Onder redactie van Lotte Jensen, Joep Leerssen en Marita Mathijsen verschijnt de bundel Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation. De boekpresentatie vindt plaats in Spui 25, het academisch-cultureel centrum van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, aan de hand van een discussiebijeenkomst over het historisme.
In Summer 2010 a workshop will be held at the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms in Amsterdam regarding language revivalism that emerged in Europe in the wake of Romantic Nationalism (1810-1880). Possibilities for establishing a research network will be explored as well as means for applying for European funding.
On 21 and 22 October a workshop will be held initiating a thematic research group on the Rhine as a cultural space in romantic nationalism. Paper proposals are herewith invited.
From Herder onwards, clerics were among the leading collectors of vernacular culture, and major contributors to ethnography in Europe and beyond. The aim of this three-day workshop is to establish what these collectors had in common intellectually and institutionally.
The due date for the call for papers has passed. The (provisional) programme will be announced soon.
A roll-call of clerical folklorists would include such luminaries as Percy (England), Moe (Norway), Feilberg (Denmark), Hurt (Estonia), Hammershaimb (Faroes), Rhesa (Lithuania), Komitas Vardapet (Armenia), Halbertsma (Friesland), Cadic (Brittany), Webster (Basque country), Alcover (Catalonia), Moses Gaster (Romania and Jewish folklore) ... What is less clear is whether, across the period and the confessional divides, their engagement was motivated by the same religious concerns, and their discoveries applied to similar religious ends. Did religious institutions nurture and propagate interest in vernacular languages and cultures? Was a concern for vernacular tradition expressive of clerical antagonism to modernity and, in particular, the secular state? How did clerics reconcile nationalist or regionalist ambitions with the universalism of religion? How important was defence of mother-tongue education in the culture wars of the nineteenth century? Was there a missionary purpose in learning the culture of even Europe’s autochthones? Did clerics seek in folk culture the wellsprings of religious instinct? Did they, in a disenchanted world, appreciate popular engagement with the numinous, however unorthodox the form? In other words, was folklore a path to God?
The aim of this workshop is to establish what these clerical collectors had in common intellectually and institutionally. To what extent did their position in their communities influence their collecting practice? How did folklore feed into their wider pastoral concerns? The workshop also aims to uncover the relationships between them and the wider community of language scholars, folklorists and activists. Yet we also want to know why more clerics were not involved in collecting. Was there a general reluctance on the part of the classically trained to engage with the culture of the uneducated, or was there a more specific rejection of the echoes of paganism and hedonism associated with popular culture?
The workshop is the first stage of a project that will examine the links between the work of clerics in the preservation and promotion of European vernacular culture and European missions overseas. A conference developing these connections is planned in Oxford for 2011. A publication is also planned.
Themes: Clerical training in philology, Defence of subaltern languages for religious purposes, Primitive religion, Touching the numinous, Traditionalism and hostility to modernity, Regionalism and opposition to the state, Missions (domestic and foreign), Commonplaces of clerical collecting, Clerical hostility to superstition/popular culture.
In the relevant sections under the heading "Resources", users can now access the online collection of portraits of national icon-figures on European banknotes, and the anthology of nationalistic verse and song. The quantity of the material presented is modest for the moment, but will be rapidly expanded now that a proper interface for clear presentation and easy searchability has been established. The present posting is mainly intended to demonstrate the features of that interface.
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, or ERNiE for short, SPIN's core project, has now been definitively conceptualized. A PDF brochure detailing scope and structure has been placed online. It can be found on this website both both under "Documents" and under "Aims/Remit" > Core Project.
A Contents Management System has been set up, various publishers have shown interest and are now consultation partners, and authors and coordinating section editors are being approached.
Printed versions of the brochure are available upon request. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
SPIN will place a digitized version online of the proceedings of Jacob Grimm's congresses of Germanisten in Frankfurt (1846) and Lübeck (1847).
This initiative has been undertaken in association with the University Library of the University of Amsterdam, and with support from the Duitsland-Instituut Amsterdam and from Amsterdam University Press.
These congresses brought together the cream of Germany's philologists, historians and legal scholars, three specialisms united in what Grimm called Germanistik. The congresses consolidated the study of German culture and mentality into a new, authoritative discipline and also signalled the readiness of Germanisten to place this new discipline at the service of a new, increasingly assertive German nationalism. The delegates at these conferences not only represent some of the leading intellects of their generation (Arndt, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Dahlmann, Droysen, Gervinus, Ranke, Uhland, etc.), many of them also were elected representative in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. In the discussions at these congresses, not only important philological agendas were outlined (such as the project of a comprehensive dictionary of the German lnguage, ultimately to become the benchmark Grimm Wörterbuch), but also matters of political import, such as the German claims on the contested territory of Schleswig-Holstein.
The proceedings of the Germanisten-congresses as a conduit from cultural to political nationalism are well-known, but the texts themselves have not been readily available. SPIN hopes to meet this desideratum. The texts will be placed online in two parallel forms: as PDFs of the original printed pages and in searchable transcript, with a search interface and accompanying background information.