Session details
Organizer(s)
Jeroen Puttevils (University of Antwerp)
Keywords
Urban Events, Future Thinking, Disruption
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a moment of reflection for many. Some hoped for a return to ‘normalcy’, others saw the pandemic as a reset, as an opportunity to start anew, both at an individual and at a societal level. This led us to think about the future either as a continuation of the ‘before times’ or as a radically new era. Events, that some might call crises, thus affect the ways in which we view the future. In this session we want to historicize this observation. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 had strong effects on the view of the intelligentsia of the Enlightenment, for example. The ways people thought about the(ir) future changed over time and were highly impacted by their environment. Not only could future thinking be affected by the big vectors of change in western European history such as the Renaissance, the Reformation or the Enlightenment, as argued by some scholars (Koselleck, Hölscher, Nelson, Baker), smaller events taking place in cities and within the lifetime of individuals also had an impact and reveal the future expectations of medieval and early modern actors. Indeed, most scholars of past futures have tended to favour long-run changes in future thinking, whereas reactions to potentially disruptive events are perhaps easier to distinguish during and right after these events. Hence, we want to focus on events and their short-term mental repercussions for future thinking. Gauging the effect of urban events on future-thinking also raises important questions about agency: to what extent did those who experienced potentially disruptive events, believe they had agency in these events? Did they think of these as man-made and malleable or did these events belong to the realm of God or Nature? Possibly, all of these forces might have interacted, producing a pluritemporality.
This session explores the effect of urban events (for example, social unrest, epidemics or military blockades) on the way people thought about their future. Our aim is to bring together urban history with cultural history and the history of mentalities.
Papers
Leaping into the Future: The French Revolution and Uncanny Temporality in Paris
Author(s)
William Max Nelson (University of Toronto)
Keywords
Time, Future, Paris
Abstract
During the French Revolution, a number of people expressed the idea that the French had made such rapid social and political progress that it was as if they had leapt forward in time. While it might be easy to dismiss this as rhetorical or metaphorical excess, I argue that this kind of formulation represents a complex understanding of historical temporality that had developed over the second half of the eighteenth century and that was radicalized in reflections on the exhilarating and disorienting events of the Revolution. One of the most complex features of this new understanding of time was the idea that people living in different stages of historical development existed at the same time. In fact, according to the strange logic of this conception of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, some people lived in at least two times, since some people living in the present were also living in the past, while other lived in the present and the future. I analyze this understanding of temporality, touch upon its emergence in Enlightenment theories of progress, and relate it to the experience of rapid transformation in urban centers, particularly during the Revolution. I will conclude with a discussion of how three books about Paris written by Louis-Sébastien Mercier over a thirty year period in the late eighteenth century exemplify this experience of feeling as if one has leapt into the future.
Did the Plague of 1399-1400 Disrupt Mercantile Future Thinking in Venice?
Author(s)
Nicolò Zennaro (University of Antwerp) and Francesco Guidi Bruscoli (University of Florence)
Keywords
Venice, Merchants, Future
Abstract
On 19 June 1400, Talerano Mattei, a Florentine broker in Venice, wrote to Francesco Datini:
«People are dying in Florence. May God, with His grace, provide an end to the deaths. Meanwhile, many people are dying here in Venice: on one day this month, 100 died. But I have heard that 30 to 40 die every day from the bubonic plague. May God in His mercy keep His hands on our heads.»
The waves of plague that followed one another between the latter part of the 14th and the early 15th centuries may have led to significant changes in the culture and mentality of Venetian society. Fear of death and the high risk it brought on trading led the merchant of this city to reconsider his way of thinking about the future. Nicholas Scott Baker analysed the effects of this cultural transformation on the mercantile culture between the mid-15th and 17th centuries. In his book, In Fortune's Theater (2021), he states that the 15th-century geographical discoveries caused it, bringing about multiple perspectives of the future. These raised different ways of thinking about it: the Christian eschatological future; the future that could be uncovered through divinatory techniques; the everyday prudential impressions of the future; and the one considered as an unknown and unknowable time yet to come, deeply influenced by the concept of God and Fortune. This paper seeks to push this analysis to an earlier century, the 14th and 15th centuries, precisely a period of important changes. Perhaps changes in mercantile culture and mentality are even to be attributed to this cycle of epidemics.
To that end, we will deep-read the letters written by Bindo Piaciti and Bartolo Zati, two economic agents of Francesco Datini, who experienced the plague in Venice first-hand. The analysis and comparison of their perspectives and discourses on the future before, during and after the pandemic will show eventual changes in Venetian merchant mentality.
The Chronicle as a Compass for an Uncertain Future : Searching for Patterns in Early Modern Dutch Chronicles
Author(s)
Theo Dekker (University of Leiden)
Keywords
Chronicles, Low Countries, Causality
Abstract
One of the reasons why early modern people chronicled current events in their communities, was to search for patterns. Chroniclers frequently recorded odd weather patterns (scorching summers or frigid winters), famines, troop movements, wars, epidemics, prices, prodigies, monstrous births, and other premonitions to search for elements that could help them to comprehend current, and to anticipate on, future events. In this paper I will explore how chroniclers from the Low Countries constructed causal relations between various phenomena and events, and how that changed between 1500 and 1850. I will do so by combining computational and historical methods to analyse 250 early modern Dutch chronicles, focusing especially on authors of the middling sort (e.g., farmers, merchants, and local officials). As a result, we gain insight on how they tried to get grip on current events in their attempt to limit future harm.
In this paper I will focus especially on how chroniclers collected data on epidemics, meteorological phenomena, and food- and fuel prices, knowledge which they regarded as useful. Using this evidence, I will argue that throughout the period, this group continued to believe in the idea that disruptive events could have both human and natural but also supernatural origins. Both faith and reason conditioned responses to potential hazards, and the solutions chosen were discussed side-by-side, usually without an apparent sense of conflict. However, natural explanations became more complex over time, which resulted in more detailed explanations on the causes and consequences of (future) hazards.
By focussing on the information that chroniclers regarded as useful, and studying the causal relations they constructed, we can not only reconstruct how chroniclers coped with contemporary hazards and crises, but also how they used their chronicle as a compass and anchor to get some grip on events as they sailed into an uncertain future.
Love's Future in Times of Rupture: the Marriage story of Daniel van der Meulen and Hester Della Faille
Author(s)
Sanne Hermans (University of Antwerp)
Keywords
Love and Temporality, Fall of Antwerp, Van der Meulen
Abstract
In the past eighteen months, weddings were postponed, downsized or cancelled. Young families were involuntarily shacked up together, and relationships – close and long-distance – were put to the test. We all have felt the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on our presences and futures, including our love life. But how was it done in the past, in times of social, economic or political upheaval, when crisis experts and future modelling did not yet exist, and contact was only personal or via mail? Or in short: How did previous periods of rupture impact people’s futures in romantic love?
Love is a well-studied topic in western historiography, especially for the middle ages, but also for the late sixteenth century: an era branded by religious wars and societal ruptures. According to Susan Karant-Nunn (2000), these cultural changes influenced all types of human relations fundamentally, romantic included. An eminent work on a particular early modern love is Steven Ozment’s Magdalena and Balthazar (1986), wherein the intimate correspondence of two German Protestant spouses is laid bare, from which the following question arises: To what extent do we actually differ from our predecessors, especially when it concerns a universal topic as love? This, of course, also applies to love in crisis situations.
Mira Moshe's dissertation Temporal Love (2016) illustrates how personal, social and cultural time perceptions organize contemporary love and romantic relationships. The aim of this presentation is to explore this interaction for the pre-modern period by means of the correspondence of the Antwerp merchant family Van der Meulen, written during the Siege and Fall of Antwerp (1584-1585). An important tale that develops within these letters is that of Daniel van der Meulen and Hester della Faille, a love story chronicled by Jesse Sadler (2015). Both were forced to leave Antwerp in 1584, after which they built a life together in Holland. The unrest in their hometown, however, had major implications for their engagement and marriage: the reason their story makes an ideal case study to explore love’s future in times of crisis. Using digital means, I will expose the sixteenth-century connection between temporality and love.