Institute for History Annual Report 2010 - O - Universiteit Leiden

were at war until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
Long before 1648, however, it had already become
evident that the division between North and South
was likely to be permanent. Due to the rift
between the two Netherlands, diametrically
opposed views on the origin of the Revolt developed.
Although there is an extensive literature on
the political fissure between North and South, the
process by which views on a shared history
diverged and led to different interpretations of a
common past has received less attention. Comparative
studies that include both the Northern
and Southern Netherlands are also lacking. This
subproject offers a political and transnational
perspective on the development and uses of public
memories of the Revolt in the seventeenth century.
It will supplement the local and individual
perspectives studied by other members of the
team, and will show how different memory
environments influenced identity formation in the
Northern and Southern Netherlands. By offering a
comparison of public memory formation in a
decentralised, Republican polity and a monarchical
political system, it should also be able to
contribute to a better understanding of the way in
which political systems affected early modern
memory formation in general. Accordingly, this
project seeks to explore how and why different
Netherlandish canons of the history of the Revolt
came into being, how the contents and (political)
uses of these narratives developed in the course of
the seventeenth century; and the extent to which
these narratives influenced the formation of new
and irreconcilable self-images in the northern and
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southern provinces. How did memory and
identity mutually influence one another in this
process?
Towards a new history of (early) modern
memory
Judith Pollmann
Most scholars who study memory believe that
people in different cultures have different ways of
remembering. This implies that it should be
possible to write a history of memory. Outlines of
such a history can be found in various modern
theories of memory, which often contain a macrohistorical
component. They usually posit an
evolution of memory and memory practices away
from the organic, local, traditional and collective
towards the synthetic, novel and individual. The
timeframe in which this development is placed is
usually quite unspecific, but broadly ‘premodern’.
While the theories can and do refer to what is now
really a mountain of evidence on memory
practices post 1800, they have considered hardly
any evidence for pre modern memory. Yet so far
as current macro-historical theories are supported
with early modern evidence at all, this is usually
derived from studies on early modern concepts of
memory, and the evidence that has been collected
to support other generic narratives of the coming
of modernity; the discovery of the self, the rise of
the public sphere, the nation and historical theory.
What they do not consider is evidence for actual
early modern memory practices. In recent years
early modernists have been doing quite a lot of
interesting work on actual remembering as it was