Max-Quentin Bischoff

• Doctoral defence: 10 June 2026 at 1.30 p.m.
• Location: FelixArchief and online
• Supervisor: Jeroen Puttevils
• ​Please register before 4 June by email​

Abstract

The dissertation investigates the future horizon of the Tucher trading company from sixteenth-century Nuremberg based on their internal correspondence. It consists of three parts. Part I discusses the theoretical foundations of the future horizon and analyses the main categories of the Tuchers’ future horizon through the annotation of 178 letters. This discoursive future horizon can be summarised in four points. 1) Almost one half of an average letter was concerned with future events or actions. 2) The Tuchers’ future horizon was largely short-term oriented, desirable, and within their control, but with no clear tendency in terms of certainty or uncertainty. 3) The future horizon partially differed between individual letter writers and domains of life. 4) The discoursive future horizon is strongly influenced by writing conventions and rhetorical strategies. A fuller understanding therefore requires a deeper exploration of the future horizon in concrete contexts.

Part II focuses on internal planning. The correspondence was primarily focused on short-term information management, servant coordination, and travelling preparations. But it also includes mid- and long-term perspectives. Mid-term planning was concerned with a horizon of one to ten years and included the conditions and positions of servants as well as structural adaptions of the company. The Tuchers had to manage personal ambitions of servants, organisational problems as well as cooperations with other merchants. Long-term planning dealt with the education of sons in order to ensure the continued existence of the family company. While the education was essentially standardised, the Tuchers continuously adapted plans to suit individual circumstances and took long-term personal development into account.

Part III analyses market expectations and how expectations were formed. Monetary expectations were mostly implied in concepts like trust, investment and interest. Nevertheless, a closer look reveals conflicting attitudes and priorities within the company: optimism and profit orientation on the side of some servants, and pessimism and security orientation on the side of the leaders. Future developments of interest and exchange rates were mostly unpredictable and were rarely discussed explicitly. Saffron prices, by contrast, were analysed in detail. The Tuchers took a range of factors into account in order to determine future prices and make investment decisions accordingly. One servant of the Tucher company, Christof Kurz, proposed a prognostic system based on astrology and market mechanisms that promised certain profits. While this idea raised interest and was even tested, it was also highly controversial within the company and quickly abandoned.

Laurent Breeus-Loos

• Doctoral defence: 19 June 2026 at 3 p.m.
• UAntwerpen Hof van Liere, W. Elsschotzaal
• Supervisors: Remco Sleiderink (UAntwerp) and Frank Brandsma (Utrecht University)
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Abstract

How do medieval chivalric romances play on the emotions of their audience? What influence do gender patterns have on the shaping of characters’ emotions? And which courtly codes of conduct govern emotional action in the literary imagination? This dissertation offers the first systematic study of emotionality in the genre of the Middle Dutch chivalric romance (ca. 1250-1350). Central to it is the theoretical concept of the ‘emotive script’, a research method developed by Sif Rikhardsdottir and further elaborated in this study through the integration of concepts from cognitive psychology and narratology (Chapter 2). The theory of the emotive script suggests that literary texts contain underlying ‘scripts’ that structure how emotionality is represented and deployed in narrative strategies, while also offering insight into ideological conceptions of emotion. To study these ‘emotive scripts’ in Middle Dutch chivalric romance, this study focuses on three lines of inquiry: (1) narrative strategies, (2) character-based patterns, and (3) intra-textual ideological conceptions. In the analytical sections (Chapter 3-5), each chapter foregrounds one of these research lines and approaches it from a specific perspective. From the perspective of the ‘medieval news cycle’, Chapter 3 examines how eyewitness and messenger characters are used in two narrative strategies – respectively termed the ‘mirror script’ and the ‘messenger script’ – which evoke a wide range of affective audience responses, such as identification, sympathy, and responses arising from the assimilation of a familiar scenario (e.g., curiosity). Chapter 4 focuses on character-based emotional patterns, with special attention to gender dynamics in the so-called script of the ‘damsel in distress’. The analysis shows how this gender-coded script functions not only as a narrative strategy but also reveals conceptions of gender and emotion, in which agency is generally associated with masculinity and emotional instability with femininity. Chapter 5 addresses emotionality from an ethical perspective and examines how the courtly-ideological code of conduct surroundig ‘moderation’ operates in the chivalric romance: courtly moderation is not primarily conceived as a code aimed at suppressing emotions, but rather at regulating them into actions aligned with courtly ethics. Overall, the study, which concludes with a synthesis (Chapter 6) across the boundaries of the individual analyses, illustrates how intra-textual emotionality forms a crucial building block in affective narrative strategies and how it is embedded in medieval conceptions about gender, conduct, and ethics. In doing so, the study reveals both transhistorical and culture-specific emotional tendencies in Middle Dutch chivalric romance.