Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 124, Issue 2, 2011

This article explores how the ‘royal image’ of the English pretender to the throne, Perkin Warbeck, was created during his stay in the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire between 1492 and 1495. This process of ‘construction’ was not uniform. It was ever evolving and unlinear. It contained the formulation of a credible claim to the throne and the adoption of a plausible princely appearance. Warbeck participated in ceremonial and political transactions and affirmed in this manner his new social position. Nevertheless, as well on the side of Warbeck as Henry VII – the Tudor whose kingship was menaced – a ‘deconstruction’ of the other’s kingship was simultaneously pursued. This also formed an integral part of rulers’ reputations.

In an article published in 1967 in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, the Dutch historian Riemer Reinsma described William I’s unifying policy regarding history education as a failure. According to Reinsma, William I and his government never succeeded in their plan to introduce one national history at school that contained both Northern and Southern history. In this article, William I’s policy concerning history education will be re-examined by means of new source material, such as school programmes and inspection reports. The main question that will be posed, is whether this policy was really aiming that much on unification as Reinsma has claimed?

Tracing the legislative debates surrounding the introduction of a law on duelling in the Belgian penal code in 1841, this article examines the changing discourses and practices of ‘honour’ in the Belgian parliamentary hemicycle. The unique position of the nineteenth century Belgian duellist, created by the new law, allows for a new perspective on the history of the ‘civilization’ of the concept of honour in Europe, as it calls existing chronologies and accounts of either slow decline or continuous persecution of the duel into question. Rather than understanding the duel as a medieval tradition that is gradually made more cultured, civil and democratic (in that order) until it fades away in the twentieth century, this article argues that the 1841 legislation created room for a new, ‘modern’ duel in which the interaction between the male body and honour were renegotiated and the duel remained available as a way to allow for a man’s personal rehabilitation.

Was France during the Interwar period ‘immune’ to fascism, or should it be considered one of the centres of fascist thinking in Europe? Was fascism in France fundamentally anti-bourgeois and ‘left wing’, or was it strongly related to traditional conservatism? These kinds of questions are still pivotal within the scolarly debate on French fascism, but at the same time research is also taking new directions. Through an overview of the historiographical debate on French fascism, this article analyses the development and the themes of an old discussion that is still raging strongly. Though the barriers between English and French language historians are far from gone, more mutual understanding must be possible. After all, only research taking into account political and intellectual history, programs of radical movements as well as ideas of non-conformist intellectuals, can provide meaningful answers to the big questions on French fascism.

Although ‘generation’ is a key concept in historiography, the problem of historicity has rarely been discussed within generational theory. In this article, I argue for a revision of generational thinking, which focuses on historical experience instead of political action. I start with a critical assessment of Karl Mannheims seminal essay ‘the Problem of Generations’ (1928). Although the core axiom of his theory – the primary importance of adolescent experiences for generational consciousness – is still valid, his historical materialist interpretation of generations is questionable as it leads to the fallacies of historicism. Alternatively, the imagined character of the generation is emphasized and a reinterpretation of the generational experience as an experience of historicity is proposed. Consequently, the generation is no longer understood as an agent of sociohistorical change, but as a meta-historical category in which the individual’s placement in history is both cognitively understood and socially mediated.

The third issue of the Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis in 2010 contained an article by Martijn Eickhoff, Barabara Henkes, and Frank van Vree entitled: ‘The Temptation of a Grey Perspective. Moral Values and the Writing of History’. In this article the authors reflected on the moral values of historical-writing, discussing three historiographical themes: the Dutch colonial past, the Second World War and the NIODreport about Srebrenica. In examining the value of historical qualifications in terms of ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘grey’, they attributed a specific moral meaning to the grey accommodation- paradigm. It is not surprising that their discussion of the historiography of the Second World War combined with their critical assessment of the grey perspective has provoked a reaction. In ‘Absurdities about a book’ Chris van der Heijden responded to what he considered to be an attack on his views. The three authors of the previously-mentioned article reply to this criticism.