, public opinion, and court judges of the fifteenth century in the Low Countries, as in France, exhibited an unmistakable understanding and clear empathy for the violent behavior of the duped individual.11 Sympathy for the perpetrator was conditioned, however, by at least four variables for the weightiness of dishonor and the potential granting of pardon. I illustrate the thesis by quoting from four letters of remission. The first consideration that could ease significantly the request of the duped husband for pardon was the fact that the adultery could be qualified as a public scandal. One such case is that of Jacot Barcueille in July 1455: 6 Nisbett and Cohen, Culture of Honor, pp. 5–9, 82–93. 7 Vertovec and Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, pp. 1–14, 211–17. 8 On Mechelen as a “cosmopolitan”place in the fifteenth century,see Prevenier,“Mechelen circa 1500.” 9 On the density of prostitution in Bruges...

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