Knowledge and understanding: chronicling cultural change in the early modern Low Countries (1500-1850)

Abstract

For innovation to happen, it is not enough that new ideas and technologies are being invented. Cultural factors play an essential role in their acceptance and appropriation. Recent scholarship hypothesises that Europeans after 1650 became more receptive to new technology and innovation than their ancestors, and so enabled the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. The spread of new knowledge and techniques among scholars and experts between 1500 to 1850 is indeed well-documented. Yet since acceptance by experts does not guarantee wider acceptance, I will demonstrate how and under which conditions, new knowledge was actually appropriated among society at large, and provide a new perspective on how cultural change anchored in the early modern Low Countries.

I will do so by using the Chronicling Novelty-corpus of more than 300 chronicles, written by a heterogeneous group of middle-class citizens from the Low Countries between 1500 and 1850. The topics subjected to diachronic analyses in my dissertation are epidemics and diseases; weather aberrations and climate change; dearth and inflation; and the increasing use of Western numerals and structured quantitative data. By using digital methods and close reading techniques, combined with cultural evolution theory, I examined how, and under which circumstances the knowledge, beliefs and practices of chroniclers changed in each topic. As a result, it became possible to examine cultural change at a concrete level but also to challenge hypotheses and theories at a more abstract level.