Books by David Van Der Linden
The persecution of the Huguenots in France, followed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in ... more The persecution of the Huguenots in France, followed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, unleashed one of the largest migration waves of early modern Europe. Focusing on the fate of French Protestants who fled to the Dutch Republic, "Experiencing Exile" examines how Huguenot refugees dealt with the complex realities of living as strangers abroad, and how they seized upon religion and stories of their own past to comfort them in exile. The book widens the scope of scholarship on the Huguenot Refuge, by looking beyond the beliefs and fortunes of high-profile refugees, to explore the lives of ‘ordinary’ exiles. Studies on Huguenots in the Dutch Republic in particular focus almost exclusively on the intellectual achievements of a small group of figures, including Pierre Bayle and the Basnage brothers, whereas the fate of the many refugees who joined them in exile remains unknown. This book puts the masses of Huguenot refugees back into the history of the Refuge, examining how they experienced leaving France and building a new life in the Dutch Republic.
Divided into three sections – ‘The Economy of Exile’, ‘Faith in Exile’ and ‘Memories in Exile’ – the book argues that the Huguenot exile experience was far more complicated than has often been assumed. Scholars have treated Huguenot refugees either as religious heroes, as successful migrants, or as modern philosophers, while ignoring the many challenges that exile presented. As this book demonstrates, Huguenots in the Dutch Republic discovered that being a religious refugee in early modern Europe was above all a complex and profoundly unsettling experience, fraught with socio-economic, religious and political challenges, rather than a clear-cut quest for religious freedom.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Articles by David Van Der Linden
French History, 2020
Introduction to the co-edited special issue "Remembering the French Wars of Religion"
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Nature Communications, Mar 2, 2021
Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans... more Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present a fully automatic computational approach for reconstructing and virtually unfolding volumetric scans of a locked letter with complex internal folding, producing legible images of the letter’s contents and crease pattern while preserving letterlocking evidence. We demonstrate our method on four letterpackets from Renaissance Europe, reading the contents of one unopened letter for the first time. Using the results of virtual unfolding, we situate our findings within a novel letterlocking categorization chart based on our study of 250,000 historical letters.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Church History and Religious Culture, 2020
The history of the Huguenot Refuge in the Dutch Republic has often been written from a strictly n... more The history of the Huguenot Refuge in the Dutch Republic has often been written from a strictly national and confessional perspective, with little attention paid to the connections between French Protestants and other religious communities. In recent years, however, scholars from fields other than religious history have begun to explore the impact of the Huguenot Refuge, while historians of migration have compared the Huguenots to other minorities. Building on these new directions, this special issue seeks to move beyond the traditional boundaries of scholarship on the Dutch Refuge. Focusing on untapped archival sources, the relations between the Huguenots and other religious communities, as well as transnational networks of conflict and solidarity, the articles gathered here propose a more systemic approach towards the Huguenot Refuge in the Dutch Republic.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Church History and Religious Culture, 2020
This article studies the mission of French Discalced Carmelite friars in the seventeenth-century ... more This article studies the mission of French Discalced Carmelite friars in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Established from 1647 onwards in The Hague, Leiden, and Amsterdam, the missionaries' aim was to minister to the French-speaking Catholics of Holland, but they also sought to convert expatriate French Protestants as part of the wider Counter-Reformation campaign to win back souls lost to the Reformation. Despite conflict with the Walloon churches, however, the Carmelite mission was surprisingly successful in converting Huguenots to the Church of Rome, repatriating many of them to France in the wake of the Revocation. As such, this article sheds new light on the relationship between expatriate communities in Holland, arguing that the Dutch Republic was not only a safe haven for refugees, but also the scene of ongoing conflict between French Protestants and Catholics during the reign of Louis xiv.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sixteenth Century Journal, 2020
This article explores the long-term memory of record destructions committed during the French War... more This article explores the long-term memory of record destructions committed during the French Wars of Religion. Although the 1598 Edict of Nantes ordered Protestants and Catholics to forget about the wars, in Montpellier the memory of archival loss continued to fuel tensions between the two communities and undermine religious coexistence throughout the seventeenth century. In the aftermath of the wars, Montpellier’s priests and friars initiated multiple court cases against the Huguenot community to claim reparations and seek retribu-tion for the loss of their records. Yet the archival destructions also functioned as a catalyst for new record-keeping practices, as both Huguenots and Catholics appointed specialists to retrieve acts, inventory records, and use archival documents as legal evidence against the other community. As such, this essay high- lights the importance of record destruction and the emergence of contested memories for prolonging religious conflict in the early modern world.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Early Modern French Studies, 2019
This article explores the commemorative meaning of sound in early modern Montpellier, focusing on... more This article explores the commemorative meaning of sound in early modern Montpellier, focusing on the use of processional music and church bells to remember the French Wars of Religion. Scholarship has demonstrated that music in post-Reformation Europe often served to consolidate confessional identities, but this article argues that in religiously mixed communities like Montpellier, sound also served as a memory vector. In the wake of the French religious wars, Protestants and Catholics developed competing soundscapes that revived painful memories about the wars and sustained religious tension throughout the seventeenth century. Catholics relied on frequent processions to recall the destruction of their churches and monasteries at the hands of the Protestants, and chose specific songs to underline their triumph in re-establishing Catholic worship. The memory of losing their church bells also prompted them to fight Protestant attempts at installing their own bells after the wars. On the basis of untapped archival sources, this article also reconstructs the musical culture of Catholics in seventeenth-century Montpellier, paying particular attention to the cathedral chapel and the confraternity of White Penitents.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
French Historical Studies, Apr 2017
Our rediscovery of a seventeenth-century postmasters' trunk in the Museum voor Communicatie in Th... more Our rediscovery of a seventeenth-century postmasters' trunk in the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, containing some twenty-six hundred undelivered letters mostly sent from France, offers the opportunity to think from the ground up about what constitutes an archive and how to approach it. We argue that understanding the process of loss, destruction, and survival of collections is a crucial exercise for historians. Practicing this " archaeology of the archive " makes us keenly aware that the questions we ask are often dictated by the genesis and structure of the archive. Although document survival is often the result of intentional safekeeping, in other cases it can be attributed to sheer accident. Addressing questions of materiality, mobility, and preservation, this article explores the notion of the " accidental archive " to consider what best practices should be developed to ensure responsible access to this unique collection.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Renaissance Quarterly, 2017
Winner of the 2018 Nancy L. Roelker Prize for best article on sixteenth-century French history an... more Winner of the 2018 Nancy L. Roelker Prize for best article on sixteenth-century French history and the 2018 Harold J. Grimm Prize for best article on the legacy of the Reformation. The article examines how Protestant and Catholic elites in early seventeenth-century France memorialized the Wars of Religion in purpose-built picture galleries. Postwar France remained a divided nation, and portrait galleries offered a sectarian memory of the conflict, glorifying party heroes. Historical picture galleries, on the other hand, promoted a shared memory of the wars, focusing on King Henry IV’s successful campaign against the Catholic League to unite the kingdom. This article argues that postwar elites made a sincere effort to manage religious tensions by allowing partisan memories to circulate in private while promoting a consensual memory in public.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
De Zeventiende Eeuw, 2015
This article explores how painters responded to the crisis on the Antwerp art market in the 1580s... more This article explores how painters responded to the crisis on the Antwerp art market in the 1580s. Although scholarship has stressed the profound crisis and subsequent emigration wave, prosopographical analysis shows that only a minority of painters left the city. Demand for Counter-Reformation artworks allowed many to pursue their career in Antwerp, while others managed to survive the crisis by relying on cheap apprentices and the export of mass-produced paintings. Emigrant painters, on the other hand, minimised the risk of migration by settling in destinations that already had close artistic ties to Antwerp, such as Middelburg. Prosopographical analysis thus allows for a more nuanced understanding of artistic careers in the Low Countries.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Simiolus, 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
De Zeventiende Eeuw, 2011
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Diasporas, 2011
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Chapters by David Van Der Linden
Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Remembering the Reformation, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Dictionnaire des Pays-Bas au Siècle d'Or, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Companion to the Huguenots, 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Huguenots: France, Exile & Diaspora, 2013
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Reviews by David Van Der Linden
H-France Forum, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Early Modern Low Countries, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Books by David Van Der Linden
Divided into three sections – ‘The Economy of Exile’, ‘Faith in Exile’ and ‘Memories in Exile’ – the book argues that the Huguenot exile experience was far more complicated than has often been assumed. Scholars have treated Huguenot refugees either as religious heroes, as successful migrants, or as modern philosophers, while ignoring the many challenges that exile presented. As this book demonstrates, Huguenots in the Dutch Republic discovered that being a religious refugee in early modern Europe was above all a complex and profoundly unsettling experience, fraught with socio-economic, religious and political challenges, rather than a clear-cut quest for religious freedom.
Articles by David Van Der Linden
Book Chapters by David Van Der Linden
Book Reviews by David Van Der Linden
Divided into three sections – ‘The Economy of Exile’, ‘Faith in Exile’ and ‘Memories in Exile’ – the book argues that the Huguenot exile experience was far more complicated than has often been assumed. Scholars have treated Huguenot refugees either as religious heroes, as successful migrants, or as modern philosophers, while ignoring the many challenges that exile presented. As this book demonstrates, Huguenots in the Dutch Republic discovered that being a religious refugee in early modern Europe was above all a complex and profoundly unsettling experience, fraught with socio-economic, religious and political challenges, rather than a clear-cut quest for religious freedom.
Mechanisms associated with transitional justice have a much older history, however, stretching at least as far back as the early modern period. Because the Reformation had split Christendom into competing Protestant and Catholic communities, early modern Europe experienced civil conflict on an unprecedented scale – yet the Wars of Religion at the same time forced societies to develop new peacebuilding strategies. Healing the scars of civil conflict also became a key objective after the Atlantic revolutions, as political opponents had to be reintegrated into the emerging nation state. Nor were peacebuilding efforts exclusive to Europe: post-war societies in Asia and Africa also relied on formal strategies to reconcile former opponents.
This conference thus approaches the early modern period as a particularly productive field for the wider study of peacebuilding and transitional justice. How exactly did post-war societies before the modern age deal with the challenge of peacebuilding? What particular transitional justice strategies did they develop? And how effective were they in achieving peace and reconciliation, either on a local or national level? As such, this conference aims to evaluate how the study of transitional justice can reshape our understanding of the early modern world – not just as a period of incessant conflict, but also a laboratory for peacebuilding efforts.
This conference brings together historians and musicologists with the aim of overcoming the boundaries that still remain between these scholarly disciplines. It focuses on the various contexts within which music was used and considers its impact in the Wars of Religion. Who sang music and for what aims? What was the relationship (if any) between the performance of music in elite circles versus the use of this art form among the wider public? Did music solidify or traverse confessional divisions? Lastly, how far can modern performers recreate the soundscapes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Treating the age of the Wars of Religion across a whole century and using France as a focal point for making wider comparisons, the papers in this conference will explore the role of music from all sectors of society, from the royal courts to the city streets, and from both Protestant and Catholic perspectives.