Conference: Memory before Modernity. Memory Cultures in Early Modern
Europe
5 Past and present, sensations of change
Keynote: Judith Pollmann (Universiteit Leiden)
Speakers:
Alexandr Osipian (Kramatorsk Institute of Economics and Humanities, Ukraine):
Nobility’s Historical Culture and Burghers’ Memory War in post-Reformation Poland:
Construction of the Usable Past in the Trials between Armenian Community and the
City Magistrate in Lemberg in 1578-1654.
Erika Kuijpers (Universiteit Leiden): Times of trouble and a sense of change.
Brecht Deseure (Universiteit Antwerpen): Chronicling change. Sensations of crisis in
early modern chronicles.
Until a few decades ago, scholars who discussed the early modern ‘sense of the past’
limited themselves to texts which they recognized as ‘historical’, i.e. narrative
accounts of the past or contemporary events, or on ‘theories’ of history. Since then,
our scope has widened, first to include the activities of antiquarians and collectors,
and lately also non-scholarly forms of engagement with the past. What used to be
the ‘history of historiograpy’ has thus been transformed into the study of ‘historical
culture’ and ‘memory’, and has also come to include the study of visual sources,
material remains, performative acts etc. However, early modernists have as yet
done little to examine what these findings might mean for the ‘grand narratives’
about the development of historical consciousness that were put out in the 1960s,
and that continue to be extremely influential among theorists of modernity and
modern memory. The objective of this panel is to revisit a key theme in these master
narratives, that of the ‘sense of change’. Modern memory theory suggests that the
French Revolution created a sense of rupture so irreversible, that it had a lasting
effect on the historical consciousness and ‘sense of the past’ of Western culture.
We invite contributors to this panel to consider: (a) to what extent earlier periods of
great upheaval had created a ‘sense of change’, for instance among diarists, local
chroniclers and memoirists; (b) whether such moments of rupture create lasting
cultural transformations or a temporary sense of dislocation that wore off in a
generation or two; and (c) what this implied for the extent to which novelty was
integrated into, and appropriated by, the discourses about the old and right order.
Alexandr Osipian (Kramatorsk Institute of Economics and Humanities,
Ukraine): Nobility’s Historical Culture and Burghers’ Memory War in postReformation Poland: Construction of the Usable Past in the Trials between
Armenian Community and the City Magistrate in Lemberg in 1578-1654.
This paper aims to investigate how historical imagination functioned in the postReformation era. It will consider the trials between the two communities – Catholic
and Armenian – when the city’s past was actively used by both rival sides. It intends
to reconstruct resources open for actors and strategies they used to get new
meanings from them. The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed an
enormous rise of interest to the history of Poland reflected in the publication of
numerous historical writings. This paper will analyze how the inventive fabrication
of the usable past resulted from the creative reading of the published historical
narratives. Thus, the main goal of this research is to demonstrate how the distant
past was constructed for the present needs and later transformed into the cultural
memory of both communities.
The main questions I establish in this research are as follows: How did two pressure
groups – Catholic and Armenian communities of Lemberg – interact with each other
during the trials? What historical arguments did they use in order to persuade royal
authorities? How were grand-narrative versions of the past perceived, reinterpreted,
transformed, and used from the townspeople’s perspective? How were the Polish
nobility’s patterns of historical culture – so-called Sarmatian myth – accepted by the
city patricians? Another group of questions addresses the issue of the burghers’
sense of the past. What was seen as possible in the past and what was seen as
impossible? What could be accepted and what could not? How did the burghers’
sense of temporality correlate with such working research concepts as the past-ofpersonal-experience, the old-people’s-past, the past-in-books and some other
concepts. In what way did they perceive these categories and concepts?
Erika Kuijpers (Universiteit Leiden): Times of trouble and a sense of change.
In 1566, a wave of iconoclasm and violent attacks on churches and monasteries
spread through the Netherlands, only to be followed by a harsh repression of
rebellion by the Spanish Duke of Alba, who was sent to Brussels by Phillip II in 1567.
Over a thousand of rebels were executed and many more people, facing accusations
of rebellion, fled to England and Germany. The events made a deep impression on
contemporaries, who left us with a large number of chronicles, diaries, memoires
and the like, that look back on local and personal experiences during the ‘troubles’,
as they were generally called, in both the Northern and Southern Netherlands.
Apparently the authors of these texts felt that they had lived through a period of
historical importance. With hindsight, contemporaries realized that the iconoclasm
and the subsequent arrival of Alba triggered the start of a violent civil war that
would lead to the foundation of a new Calvinist state, the Dutch Republic. This
paper aims to analyze the way they evaluate the events in the context of what
happened subsequently. When, where and why did it all start, according to their
point of view? And when did the troubles come to an end? What events are
considered to have determined the course of history? Secondly, I will look for
indications of generational awareness and the connections made between history
and the course of the authors’ own lives. To what extent did people feel that the
troubles had affected their identity? Was there something their children had to
know about their own past? What was the message passed on to following
generations?
Brecht Deseure (Universiteit Antwerpen): Chronicling change. Sensations of
crisis in early modern chronicles.
Dominant theories about the development of historical consciousness are heavily
influenced by the concept of modernity. According to these ‘grand narratives of
memory’, the past relationship of individuals and societies in the modern age is
fundamentally different from that of their early modern predecessors. A series of
radical events is usually invoked to make this claim. The political, economical and
cultural upheavals of the so-called Sattelzeit are supposed to have brought about a
crisis in historical consciousness deep enough to produce a watershed between
early modern and modern ways of relating to the past.
Yet these assumptions are rarely put to the test. The effects of crisis on early
modern historical consciousness have never systematically been studied. As a result,
the unicity of the ‘breach’ in historical consciousness around 1800 remains doubtful.
Only by systematic comparison with earlier crises can its real significance be
grasped. Early modern memory has indeed known several major crises before 1800.
Was the sense of rupture produced by them indeed less permanent in character?
And if so, for what reasons? Or do we exaggerate the impact of the crisis of around
1800 and was it really only one crisis in a row?
The present proposal seeks to address these issues by focusing on early modern
local chronicles (a genre situated on the crossroads of autobiography and
historiography). Although poorly studied, these sources hold important information
for the study of historical consciousness. As the tradition of chronicling spans
several centuries, chronicles are ideally suited to trace developments in past
relationships over a longer period of time. As such, they allow to mutually compare
the effect of different crises.
The paper will focus on one crisis out of many, yet credited with epochal
significance: the French Revolution. As examples will make clear, a sense of rupture
can indeed be found in the writings of local Brabantine chroniclers as a result of this
event. To determine how unique or permanent this sense of rupture was, the
studied chroniclers’ observations will be compared to those made by their
predecessors writing in earlier times of crisis. Also, alternative theories regarding
long-term transitions in historical consciousness will be drawn in (Pocock,
Tollebeek, Woolf).