Conference: Memory before Modernity. Memory Cultures in Early Modern
Europe
4 Memory transmission and identity formation
Keynote: Dagmar Freist (Universitaet Oldenburg): Lost in time and space? Material
culture and memory transmission
Speakers:
Kate Hodgkin (University of East London): Women, memory and family history in
seventeenth-century England
Johannes Müller (Universiteit Leiden): Exile memories and the reinvention of family
history
Christian Kuhn (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg): Historicizing the Reformation
in late 16th century. Urban ‘Lutheran’ identities in the light of calendars
The relation between individual identities and the memory canons of groups and
communities is a key question in the field of memory studies. In the case of early
modern Europe, the way individuals were able to inscribe their own experiences
and memories into the memory canons of groups and communities has not yet been
studied extensively. While some theorists have suggested that in the early modern
period the memory cultures of local and urban communities were the most
important mnemonic framework for individual identities, studies on early modern
religion suggest that confessional discourses about the past were also highly
important. After all, these could bring together narratives of communities all over
Europe, especially those of the great masses of migrants and confessional exiles.
This panel aims at an evaluation of the question how local or confessional memory
cultures could incorporate the experiences and identities of individuals and
between which mnemonic frameworks individuals could choose or switch. In the
case of migrants and religious refugees, the interrelations between affiliations to
(new or old) local communities and the wider confessional discourses about exile
could be an interesting case to study. Linking this question to theories about
generational memory might deliver valuable insights into the processes of
identification and group formation. As Aleida and Jan Assmann suggest, memories of
historical events undergo a decisive transformation after approximately three
generations when after the death of the last eyewitnesses ‘communicative memory’
is turned into ‘cultural memory’. Once this ‘cultural memory’ has provided a
coherent discourse about the past, it could be asked how the experiences of
following generations relate to the conveyed narratives: which meanings were
ascribed to the canonical past, how were they appropriated or contested and to
which extent had traditions to be reinvented in order to make sense in the present?
Papers in this panel may ask into which greater (communal, confessional,
‘national’) entities individuals projected their personal identities and how these
various discourses competed with one another? How did personal and collective
memories interrelate? Which were the media that could bring them together? How
were memories transmitted and transformed over generations? Which role did
public discourses about the past play in this process and to what extent did the
transmission of memory influence the socialization of individuals in a group?
Kate Hodgkin (University of East London): Women, memory and family
history in seventeenth-century England.
This paper considers the relation between group memory and individual identity on
a small scale: it is concerned with the investment of aristocratic women in family
history in seventeenth-century England. If women’s identities derive above all from
their family roles – as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers – nonetheless a woman’s
family identity is complicated by marriage and the consequent move from one kin
group to another. Women, in a patriarchal lineage system, are transmitters rather
than bearers of lineage: birth family and marriage family intersect in complex ways.
And yet many early modern women writers are significantly attached to lineage,
despite its overriding preoccupation with the preservation of the male line and
name. For the early modern English women who investigated and recorded their
family histories genealogy had a significant meaning, embedding them in a
particular account of the past, and asserting claims in the present. It negotiated
issues of belonging and exclusion, rights and property, both in relation to birth
family and marriage family.
The early modern women discussed in this paper thus wrote their own stories into
and through the history of their families, representing themselves as bearers of
significant traditions, keepers of memory within the family for future as well as past
generations. The brief family histories which frequently preface life stories –
women’s own or those of their husbands – bring together lineage and personal
memory; they record domestic as well as genealogical stories, moving them from
the oral to the written domain. These stories allow women to locate themselves in
time, remembering forebears in both paternal and maternal lines, moving between
national politics and local fortunes, and identifying possible futures in their own
children. At the same time the insecurities of childbirth and childrearing mark the
trajectory of the family they trace as always provisional; the desired generational
transmission is never secure.
This paper considers some examples of such writing to explore the ways in which
upper-class women constructed family histories, asking how they mobilised
memory in order to think about the relation between past, present and future as
well as their own places in history.
Johannes Müller (Universiteit Leiden): Exile memories and the reinvention of
family history.
After the fall of Antwerp in 1585, thousands of merchants and artisans relocated to
cities in Northern Germany and the Dutch Republic. While the first generation
initially remained hopeful to return to their hometown, the prospects of a future in
the South became increasingly unrealistic after the Twelve Years Truce (16091621). It has often been suggested that the migration of Antwerp’s elite was the
engine behind the spectacular economic flourishing of the Northern Netherlands
and that the descendants of the migrants easily found their place in their new host
society. Even if they were often excluded from public offices as ‘foreigners’, the
hardships of exile were unknown to them and their parents’ memories of Brabant
belonged to a distant past, as the latest studies on this group assert.
However, the migration experience was often preserved within the families and
recorded in family books generations later. Descendants of the second and third
generation tried to keep the memories of their forefathers alive and wrote down
their oral accounts of life in Antwerp, going into exile and living abroad. In the
genealogical records of the Martens, Van der Muelen and Van Panhuysen families,
the notion of belonging to a small elite of elect who had left their home for the sake
of faith plays an important role. As can be shown, some of these records were
repeatedly rewritten by the children and grandchildren of the Antwerp refugees. By
comparing the various versions and compilations and attributing them to the
respective generations, it can be studied how the exile past was remembered at a
certain time, which parts were left out or added and into which discourses the
authors inscribed themselves and their families.
In this paper, I want to examine the meaning of the exile past for families
descending from Antwerp migrants. These findings could shed an interesting light
on the question how the formation of early modern identities was the result of an
interplay between public discourses, kinship consciousness and individual self
awareness. The way families and individuals integrated their own stories and
memories into wider-known narratives shows how identity formation was often an
active process, that required various tactics and sometimes choices between
antagonistic religious and political discourses about the past.
Christian Kuhn (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg): Historicizing the
Reformation in late 16th century. Urban ‘Lutheran’ identities in the light of
calendars.
In the social history of the Reformation, the Imperial City of Nuremberg is often
considered as a model. Nevertheless, there is evidence that suggests that the
Reformation’s identity change (Hamm 1996, 57f.: “Konsensgemeinschaft”) was
historicized already by late 16th century history writing. This is evident from an
unstudied source originating from a family that belonged to the actors of the
Reformation.
This paper will study a manuscript calendar of the patrician family EbnerEschenbach. In structure, the calendar follows the genre tradition as established in
the “Calendarium Historicum” (1550) by the Wittenberg theologian Paul Eber
(1511-1569) that would have been available on the book market in one of its
several editions. Eber presented universal and profane historiography with a
number of denominationally marked notes regarding Wittenberg’s theological elite
(Pohlig 2007, 422f.). In contrast to the tradition of Schreibkalender printed in a
layout suited for handwritten additions (Herbst 2009), Eber’s calendar is a printed
ready-to-use product intended for the non-specialist city burghers. Nevertheless,
the Ebner-Eschenbachs produced their own self-conceived handwritten calendar.
Despite undeniable parallels in genre and structure, the familial manuscript is
strictly different in content. Most strikingly, it combines the ‘hagiography’ of Luther
commonplace in remembering the Reformation during late 16th century with and
papal history, such as the inauguration dates of Popes. There seems to have been no
coherent denominational agenda underlying the individual appropriation of
historical knowledge, in contrast to the scheme of generational change in the late
16th century established by the most influential early modernists (Reinhard 1997,
48/ Schilling 2007, 478).
Rather than that, the calendar’s aim was to use history for a better understanding of
politics. The calendar presents a variety of notes and apophthegmata from universal
history including Antiquity and the Middle Ages, miracles and signs past and present,
dates of marriages of the German princes and monarchs more generally, as well as
urban revolts and tyrannicide. In contrast to the strictly denominational project of a
Lutheran church history in the Magdeburg Centuriae, the structuring principle in the
presentation of history is relevance to the rule of the patrician elite. The mentioning
of eruptions of the public opinion is frequent, even the Freyheytt des Pasquilli zu
Rom is included, an existing public place and already a lieu de memoire in the 16th
century (Lastraioli 2003), signifying the power of public opinion and its relevance
for the political culture.
Popular media of teaching history have only recently been studied in dephth, e.g.
history games (Droste in Rau 2010). One of the most predominant economic source
genres, calendars, will be a promising object of a study in memory culture, how
historical knowledge was presented as a matter of teaching and learning (magistra
vitae).The fact that there is nothing such as a preface, an introduction, a dedication
or even a title suggests that this is a document for ‘internal’ use during the years
when the entries on contemporary history were still part of lively social knowledge
(until around 1612). The amalgamation of Catholic and Lutheran historical
knowledge can only be explained by a super-denominational identity of those
reading this calendar for enhancing their historical knowledge as well as repeating
dietary and medical requirements, annotated shortly by the month.
The calendar will be placed in the greater picture of Nuremberg’s innovative
memory culture. Central issues of public life had remained undistinguishable from
pre-Reformation traditions, such as the continued showings of the enshrined relics
of the city patron St Sebald or the adorance of medieval art often donated by
Nuremberg families (Kuhn 2010a). One of the most distinguished family histories
included the Reformation as a purifying instance in the generational continuity of
this, although some of its sons had studied theology in Wittenberg and had even
been guests in Luther’s house (Kuhn 2010). Put in the context of the broader
memory culture, the calendar throws light on a political culture in the age of
confessionalisation shaped by how history was remembered.