Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 134, Issue 1, 2021

Merciful Augusta. Margaret of Brabant as counselor, mediator and saint in Italy (1310-1311)

This article shows that Margaret of Brabant (1276-1311), Queen of the Romans, played an influential diplomatic and moral role on the international stage and had great influence on her husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, in the perception of her contemporaries, who glorified the love between the two. A study of several letters addressed to her shows how Margaret helped her spouse to build a stable political network based on personal relations. This article then discusses the perception of Margaret in contemporary historiography and it demonstrates that early humanists Albertino Mussato and Giovanni de Cermenate both acknowledge her importance as a political counselor and mediator crucial to Henry’s reign. This view contrasts with other accounts of her life, in which she is solely remembered for her piety and holiness. Indeed, these aspects came to dominate the memory of Margaret soon after her death, as the Franciscans promoted her cult as ‘Holy Empress’.

Fun without worries. Cities promoting fairs in the Austrian Netherlands.

Focusing as a case study on the fairs of Kortrijk, a middle-sized city in the county of Flanders, this contribution aims to further our knowledge of an increasing respectability of fairs in the eighteenth century. The city magistrate regulated fairs, but also increasingly had an active role in their organization. Kortrijk had a variety of fairs in the early modern period, ranging from local parish processions to two large scale commercial fairs with additional forms of entertainment visited by people coming from as far away as Normandy. The fairs were celebrated practically all year round and were spread over many locations in the city. They took place on squares and in public buildings. Although traces of the fairs are scarce and need deep archival research to be recovered, there is no doubt that in the latter half of the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth century the fairs of Kortrijk were attractive for all social groups and deemed respectable. This ties in with current research on fairs by, among others, Benjamin Heller and Ann Tlusty, who have situated fairs as visited by elites and actively promoted by city governments. Why this was so, I suggest, is because the persistence of fairs as cyclical ritual in the Austrian Netherlands matched with policies of local government to create spaces and activities of leisure for their citizens.

Working on Water. the Hygienist Movement in Utrecht (1866-1900)

This article approaches the hygienist movement as a social health movement, a complex societal campaign aiming to alter norms and arrangements regarding hygiene and thereby improve public health. This perspective is applied to a very specific topic: drinking water arrangements in the city of Utrecht (1866-1900). Archival study indicates that not only medical doctors contributed to the functioning of the hygienist movement, as is often assumed, but also ‘regular’ citizens, for example by providing the movement with money, information and services. By showing this, the article enhances our understanding of citizens’ relations with local public health arrangements in the nineteenth century.

From Humanism to Nazism. The case of Frederik Jzn. Muller (1883-1944)

Frederik Jzn. Muller (1883—1944) was professor of Latin at Leiden University from 1921 to 1944 and one of the few prominent Dutch classicists who collaborated with the German occupiers during the Second World War. The driving force behind Muller’s collaboration was not political opportunism or anti-Semitic ideology, but the conviction that only in a ‘Third Reich’ under German leadership could a new era of European culture dawn. With his belief in the close connection between cultural flourishing and state-building, Muller was a rare Dutch exponent of the intellectual movement known as the ‘third’ humanism, of which the German classicist Werner Jaeger (1888-1961) is commonly seen as the most typical representative. However, Frederik Muller’s views, much more so than Jaeger’s, expose the utterly paradoxical relationship between the ‘third’ humanism and the history of National Socialism.

Careers in context. Figuring out thirty years of Flemish PhD’s in history

The number of history PhD’s in Flanders has significantly increased in the last three decades. Yet little is known about the impact of this evolution on the degree itself. Many reports have argued that the decreasing chances of pursuing an academic career lead ever more young researchers towards employment that has little to do with the university, a trend that this article confirms for the discipline of history in Flanders. By discussing the actual amount of new doctorate holders and their later careers, it is shown that the amount of Flemish history doctors who continue to do in-depth academic research will soon reach historically low levels, dropping from nearly one in two to potentially about one in ten. Several scenarios for handling this change are discussed, ranging from a ‘status quo’ approach, to an increased focus on transferable skills, and to the possible inclusion of new types of applied research.

Challenges for contemporary historical culture. An introduction

The concept of historical culture refers to the ways in which society deals with the past in the broadest sense. The concept enables an integrated study of the different, and sometimes conflicting practices that give meaning to the past. The aim of this thematic section is twofold: it aims to reflect on the value of the concept historical culture for analyzing contemporary society, and it discusses contemporary challenges in historical culture within three key areas of the historiographical praxis: the theory of history, public history and history didactics. These challenges include digitization and the plurality of (dis)information; multi-perspectivity; constructivism and the perceived relativity of historical truth. Herman Paul notices an increased interest in historical culture in the philosophy of history, and argues for more balance in the conceptual and empirical treatment of concepts such as ‘presentism’. Marijke Huisman reflects (self)critically on her role as an academic historian in a public history project on the queer bookstore Savannah Bay. She outlines the difficulties of safeguarding academic principles such as neutrality, contextualization and multi-perspectivity in the context of this project. Karel van Nieuwenhuyse and Tina van der Vlies discuss why increased diversity problematizes the question of what is worth teaching in schools. They show how processes of digitization have changed ‘traditional’ learning processes and ask whether pupils are sufficiently prepared to function in a society where “fake news” and alternative facts start to play increasingly important roles.