Land of Thieves: Survival in the Middle Ages
Brilliantly-researched, groundbreaking reconstruction of daily life in the fifteenth century
Drawing on newly-unearthed criminal registers, court records, and city archives, Coomans paints a vivid picture of the lives of commoners in the late Middle Ages. Her research is uniquely centred around thieves: 158 of them, arrested and tried between 1470 and 1510 in the Low Countries (present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg). Most of these criminals were men, only six were women, all of them confessed in surprising detail to their crimes.
Non-FictionPrint
Original title
Dievenland
Author
Janna Coomans
Year of publication
2025
Page count
343
Contact for translation rights
Marijke Nagtegaal
Bee Rights
m.nagtegaal@debezigebij.nl
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Those medieval folks weren’t actually that medieval: there was hardly any torture, beheadings or racks, as Janna Coomans demonstrates in Land of Thieves, penned with obvious pleasure.
de Volkskrant
Juicy and colourful […] The historian paints a vivid picture of the exploits of both small-time and major medieval crooks, thanks to excellent detective work in 500-600 year-old criminal registers, lists of court verdicts, and thieves’ confessions in real finds with titles like the liber filorium perdicionis – The Book of Lost Sons'
Trouw
Janna Coomans
Janna Coomans (b. 1988) is a historian and associate professor at Utrecht University. In
2021, her PhD thesis was published as Community, Urban Health and Environment
in the Late Medieval Low Countries by Cambridge University Press. Her research in
provincial archives has led her to consider how the Middle Ages can offer a source of
inspiration for our society today.