Erika Kuijpers

The organisation of markets as a key factor in the rise of Holland from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century: a test case for an institutional approach

Although the importance of New Institutional Economics and the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development and the early growth of markets are widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess more directly the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets. This paper uses empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland to illuminate some of the factors behind the development of the specific institutional framework of markets for land, labour, capital and goods, and some effects of these institutions on the actual functioning of the markets. The findings are corroborated by a tentative comparison with the functioning of markets in Flanders and eastern England.

Introduction. On the Early Modernity of Modern Memory

This introductory chapter of the book Memory before Modernity highlights and summarises what the insights presented in the individual chapters of this volume can contribute to an alternative view. It aims to show what the study of early modern memory practices has to offer to field of memory studies and history of memory as a whole. The essays are organized consciously around three themes that play a central role in the field of memory studies: the politics of memory, mediality and personal memory. We believe that in each of these areas, early modernists have much to learn from modern memory studies. The chapter also argues that early modern practices shed an unexpected light on many scholarly assumptions about modernity of modern memory. Most studies of memory politics have concerned themselves with the period after around 1800, when nationalism was in its heyday and traditions were being invented thick and fast.Keywords: early modernists; memory politics; modern memory; nationalism

Expressions of fear, counting the Loss: Managing emotions in war chronicles in the Netherlands (1568-1648)

The Dutch Revolt was a civil war during which fellow citizens could turn into enemies. Interestingly most authors, laymen, citizens, Catholics and Protestants alike, still framed their war experiences in a religious narrative that gave purpose and meaning to their sufferings and endurance and in which God would punish the sinners. Religious narratives gave purpose to suffering, ascribed clear meanings to traumatic memories and framed the victim’s fears, despair, and sorrow. Constancy, resignation and trust in a good Lord, divine providence or eternal rewards for the just, were accepted ways of dealing with the experience of violence, insecurity and social disruption. This article analyses how close descriptions of local events, indicating who was to blame and shame, were accommodated in that widely used script.

Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination

The battlefield is a world apart. A place that evokes emotions that civilians do not know and veterans try to grasp in their memoirs. There is suffering, agony, fear, exhaustion, but also the pleasure of being with one’s comrades, being absorbed in group action, the power of life and death, the excitement of a game: to hit, to win, to be pushed to physical and emotional limits.1 One of most enduring adages in military memoirs since the late sixteenth century is that it is impossible to imagine what the battlefield is like for those who have never been there. Not only are traumatic experiences difficult to share, many battlefield emotions are loaded with taboos and sometimes shame and guilt. Compared to their predecessors, modern media pay much attention to individual and intimate feelings like fear and dejection suffered by the military subject. The psycho-medicalisation of Western society has turned soldiers from heroes into perpetrators and victims of their uncontrollable emotions. As Mary Favret noted in her lecture at one of our workshops: nowadays more US Soldiers die from suicide than on the battlefields across the world.2 Emotions can be lethal. It is difficult to live with the memory of violence, with fear or with guilt. It seems to be even more difficult to reconnect emotionally to a world that does not share these memories and does not understand or appreciate what has been lived through.

Storyteller: Visualizing Perspectives in Digital Humanities Projects

Humanities scholars agree that the visualization of their data should bring order and insight, reveal patterns and provide leads for new research questions. However, simple two-dimensional visualizations are often too static and too generic to meet these needs. Visualization tools for the humanities should be able to deal with the observer dependency, heterogeneity, uncertainty and provenance of data and the complexity of humanities research questions. They should furthermore offer scholars the opportunity to interactively manipulate their data sets and queries. In this paper, we introduce Storyteller, an open source visualization tool designed to interactively explore complex data sets for the humanities. We present the tool, and demonstrate its applicability in three very different humanities projects.

HEEM, a Complex Model for Mining Emotions in Historical Text

Recently, emotions and their history have become a focus point for research in different academic fields. Traditional sentiment analysis approaches generally try to fit relatively simple emotion models (e.g., positive/negative emotion) to contemporary data. However, this is not sufficient for Digital Humanities scholars who are interested in research questions about changes in emotional expressions over time. Answering these questions requires more complex, historically accurate emotion models applied to historical data. The Historic Embodied Emotion Model (HEEM) was developed to study the relationship between body parts and emotional expressions in 17th and 18th century texts. This paper presents the HEEM emotion model and associated dataset from a technical perspective, and examines the performance of a multi-label text classification approach for predicting HEEM labels and labels from two simpler models (i.e., HEEM Emotion Clusters and the Positive/Negative model). The results show that labels in the complex model can be predicted with micro-averaged F1 = 0.45, and macro-averaged F1 = 0.24. Labels with fewer samples (<; 40) are not predicted. Overall performance on the simpler emotion models is significantly better, but for individual labels the effect is mixed. We demonstrate that a multi-label text classification approach to learning complex emotion models on historical data is feasible.

The Creation and Development of Social Memories of Traumatic Events: The Oudewater Massacre of 1575

Every culture has its own memory practices, that is, ways of encoding and transmitting memories in narratives, images, rituals, display of emotions, or coping strategies after traumatic events. History offers the material to study the development of memory practices on a longer term. An example of how individuals and societies create, communicate, and preserve memories of traumatic events can be studied in the case of Oudewater, a small town in Holland, that was sacked and massacred by Spanish troops in 1575. An annual service to commemorate this event is held in Oudewater until today.