The Spirit of the belltower: chronicling urban time in an age of revolution

Abstract

Many scholars argue that Age of Revolutions wrought a new sense of time, in which the gap between past and present had widened, and the future became unpredictable. Urban chronicles offer good evidence for temporal fissure, yet the genre also points to the persistence of traditional cultural strategies to deal with change. Using chronicle evidence from the Low Countries this chapter argues that for many ordinary people political change was primarily a local affair, and experienced in local terms. Because of this, the restoration of some local practices or spaces could signal the restoration of ‘old times’, and allow a sense of closure. In this way phenomena that had once been new, could, within a generation, be perceived as part of an ‘old order’.