History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 16
Département Nord : the originally Dutch-speaking remainder of what is now the
département Nord (Nord-Pas de Calais), called Westhoek or Maritime
Flanders, ceded to France in the 17th and early 18th century, during most of
which latter century the area was the province of Flanders and that of Artois.
The Netherlands :
A part of what is now Zeeland in south-western Netherlands, called Zeelandic
Flanders (Zeeuws-Vlaanderen)
The significance of the County and its counts eroded through time, but the designation
remained in a very broad sense. In the Early Modern, the term Flanders was
associated to the southern part of the Low Countries, the Southern Netherlands.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, it became increasingly commonplace to refer to
the area from De Panne to Maasmechelen, including the Belgian parts of the Duchy of
Brabant and Limburg, as "Flanders".
The ambiguity between this eastwardly much wider area and that of the Countship (or
the Belgian parts thereof), still remains. In most present-day contexts however, the
term Flanders is generally taken to refer to either the political, social, cultural and
linguistic community (and the corresponding official institution, the Flemish
Community), or the geographical area, one of the three institutional regions in
Belgium, namely the Flemish Region.
In history of art, the adjectives Flemish, Dutch and Netherlandish are commonly used
to designate all the artistic production in this area. For examples, Flemish Primitives is
synonym for early Netherlandish painting, Franco-Flemish School for Dutch School,
and it is not uncommon to see Mosan art categorized as Flemish art.
Ghent (East Flanders)
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