Call for papers
Memory before Modernity. Memory Cultures in Early Modern Europe
Leiden University, The Netherlands
20-22 June 2012
In the ‘memory boom’ that has emerged in the humanities and social sciences since
1990, five major themes have captured most attention: (a) the relationship between
politics and memory, (b) trauma and memories of violence, (c) the ‘mediatization’ of
memory (d) the transmission of memory and identity formation (e) the relationship
between memory, history and other concepts of the past. Yet most case studies
relating to these themes have been concerned with events and evidence post-1800;
indeed, many theorists of memory allege that there is something intrinsically
‘modern’ about them. The aim of this conference is to put this assumption to the
test.
First, we want to ask to what extent, and in what ways, these five themes
also played themselves out in the early modern period. Secondly, we want to analyze
more closely how early modern cultural, social, political and religious frameworks
affected cultures of memory. Who ‘managed’ early modern memories? What
mechanisms were at work? What patterns can we establish? How distinctively ‘early
modern’ are these?
We invite late medievalists and early modernists to offer proposals for 20 minute
papers on one of the following five themes. Details on the panels can be found below
Panel
Panel
Panel
Panel
Panel
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Memory wars before the nation state
Coping with distressing memories
Memory landscapes as multimedial experiences
Memory transmission and identity formation
Sensations of change
The themes will be introduced in five keynote lectures. Confirmed keynote speakers
include Philip Benedict, Susan Broomhall and Benjamin Schmidt. The conference will
end with a round table in which experts on modern memory will comment on the
findings of the conference.
We will be able to cover the expenses of economy travel and accommodation in
Leiden for all speakers selected. Papers should be submitted two weeks before the
conference and will be made available to all participants beforehand. Proposals can
be submitted until 1 November 2011 by email: emm@hum.leidenuniv.nl
This conference is organized by the NWO VICI Research Team Tales of the Revolt.
Memory, Oblivion and Identity in the Low Countries, 1566-1700, that is directed by
Professor Judith Pollmann. Further information on the team and the project at
www.earlymodernmemory.org
Panel 1.
Memory wars before the nation state
David Cressy’s seminal work on national memory in Elizabethan and Stuart England,
Bonfires and Bells (1989), attributes a central role to the state as a driving force in
early modern memory formation. Governments could influence memories of the past
in order to bolster their political agendas. But the state was never the sole
manipulator of memory and sometimes not even a necessary actor. Pressure groups,
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such as Huguenots in seventeenth century France, could defy dominant government
readings of the past. In the resulting ‘memory wars’, these opposition groups
deployed counter-memories in support of their own political aims. Moreover, in
decentralized states such as the Dutch Republic or Poland, political appeals to
feelings of togetherness in (new) national communities drew on the reconstruction of
a real or imaginary ‘national’ past. They became increasingly important to marshal
support for public projects that could not be carried out merely on a local scale, such
as the protection of an endangered church, the restoration of a challenged dynasty,
and/or alternative attempts of national consolidation.
Memory practices had a major impact on the forging of new ‘national’
identities during the religious, civil and dynastic upheavals in Reformation and
Counter-Reformation Europe. In the great variety of early modern European polities
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much depended on the political system
in which memory was being manipulated. But regardless of the political system,
identities did not simply arise organically in the passing of time. They were also the
products of memory wars: conflicts between competing pressure groups who derived
authority by invoking memories of the past. Contributors to this panel are therefore
asked to consider under what conditions ‘national’ canons of remembered history
could come into existence and who were the most important actors, to explore what
kind of political conflicts between rivaling factions could be fought out with memories
of the past, and to map out subverting mechanisms employed by government
authorities and pressure groups to ensure that undesirable parts of history did not
countermand their political agendas.
Panel 2
Coping with distressing memories
During early modern wars populations at large were confronted with violence and
life-threatening situations. The countryside suffered from pillaging troops while many
town dwellers experienced sieges and sacks,Many also experienced abuse,
harassment and violence from fellow citizens in different confessional or political
camps. Today, we are conscious that victims of violence or natural disasters may
carry on their distressing memories for the rest of their life. The psychological
damage of traumatic experience is considered to be important, because it can lead to
a great variety of symptoms and functional impairments even in subsequent
generations. Yet, we also know that the way people cope with these memories may
vary across cultures. Research suggests that coping strategies that manage to give
some sort of meaning to a traumatic experience are the most effective in preventing
the development of severe psychological disorders.
The central question in this part of the conference is whether our sources
allow for a characterization of early modern coping strategies. Of course this
question is difficult to answer for a number of reasons: Sources are lacking, do not
provide the necessary information, are not representative or are for other reasons
very hard to interpret. Still, the participants of this panel are encouraged to develop
creative methods to work around these problems. Except for personal documents like
diaries, memoires, autobiographies, and letters, we would like to explore the
potential of non-literary accounts like chronicles, judicial accounts, testimonies, and
attestations, claims, requests and petitions sent to public institutions and authorities.
In addition, texts with autobiographical content or reported eyewitness accounts can
be studied: histories and chronicles of war and journals. While early modern
narrative conventions may have precluded the expression of individual emotion so
central to modern war memoirs, this neither means that these feelings were nonexistent, nor that these texts did not serve a purpose in the process of coping or
coming to terms with the past. Instead we may need to ask what these texts do
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express, keeping in mind that writing down or narrating one’s memories is a social
act and thus reflects what is to be meaningful for both the author and the (intended)
audience.
Panel 3
Memory Landscapes as multimedial experiences
Modern memory scholars often present the development of mass media as a
condition for the circulation of collective memory. Undeniably, through media such as
photographs, films and postcards it became easier to reach a larger part of the
population than in the early modern period. Yet, while mass media did not develop
until the nineteenth century, early modern societies can be characterized as
multimedial. Early modern memory scholars have already shown that a wide array of
older media such as paintings and prints, pamphlets and sermons, songs and rituals,
could also be used to transmit, create and manipulate public memory, and to great
effect. By integrating a range of media into the study early modern memory, and by
exploring the multimediality of early modern societies, research makes it possible to
map a so-called ‘memory landscape’. Besides a focus on elite media such as
paintings, books and tapestries this approach also includes material objects, places
of memory, and archeological evidence. Analyzing these artifacts in cohesion
produces a different reading of early modern memory cultures, because it looks
beyond the boundaries of the memory cultures of elites and authorities. A focus on
media and their interaction therefore poses new questions about the social diversity
of local memory cultures.
This panel aims to examine the possibilities of integrating a range of objects
in early modern memory research and to connect them in time and/or space.
Participants are encouraged to consider a) which media reached which audiences b)
how different media interacted with each other and their audiences c) which groups
or individuals were important in the establishment of a memory landscape and d)
which changes occurred within the landscape over time.
Panel 4
Memory transmission and identity formation
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
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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?
Panel 5
Sensations of change
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.
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