Who's Who in Late Medieval Brussels

Historians face many difficulties when plumbing the depths of the very dynamic and heterogenic population structures of pre-modern towns, especially because very few sources encompass the various layers of the urban population. In this paper I argue that it is necessary to collect and unlock larger amounts of data in databases, which in turn allow to compose multi-facetted biographies of townspeople and finally pave the way for urban prosopography. That is exactly the aim of the current Who’s who in late medieval Brussels database project, which unlocks biographical data on people who worked, lived or stayed in Brussels before 1600. In this paper I will shortly explain the configuration of the database and take it as a case study for balancing some of the methodological issues and present some research perspectives.