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Rethinking the Republic of Letters offers a revisionist look at the historiography of the Republic of Letters and the European, early modern community of learning. It suggests a new approach by conceptualising the learned world as an imagined community, since the members did not know all their peers. These learned communities formed through distinct memory cultures and the representation and identification with collective identities. Rethinking the Republic of Letters looks at early modern biographical dictionaries (vitae), eulogies, letters, travelogues, and funerary monuments of early modern learned man to trace the (re)formation of these communities. It thereby offers a novel perspective on early modern learned communities: the Republics of Letters.

This history of deep brain stimulation in psychiatric disorders describes how the idea, technology and scientific and clinical application of deep brain stimulation developed, from the first research with brain electrodes around 1860 to modern therapeutic deep brain stimulation. From 1860, brain researchers knew how to relate specific cortical brain areas to certain (sensory and motor) functions with increasing precision through ablation and electrical stimulation, and neurosurgeons explored the first diagnostic possibilities of cortical electrical stimulation. Between the 1920s and 1950s, backed by unprecedented philanthropic investment, particularly from the Rockefeller Foundation, a scientific psychiatric approach developed in which biological, psychological and social aspects were considered important. From this holistic perspective combined with psychoanalytic insights, doctors and researchers in the 1930s and 1940s tried to understand and improve two important new somatic treatments of the 1930s - electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery. From 1948, the first experiments with deep brain stimulation in psychiatric patients took place in the United States. Deep brain stimulation managed to develop into its own experimental field with the support of the American government, but the clinical experiments did not yield unambiguous results. The psychoanalytic interpretation of patients' experiences during stimulation also proved to be difficult. Despite these problems, all stakeholders and institutions believed that deep brain stimulation was a promising therapy. In the 1950s during the Cold War, deep brain stimulation in the United States contributed to the fear of (massive) mind control and behavioural manipulation of civilians. Doctors and researchers had found several brain regions in the midbrain in particular that they could use to influence behaviour of their laboratory animals through deep brain stimulation. In the 1970s, the anti-psychiatric movement strongly protested against electroconvulsive therapy and (plans for) experiments to influence unwanted and/or aggressive behaviour of psychiatric patients and prisoners through psychosurgery and deep brain stimulation. Doctors were, on the contrary, working hard at the time to optimise their psychosurgical procedures, both technologically through the stereotact and neuroanatomically through standardisation of some brain regions relevant to psychopathology. Discussions between proponents and opponents were conducted from strong utopian and dystopian perspectives with overly high expectations of the possibilities of deep brain stimulation. Investigations of the American government in the 1970s revealed a serious lack of national oversight of the above developments. This contributed to new medical-ethical guidelines on informed consent, among other things. However, controversy meant that by the end of the 1970s, psychosurgical procedures, including deep brain stimulation, hardly ever took place, despite new scientific understanding that they could be effective treatments for certain psychiatric patients and could not be used for mind control. During the reintroduction of deep brain stimulation for psychiatric disorders in the late 1990s expectations were again high. This was despite the fact that the treatment had remained virtually unchanged and it was not - and still is not - well understood how it works. The positive results of small-scale experiments were not replicated in better-controlled large-scale effect studies. Unlike in the 1970s, there was relatively little critical discussion.

The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000). This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline.

To date, the evolution of archaeological knowledge production and theory has been discussed and analyzed using qualitative methods by reading vast amounts of archaeological texts in search of specific discourses or framings of the past. In this paper, we present text mining methodologies from digital humanities that can be applied to large corpora of archaeological texts to trace and evaluate changing knowledge practices. Such a big data approach is imperative. Due to the rapid increase of archaeological publications, qualitative research into the intellectual history of archaeology has become complicated and highly selective. The big data methods presented in this study were tested on a large corpus (4,811 texts totaling over 51 million words) of different types of archaeological texts from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The different text mining tools were successful in identifying theoretical trends. Our tools were also successful in charting the decrease in quality due to changed organizational circumstances (developer-led archaeology). Furthermore, we could also map changing banal nationalist framings of the past.

This paper explores the possibilities of examining undergraduate dissertations as sources. By means of archival research on a collection of geography undergraduate dissertations at the University of Glasgow, comprising over 2,600 dissertations from 1954 to 2014, this paper argues for the epistemological value of both these ‘small’ knowledge productions and the experiences of becoming‐a‐geographer for studying the history of geography. A sustained study of the collection reveals that the dissertations comprise three kinds of sources: intellectual sources, seeing the dissertations as original pieces of academic research; cultural sources, examining the role of this ‘rites of passage’ in becoming a geographer; and lastly, as social sources, whereby the dissertations illuminate a diverse, personal network within and beyond the university. The vastness of the archival collection of undergraduate geography dissertations and the opportunities offered for a longitudinal examining of shifts within them over the years, revealing notable overall trends and traditions, ultimately discloses their own importance as exciting and striking original knowledge productions.

Throughout history, songs have been considered effective instruments to strengthen the formation of collective identities. Eighteenth-century Dutch songwriters engaged with this idea in their striving for national unity. Political songs from that period employ several tropes, and the music often reinforces such images through musical imagery and intertextual references. Moreover, the imagined identities voiced in the songs might have become embodied identities through the performative act of singing. Therefore, for an investigation of the construction of collective identities in songs, the imagological approach can be expanded to musical imagery and take into account cognitive theories explaining the effects of singing.

Een van uitgangspunten van de vernieuwing van het nationaal curriculum in Nederland is het creëren van inhoudelijke samenhang tussen de vakken op basis van leergebieden. Voor de Mens- en Maatschappijvakken (aardrijkskunde, economie, geschiedenis en maatschappijleer) was het de bedoeling dat dit voornamelijk plaatsvindt in een leergebied Mens & Maatschappij. De aanleiding voor dit onderzoek is dat in de bovenbouw van het Nederlandse onderwijs een samenwerking tussen deze vakken nauwelijks voorkomt. Uit onderzoek onder docenten lijkt de oorzaak daarvan vooral de vakspecifieke examenprogramma’s en de focus van docenten op het examen te zijn (Tuithof, 2017; Pieters, 2022). In dit artikel doen wij verslag van de wijze waarop docenten bij verschillende M&M-vakken omgaan met een inhoudelijk begrip dat bij alle vakken wordt behandeld. Op basis van een analyse van de examenprogramma’s is gekozen voor het onderzoeken van de vakdidactische kennis van docenten over het begrip urbanisatie. Uit het afnemen van een bestaande vragenlijst bij 23 ervaren docenten blijkt dat docenten over minder specifieke vakdidactische kennis beschikken dan dat wij van tevoren hadden verwacht. Anderzijds lijken de docenten van de vier betreffende vakken wel een gedeelde visie op het begrip urbanisatie te hebben. Dit kan een goede basis vormen voor vakoverstijgende projecten.

This article argues that psychology gained prestige as a useful and practical science in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on discussions of the practice of criminal interrogation, the article shows that around 1800, legal scholars increasingly turned to psychology as a solution to practical problems of criminal justice that had arisen with the abolition of judicial torture. Whereas up to the eighteenth century most German legal scholars had found that their own “experience” sufficed to advise on interrogations, around 1800 they started to point out the necessity of psychological knowledge. Psychology hence became not only a field with specialists, journals, and courses but also a field of knowledge that people turned to to solve problems in wholly different areas.

This article discusses the representation of parents who killed their children in Dutch newspapers in 1960–1989. It concludes that infanticidal women were portrayed as irrational, ill, pathetic, and passive, as well as not fully responsible for their crimes. When they displayed emotions in court and proved their love for their children, journalists pitied them, thus underlining a traditional image of femininity and motherhood. Fathers, however, were initially depicted as cold-blooded and responsible for their selfish acts. Rationality took centre stage in these stories, which meant the press allocated more moral responsibility to fathers. If men showed emotions during the trial and there was proof of good fatherhood, they were described with more compassion. From the 1980s journalists demonstrated more sympathy for fathers’ sense of powerlessness, dovetailing with new ideals of fatherhood. This confirms Joan Scott’s notion of gender as a binary opposition, but shows how femininity, rather than masculinity, was the ideal and demonstrates how views on parenthood interact with (changing views on) gender in images of perpetrators of infanticide.

The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and the Netherlands eScience Center hosted a two-day international workshop in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) on 8-9 November 2023 to set the future agenda for national and international funders to support sustainable research software. As the importance of software in research has become increasingly apparent, so has the urgent need to sustain it. Funders can play a crucial role in this respect by ensuring structural support. Over the past few years, a variety of methods for sustaining research software have been explored, including improving and extending funding policies and instruments. During the workshop, funding organizations joined forces to explore how they can effectively contribute to making research software sustainable. In preparation of the workshop, a draft of a future international declaration, titled "Amsterdam Declaration on Funding Research Software Sustainability" was created by the Research Software Alliance, the Netherlands eScience Center and with input from stakeholders in the field.

Based on criminal court cases found in archives and newspapers, this article traces how the diagnosis of hysteria functioned in trials and Dutch forensic psychiatric practice ca. 1885–1960. Informed by Science and Technology Studies and praxiography, hysteria is studied as a ‘fire object'. It can make multiple relations with gender, which can be absent or present. This approach asks whether and how gender is important regarding hysteria. Gender only ‘stuck’ to hysteria in certain situations. In rape cases, hysteria took the form of lying and was connected to women. Although a woman's hysteria could be used as a reason to exonerate the male perpetrator's crime of murder, a man's hysteria never served to exculpate a female perpetrator of a crime. Signs on the body appeared to be very significant but did not suffice for a clear diagnosis. Inconsistencies during the psychiatric examination of the body therefore needed to be coordinated by pointing to other bodily symptoms, personal life stories, academic literature or logical reasoning. To analyse the ways hysteria functioned as a versatile fire object in the courtroom and pre-trial investigation alerts us to hysteria's shapeshifting potential that might explain the power of the hysteria label in twentieth-century medicine and culture.

Why did early modern Europeans hunt for witches? Were witch hunts a shrewd tool to oppress women or the poor, or were they just a way of making money? Or were witch-hunters primarily driven by a genuine belief in witchcraft? The witches’ sabbath, the diabolical pact and the nightly flight were elements in the early modern concept of witchcraft that seem to have been intelligently designed to trigger persistent witch persecutions. But in contrast to many explanations adduced by historians, witch hunts were not based on intelligent design. So how to explain them? Steije Hofhuis suggests a new theory: Darwinian cultural evolution. He contends that the apparent design underlying the witch hunts emerged from a hidden evolutionary process. That process fostered the preservation of cultural variants which over time accidentally unleashed larger and larger persecutions. Witch-hunts did not so much evolve to serve human interests, but ensured their own “selfish” reproduction. Historians have often compared witch persecutions to the outbreaks of contagious disease, but only as figure of speech. But shouldn’t we take the similarities more seriously? Were witch-hunts perhaps a cultural ‘virus’ that spread at the expense of its human hosts? This study bridges the gap between qualitative history and the upcoming field of Darwinian cultural evolution. The aim is to contribute to a new research program, based on the qualitative application of Darwinian theory to the humanities

This article seeks to answer the question how people in the early modern period could build enough trust amongst each other to expect fair treatment and reciprocity. It does so by adopting a socio-linguistic approach. I will analyze the way in which early modern learned letter writers employed the phrase ‘Republic of Letters’ as a speech act in the Austinian sense: an illocutionary act. The repetition of these acts created patterns of behavior that, overtime, started to act as regulative ‘rules’ about what and how to communicate. The ‘Republic of Letters’ is hence regarded in this article as a speech community with shared norms that became more and more explicit and finally even codified.

In this contribution we introduce a compilation of articles that reflect on the use of the CLARIAH Media Suite and its impact on research methods, as they were conducted during the CLARIAH research pilot projects (2017-18). The pilot projects fit in a co-development approach in which users are involved in infrastructure development from the start. We discuss how feedback of the pilot researchers was incorporated in the iterative development and testing of the Media Suite.

This introductory article to the special issue on digital history claims that digital history bears promise for the study of modernity. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck argued that the rise of modernity involved fundamental discursive shifts. These can be found in texts, of which many are rapidly becoming available in digitized form, while the steady rise of new text mining techniques provides unprecedented opportunities to explore these texts in innovative ways. However, digital historians need to use these techniques critically since most are not geared towards the study of history. In particular, historians have to account for comparability, chronology and language. The articles in this special issue offer showcases of how digital historians have shed new light on various aspects of modernity.

This chapter demonstrates how Guilielmus Surenhusius tried to make a career out of both the Mishnah specifically and Hebrew studies more generally through the book trade and the publishing of Hebrew works. The information is culled mostly from his correspondence, from which we learn that he was working with both Jews and Christians. It is demonstrated that the Surenhusius’s achievements were not only limited to his monumental edition of the Mishnah, but also that he also collaborated on Nuñez and Athias’s Amsterdam edition of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1702), the lost commentary on the whole of the Talmud by Benjamin ben Immanuel Musaphia, the lost Latin translation of the whole of the Talmud by Balthasar Scheidt, and Breithaupt’s Latin translation of Jarchi (Rashi).