GEMS is hosting a talk by Dr. Francesco Caruso on Angelo Poliziano and the encyclopedic ideal.

For early humanists, engaging with the classics was an integral part of their intellectual activity. The inventory of what remained after the shipwreck of the ancient world became the battlefield where “the best minds of three generations” clashed, in the attempt of incorporating this or that author to their range of expertise. In the late 1480s, during the opening of the academic year at the University of Florence, the Tuscan poet and humanist Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) delivered a prologue, the Panepistemon. This work implicitly certified that the efforts of his predecessors had been short-sighted. Not only did they demonstrate a limited or non-existent knowledge of the Greek language, but they also focused on a narrow range of ancient authors, mostly poets, historians, and orators. For Poliziano, this highlighted the need to create a vast encyclopedic project to reorganize the entire intellectual heritage of Greek and Latin output, including, among others, philosophy, sciences, and the law.

Dr. Francesco Caruso has a double background, legal and literary. He graduated from the School of Law in Palermo and holds a MA from University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. His main areas of  research are the Italian Quattrocento, Neo-Latin literature and intellectual history. He has primarily published on Boccaccio and Poliziano, to whose intellectual biography he devoted his dissertation. He currently teaches Italian language and literature in the International Baccalaureate Program at the Gonzaga Campus in Palermo and works also as a professional translator. His current projects concern Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses but he is also conducting archival research on the Hortus Catholicus, one of Europe’s earliest botanical gardens.

GEMS is organising a feedback session for FWO-applicants in the field of early modern studies*.

In this session, MA students applying in March 2025 to the FWO (or in the subsequent year, but who have already completed their application) will share their application with the attendees: PhD and senior researchers in the field of early modern studies, and other students. They will also briefly present their research in a 5-minute presentation (in English), followed by ample time for feedback and discussion.

The goal of this session is for students to receive useful feedback on their research and application from different experienced researchers to finetune their project before applying to the FWO.

The session will take place on the 14th of February from 2pm.

Student can register via this form or the QR-code.
If you have any questions, please contact Eru.Fevery@UGent.be or Joris.Verschelde@UGent.be

*Researchers focusing on adjacent time periods are also welcome!

Seminarie ‘Verbeelding van verlangen in vroegmoderne Nederlandse komedies’

This event will be held in Dutch

Sara Troost, Wie nog lopen kon ging; wie dat niet meer kon, viel om (1768), via: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200310259

Op 7 januari 2025 organiseert de onderzoeksgroep Vensters van Verlangen: de verbeelding van consumptie in de komedie van de Lage Landen (1650-1725) in samenwerking met GEMS en Thalia een seminarie over de verbeelding van verlangen in komisch toneel in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw. Vensters van Verlangen onderzoekt de representatie van consumptie en verlangen in vroegmoderne Nederlandse komedies. Kluchten en blijspelen vormen een vruchtbare bron voor het bestuderen van emoties en consumptie, omdat zij veelal handelen over herkenbare sociale omgevingen en kwesties en blijk geven van contemporaine morele en sociale waardeoordelen. In dit seminarie behandelen Estel van den Berg en Evi Dijcks de verbeelding van twee centrale verlangens: geldzucht en seksuele lust.

Geldzucht was een populair thema in kluchten en blijspelen in de vroegmoderne tijd en ging altijd samen met humor over klasse. Stereotype personages zoals de vrek en de sociale klimmer kwamen veelvoudig voor in komedies. Estel van den Berg presenteert aan de hand van een aantal scènes uit D’ingebeelde Ryke (1665) van Joost van Breen, De woekeraar (1702) van Abraham Alewijn en Quincampoix (1720) van Pieter Langendijk welke theatrale technieken werden ingezet om het verlangen naar rijkdom te verbeelden. Zij onderzoekt of rijkdom enkel een voorwaarde was om te kunnen consumeren, of dat het najagen van rijkdom werd gerepresenteerd als doel op zichzelf.  Zij onderzoekt welke rol komedies hadden bij het distribueren van het verlangen naar rijkdom en wie in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw mocht verlangen naar rijkdom.

Een ander geliefd onderwerp van toneelschrijvers was seks en seksueel verlangen. In kluchten en blijspelen leidt dat verlangen regelmatig tot overspel. Op het toneel worden vaak negatieve stereotype genderrollen getoond, waarmee de gebruikelijke hiërarchie tussen man en vrouw tijdelijk wordt omgekeerd. Het gebruik van humor biedt zo ook de mogelijkheid een alternatieve werkelijkheid te verbeelden, waarin meer subversieve ideeën de ruimte krijgen. Aan de hand van een tegendraadse lezing presenteert Evi Dijcks welke alternatieve denkbeelden rondom overspel op het vroegmoderne podium worden gerepresenteerd.

Na de presentaties is er ruimte voor vragen en discussie. Wie wil deelnemen aan het seminarie kan een e-mail sturen naar evi.dijcks@ugent.be.

Architecture’s Mannerisms, or the Modern Path of an Unstylish Style

The department of Architecture and Urban Planning is hosting a lecture by Andrew Leach (University of Sydney) on the notion of mannerisms in 20^th century architectural culture. This talk reports on a book begun at Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti. It reflects on the work done by a modern and evolving concept of architectural mannerism for architecture itself. How has mannerism, it asks, shaped architectural values—directly and obliquely? What does it tell us about modern architecture’s relationship with history? Tracking the ebbs and flows of mannerism’s presence in architectural debate offers a way to think about the construction of architecture as a field apart, and as a profession subject to corruption.

Middle East Studies Research Seminar Series - with Prof. Dr. Nir Shafir (UC – San Diego)

In the seventeenth century, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire became embroiled in a polarizing cultural war over the permissibility of everyday practices like worshipping at saints’ graves, smoking tobacco, and an odd medical procedure called “chickpea cauterization.” This talk traces this widespread religious and political polarization to the rise of a new “communication order,” focusing, in particular, on the advent of “pamphlets”: short, mobile, and polemical tracts, all copied by hand. The talk paints a new picture of the entire ecosystem of books in the manuscript culture of the early modern Ottoman Empire and how it fell into supposed disorder as middling readers stoked polemics, falsified authorship, and fashioned new reading publics.

contact: middleeast@ugent.be

Boekvoorstelling biografie door Marita Mathijsen en panelgesprek met Annelies Verbeke en Tom Verschaffel

Registreren voor 22-11 via: https://event.ugent.be/registration/wolff 

Dit najaar verschijnt Een vrije geest: Het uitzonderlijke leven van Betje Wolff bij Uitgeverij Balans. Elizabeth (Betje) Wolff schreef samen met Agatha Deken de roman Sara Burgerhart die in Nederland onderdeel is van de historische canon. Met dit boek krijgt Elizabeth Wolff haar eerste solo-biografie. Marita Mathijsen komt naar De Krook om er deze biografie voor te stellen en in te gaan op het turbulente leven van de schrijfster. Daarna zal zij in gesprek te gaan met Annelies Verbeke en Tom Verschaffel, over de positie van vrouwelijke auteurs in de achttiende eeuw en nu. Waarom wordt het werk van getalenteerde schrijfsters zo weinig gelezen? Waarom ontbreekt de Verlichting in de Vlaamse literaire canon? En waarom is het voor vrouwelijke auteurs nog steeds lastig om een plek in die canon te krijgen? Moderator: Kornee van der Haven.

Over Elizabeth Wolff

Het leven van de achttiende-eeuwse schrijfster Elizabeth (of Betje) Wolff is ongekend opwindend en haar schrijverschap is meesterlijk. Geen vrouw wist ooit zo spottend tegen het orthodoxe geloof te schrijven. Ze nam ferm stelling tegen de onderdrukking van vrouwen, tegen de slavernij, tegen dierenmishandeling, vóór natuurwaardering, vóór democratisch bestuur. Dat maakt haar uniek, niet alleen toen, maar ook nu nog. Ze stond al in heel letterenland bekend als schrijfster toen ze Agatha (of Aagje) Deken leerde kennen, die nog geen naam had. Samen schreven ze het succesboek Historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart. Op haar vijftigste vluchtte ze vanwege de politiek met Aagje naar Frankrijk. Negen jaar later kwamen ze gedesillusioneerd terug. Hun succesjaren waren toen voorbij. In 1802 overleden de twee vriendinnen, kort na elkaar.

Marita Mathijsen

Marita Mathijsen is cultuurhistorica en emeritus hoogleraar Nederlandse literatuur aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Ze is bekend om haar werken over vooral de negentiende eeuw: De geest van de dichter, De gemaskerde eeuw, Historiezucht, L: de lezer van de 19^de eeuw en haar veelgeprezen biografie Jacob van Lennep: Een bezielde schavuit. Haar werk verscheen op de short lists van de geschiedenisprijs en de biografieprijs.

Annelies Verbeke

Annelies Verbeke schrijft vooral proza en theaterteksten. Ze schreef ondermeer de romans Slaap! (2003), Reus (2006), Vissen redden (2009) en Dertig dagen (2015), de verhalenbundels Groener gras (2007), Veronderstellingen (2012), Halleluja (2017) en Treinen en Kamers (2021). Ze is betrokken geweest bij een podcastreeks van het feministische schrijverscollectief Fixdit over in de vergetelheid geraakte schrijvende vrouwen doorheen de geschiedenis van de Nederlandstalige literatuur (te beluisteren via https://www.de-gids.nl/podcasts/fixdit ).

Tom Verschaffel

Tom Verschaffel is hoogleraar cultuurgeschiedenis vanaf 1750 aan de KU Leuven. Hij is de auteur van De weg naar het binnenland (2017), het deel over de literatuur van de Zuidelijke Nederlanden in de 18^de eeuw in de Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Literatuur. Zijn onderzoek betreft de historiografie en de brede historische cultuur van de achttiende, negentiende en twintigste eeuw, publieksgeschiedenis en de visuele voorstelling van het verleden, cultureel nationalisme, de culturele uitwisseling tussen België en zijn buurlanden, en de cultuurgeschiedenis van migratie.

Organisatie: Bibliotheek De Krook & Universiteit Gent (Vakgroep letterkunde, Humanities Academie, Group for Early Modern Studies) m.m.v. Koninklijke Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde (KANTL)

Talk by Prof. Dr. Allan Potofsky: The Origins of “Greater Paris?” Delimiting, appropriating, and reforming the stone quarries in the outer boundaries of Paris in the eighteenth-century.

Organization by Teodoro Katinis (Dep. of Literary Studies – GEMS) and Elizabeth Merrill (Dep. of Architecture – Sarton Center for the History of Science)

In the years leading to this summer’s Olympics, Parisian and the Île de France regional authorities wielded broad municipal authority to redeploy the Seine for ceremonial and sporting events as well as post-industrial quarters in the outer suburbs for housing and transport. Starting in the eighteenth century, urban reform featured a similar restructuring of the capital city’s core and periphery. Eighteenth-century Paris was a time and a place where urban space was deftly reassigned from historically determined spaces where specific trades had traditionally gravitated:  displaced activities included market spaces (increasingly confined to Les Halles) and the leatherwork and chemical works (moved from the Seine to la Bièvre). What a later generation would call zoning, the geographic fixing of life and work to demarcated areas, was practiced in an embryonic form during the ancien régime.

However, some industries were clearly not transplantable. In his paper, Allan Potofsky examines the reforms of the end of the ancien régime that sought to limit the risk presented by an archetypically unmovable industrial site: the stone quarries situated in much of the outer zones of the capital, particularly, in the areas of Montmartre, Belleville, and Ménilmontant in the North and Northeast of Paris. Collapsing buildings and industrial accidents alerted authorities to the hazards of open stone quarries in proximity to encroaching residential areas, rapidly expanding as the overpopulated city grew desperate for livable space. The porousness of Paris and its outer perimeters first posed the challenge of the limitless city, well before the contemporary idea of a Greater Paris was born.

Allan Potofsky (PhD Columbia University, 1993) is an urban historian who specializes in the history of planning and construction of early modern Paris. He is particularly interested in the relationship between social and architectural history, political economy, and intellectual history. He is currently Professeur des universités and was previously Maître de conferences at the Université Paris-8. As a sequel to his Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (NY: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), his current book project is entitled Paris is the World: the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. It focuses on the politics of urban reform, techniques of organization and construction, and the material culture (particularly, the interplay of property right, labor, and resources) that shaped the city in the century before Haussmannisation.

Group for Early Modern Studies, Sarton Centre for History of Science and UGent Doctoral School are organising a seminar by Prof. Dr. Paola Ugolini (University at Buffalo, USA).

The seminar will take place on the 3rd of September at 11am in room Camelot, Campus Boekentoren.

Prof. Dr. Paola Ugolini will present her paper ‘“A Woman Dressed in Gold (…) Holding Out Her Heart.” Sincerity in Early Modern Italy.’, followed by a 10-minutes response given by Prof. Dr. Katinis (director of GEMS). The last 40 minutes will be reserved for open debate with the participants.

Early modern culture is known for devoting a unique amount of attention to accessing and revealing one’s interiority. Poets dreamed of a “crystal heart” that would show the authenticity of their feelings. Authors of physiognomic manuals explained how physical features could help understand a person’s moral character. In medical texts, dissected bodies were portrayed as lifting their skin, disclosing the secrets of human anatomy. Studies such as Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity and John J. Martin’s “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence” have formulated the assumption that the notion of sincerity as a moral value is a creation of the Renaissance, while in earlier societies the term “sincere” was used exclusively to refer to a substance or an object that was pure or unadulterated. Prof. Dr. Paola Ugolini intends to put this assumption to the test, while also trying to identify the reasons that could have prompted such a change. Furthermore, she plans to investigate the contrast between the urge for sincerity and the need for simulation and dissimulation that characterized early modern society. In her research, she also explores the claims of sincerity expressed by the authors of early modern scientific texts, and how this intersects with the idea of accessing the secrets of Nature

Prof. Ugolini holds a doctorate from New York University. Since 2020 she has been an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, where she teaches Italian and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Bologna in 2021, and has been invited to give lectures at universities across North America and Europe. She has published on a wide array of Renaissance Italian writers, including Pietro Aretino (on which she also co-edited a volume; (2021)), Ludovico Ariosto (2017; 2022; 2024), Veronica Franco (2024), Veronica Gambara (whose poems she edited and translated; (2014)), and Gaspara Stampa (2024). She is currently co-editing a volume titled Women Warriors in the Early Modern World (under contract with Amsterdam University Press) and working on a book project on the history of sincerity in early modern Italy.

Landscape History & Ecology – Ghent, 27-31 May 2024

This Spring School is organised by Ghent University (Doctoral Schools), University of Groningen, the Huizinga Institute and the Dutch Research School for Medieval Studies to stimulate contacts and exchange between PhD candidates and ReMa students in the field of cultural history, art history, historical geography, urban history, archaeology, early modern history, medieval history, literary studies, environmental psychology, environmental design and engineering, sustainability studies and environmental education. The course will mainly focus on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, but students working on Antiquity or the Modern Period can attend as well.

Topic

Climate change, depletion of natural resources, loss of natural and cultural landscapes, and many other (ecological) sustainability challenges urge us to (re)evaluate human interaction with the natural world. This renewed environmental consciousness has invigorated not only scientists working on effects in the present and solutions for the future, but also those who study the (distant) past. It has become clear that we need to take the story back(much) further than the industrialisation of the second half of the eighteenth century. Specifically in medieval and early modern studies, scholars have uncovered the deep historical backgrounds of the anthropogenic ecological challenges, including (over)exploitation of natural landscapes, diminishment of open space, deforestation, food production, use of energy and water, fauna and flora extinctions et cetera. Over the past decades, ever more research has been conducted into the ecological impact and implications of practices in different landscapes. Also the traces of environmental mentalities in art and the cultural representation of human interactions with the environment is a flourishing field, strongly influenced by ecocritical approaches. The Spring School will therefore pay attention to a wide range of ecological issues in history related to the landscape of city, country and colony and their mediation in cultural production, most notablyliterature and art. It combines a focus on the medieval and early modern period with an multidisciplinary perspective, attending to the theoretical and methodological background of landscape and cultural history, ecocriticism and archaeology.

Approaches

This course takes four topics and methodologies related to historical landscape and ecology as a starting point:

(A) History of the city and the country,

(B) Archaeology and landscape history,

(C) Artistic representation and ecocriticism,

(D) Ecology and economy.

Ten specialists will reflect from their scholarly background (landscape history, archaeology, literary studies, cultural history) on ecological issues in their own research. An accompanying reading list gives rise to further reflection and discussion with the participants. This will offer students a framework to think theoretical concepts and methodologies through in relation to their own work. Through short pitches the attending PhD students will reflect on the possibilities and difficulties of working with the same concepts and methodologies in their own research projects. A guided bike tour on the ecology of the city Ghent and its surroundings will be part of the programme, as well as an excursion to the Zwin-region and Zeeland Flanders, with presentations and discussions ‘in the field’.

Programme

Session I: Visit Exhibition ‘Ghent’s Lands’ & Bike Tour – Guide: Esther Beeckaert (Ghent Museum for Urban History STAM)

Session II & III: History of the City and the Country- Lecturers: Tim Soens & Iason Jongepier (UAntwerpen)

Session IV: Archaeology and Landscape History – Lecturer: Wim De Clercq (UGent)

Session V: Landscape History and Garden Culture – Lecturer: Willemieke Ottens (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

Session VI: Workshop ‘Nature Writing’ – Lecturer: Femke Kramer (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

Session VII: Artistic Representation & Ecocriticism – Lecturer: Joana van de Löcht (Universität Freiburg)

Session VIII & IX: Ecology and Economy – Lecturers: Marrigje Paijmans (University of Amsterdam), Charlotte Kießling (University of Cologne) & Thijs Lambrecht (Ghent University)

Registration

PhD students and ReMa students are invited to register for this course before 12 January 2024 through the following link: https://forms.gle/hQUuu4SVfs4wTRsq9 Please note that there is a limited number of places available for this course. After your registration you will soon receive more information about whether your registration can be confirmed or not. Some of the participating graduate/doctoral schools will cover tuition and lodging for their participating members (please wait for more information after your registration).

Organising institutions and partners

This Spring School is organised by Ghent University (Doctoral Schools), the University of Groningen, the Huizinga Institute and the Research School for Medieval Studies in cooperation with the following research groups: the Group for Early Modern Studies (UGent), the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies (UGent), the Amsterdam Centre for Studies in Early Modernity (UvA), the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), the Centre for Urban History(UAntwerpen), the Institute for Early Modern History (UGent-VUB) and the Onderzoeksgroep Nieuwe Tijd (KU Leuven). The Spring School was also made possible by the Rudolf Agricola School for Sustainable Development (University Groningen).

Organising committee

Caroline Baetens, MA (UGent, Group for Early Modern Studies), Dr. Femke Kramer (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Research Institute for the Study ofCulture), Dr. Stefan Meysman (UGent, Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies), Dr. Marrigje Paijmans (UvA, Amsterdam Centre for Studies in Early Modernity), Prof. Jeroen Puttevils (UAntwerpen,Centre for Urban History), Prof. Hanneke Ronnes (UvA / Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Landscape History), Prof. Kornee van der Haven (UGent, Group for Early Modern Studies)

Join GEMS on the 22nd of April for the Young Researcher’s Day, a work-in-progress session by MA students where they will be presenting their research through a short poster presentation, with ample time for questions. The presentations aim to help students fine-tune their research and are a great opportunity to get feedback from their peers and other researchers in the field of early modern cultural history and literature.

Location: Library Lab, Magnel Wing – 11am-3pm

Presentations:

• Widow Immolation (Sati) as a Religious Practice: Crystallisation of a European Image of India in the 18th Century
• The Late Medieval and Early Modern in Macbeth: The Transgressive Power of Blood, the Body and the Supernatural
• European Science Theories in 18th Century Latin America: The Almanacs of Cosme Bueno
• Early Modern Death: The Function and Form of Death in Everyman, The Faerie Queene, “Death Be Not Proud”, Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress
• Trauma and Cognition in 20th Century Fiction
• Asexuality in Media

We encourage researchers who are interested to attend and register through this form by the 17th of April. Lunch and refreshments will be provided. If you have any further questions, feel free to contact eru.fevery@ugent.be and caroline.baetens@ugent.be

We hope to see you there!

Dr. Carme Font-Paz, Associate Professor of English Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and director of WINK (Women’s Invisible Ink), is giving a lecture where she’ll be presenting the WINK project and her paper on ‘Intellectual Freedom in Early Modern Women’s Spiritual Writings: Practice, Methods, and Identities’.

The essence and manifestation of God’s love has been a major concern for men and women of faith over the centuries, and the object of mystical, fictional and analytical approaches to understanding the relationship between human and divine nature. This presentation will briefly examine the methodological challenges posed by narratives of faith and grace that seek to represent subjective reality as an experience of universal truth.

By paying special attention to four seventeenth-century women writers from different Christian backgrounds, we shall see in what ways their notion of intellectual freedom was constructed and invoked as the primary reason for writing and speaking in public against pastoral misconduct, social ills and domestic abuse within their congregations and communities of faith. Their arguments point at their own freedom of conscience, as well as the “hypocrisie” and superficiality of the alleged “liberty of conscience and freedom” of their own communities. They claim to be intellectually freer in their obedience to God.

This paper will bring to light Maria Jesus de Ágreda manuscript Leyes de la esposa (1637) for the first time, Arcangela Tarabotti’s La semplicità ingannata (1654), Susanna Parr’s Apologie against the Elders (1659), and Anne Wentworth’s A Vindication (1670). We will look at the discourse of divine love and personal conscience as a common feature of female spirituality and intellectuality within a European context, markedly influenced by Teresa de Ávila’s program for mental prayer. We shall discuss the relationship between literary genre and theological tradition, the limits of reason and the imagination as sources of knowledge, and the faint borderlines between obedience and freedom of conscience as paths for intellectual inquiry.

Dr. Carme Font-Paz is Associate Professor of English Literature at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is also an ICREA Academia fellow and director of the European ERC Starting Grant project WINK “Women’s Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity”. A specialist in prophetic genres and early modern women’s writing, her latest books are Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2017) and, with Nina Geerdink, Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2018). She is now preparing her forthcoming monograph Women Writing on Social Change in Early Modern Europe (Brepols).

Contact: elizabeth.amann@ugent.be

From the 12th of April until the 29th of June 2024 you can visit an exhibition co-curated by GEMS-members Kornee van der Haven and Caroline Baetens in collaboration with Piet de Blaeij from Museum Het Warenhuis. The exhibition centres around the early modern Dutch poem Dapes inemptae, of de Moufe-Schans (1621) in which Petrus Hondius celebrates his life in the garden the ‘Moffenschans’. You can explore the seventeenth-century garden life in this exhibition through Hondius’ verses. You walk through the garden and the poetry to get a unique picture of garden life in the seventeenth century. The garden comes to life as a place of pleasant gatherings, of plant science, of experimenting with nature and landscape, but also as a place where you can indulge in gardening.

For more information you can read the description in Dutch below:

Vers uit de tuin. Petrus Hondius’ dichterlijke wegwijzer door het zeventiende-eeuwse landschap.

Tentoonstelling UGent & Museum Het Warenhuis (Axel), 12 april – 29 juni 2024

Bij verse oogst uit de tuin denk je waarschijnlijk in de eerste plaats aan wortels of komkommer. In de zeventiende eeuw oogstten tuinbezitters niet alleen groenten, maar ook dichterlijke verzen uit de Zeeuws-Vlaamse grond! Die gedichten geven een inkijkje in hoe het rijke tuinleven in de zeventiende eeuw werd ervaren. Een van de eersten die over dat leven in de tuin dichtte, was predikant Petrus Hondius. In 1621 bezingt hij in zijn dichtwerk, Dapes Inemptae, of De Moufe-schans, alles wat er te beleven valt in zijn tuin bij Terneuzen (de Moffenschans): van maaltijden met groenten van eigen bodem, tot de kweek van zeldzame bloemen en uitstapjes door de omliggende velden.

Van 12 april tot 29 juni 2024 kun je in Museum Het Warenhuis te Axel via Hondius’ wandelpaden zelf het zeventiende-eeuwse tuinleven verkennen in de expositie. Je bewandelt de gangen van de tuin via het dichtwerk en krijgt zo een uniek beeld van het tuinleven in de zeventiende eeuw. De tuin komt tot leven als een plek van gezellige samenkomsten, van plantwetenschap, van experiment met natuur en landschap, maar ook als een plaats waar je je kunt uitleven in het tuinieren. Wie weet herken je je eigen ervaringen wel in Hondius’ verzen of leiden zijn wandelpaden je tot nieuwe inzichten over de hedendaagse tuin!

Veel idealen uit Hondius’ poëzie zijn herkenbaar voor een hedendaagse lezer. Net zoals stedelingen vandaag aan de drukte trachten te ontsnappen in een tuin of park, zochten diegenen die daar de mogelijkheid toe hadden ook in de zeventiende eeuw de rust van het platteland op. De Terneuzense predikant geeft dan ook uitdrukking aan die herkenbare drang naar ontsnapping in een groen decor. Ook hedendaagse idealen van zelfvoorzienendheid of lokaal shoppen lijken al vroeg in die literatuur vorm te krijgen, want ook Hondius streeft naar ‘Ongekochte spijs’ of groenten van eigen bodem. Zijn verhaal schetst niet alleen een uniek beeld van het rijke tuinleven in de zeventiende eeuw, maar biedt dus ook een leidraad voor reflectie op onze bedrijvigheid in de tuin vandaag.

Als je het museum uit stapt, kun je de wandeling verderzetten en met een nieuwe blik het landschap rondom verkennen. Op een boogscheut van het museum vind je een laatnegentiende-eeuws landhuis dat nog steeds de naam ‘Moffenschans’ draagt, naar Hondius’ tuin die zich daar eeuwen eerder bevond. Te voet, te paard of te vloot bereist Hondius vandaaruit de polders, schorren, duinen en rivieren rondom zijn tuin. Hij treedt buiten de omheining en legt een breder beeld van het Zeeuws-Vlaamse landschap vast in woord. In de expositie leer je dus iets nieuws over de zeventiende-eeuwse beleving van de directe omgeving van de tuin en het hedendaagse museum.

Ontdek wat het Zeeuws-Vlaamse tuinleven in de zeventiende eeuw zo uniek en toch zo universeel maakt, van 12 april tot 29 juni 2024 in Museum Het Warenhuis (Markt 2, 4571 BG Axel).

Dit project is een samenwerking tussen Museum Het Warenhuis en de Vakgroep letterkunde aan de Universiteit Gent. De expositie kwam tot stand met de steun van de Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte van de Universiteit Gent, het Maatschappelijk Valorisatiefonds van de Universiteit Gent, het Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen en het Scheldemondfonds.

Join GEMS on the 22th of February for a Book Presentation by dr. Sarah J. Adams. She will present her new book Repertoires of Slavery: Dutch Theater Between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770-1810 (University Press Amsterdam, 2023). Through the lens of a hitherto unstudied repertoire of Dutch abolitionist theatre productions, Repertoires of Slavery prises open the conflicting ideological functions of antislavery discourse within and outside the walls of the theatre and examines the ways in which abolitionist protesters wielded the strife-ridden question of slavery to negotiate the meanings of human rights, subjecthood, and subjection.

For more information and to order the book, you can follow this link

Please let us know if you can attend by the 16th of February via this link