Bruges and Europe

Bruges and Europe: Valentin Vermeersch

The prestigious works that Fonds Mercator has dedicated to the city of Bruges and its glorious past are rightly appreciated and admired by bibliophiles, academics, and historians alike. Appropriately enough, Bruges has always been a creative centre for the production and distribution of fine books, from the illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages to the incunabulum and ultimately the modern printed book.

The need was felt for a third publication to complement the two major works – ‘Bruges, Mille ans d’Art’ and ‘Bruges et la mer’ – that Fonds Mercator has already published on the city. On the eve European unification, the new work focuses upon the Continental dimension of cosmopolitan Bruges, and looks forward to the promising future of this historic Flemish city in tomorrow’s Europe. ‘Bruges and Europe’ is another outstanding Fonds Mercator product. I congratulate the editors, authors, translators, coordinators and printers whose labours have culminated in this excellent book, and offer my appreciation to those Bruges institutions whose support has allowed it to be published in four languages, thus ensuring maximum international dissemination. They include the Port Authority Bruges-Zeebrugge, which also sponsored the book ‘Bruges and the Sea’, and Saint John’s Art and Conference Centre. 

I also think it significant, not to say symbolic, that this book on Bruges’ place in Europe should be published in the year when the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the Americas is being celebrated throughout the world. It is also five hundred years since one leading Bruges European first saw the light of day, and another passed on: the great Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives was born in Valencia in 1492, while Lodewijk van Gruuthuse, patron of the arts and European diplomat, died in Bruges in the autumn of that same year. His famous library, one of the most sumptuous in late-medieval Burgundian Europe, would not have been disgraced by this excellent new Fonds Mercator publication dedicated to his native city.