Review : Annual Congress of the Flemish-Dutch Association for New History

Leuven, October 25 2024

Toekomstdromen: Leven tussen hoop en vrees in de vroegmoderne tijd (Dreams for the Future: Living between Hope and Fear in the Early Modern Times)

Report by Marie Verbiest

Overview of the program

On the 25th of October 2024, the VNVNG held its 23rd annual conference in Leuven and presented Dreams for the Future: Living between Hope and Fear in the Early Modern Times as the overarching theme of discussion. Recent developments in this area of study have questioned the long-held belief that people in the premodern period experienced the future in radically different ways than they did in modern times: the premodern attitude towards the future was thought to be a rather conservative one, oriented backwards and defined by the ever-imminent end of times, while the modern times supposedly experienced the future as open-ended and full of possibilities. Challenging this simplified dichotomy, this conference set out to investigate the complex ways in which people of the early modern times envisioned and tried to shape their futures.

The first speaker, post-doctoral researcher within the Back to the Future-project Elizabeth Heijmans (University of Antwerp), presented her research on forward-thinking as expressed in the correspondence of French merchants involved in the Atlantic trade from 1740 to 1760. Analysing these letters through a close reading and then systematically annotating each reference to the future, she ranked every one of them on a scale from “high insecurity” (expressing low levels of control) to “low insecurity” (expressing high levels of control). Taking a sample of these letters to counter a possible bias towards exceptional cases, she concluded that most merchants communicated a rather low level of insecurity about the future. Additionally, these letters talked primarily about the very near future and this in a mainly pragmatic way.

As part of her doctoral research, Jessica den Oudsten (Radboud University) focused on the lives of immigrants and their descendants in premodern Amsterdam. Using mostly baptismal, marriage, and funeral registers, as well as notarial archives, she tried to study the ways in which social mobility interacted with prospects and plans for the future in immigrants’ lives. Despite the richness of information that she found in these sources, they didn’t explicitly reference the future. She concluded furthermore that social mobility was complicated by the extreme difficulty immigrants faced to amass capital for their posterity.

Approaching the subject from a different angle was Professor Steven Vanden Broecke (University of Ghent), whose presentation centered on the role of forecasting in the neo- stoic culture of the Southern Netherlands (ca. 1630). Specifically, he focused on Dutch astronomer and Catholic priest Govaert Wendelen (1580-1667) and his Diluvio-project, which investigated the two eschatological disasters that delimited the beginning and the ending of human history: the universal flood (or deluge) on the one side, and the final conflagration on the other. Concluding that Wendelen’s theory was heavily influenced by the politics of his own time, Vanden Broecke mainly argued for the importance of studying intellectual histories within their historical and political context, leaving the role that these imagined disasters could have played in people’s thinking and acting with regard to the future uncommented on.

The fourth speaker, post-doctoral lecturer Anna-Luna Post (Utrecht University), presented her research on land reclamation projects in the early modern Netherlands, specifically the plans concerning the Haarlemmermeer (1617-1642). While these types of projects serve a mainly triumphant narrative in Dutch historiography, they nonetheless reveal characteristics which Post compares to practices of domination and appropriation in the colonies, as can be seen for example in the forced relocation and people’s loss of income following the disappearance of the water. She concluded that the campaigners of these projects, in order to persuade potential investors and interested parties to endorse their plans, painted a very utopian picture of the future, appealing to narratives of ‘modernization’ in various ways.

Ending the conference with a few closing remarks was Professor Jeroen Puttevils (University of Antwerp), coordinator of the ERC-funded Back to the Future-project conducted at the University of Antwerp. After giving some general background of historians’ interest in the study of the future, he mainly highlighted the importance of differentiation when dealing with this topic. Considering social, political, geographical and even conceptual differences regarding the future, we should always keep in mind that there is no such thing as one early modern experience of ‘The Future’, but instead an abundance of complex experiences, revealing multiple interacting futures.

---

---