Revisiting Presentism

This essay explores the pertinence of the present as a temporal category in the late medieval and early modern period. After a historiographical overview of scholarship on presentism and reflections on the complex notion of ‘present’, we present three case studies to explore how the experience of the present could be discerned and studied in literature, visual arts, and news media. The first case study focuses on the increasing emphasis on the present in the Gruuthuse manuscript and rederijker plays. Secondly, an examination of depictions of the breach of the Sint Anthonisdijk in 1651 shows different ways in which Dutch landscape painters engaged with the present. The final case study discusses how the spread of the northern invention of printed newsletters stimulated a wider interest in the present ‘elsewhere’ in apparent peripheric locations like Geneva. Drawing on these cases, we reflect on the relation between crises and presentism and suggest that the manner in which time, and the present in particular, was experienced in north-western Europe seems to be distinctly different from the relation to time of people in Renaissance Italy

Borderless Creativity? A New Perspective on Netherlandish Artists in Early Modern Spanish Naples

Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century artist biographers documented the mobility of early modern Netherlandish artists. Yet, research into the movements of Dutch and Flemish artists still fails to capture the full significance of this essential aspect of the artistic profession. This article presents a novel approach to artist mobility, by applying Michael Baxandall'sinterpretation of the artwork as “a solution to a problem” to a selection of artworks by Northern artists in late-sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Naples. By analyzing itinerant artists’ abilities to solve the challenges they faced as foreigners in the Spanish Viceroyalty, this study offers new insights into their creativity

Time and Temporality in the Early Modern Low Countries

Introduction to the special issue 'Time and Temporality in the Early Modern Low Countries'

Revisiting Presentism: The Experience of the Present in Late Medieval and Early Modern North-Western Europe

This essay explores the pertinence of the present as a temporal category in the late medieval and early modern period. After a historiographical overview of scholarship on presentism and reflections on the complex notion of ‘present’, we present three case studies to explore how the experience of the present could be discerned and studied in literature, visual arts, and news media. The first case study focuses on the increasing emphasis on the present in the Gruuthuse manuscript and rederijker plays. Secondly, an examination of depictions of the breach of the Sint Anthonisdijk in 1651 shows different ways in which Dutch landscape painters engaged with the present. The final case study discusses how the spread of the northern invention of printed newsletters stimulated a wider interest in the present ‘elsewhere’ in apparent peripheric locations like Geneva. Drawing on these cases, we reflect on the relation between crises and presentism and suggest that the manner in which time, and the present in particular, was experienced in north-western Europe seems to be distinctly different from the relation to time of people in Renaissance Italy