Institute for History Annual Report 2010 - O - Universiteit Leiden

done by early modern people. Modern scholars
have transformed the world of custom, community
and tradition that Nora so confidently
identified as the settings of ‘milieux de mémoire’,
into a much more complex and dynamic phenomenon.
They have emphasised how early modern
culture integrated and domesticated change on
the one hand, while at the same time innovating
much more radically than itself was willing to
admit. This project will attempt to bridge the gap
between the macro-historical narratives of the
memory theorists, and the evidence for early
modern memory practices. The aims are both to
improve and rethink the macro-historical narratives,
and because it might help early modernists
themselves to think more systematically about
continuity and change in the shape and uses of
memory in this period. To achieve this aim, this
project will pursue two routes. The first is a
comparison over time, through a study of modern
and early modern memory practices, with a focus
on those related to civil wars. The second focuses
on identifying and explaining changes in memory
by departing from the early modern period. The
idea here is to exploring a number distinctive
features of the ways in which early modern people
engaged with the past, and the impact of these on
memory practices, before examining the extent to
which, and the reasons why, these transformed
over time.
Families, Corporations and Institutions.
The Role of Trust in the Formation of
Urban Communities in Western Europe,
Institute for History
51
1250-1500 (NWO Rubicon, Birkbeck,
University of London)
Arie van Steensel
In the rapidly growing cities of the late Middle
Ages new forms of trust emerged that gave social
cohesion to the urban community. Civic
corporations and public institutions strengthened
the processes of social integration and community
building in the medieval city. This project aims to
reveal the social mechanisms that underlay these
new, extra-familial solidarities, as well as to
determine the factors that facilitated their
formation. It does so by comparing the
developments in cities with different political and
socio-economic profiles from Italy, the Low
Countries and England. This comparative research
will contribute to our knowledge about the
structural factors that explain the relation between
the evolution of urban communities and the
provision of public services. It will contribute to
the interdisciplinary debate about the practice of
trust and the role of institutionalisation and civil
society in community building, drawing on
sociological theory pertaining to trust and social
networks. The research also enhances our
understanding of the scope and organisation of
public services in the medieval city. The central
question is how the transition from personal to
more general forms of trust in corporations and
institutions facilitated the process of urban
community building in the period from 1250 to
1500.
Taste in Transition