Session 1 – Diverse media of ‘free-speech’
Carol Symes
University of Illinois
KEYNOTE: Documenting Dissent before 1300: Three Case Studies in Diverse Media
Three case studies will provide a deeper temporal context to this workshop by exploring the ways that men and women were empowered to challenge authority through a variety of media and in different milieus prior to 1300. I begin with the handbook composed by the Carolingian noblewoman Dhuoda (fl. 824-844) for her son, William, which has invariably been read as a submissive text supportive of patriarchy and piety. On the contrary, I argue that Dhuoda’s extensive citation of patristic authors, her frequent denigration of her own powers, and her pointed references to scripture are all rhetorical ricks that enable her to communicate complex, often coded messages to her son – and yet to ensure that these subversions of authority would be veiled from scrutiny even if her writings were read aloud and discussed by other denizens of Charles the Bald’s court (where William was a hostage for the good behavior of his feckless father, Bernard of Septimania). I then turn to the rough textual remains that undergird Domesday Book, the massive survey of William the Conqueror’s English realm, in order to show how individual scribes, monasteries, and groups of townspeople used that documentary process to express their resistance to the Norman conquest and its brutal aftermath. Finally, I examine how Adam de la Halle of Arras enacted the political discontents and clameurs of his fellow townspeople, as well as those of Palermo, in the Jeu de Robin et de Marion. This dark musical satire was composed at the Neopolitan court of the Angevin king Charles I, whose misrule was the cause of the “Sicilian Vespers” uprising of 1282 and whose nephew, Adam’s patron Robert of Artois, had left the Arrageois to the mercy of a brutal urban elite.
Louise Vermeersch
Ghent University
Multimedia strategies and religious polemics in the public sphere of the Ghent Calvinist Republic (1577-1584).
In 1577, a revolutionary regime was installed in Ghent. The new city officials joined the regional uprising against King Philips II of Spain and the parallel strife for religious freedom. One of the aspirations of the new regime was to establish the Calvinist denomination. In this context, any expression of a Catholic or Calvinist set of opinions was consequently polemical and stirred debate among the urban community. Especially the establishment of a religious peace in 1578 intensified the religious debate in the public sphere and is therefore an excellent case to study strategies in which citizens claimed their ‘freedom to speech’. This paper especially draws attention to the multimedia character of those strategies. It is generally known that citizens participated into such religious polemics through various media. Yet the interplay between oral, scribal, performative and printed messages remains a difficult issue to tackle. How can we integrate all those media into one urban communication network? Inspired by concepts from Intermediality Studies, this paper will study multimediality on three levels: 1) that of the textual source, how can this be a hybrid object? 2) On the level of a media event, how was printed communication integrated in a larger medial combination? 3) And finally on the level of the urban public sphere, how did citizens expressed their opinions within the urban communication network?
Laura Doak
University of Glasgow
Seditious psalms on the Scaffold in later seventeenth century Scotland
On 19 May 1682 Robert Gray was executed for treason. On the scaffold, he attempted to criticise what he considered the unconstitutional nature of Scotland’s Stuart monarchy and Episcopalian church. But Gray’s words were drummed out by waiting soldiers. He was, however, permitted to sing a psalm. Gray chose the 84th psalm, communicating to spectators that God alone was his king and he would rather ‘keep a door’ in the Lord’s house ‘then dwell in tents of sin’. This paper will explore how men and women like Gray used psalms to speak freely on the scaffold in later seventeenth-century Scotland. Carefully chosen psalms enabled the subversion of permitted words into forbidden ideas, as in earlier executions in England and elsewhere. They also offered the condemned a chance to connect their deaths to other cultural media. Thus, the imagery of God as ‘a sun & shield’, in the psalm Gray sung, echoed the January 1682 Lanark Declaration, which publically condemned Charles II as a forfeited king who had failed as ‘a sun and a shield to the people’. Following discussion of these seditious psalms’ relationship to other oral, written, and printed statements of dissent, this paper will conclude by inviting discussion of European parallels for such intersectionality.
Session 2 – Political songs, theatre and drawings
Linde Nuyts
Ghent University
“Nyeuport, stand fast, thou shalt not be defeated” – Late medieval song as free speech & memory politics
Popular vernacular songs seem to express the ‘popular will’, it appears to be the perfect medium for research on free speech. However, this is only true to a certain extent. Censorship could hold a song from spreading widely and ballad-makers were probably careful when (not) touching the most sensitive subjects. The subversive songs that did circulate were rarely written down, let alone being printed. Printed political songs thus managed to find a way beyond these limitations, sometimes by consequence but more often by intention: loyalty to the regime would open doors for a song on its way to the top of the charts.
I focus in this paper on a song with strong local sentiments of victory. It was printed in the Antwerp Songbook of 1544 and spread widely over the Low Countries. The topic of the song is the siege of the Flemish coastal town of Nieuwpoort in 1489. This siege was part of the Flemish Revolts against Maximilian of Austria between 1482 and 1492. Rebels tried to conquer the Flemish coast and hoped for an easy victory in Nieuwpoort. The port town, siding with Maximilian, stood stronger than expected and won the battle. The song, an annual procession remembering the victory and some descriptive traces reveal the place of this tough victory in the urban memory.
This song circulated in the whole Low Countries for over a century in between political strategies of transmission, censorship and memory. Why and how did a song on a local event spread so widely? What are the reasons for a short siege to stay in the collective memory for such a long time? This case shows how songs about political events and the whole memory culture around them were shaped through divergent narratives, each specific for the interests of the writer or singer and for their place within local or central politics.
Eva Guillorel
UBO University of Western Brittany Brest
“We will be happy far from the throne where there is nothing but treachery” Oral ballads and subversive speech in early modern Brittany
Studying oral ballads provide an unusual insight into the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Breton society. Thousands of such songs were written down from the nineteenth century onwards by ethnographers who heard them mostly from rural and uneducated people. These singers had learnt their repertoire from oral transmission in family and neighbourhood (there is no evidence of written circulation before ethnographical fieldwork). Breton ballads relate events that happened during the Ancien Régime and are of great interest to document early modern Brittany with a social and cultural approach. But do they convey a subversive discourse, and the opinions of which categories of population do they represent? Most of the ballads focus on local news and develop no political speech. However some of them give a central role to subversive figures (like leaders of gangs or female outlaws). They also often give an opinion – negative or positive – on local lords and influential families of noblemen. More rarely they evoke the king of France and can criticize his decisions: the ballad on the duel of Montmorency-Bouteville and Des Chapelles in 1627 is certainly the most interesting in this respect and will be presented in details.
Bram Caers
University of Leiden
Subversive manuscripts in a time of censorship: orangist songs, poems and drawings in the Counter-Reformation Southern Low Countries
When Alexander Farnese reconquered the southern Low Countries in the 1580s, formerly rebellious cities were ‘reconciled’, which included a clause of silence: the recent past, including the gruesome rule of the Duke of Alba, was to be left to rest. The general consensus is that anyone who held rebellious sympathies either fled north, or kept their opinions to themselves. While the north in the following period is known for its liberal climate in which literature in the vernacular thrived again, the south is most often seen through the lens of censorship and repression. Censorship could of course prevent subversive texts from being printed, but it was powerless against the medium of manuscript. In this paper, I will show how Early Modern manuscripts could carry subversive opinions that are impossible to trace in printed texts. Taking two manuscripts (c. 1600-1620) with subversive songs, poems, drawings and riddles as a starting point, I will argue that against popular belief, subversive opinions continued to linger in the southern Low Countries, and interacted to a certain extent with the dominant Counter-Reformation discourse. In this way, the Early Modern manuscript has the potential to change our understanding of historical culture in the Southern Low Countries.
Session 3 – Narrative texts and political literature
Martine Veldhuizen
Utrecht University
Truth-tellers in narratives in the first printed books in Dutch
In the Middle Dutch fable collection Twispraec der creaturen (printed in 1481), a translation of Dialogus creaturarum, the character ‘an honest man’ takes a huge risk when he candidly tells the King of the Apes his true opinion. Through an analysis of such truth-telling figures in the first printed books in Dutch, I aim to gain insight into the late medieval mentality behind subversive speech behaviour in the Low Countries – the way people think, feel, imagine and/or act (Nora Pleßke). Although freedom of speech, ‘the right to express beliefs and ideas without unwarranted government restriction’, was not a fundamental right in the late Middle Ages, vocal criticism of power in the towns of the Low Countries was widespread. The narratives on truth-tellers constituted a risk-free space for testing and considering ways of this speech behaviour in urban late medieval society.
Erika Kuijpers
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
The oral sources of chroniclers in the Low Countries 1500-1850
The interdisciplinary project: Chronicling novelty. New knowledge in the Netherlands, 1500-1850. Will research the circulation and reception of new knowledge, ideas and technology among middle class writers of local chronicles. Per 1 September 2018 we have started with the creation of a digital corpus of chronicles. Per September 2019 the research team will get started. In my talk I will sketch out the aims of the project and present the method we hope to use to digitize and analyze chronicles in large numbers and comparatively in order to assess the circulation of new ideas, their reception, and the impact on attitudes to novelty and tradition in wider society. One of the subprojects aims to map out the media use by chroniclers. We will investigate when and where local chroniclers encountered newer types of media and information (observation, oral, manuscript, books, newspapers, images, instruments), what sources they privileged, and how this changed over time. Did the importance of oral information recede as there was more printed information available? What was the relative weight of different sources? What information, from which source was considered (un)reliable? In order to answer this particular set of questions we plan to manually tag the indicated sources of information in our corpus.
Minne De Boodt
KU Leuven
‘How one shall govern a city’: the polyphony of urban political thought in the fourteenth-century duchy of Brabant
This paper examines the polyphonic character of urban political thought. As such, it contributes to a better understanding of late medieval political ideas and the ways in which townspeople could express their (critical) opinions towards power. The setting of this study is the fourteenth-century duchy of Brabant, the birth place of one of the oldest preserved vernacular texts with a didactic focus on urban government, How one shall govern a city (or Hoemen ene stat regeren sal). The main goal of this influential Middle Dutch poem was to prescribe the ways in which urban governors ought to rule. An intertextual comparison of How one shall govern a city with one contemporary ducal charter and two petitions, will highlight the exchange of ideas between ruling elites and the politically excluded craft guilds. Ideas were not carved into stone, but were created and recreated to fit the interests of their consumers. Because of their flexible and inherently different interpretations, political ideas were living implements that caused and steered political conflicts. During the fourteenth century, the Brabantine citizenry was involved in an ideological battle that was fought with similar, but adaptable, weapons.
Stéphane Haffemayer
Université de Caen
La liberté de parole dans l’Angleterre en révolution : Samuel Hartlib et la presse (1641-1642)
À partir de la libération de la parole entraînée par l’ouverture du Long Parlement en 1640, l’intelligencer allemand Samuel Hartlib se mit à défendre publiquement le point de vue désintéressé du non-citoyen pour défendre un projet réformateur visant à faire de l’Angleterre un modèle de société chrétienne idéale. À côté d’un lobbying actif en direction des élites du Parlement, il fit de l’imprimé un outil privilégié pour provoquer un débat collectif et promouvoir de profondes réformes politiques, religieuses et sociales. En arrière-plan, Hartlib mobilisait les ressources d’un formidable réseau manuscrit ouvert à la parole féminine.
Session 4 – Gender and ideas on ‘free-speech’
Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga & Jeroen Puttevils
University of Antwerp
Voicing sensitive opinions and hoping to win a prize: lottery prozen as a medium for free speech used by women in the 15th and 16th-century Low Countries?
This paper focuses on a rather unexpected (and historiographically quite neglected) late medieval text genre, the so-called lottery proze. In the lotteries held throughout the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries, ticket buyers could identify themselves through a short verse. Since all tickets were read out loud by lottery officials during the draw, often in public squares, the lottery prozen were certainly a means to express beliefs and ideas. Government authorities quickly saw the danger involved in anticlerical verses and prozen mocking the authorities. Yet, the installed censorship did not rule out the survival of subversive verses, since the amount of verses meant there was a certain degree of anonymity. In this paper we will analyze a selection of the tens of thousands of these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century verses which are still largely unpublished. Using the lottery registers we can identify the writers of these verses, their gender and in some cases also benchmark them on the social scale. We will focus on the subversive verses written by women. To what extent and how did they use the verses to voice discontent? Does this in anyway differ from the male writers when it comes to topic, way of expression or frequency? And, finally, did their gender play a role in the verses themselves? Did they refer to it or did they hide it?
Sven Molenaar
University of Antwerp
“La casteté m’offence” – Pleas for sexual freedom in a manuscript from the late seventeenth-century Southern Low Countries.
One of the subprojects aims to map out the media use by chroniclers. We will investigate when and where local chroniclers encountered newer types of media and information (observation, oral, manuscript, books, newspapers, images, instruments), what sources they privileged, and how this changed over time. Did the importance of oral information recede as there was more printed information available? What was the relative weight of different sources? What information, from which source was considered (un)reliable? In order to answer this particular set of questions we plan to manually tag the indicated sources of information in our corpus.