Institute for History Annual Report 2010 - O - Universiteit Leiden

fore when individual tales are compared with tales
that have become popular in the public domain.
The similarities in themes, style, form,
interpretation etc reveals how much personal tales
are fused with those from oral traditions, and what
people have learned from other media. The way in
which people were dealing with past experiences
in the seventeenth century should have some
elements in common with how people do this
today. In historical literature, however, it is the
differences that are often emphasised: the absence
or rarity of introspection and self-reflection, for
instance, the supposedly less developed sense of
individuality and the strong collective
consciousness of groups and communities. It is
also often alleged that a very different meaning
was attached to suffering, and that there was less
appreciation for individual characteristics and
authenticity. This project aims to test these assumptions.
The following questions are central to
this project: 1. When and why did people narrate
or write about their personal memories of episodes
or experiences during the war? 2. How and to
what extent did the medial context, social identity,
self reflection and contemporary notions of truth
determine the content of narrated memory? 3. Do
early modern war memories differ in content,
meaning and function from today’s war
memories? If so, what exactly are the differences
and how can we explain for them? 4. Why did
some personal stories reach a wider public and
become part of the historical canon while others
had a limited reach or remained private?
Institute for History
48
Commemoration and Community.
Mediating local memories of the Dutch
Revolt in the Low Countries, 1566-1700
(PhD project)
Marianne Eekhout
The subproject Commemoration and Community
focuses on local memories of the Dutch Revolt in
the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands.
Memory cultures varied considerably from town
to town. After the Revolt, some towns drew
attention to their role as victims of the cruel Dutch
or Spanish soldiers whereas others presented
themselves as victors, or tried to cover up their
part in the Revolt. This project seeks to chart both
why and how such memory cultures came into
existence, however, and under what conditions
they could continue to survive and be deployed to
support local identity or local political positions
and reputations. There have been claims that local
magistrates pursued an active memory policy and
engaged in memory ‘management’, but whether
they were the most important players is still
unclear. Various other actors such as religious
groups, families or guilds also had the ability and
power to influence the decisions of which memories
should be forgotten and which ought to be
remembered. These uncertainties provoke other
questions related to memory studies and
especially to the way in which memories took
shape in the seventeenth century. How does a
memory culture develop? Is it the result of a
contest between factions and individuals? To what
extent could versions of the past coexist? Did the
population know which groups advocated which