Jasper Steen

The Revolt in the Netherlands erupted in 1566 and tore apart the Low Countries. In Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566-1700 Jasper van der Steen explains how public memories of the Revolt in the Habsburg Netherlands in the South and the Dutch Republic in the North diverged and became the objects of fierce contestation in domestic political struggles, on both sides of the border and throughout the seventeenth century. Against widespread assumptions about the supposed modernity of cultural memory Memory Wars argues that early modern public memory did not require the presence of state actors, nationalism and modern mass media in order to play a role of political importance in both North and South.

Many students of memory assume that the practice of memory changed dramatically around 1800; this volume shows that there was much continuity as well as change. Premodern ways of negotiating memories of pain and loss, for instance, were indeed quite different to those in the modern West. Yet by examining memory practices and drawing on evidence from early modern England, France, Germany, Ireland, Hungary, the Low Countries and Ukraine, the case studies in this volume highlight the extent to which early modern memory was already a multimedia affair, with many political uses, and affecting stakeholders at all levels of society. Contributors include: Andreas Bähr, Philip Benedict, Susan Broomhall, Sarah Covington, Brecht Deseure, Sean Dunwoody, Marianne Eekhout, Gabriela Erdélyi, Dagmar Freist, Katharine Hodgkin, Jasmin Kilburn-Toppin, Erika Kuijpers, Johannes Müller, Ulrich Niggemann, Alexandr Osipian, Judith Pollmann, Benjamin Schmidt, Jasper van der Steen