For those who couldn't make it yesterday: the seminar was recorded and @jwbaker.bsky.social has already put it on Youtube! www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwT7...

Final call for boarding!

We changed to winter time last weekend. According to the Rule of St Benedict winter time starts today, on All Saints Day, and lasts until Easter.

Join the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History seminar on 4 November (12:00 GMT on Zoom) to celebrate the winning entry for the 2025 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History and to learn about gender and lottery rhymes in the medieval/early-modern low countries ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/09/tues...

De ironie van de geschiedenis: de Vlaamse regering zet het mes in instellingen die historisch onderzoek naar de geschiedenis en taal van Vlaanderen mogelijk maken: de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, de KANTL, sociale en humane wetenschappen aan de universiteit.

We have just put the Zotero bibliography of the Back2theFuture project online. www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/... Throughout the project we have built this bibliography which we hope can serve the scholarly community #skystorians interested in the following subjects:

PROGRAMME! Excited to be welcoming Alexander Marr, Dirk van Miert, and @ebenbow.bsky.social this term -- and David Hopkin, Jeroen Puttevils, Feike Dietz, Sam Geens, Valika Smeulders, and Gloria Moorman in Spring. All welcome @ihr.bsky.social or zoom! www.history.ac.uk/news-events/... #SkyStorians

ChatGPT Edu is built for conning education executives into subsidising and edu-washing planet-burning slop machines via non-consensual access to young people’s creativity AND DATA while attacking their ability to learn. At a university.

🎉My co-authors Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga, Sara Budts are absolutely delighted to share this news with the world. Read our article for the unique source, short lottery poems, and for the digital history methods we have used to deal with the mass of these so-called prozen.

📚 𝗡𝗶𝗲𝘂𝘄 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝘃𝗮𝗻 𝗧𝗦𝗘𝗚 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗼𝘄 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗘𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗛𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲: 𝗩𝗼𝗹𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝟮𝟮 – 𝗜𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲 𝟮 – 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 🔓 Lees gratis via #openaccess: tseg.nl/issue/view/1... 👉 Bestel de print editie: bit.ly/4lG7rZX #socialegeschiedenis #socialhistory @iisg-amsterdam.bsky.social

Voor wie nog wat zomerlectuur zoekt: Het tweede deel van het tweeluik over de kleine tentoonstelling van middeleeuwse concertinakalenders in Lambeth Palace Library, Londen. medium.com/@JeroenPutte...

Een nieuwe aflevering op de middeleeuwse toekomstenblog. Dit keer een tweeluik over een kleine tentoonstelling van middeleeuwse concertinakalenders in Lambeth Palace Library, Londen. medium.com/@JeroenPutte...

🔗Archief Stadsgeschiedenis nu digitaal! Het archief van het tijdschrift Stadsgeschiedenis is nu digitaal toegankelijk! Nummers van het tijdschrift van 2021 en eerder zijn vrij beschikbaar voor download. Het digitale archief is hier te vinden: lup.be/archief-stad...

Het heeft lang geduurd maar hier is ze dan: episode twee van mijn blog over middeleeuwse toekomsten in de Lage Landen. De doopvont van Neerhespen. medium.com/@JeroenPutte...

De vijftiende-eeuwse Brugse loterijen spelen een prominente rol in episode 32 van de podcast Stoute Schoenen van @bartvanloo.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/s... Van Loo is al even enthousiast over die geschiedenis als ikzelf! Hij liet zich inspireren door de historiografie die … 1/

🏆 Congrats to CSG member Sam Geens for winning the pre-1800 PhD Dissertation Prize at the World Economic History Congress in Lund! His award-winning PhD-thesis explores income & wealth before and after the Black Death in the Southern Low Countries & Florence. 👏 Well deserved!

🗣️ Public lecture On the 2nd of July Prof. em. Carl Nightingale will give a public lecture titled ‘Urban History and Earth Time: Five Big Stories About Cities and Their Planet’. The lecture will be followed by a reception. Register before Friday 30 June via this link: lnkd.in/e67JhpDd

New open access book alert! Slavery & The Dutch State: Dutch Colonial Slavery and Its Afterlives library.oapen.org/handle/20.50... It is the translation of Staat & Slavernij: www.staatenslavernij.nl/nl/ My contribution to the book deals with The Southern Netherlands’ Early Participation in Slavery

This afternoon @nicolozennaro.bsky.social successfully defended his PhD dissertation “1400: Un Fortunoso Anno. Future Thinking and Risk Late Medieval Venice” and now goes through life as Dr Zennaro. @erc.europa.eu @urbanhistoryua.bsky.social @uantwerpen.be

🔍Did you know that in 1559 people in Antwerp placed bets on the next pope? CSG-member Jeroen Puttevils wrote a blogpost on it. Go check it out! www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-...

Wedden op de volgende paus? Dat deed men ook in Antwerpen in 1559. Ik schreef er de volgende blogpost over.

📰In @demorgen.be is nu een opiniestuk te lezen van CSG leden Nicolò Zennaro en Jeroen Puttevils over de paralellen en verschillen tussen de dood van de paus en de daaropvolgende gebeurtenissen in de veertiende eeuw en nu. Lees het stuk hier: www.demorgen.be/meningen/wat...

Something went wrong with the message on Friday: @nicolozennaro.bsky.social and @jeroenputtevils.bsky.social published an op-ed on parallels and differences between the death of the pope and the following events in the fourteenth century and today in @demorgen.be : www.demorgen.be/meningen/wat...

Voor de avondshift: www.demorgen.be/meningen/wat...

Our team member Nicolò Zennaro will defend his PhD dissertation next week, on Friday 9 May. You can attend when you're in Belgium! He has also written a blogpost on his dissertation for the blog of the Faculty of Arts @uantwerpenfsw.bsky.social of @uantwerpen.be . blog.uantwerpen.be/bladspiegel/...

Nicolò Zennaro is the first in line and he has found stunning details in the famous letters of the Datini company on the death of Antipope Clement VII in Avignon in 1394. This leads him to reflect on parallels to what is happening today and in the near future. medium.com/@JeroenPutte...

The passing away of Pope Francis I and the funeral that is about to take place made a few members of the Back to the Future team think about historical futures and the deaths of popes, their funerals and the ensuing conclaves.

@tourjsp.bsky.social was on my program for a short visit to Paris this week. This Burgundian gem close to Les Halles has a beautiful sculpted tree at the top of the spiral staircase, an absolute masterpiece by Claus van de Werve.

An appropriate day and time to look at this Crucifixion by Jan Provoost in the Bruges Groeninge Museum

To end this thread and the conference: Nicolò Zennaro (Back2theFuture) presented a chapter from his PhD (which he was still writing at that time). Nicolò uses the wealth of the medieval Datini archive. The title of his talk: The Ermine’s game. Mercantile futures and warfare in late medieval Venice

Medievalist @kpo.bsky.social Klaus Oschema ( @dhi-paris.fr ) considered what the end(s) of time in the Middle Ages were and how this might takes us to rethink models of histories of the future.

Een meer dan terechte laureaat! Met vlotte pen doet Jonas Roelens onderzoek naar de onuitspreekbare zonde van homoseksualiteit in de middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Lage Landen. Uitstekende keuze van voordrager @bartvanloo.bsky.social !

Max-Quentin Bischoff (Back2theFuture & University of Antwerp) drew on the rich Tucher letters from the first half of the sixteenth century and consider the relations between futures in these letters and other types of sources such as testaments and contracts. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5F...

Lees de boeiende bijdragen van mijn Antwerpse collega’s-stadshistorici in dit boeiende nieuwe boek. In volgorde van de inhoudstafel Bruno Blondé, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, ‘Klootjesvolk’ en de wereldmarkt; Torsten Feys (samen met Michael-W. Serruys), Oostende, Van Kleine garnaal tot Koningin der Badsteden

Penelope Corfield (Royal Holloway) presented Shifting views of time: From cyclical to linear and the future of prophecies. Spanning several centuries, Corfield pointed out the changing roles of prophets and how their ideas and those of their followers are related to changing ideas about time.

Sara Budts (Back2TheFuture, University of Antwerp) has shown us how to learn more about temporal awareness in the fifteenth- and sixteenth century letters of the Cely and Johnson families by annotating temporal markers in these large correspondences.

Matthew O’Hara (UC Santa Cruz) took us to revolutionary Mexico drawing on a fascinating chronicler who found himself between tradition and sudden change. The collapse of Spanish colonial society in Mexico led the author to think about what the New World could bring for Mexico.

with @eheijmans.bsky.social we travelled to 18th C France, the period and place often emphasized as key shifts in the history of thinking about the future. Elisabeth presents empirical evidence on the future statements of French businesswomen and evaluates whether they wrote differently.

I just read and recorded the name of Icyk PERELSZTAJN. Icyk and I share our birthday and age. He was born in 1902 in Leszno, Poland. He declared himself at Kazerne Dossin on 10/8/1942 and was deported 5 days later in Transport III. He was one of the 6 million of victims of the Shoah. #elkenaamtelt

with @judithpollmann.bsky.social (Leiden University) we stayed in the Low Countries but fast forwarded a bit over a century. Drawing on the rich corpus of chronicling-novelty.com she demonstrated that chronicles can serve as a source for histories of the future too.

Medievalist Matthew Champion (Melbourne University) took us to virtual Melbourne where one can see the Triptych with the miracles of Christ (1491-1495) produced in the Low Countries. It served as starting point for a deep exploration of multiple futures in the devotio moderna

Who wouldn’t, right? Thomas Cromwell/Mark Rylance in The Mirror and the Light

Day 2: Marek Tamm www.tlu.ee/en/node/105928 took us for a walk through the different historical theories for histories of futures www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaiP...

Today Introduction to the conference and the theme: Back to the Future by @jeroenputtevils.bsky.social : www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5tz...

🎓Last Friday, CSG member @jsegerink.bsky.social successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, 'The Lodging House and the City. Accommodating Migrants in Urban Space, Antwerp, 1850-1914'. Congratulations, Dr. Segerink! 👏🎉

Job opportunity! The University of Antwerp is looking for a PhD candidate to work on language vitality among the Congolese diaspora in Belgium, supervised by Mieke Vandenbroucke and myself. It is more important than ever to put Congo and its people on the map! 🇨🇩 www.uantwerpen.be/en/jobs/vaca...

📝Call for Sessions! The 17th EAUH Conference will be held in Barcelona, 2-5 September 2026. The call for sessions is now open. The conference theme is 'City Networks in Europe and Beyond'. Deadline: 15 April 2025. More information: eauh.eu/eauh2026

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.