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Sym: 0712.19
Date: 11 december 2007
From: Francien Petiet <f.petiet@uva.nl>
Subject: Sym: 0712.19: International Conference 'Free Access to the Past. The Past in the Public Sphere', Amsterdam, do 17 - za 19 januari 2008
International Conference
'Free Access to the Past. The Past in the Public Sphere'
Throughout Europe, attitudes towards the past changed in the decades
around 1800, rendering, in effect, history a matter of public
interest. This process transfers historical sources and interest
from private associations, collections, monastic communities, noble
estates and royal palaces (in short: from non-public enclosures)
into the public sphere.
This change is part of the European modernization process. The shift
from private to public occurred both in an intellectual and in a
concrete-material sense, involving the establishment of museums,
libraries, archives and university institutes, as well as the
dissemination of texts, documents and historical knowledge by way of
text editions, philological studies, historical novels, plays,
operas and paintings, monuments and restorations.
Views of the past changed in the process, sometimes to the point of
counterfactual (re-)invention. In their search for fresh sources,
antiquaries, philologists and historians produced a new past.
Fragments, remnants and ruins were cherished as irreplaceable
connection point with a receding reality, and were reconstructed or
reconfigured into what should constitute a coherent and meaningful
History. This rendered the past both accessible, a matter of
tradition, continuity and identification, and foreign, exotic,
colourful.
The interface between private and public engagement with the past
was the locus of contrary interests and fields of expertise; it was
shared and contested between antiquarians, artists, nationalists,
academics. Who could appropriate which sources? What impetus was
stronger, competition or collaboration? In how many different
pursuits could a given individual participate? And was the best mode
of access to the past that of painstaking source-inventory, or else
that of a visionary, intuitive empathy - was, in other words, the
past best brought back to life by the informed historian, or by the
inspired artist?
At the same time, the past so reconfigured was claimed by different
orientations and loyalties. Did the past provide identification
roots for the nation, the city, the region, the family, the
religion? Which virtues did it exemplify?
The contributions to the conference will address these issues in the
late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century de-privatization of
the past. You can find the program of the conference on the
website of the Huizinga Instituut: http://www.hum.uva.nl/~huizinga.
For information and registration please contact Jantine Beuvens,
huizinga-fgw@uva.nl.
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