Postdoc: DE ZWAAN Klaas (UU) | Supervisor: KESSLER Frank (UU)
This subproject carried out by the external Dutch partner adds an important dimension to B-magic by providing material for a comparison with the Netherlands, a neighbouring country with a similar, yet in several respects (among which was the position of the Catholics) very different social structure. As in Belgium, newspaper announcements of and reports on lantern performances and illustrated lectures abound (e.g. the thousands of hits in a preliminary survey in the Dutch database of digitized newspapers, “Delpher”), which will enable the mapping of magic lantern projections in the Netherlands and identify the societal groups that organized them, their subjects, and the way in which they were discursively framed.
One of the case studies that has been explored already involves the use of the optical lantern as a means of Belgian propaganda in the neutral Netherlands during World War One. Fled Belgian intellectuals like art professor Leo van Puyvelde and architect Huib Hoste were highly active in Dutch lecturing networks. Lantern lectures on Belgian architectural history were a widely employed format to fuel anti-German sentiment as well as Belgian patriotism among a dispersed community. Part of this research will be published in Journal for Belgian History (fall 2021).
Another case study involves the use if the lantern for Boer propaganda during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in the Netherlands and Flanders. Many lantern lecturers actively took part in this early media war, often addressing the cultural kinship between the Dutch, Flemish and Boer ‘brother nations’. Here, the optical lantern functioned as an instigator of discourses on the Greater Netherlands.
The last case study focuses on another aspect of lantern culture around 1900: the uses of the optical lantern to disseminate medical knowledge in- and outside academia. Projecting microscopic images was a landmark event in medical science communication, allowing a wider, international audience to witness a hidden world and to accept new truths. We argue the lantern was a pivotal part of the ‘golden age of bacteriology’.