Perspectives on the World Reflections of -
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A word from the Dean The - academic year saw the quality assessment of the education and research carried out at our institutes. It goes without saying that these assessments involve a lot of work, but they are necessary for transparency and accountability, as well as being extremely useful. We learn from the experience, and we receive useful suggestions from our peers who review us.
monographs”. The output of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) was described as “good to excellent in all three programmes”. The committee concluded with regard to the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA): “It is clear that Leiden University and the Faculty of Humanities have a success story on their hands”.
The Faculty of Humanities can be proud of the way the different committees evaluated the quality of our research. The output of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), for example, was termed “impressive in its quality, often representing international-level research and in some cases even world-leading research”. The committee that assessed the Leiden University Institute for History (LUIH) “was impressed by the number of grants, awards and prizes that were acquired in the period under review” and described the institute as “an attractive and prestigious place of research and teaching for many scholars”.
It is highly rewarding to work in such a Faculty and to know that we can look forward to the future with confidence. It is also clear that the quality of our research is recognised internationally. A few examples of this research are presented in this edition of Perspectives, that covers the - academic year: from the impact of social reading on the book industry, to the system of deliberative democracy; from the response to environmental problems to Assistant Professor Boletsi’s insight that “we’re all barbarians”. You can also read about former master’s student Sander Stolk, who developed a computer tool to calculate how many words can be found for a given concept in the Thesaurus of Old English, as well as about how young people draw an image of God, what are the underlying aspects of effective speeches of politicians, and what we, as society, can learn from studying – sometimes inaccurate – accounts of the Dutch Revolt.
Another committee remarked that the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) is working towards a more interdisciplinary and transregional research programme. They complimented the researchers of this institute: “They are strong international players, even among the leaders in their respective fields”. The Leiden University Institute for Religious Studies (LIRS) was referred to as “the institutional home of a number of high-calibre scholars with an strong national and international reputation”, while, according to another committee, the research of the Leiden University Institute for Philosophy (LUIPh) “reaches a high standard, as evidenced by refereed articles, book chapters and
I hope you will enjoy reading our Perspectives on the World. Professor Wim van den Doel Dean
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Humanities at Leiden University Leiden’s Faculty of Humanities is an international centre for studying the world’s languages, cultures and nations. The Faculty’s research stretches from prehistoric times to the present day, and adopts a broad perspective that encompasses fields as diverse as religion, philosophy, literature, art and technology.
Multidisciplinary collaboration The Faculty of Humanities was formed in . Merging the diverse departments to create the current institutes has enabled us to engage in collaboration at a multidisciplinary level and given us the opportunity to extend our scope beyond the limits of the former departments. The Faculty’s research activities are currently structured within seven institutes: • The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) focuses on bringing together art and science • The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) combines thorough knowledge of language and culture with disciplinary approaches from the humanities, social sciences and law • The Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) covers the field of literature and literary studies, the history of art and material culture, and film and new media studies • The Leiden University Institute for History (LUIH) has a broad and wide-reaching academic scope. The Institute has an unique international orientation and focuses on the study of European, American, Asian and African societies in a global context • The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) brings together all the Faculty’s linguistic research
• The Leiden University Institute for Philosophy (LUIPh) studies philosophy in all its facets, in relation to the many disciplines taught at the University • The Leiden University Institute for Religious Studies (LIRS) includes all religions within its range of expertise The Faculty of Humanities is home to more than , students. In the - academic year they are able to choose from no fewer than BA and MA programmes, including research master’s. In , the Faculty’s staff members were engaged in teaching and research activities based on a turnover of almost million euros. The Faculty awarded PhD degrees to candidates in .
International research The Faculty is ranked among the top five Arts and Humanities faculties outside the English-speaking world. The quality of the Faculty’s research is recognised internationally, as witnessed by the fact that our researchers are regularly awarded significant national and international research grants and prizes. An example this year is the award for the short film El último consejo. This film by PhD candidate Itandehui Jansen of our Academy of Creative and Performing Arts was acclaimed at the international film festival Viña del Mar in Chili. The film is about the Mixtec Indian community in Mexico. The jury commended Jansen for the way
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she blended fiction and non-fiction. The European ‘WeCurate’ subsidy for cultural projects was awarded to Professor Kitty Zijlmans (LUCAS). Together with artists, the public and cultural institutions, Zijlmans’ research team is investigating how cultural organisations and the public themselves can think about culture in a broader way. How can culture and cultural activities contribute to social challenges? Or improve the quality of our neighbourhood? And how can museums connect with new generations?
In , our university founded ‘LeidenGlobal’ a collaboration between research institutions and museums. This partnership brings together scientific and educational knowledge about global and area studies.
Besides awards and European subsidies, funding is also provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) that finances a number of top researchers every year. Its prestigious VICI award, one of the largest personal scientific awards in the Netherlands, has been awarded to a Leiden Humanities researcher twelve times since its inception in . Last year Professor Kasia Cwiertka (LIAS) received a VICI award for her research on waste management and what it tells us about society. More specifically, her research is about recent changes in China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The contribution made by the Faculty of Humanities plays a key role in positioning Leiden University among the top three recipients of VICI awards.
Profile themes In order to facilitate cutting-edge fundamental research at national and international level, Leiden University has chosen to focus on six key themes from among eleven multi-disciplinary fields of research. The Faculty of Humanities is engaged in research relating to four of these themes: • Global Interaction of Civilizations and Languages • The Asian Challenge • Health, Life and Biosciences • Law, Democracy and Governance: Legitimacy in a Multilevel Setting
More about the Faculty of Humanities For more information about the Faculty, its programmes and institutes, see: hum.leiden.edu. The recipients of scientific awards are listed at: hum.leiden.edu/research/hall-of-fame. A list of candidates who recently received their PhD can be found at: hum.leiden.edu/research/PhDs. Subsidies received by researchers are listed at: hum.leiden.edu/research.
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A politician’s way with words Whatever you may think of Geert Wilders’ opinions, he is rarely accused of using ‘vague language’. So what is his secret? And what is it that makes us decide that some politicians are too ‘woolly’? Does one politician speak more as a ‘man of the people’ than another? Maarten van Leeuwen (1981) graduated in Linguistics, and is now studying politicians’ speeches at word and sentence level for his PhD dissertation on the stylistics of the Dutch language. Van Leeuwen is affiliated to Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Apart from an isolated attempt some years ago to identify the stylistics of the Dutch language, there has for a long time been little or no scientific knowledge in this field of study. A group of Leiden researchers is currently working in this unchartered territory, within the context of the interdisciplinary NWO research project on ‘Stylistics of Dutch’, in which Van Leeuwen is participating. The goal of the project is to reintroduce stylistics to Dutch Studies as a field of research. Van Leeuwen’s work is part of this effort.
Stylistics is about the choices a writer makes. Van Leeuwen: “The DutchRail used to have stoptreinen (literally: ‘stop trains’). Now they refer to these same trains as sprinters. With this change they are making a stylistic choice that has rhetorical consequences: in contrast to ‘stop train’, ‘sprinter’ emphasises how quickly the train accelerates away.” Van Leeuwen studies these kinds of stylistic choices in parliamentary speeches, taking media opinions of different politicians as the starting point.
Foto ANP: Phil Nijhuis
War metaphor Van Leeuwen compared a number of speeches on the topic of integration by MP Geert Wilders, who is known as a ‘clear’ speaker, and former Minister Ella Vogelaar, who was said to use ‘woolly’ language. His analysis of their use of vocabulary and figures of speech confirmed these opinions. “Wilders gives many specific examples and, unlike Vogelaar, uses a lot of repetition and metaphors. Many of Wilders’ speeches are recognisable by his use of war metaphors: he often uses terms from warfare such as ‘fight’, ‘capitulate’ and ‘Trojan Horse’.” The analysis also shows the grammatical choices that create the impression that Wilders formulates his opinions clearly – this is where Van Leeuwen’s background (his master’s thesis was on
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grammatical constructions using the verb krijgen (‘to get’) is most apparent. “Vogelaar often formulated sentences with a main clause and a subordinate clause, for instance: ‘I think that the weather will be good tomorrow.’ Wilders says: ‘The weather will be good tomorrow.’ Vogelaar’s choice of sentence structure left much more room for discussion.”
Having a say Another aspect of the research focuses on whether the language used by Wilders and Alexander Pechtold, another opposition leader, corresponds with the way in which they present themselves. “Wilders has created an image of himself as a political outsider and a ‘man of the people’. This is also apparent in his stylistic choices: he says, for instance: ‘People think’ instead of ‘I think’. This seems to give voters something of a say as well. Pechtold, however, creates the impression that he is a part of the political establishment in The Hague. This, too, can be seen in his use of language. He uses more jargon, and policy rather than voters takes centre stage in his speeches. Pechtold says things like: ‘There will be less of a burden on the public and business.’ Wilders would say: ‘The public and business will bear less of the burden.’ Wilders takes the perspective of the voters, and nearly always gives them a more prominent role in the sentence.” One of the goals of the stylistics project is to develop a method for forming well-founded judgments about style. Van Leeuwen: “We are creating a checklist of linguistic phenomena, so that you can systematically analyse style. We use it when teaching stylistics, but others will also be able to use it for scientific research. This kind of checklist could be useful for speechwriters and journalists, too. In addition, the study provides insight into the rhetorical effects of stylistic choices, which is of interest to anyone who is professionally involved with language.”
“The NS used to have stoptreinen (literally: ‘stop trains’); now they refer to these same trains as sprinters.”
Maarten van Leeuwen
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Solving environmental issues Hanneke Muilwijk (1986) has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in both Chemistry (Sustainable Molecular Science & Technology) and Philosophy. Her Philosophy thesis was awarded the Wouter Achterberg Prize in 2013.
“During my Chemistry studies, it became abundantly clear to me that in terms of technology, we are able to come up with fantastic solutions to environmental problems. But what about the next step? I find this question fascinating, because actually implementing these solutions often turns out to be much more complex than the technical issues involved. In my thesis I investigated why this is and how things could be improved.
“Sustainability issues often involve a number of different interests: some people need the timber from the rainforest in order to survive whereas others want to protect a rare butterfly. Personal gain – a car journey, for example – is often at odds with a collective problem, such as environmental pollution. In addition, it’s essential that people take responsibility for their own behaviour: low-energy bulbs should not mean that they leave their lights on longer. Another difficulty is that while our problems transgress borders, the international structures are not equipped to deal with them. “The conclusion I have drawn is that our liberal model of democracy is not particularly suited to address these kinds of problems. My hypothesis is that a deliberative democracy, in which decisions are not based on a vote but on discussion and consensus, is much better equipped for this.
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“The American researcher Fishkin has performed experiments in which he brought people together and asked them to make consensual decisions. He asked the test subjects to fill in a questionnaire before and after the experiments. In one of his European experiments, many of the participants proved to have changed their minds on environmental issues: after the experiment they made greener choices and voted for different parties. “Of course, deliberative democracy is not a magic wand; you cannot determine the outcome. But it does show that this system is better equipped to deal with environmental problems. “After I graduated, I joined the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment as a government trainee. I focus on the public perception of water safety. I am happy to be doing work that is socially relevant. In the future I would like to do a PhD on the interaction between science and society.”
“The conclusion I have drawn is that our liberal model of democracy is not particularly suited to address these kinds of environmental problems.”
Hanneke Muilwijk
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To read or not to read Carola van der Drift (1989) has a Bachelor’s degree in Japanese Studies and recently completed her Master’s degree in Book and Digital Media Studies. “What makes a reader decide whether or not to read a new book? The opinion of professionals, such as reviewers, is starting to count for less. Research shows that what your friends and acquaintances think is becoming increasingly important. Book marketing has become more democratic, as it were.
“Reading has always been an incentive for social interaction – we can term this ‘social reading’ – but the internet and social media have made this process quicker and easier. Readers visit websites and download apps on literature. They exchange book tips, news and reviews via media such as Facebook and Twitter. In my thesis, I documented how social reading can be used in book marketing. “The book industry is having a hard time in the Netherlands: publishers are faced with falling sales figures. They could use this new kind of social reading, for instance by giving away books to people who retweet a message about a book or write a review. The most effective form of marketing is to stir consumers to action because you then create a group of loyal followers, and word will spread quickly about your book. The trouble is that publishers run the risk of losing control: a book could end up receiving bad reviews. “Some publishers are therefore still a bit cautious. But the great advantage is that you can easily reach a large target group, even for books with a low marketing budget or by unknown writers. It also enables authors to do much of the marketing themselves. And you can reach people who rarely enter a bookshop, if at all.
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“I have just completed my thesis, but the topic is still very much on my mind. I work at the University Library and write about the impact of modern media on the library world for the journal Informatie Professional. I would like to continue doing research, especially if I can combine the themes of my master’s degree with those of my bachelor’s degree, which was in Japanese.”
“Research shows that what your friends and acquaintances think is becoming increasingly important. Book marketing has become more democratic, as it were.”
Carola van der Drift
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“We’re always somebody else’s barbarian” Whenever the ancient Greeks encountered people they didn’t understand, they would call them barbaroi, because to the Greeks, their language represented incomprehensible sounds. In our current dictionaries, ‘barbarian’ means the opposite of civilized, or the antithesis of ‘us’. However, in his poem ‘Waiting for the barbarians’ (1904), Greek poet Cavafy suggests that the civilized depend on the barbarians, because they carry the promise of a new beginning. Maria Boletsi (Corfu, 1979) was fascinated by this poem as a teenager. She works at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society where she is Assistant Professor at the Film and Literary Studies Department. Boletsi has just published Barbarism and Its Discontents. Maria Boletsi is a product of her time. When she started her master’s in Amsterdam in , the West was dominated by the alQaeda attacks of . In the years that followed, Boletsi detected an increase in the use of the word ‘barbarian’ in the media and in political rhetoric as well as in everyday language. With Cavafy in mind, she had found the inspiration for her research.
Dangerous enemies
Detail of the Esperando a los bárbaros installation by Graciela Sacco (). Heliography on paper and wood, variable dimensions. Photograph by Maria Boletsi, taken at Museum Morsbroich, Germany.
Boletsi soon concluded that the barbarian’s role is always in relation to civilisation. “To call somebody a barbarian has certain consequences for how we perceive this person. It isn’t at all innocent; there’s a lot of violence in these linguistic constructions. Tagging others as barbarians transforms them from legitimate opponents into irrational and dangerous enemies that you have to eliminate. You can’t reason with evil. We hear politicians using the term to legitimise military action against
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others or to suspend human rights in the name of protection; Guantanamo Bay is the perfect example of this.” The meaning of barbarian as ‘someone we don’t understand’ is also reflected quite literally in how people view recent protest movements, such as the Occupy movement. “Many people don’t understand the Occupy movement. They feel it doesn’t have clear objectives. This is why they view it as barbarian, incomprehensible. But this case also shows how relative the concept is: the occupiers call bankers ‘barbarians’ too. The barbarian isn’t a natural category. People aren’t essentially or naturally barbarians; we’re always somebody else’s barbarian.”
A new perspective However, there can also be another side to the concept of barbarism. “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution,” Cavafy writes. In Boletsi’s view, “This is what is intriguing about this poem: what happens to the civilised when the barbarian is no longer there? We’re lost if we don’t have this category of ‘the other’ against which we can define ourselves.” But barbarism can also be used in an affirmative or critical way, she suggests. “It has been used in art, literature and philosophy as a mode of critique of civilisation, progress or rationality. As a critical concept, it can signify an alternative, new perspective, a new beginning.
“Tagging others as barbarians transforms them from legitimate opponents into irrational and dangerous enemies that you have to eliminate.”
Maria Boletsi
The implications of current uses of the word still intrigue Boletsi. In her new research she is focusing on the role of barbarism after / in art and literature, as well as in media and cultural theory. This summer she will start a project with researchers from Switzerland and Germany on the modern history of barbarism and its role in definitions of European identity since the eighteenth century. The project, for which she has just received an NWO Internationalisation grant, is due to be completed in .
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An old man with a long beard Lizette Romijn (1987) did a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and went on to do two Master’s degrees simultaneously: in Psychology and Religious Studies. “In my Psychology training very little attention was paid to spirituality and the answers people seek to the big questions in life. But I think this is precisely what makes us human. In society there is also a lot of interest in spirituality and practices such as mindfulness, but meanwhile the churches are emptying. This is why in my Religious Studies thesis I wanted to consider the basis of religious conviction: the development of the relationship between an individual and God. “I asked over seventy young people to draw the picture they see in their minds if they think of GOD – I used three capital letters to avoid biasing them. I wanted to find out how ‘developed’ their image of God was, whether it had personal features and differed from the fairy-tale image of an old man with a long beard, high up on a cloud. “Many drawings turned out to be very specific, and most were of the fairy-tale old man. The young people had not really developed their images of God into their own personal depictions. This might be due to the way that churches try to appeal to young people. They tend to reach out to them with mass events, but appear to pay little attention to the more personal relationship with God. Drawing by one of the young participants.
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“I also used a questionnaire to obtain some personal information about the participants, and then looked at whether this information correlated with their image of God. Most of the drawings that depicted biblical scenes proved to have been produced by religious young people with diplomas in junior general secondary education or senior secondary vocational education. Religious participants with a senior general secondary education diploma or a higher professional diploma were most likely to produce drawings that did not contain any biblical references. Young people who felt insecure in their relationship with their mother had a tendency to draw a more realistic image of God, which differed more strongly from the fairy-tale picture. Some researchers think that children’s images of God are primarily a projection of their parents. If young people are more insecure in their relationship with their mother, their image of God will tend to represent a more accessible figure. “If I were given the opportunity to do PhD research on this topic, I would definitely seize it. At the moment I am working as a researcher at the Youth Care Bureau. In my work, I often come in contact with people with a different religious background, so my studies definitely come in handy.”
Lizette Romijn
“I wanted to find out how ‘developed’ their image of God was, whether it had personal features and differed from the fairy-tale image of an old man with a long beard, high up on a cloud.”
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The Japanese struggle with a wartime past When Ethan Mark (1965) met his future wife, the daughter of an Indonesian air force officer and his Dutch wife, he also met his academic future. Mark had already finished his Bachelor’s degree in Japanese Studies and had been an exchange student in Tokyo. His encounter with Indonesia inspired him to complete a PhD at Columbia University on the Japanese occupation of the Indonesian island of Java during World War II. Next year, he will publish the English translation of a landmark book about Japanese fascism, with an extensive introduction that puts the issue in a global perspective. Ethan Mark is a specialist in the history of modern Japan and works at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. During his PhD training, Mark encountered a book by Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki called Grass-Roots Fascism. The War Experience of the Japanese People (). “It’s a fascinating book, because it looks at the experiences of ordinary Japanese people during the Second World War. When I finished my PhD, I jumped at the chance to translate it, because I thought it was long overdue.” Yoshimi, a member of the Japanese student protest movement in the sixties, saw German students demanding an explanation for the war. He wondered why this wasn’t happening in Japan. Mark: “Japanese history is often seen as a history of oppression from above, partly based on the idea that the Japanese are passive and feudalistic: not modern enough, and therefore easily pushed into war. This was a convenient explanation, maintained both by Japanese elites and by foreign countries with their own political
agenda. But Yoshimi didn’t accept the idea that ordinary Japanese people had no active role in the war.” Historical research on the experiences of ordinary people during a war that had ended more than thirty years earlier wasn’t easy. “But Yoshimi found many diaries and memoirs of low-ranking soldiers and their families. These people turned out to be surprisingly literate. The Japanese government had not been forthcoming in explaining the war, but Yoshimi saw that there were many Japanese who had thought about it and were still wrestling with it.”
Brothers? The most striking aspect of the book in Mark’s eyes, however, is its illustration of the central role of the Second Sino-Japanese War (starting in ) in shaping developments within wartime Japan
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– and beyond. “The interaction between the battlefront and the home front, which Yoshimi emphasises, is something we tend to overlook, and it has relevance for our understanding of the Second World War more generally. The Japanese became increasingly brutal because they couldn’t handle Chinese resistance. While the propaganda called the Chinese ‘brothers’, one diary after another shows that in daily practice the Japanese treated them as untermenschen. In the end, these experiences radicalised Japan.” In his introduction to Grass-Roots Fascism, Mark also assesses its depiction of Japan’s occupation experience in neighbouring countries like Taiwan, Korea and Indonesia. “In the last twentyodd years, scholars have started to look more at the grey areas of interaction in colonial history, not just oppression and resistance. For example, ordinary Indonesians suffered severely under Japanese occupation, but the Indonesian elite had a much more complex relationship with the Japanese. In my own work I look at questions such as: why did they co-operate, what kind of interests or ideologies did they share?” Having completed a revised version of his PhD thesis, Mark now wants to write a history of the Second World War that isn’t Eurocentric. “The story of the War always starts in in Poland. I have trouble finding a valid reason for this. If you look at the War from the perspective of most of the world, this was a war about empires fighting to the death. The fascist countries all saw the war as a legitimate war for empire. The Sino-Japanese war was the beginning of the end of colonialism. In this sense, the war in Asia was essential to global history. I’d like to write a narrative that starts the Second World War in , at the Marco Polo Bridge in China, when the Japanese and Chinese initiated total war.”
Ethan Mark
“The Japanese government had not been forthcoming in explaining the war, but Yoshimi saw that there were many Japanese who had thought about it and were still wrestling with it.”
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Greetings from the Anglo-Saxons Sander Stolk (1985) studied Computer Science before doing a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Culture and a Master’s in Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture. “For my master’s thesis in English I tried to find a use for the programming skills I had acquired while studying Computer Science. I developed a tool that calculates how many words can be found for a given concept in the Thesaurus of Old English. “The thesaurus organises groups of words into a tree structure: it begins with an abstract category of words, such as ‘actions’, and then branches out into increasingly specific categories, such as ‘gestures’ and then ‘greetings’. The vocabulary of a civilisation reveals its culture: we can now see how many words and nuances the Anglo-Saxons had for ‘war’, for example.
“I did a case study on the words for and meanings of ‘to greet’. The first thing you do when you meet another person is greet him. It is a way of acknowledging the other person, a ritual that structures the encounter. The Old English gretan (English: to greet, Dutch: groeten) can have a number of meanings, all of which relate to initial contact, whether this be playing the harp or attacking with a spear. The same word can therefore have many associations. “I also studied literary texts, poems and administrative texts that contained the words for greeting, in order to discover more about the context in which they were used.
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“My study showed that the initial greeting in Old English often had a health or well-being connotation: hal (English: whole, Dutch: heel) and gesund (English: healthy, Dutch: gezond) are examples of this. Health wishes are not a feature of greetings in modern English: they generally take the form of a question (‘How do you do?’) or are used when leaving (‘Take care’). “This kind of study makes it possible to chart the development of a language. Although I originally studied English because I didn’t enjoy working in the IT sector, my research has once again given me a taste for programming, so that’s what I will be doing next. But I will also be giving some serious consideration to whether I want to do a PhD in this field.”
“I developed a tool that calculates how many words can be found for a given concept in the Thesaurus of Old English.”
Sander Stolk
Episode from the Dutch Revolt. Hendrik van Steenwijck, Church interior with iconoclasts, c. -, oil on panel (Collectie Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft).
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Tales of the Dutch Revolt On 3 October each year, Leiden celebrates the Relief of Leiden – the city’s liberation from the Spanish Siege in 1574. People eat hutspot, and herring with white bread is handed out. Every Dutch person has heard of these festivities; they are familiar components of our memory culture of the Eighty Years War. Where better to carry out research on this culture than at the Leiden University Institute for History? This is where Professor Judith Pollmann (1964) is leading the exceptional research project ‘Tales of the Revolt. Memory, oblivion and identity in the Low Countries, 1566-1700’. Apart from Leiden’s eating habits, Pollmann and her research group are studying diverse aspects of Dutch culture in the Golden Age that bore witness to the tumultuous past, be it stained-glass windows in churches, plaques on houses, street names, storytelling, chronicles, literature or plays. “We study how memories are transmitted, but also what this says about how people deal with change and how they construct their own story from events.” The Eighty Years War (-) is a rewarding epoch to study, because of the quick succession of events during the Revolt against the King and the lasting effects of the ensuing war on the relationship between the Northern and Southern Provinces of the Low Countries. This struggle eventually led to the formation of two separate states. One of the threads that Pollmann can see running through her work as a historian specialising in the early modern era is how people deal with change. “I am a child of the time when religious barriers were lifted in the Netherlands: at a young age I had many a discussion with my grandmother about the consequences of these changes, for example.” Pollmann studied History in
Amsterdam and Renaissance Studies in London, and developed an interest in the impact of change in the sixteenth century. A collection of her research group’s results will be published later this year under the title Memory before modernity. Practices of memory in early modern Europe. Pollmann’s own contribution to the larger research project will follow in .
Awkward If you consider what we know about the Eighty Years War in the Low Countries, you can see how people construct their own version of history and use this for political purposes. The Southern regions – modern-day Belgium – initially rose in revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs, but later they again came under Spanish rule. “This was awkward, so they reconstructed history. Religion played an important role in this respect. Stories were told of how local saints had repelled attacks by heretics. William of Orange, who initiated the revolt, was depicted as a person driven primarily by his own ambitions. And, no, they had never been Calvinists: it was just the bad influence of those Hollanders (from the North).”
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In the independence-seeking North, there were too many religious distinctions to use religion as the basis for a commonly constructed identity, Pollmann concludes. “So their story had a much more secular and xenophobic bias: the Spanish versus the Dutch. The concept of Fatherland proved to be the solution here: Dutch was primarily all that was not Spanish. Revolt memories became a tool in national politics: did you fight hard enough for our Fatherland? But a common culture of remembrance was not a matter of course. We can see this from the fact that it took thirty years for a funerary monument to be built for William of Orange.”
Different stories Her research also led Pollmann to develop more profound ideas about her field. “So many different stories have been told about our past over the years. Some of these stories are nonsense when looking at them from a scholarly perspective, but that doesn’t make them less interesting. Mayor Van der Werff is traditionally seen as a hero who offered his own body to the hungry Leiden citizens during the Siege of Leiden. We now know that there is no evidence of such heroism, and that he may in fact have considered capitulating. This knowledge changes nothing about the celebration, and we still sing patriotic songs near his statue on October. And there is not necessarily anything wrong in this. It is our job as historians to challenge myths, but we also need to accept that other people want to do other things with the past.”
Judith Pollmann
“We study how memories are transmitted, but also what this says about how people deal with change and how they construct their own story from events.”
Perspectives on the World
Portrait photography
Reflections of - Faculty of Humanities
Hielco Kuipers
Design Editors
Ratio Design, Haarlem
Jesca Zweijtzer Crowd Communicatie, Lise-Lotte Kerkhof
Graphic production UFB / GrafiMedia
Interviews Schonewille Schrijft, Marie-Louise Schonewille
Translation Academic Language Centre, Faculty of Humanities
September
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