ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book investigated a broad and unusual range of sources and utilized a number of methodologies drawn from the disciplines of history as well as art history, geography, and tourism and heritage studies. It ranged across several centuries and the terrain of modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in our search for insights into how scholars, tourism and heritage agencies, museums, galleries, and popular culture present the lives of late medieval and early modern women. While visitors to the Lakenhaal Museum in Leiden encounter striking images of women at work, they will struggle to locate those images in an understanding of womens lives. Tourist literature, for example, often uses the idea of place as a historical source to support narratives of the past which tend to be quite conservative, emphasizing golden eras in regions past.
