Summary: Tales of the Revolt. Memory, Oblivion and Identity in the Low Countries, 1566-1700

This research project, that started in September 2008, aims to explore how personal and public memories of the Dutch Revolt in the seventeenth century evolved and interacted to create new political and cultural identities for the societies that eventually were to become the kingdoms of the Netherlands and Belgium. While on both sides of the new border there emerged a body of ‘canonic’ knowledge about the Revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs, this simultaneously involved the conscious eradication of other aspects of the past, meaning that two radically different versions of the same past came to prop up two distinctive ‘national’ identities.

The first aim of this project is to investigate how these versions of the past came into being, to what extent they were assimilated by individual Netherlanders, and how they contributed to identity formation. The project builds on the surge of scholarly interest in the phenomenon of ‘collective’ or ‘social’ memory – the way in which societies remember and deploy the past. Research on the twentieth century has shown that individual memories will evolve in response to those of other people, or those that are promulgated in the public domain – thus contributing to the formation of group identity. Few scholars have so far tried to map the interaction between personal and public memory before 1800. The second aim of this project is to show that this is both possible and worthwhile. By exploring storytelling about the Revolt in memoirs, chronicles and many other sources, we will gauge the impact of different ‘memory policies’ on early modern populations that shared the same past but that became politically and confessionally divided. This situation was not unique to the Netherlands, and the project aims to offer insights that can be applied to other parts of Europe.