Defying what might seem obvious at first, we could say that the notion of presentism is nothing new. In English, the word is attested as early as 1916. In 1924, the French philosopher Frédéric Paulhan appears to have been the first to have introduced and discussed presentism. He primarily considered it in psychological terms, however, without connecting it to a precise historical period: ‘I call presentism the excessive predominance of the present situation in the mind, whether it is the emotion of the moment, the current feelings, a freshly hatched idea.’⁴ Emmanuel Mounier joined him two decades later, describing a mindset that ‘instead of orienting oneself fully towards the future with all one’s lifeforce, folds in onto itself and closes down’.⁵

It would nevertheless take until the 2003 publication of François Hartog’s Régimes d’historicité for the notion of presentism to make its sensational appearance in the vocabulary of historians. Taking a lead from the work of Reinhart Koselleck, Hartog defends the existence of ‘orders of time’ based on a location and era: a specific manner of thinking and living one’s relation to time.⁶ By means of identifying different ‘regimes of historicity’ (régimes d’historicité) that reflect the ways in which the temporalities of past, present, and future are articulated, Hartog distinguishes one that he perceives as being typical for the contemporary mindset, calling it presentism.⁷ In this essay, we set out to talk about presentism to characterize the experience of time in the late medieval and early modern period. Firstly, by way of contrast with the futurism that dominated the European horizon as a thought category and object of scientific research for a long time – before its disappearance at a moment of disorientation and rising uncertainty and doubt. Secondly, to better compare our current present with the ‘presents’ of the past, or at least with some of the more notable ‘presents’ that left the deepest mark on European culture: the Homeric present, the ancient present of the philosophers, the reborn one of the humanists, the eschatological or messianic present, or the modern present produced by the current regime of historicity.⁸

Later, Hartog proposed to refine his definition of postmodern regimes of historicity by distinguishing two kinds of presentism. The first would have been born between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, in the context of what he calls the ‘coronation of history’ (sacre de l’histoire).⁹ This first kind of presentism coincides with ‘the modern concept of history, which portrays time as an actor and agent and the widening gap between the field of experience (memories) and the horizon of expectation (hope), where the new historical time is produced’.¹⁰ The second kind, the ‘new presentism’, is born out of the ashes of the two world wars and the end of providential or futurist illusions.¹¹

Originating in the vocabulary of the philosophy and psychology of the early twentieth century and later reinvented in the context of historical discourse, the notion of presentism now occupies a central place in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in the media. Historians have appropriated it to study the methodological consequences for the discipline or to apply it to their own research subjects, and several philosophers and sociologists have used it to describe (and often denounce) postmodern history and society, marked by the cult of speed, change, and immediacy.¹² But as it is starting to be recognized outside strictly academic circles, the notion of presentism has started to encounter its first criticisms. Initially, these were attempts at nuancing the concept: where should the true starting point of presentism be located? And should Hartog’s two-level interpretation of presentism be preserved – the first following the French Revolution and the second after World War II – or should other explanatory models be proposed?¹³ Our aim here is not to revisit the debates, arguing for or critiquing an exclusively contemporary presentism. Instead, we recall the words of Lynn Hunt to characterize people’s difficulty to fully understand their own place in history: ‘We constantly need to remind students that the Greek and Romans did not consider themselves ‘ancient’ and that the people of the twelfth century did not believe they were living in a transitional period.’¹⁴

These nuances do not only evoke historiographical questions, they also lead to methodological issues. Firstly, if we talk of ‘presentism’, is it completely clear which present we are thinking about? In a pioneering study, Preston King has complicated the idea that we might spontaneously have of the present, particularly from a historical perspective. He distinguished four types of present, defined on two temporal scales, namely chronological (time as an abstract sequence) and substantial (time as a sequence of concrete events).¹⁵ On the chronological axis, the present can either be ‘instantaneous’, capturing the elusive yet real limit between what has not yet happened and what has, or it can be ‘extended’, covering a portion of time longer than a simple moment, to which a community can consider itself partial (a day, a year, or a century). On the substantial axis, it is possible to distinguish an ‘unfolding’ and a ‘neoteric’ present. The first characterizes the state of an event or of a historical evolution that is present because it is being done: it will no longer be – that it to say, it will be ‘in the past’ once it has completed its development. The second refers to the sensation that, at any given time, time appears to be detached from another, traditional, conventional, or old concept of time: this present constitutes a rupture and is characterised as new, innovative, or modern.¹⁶

All these distinctions contribute to a more nuanced understanding of presentism, intentionally adding layers of complexity to its seemingly straightforward nature. When considered in a chronological manner, it may seem contradictory. How is it possible to affirm the primacy of a temporal community marked by a refusal to rest, an obsession with innovation and an attachment to the immediate present only, all the while underlining that this community inscribes itself in a ‘conquering phase of presentism’, that is to say: to an epoch and therefore detached from the vicissitudes of the moment? From that perspective, the very idea of a ‘presentist period’ appears to be oxymoronic. Indeed, presentism has its limits as a substantial view point. While it is true that postmodern societies evolve at an ever-quicker pace – one of the reasons why Hartog defends the very notion of presentism – is it true that societies evolve always, all, and all-over? If this is not the case, which seems likely, this means that the values of presentism are not unanimously adhered to, nor are they shared in a durable and totalizing manner. As such, it is necessary to study the frictions and conflicts that are at the origin of this discrepancy. To borrow from Georges Gurvitch, Jacques Le Goff, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans-Georg Brose, Helge Jordheim, and Giorgio Agamben, who all reflected on ‘non-simultaneity’ of social time, temporalities, and contemporaneity: living at the same present time does not mean living the same present.¹⁷ If the notion of presentism can indeed be moved around from one period to another, from the second half of the eighteenth century to our own day, does this imply that it is typical for modernity or postmodernity or, by contrast, that it is a more general structural category? This second possibility is upheld by several historians who, contrary to Hartog, consider a form of presentism that is less directly linked to the specificities and uncertainty of contemporary history.

In what follows, we will present three case studies related to the late medieval and early modern Low Countries to reinforce our hypothesis that societies and individuals in that time and space turned the present into an essential dimension of their perception of time. Moving beyond historiographical and theoretical considerations, these three case studies illustrate in more tangible terms how we intend to study presentism in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries by focusing on people’s lives, practices, and imagination.

To which degree is an individual conscious of the construction of their own reality and how can the present become a subject on itself? Furthermore, is this present to be considered as a moment of existence between the before and after, or as a long sequence enveloping enough shared elements for people – on the level of a family, a neighbourhood, a city, or a country – in the feeling of belonging to an epoch? Literature is undoubtedly one of the most sensitive mediums for expressing emotions. Poems and plays allow access to a particular awareness of the present moment, experienced in the urgency of crisis, whether it inspires regret or prompts action to overcome it.

The Low Countries were home to a dynamic nature of performative literary communities, such as rederijkers, puys (confraternities devoted to religious poetry in northern France), and theatrical companies. It is not surprising that Netherlandish urban theatre plays offer an extraordinary source with which one might illustrate a specific attention to the present, and the way it was identified, characterized, and personalized by means of allegory. The intense literary activity of the rederijkers and poets in the international trade city of Bruges has been widely studied.¹⁸ Jan Dumolyn’s recent interpretation of the famous Gruuthuse manuscript from the library of Louis de Gruuthuse (1422-1492), a rich and veritable literary monument of Flemish glory, has shown how some of the included poems testify to the factional battles that lacerated the urban unity at the turn of the fourteenth century.¹⁹ The street fights and power plays did not only foster political instability but also cultivated a deleterious atmosphere of poisonous discord, suspicion, and denunciations, motivating the chronicler Olivier Van Dixmude to describe the envy that spread through the town in the year 1407: ‘From then on envy started to go around and everyone did their best to molest others. And in Bruges a great envy had invaded the city, because Jan Canfin and Jan Honin had been deposed, and Lubrecht de Scutelare and his followers had taken power.’²⁰ The references to envy (nyt), hate, and the lament of the end of brotherly bonds testify to the socio-political engagement of the singers, poets, and rederijkers, and to the existence of an engaged discourse reflective of its time (figs. 1–2).²¹ The brotherly love (broederlijke minne), the northern counterpart of the Sienese concordia and a key element of the corporatist harmony of the city, has disappeared. Jan Moritoen, one of the more noticeable authors of the volume together with Jan Van Hulst, complains about this loss in a poem that Dumolyn has titled ‘The seven gates of Bruges’, read out at the occasion of a vigil of the kings organized by the brotherhood of the White Bear (Witte Beer). Moritoen concludes his poem with some wishful thinking: ‘And we want to prove to you that we are friends by looking each other in the eyes, rather than behind the back.’²²

If reflections on the poets’ own time are at the heart of this poem, we have to wait until the first decades of the sixteenth century and the pen of Cornelis Everaert to see the emergence of a personification of the agitated times that continued to shake the city of Bruges. Everaert, a cloth dyer, fuller, and member of the city’s two rhetorical chambers, De Heilige Geest (The Holy Spirit) and De drie Santinnen (The Three Saints), wrote several plays at the occasion of festivities organized by the chambers, as well as to celebrate important events in the reign of Charles V, such as victories, agreements, and peace treaties.²³ Reflecting the same mindset that formed the basis of some of the later texts in the Gruuthuse manuscript (III.17), prayers for a peace that would preserve trade and the common good dominate the choice of subject. The infernal succession is well known, as are the means to stop it, and yet it repeats itself forever: ‘Envy leads to battle/ Battle leads to war/ War leads to poverty/ Poverty leads to peace.’²⁴

It is in this context that the zinnespelen, used to transmit a concept or moral idea (zin) to the public, invoke a number of allegorical figures. In the sophisticated writing of the rederijkers these allegories, including Meest al de Wereld (Almost All of the World), Broederlijcke Liefde (Brotherly Love), Eyghen Liefde (Self-Love), and sHeeren Wille (God’s Will), make it possible to incarnate and articulate debate and opposition.²⁵ Facing a weakened economy, which was worsened by Charles V’s endless wars, Den Beroerlicken Tyt (Troubled Times) appears on the scene. In the piece Ghewillich Labuer ende Volc van Neerynghe (Willing Work and Business People), created at the time of the Peace of Madrid in 1526, Ghewillich Labuer is represented by the mechanism of a clock and Den Beroerlycken Tyt is accused of causing all the suffering of the hard-working people of Bruges.²⁶ The accusation is sufficiently vague to appeal to the authorities and escape censorship. By contrast, a piece like dOnghelycke Munt (Inequal Money), which explicitly calls the emperor’s fiscal and financial politics into question, was censured by the authorities in 1530. It was hastily replaced by the more inoffensive Groot Labuer en Sober Wasdom (Great Labour and Small Profit), in which Tyt van Nu (The Time of Now) again functions as the incarnation of trouble.

Eventually, that same present time becomes the central subject of a play presented in Antwerp in 1585, called De tegenwoordighe Tijt (The Present Time).²⁷ It arguably represents a refined version of the word on the street which laid the blame for the endless disasters that continuously shake and weaken the poor people on ‘the times’. Opinion and rumours enter the theatre plays of Cornelis Everaert and promulgate an argument that perfectly illustrates the popular debates about issues, like the incorrect pricing of goods, injustice, and wars that are considered unfair. Simultaneously, personifications on the French-speaking stage like Bon temps (The Good Times), representing a golden age that is deeply missed, and Temps qui court (Time Running Out), who appears completely agitated and disoriented, clearly place the present with its overwhelming problems front and centre.²⁸ Besides its political and economic implications, the personification of the present can also reveal the moral and religious obligation to put one’s life on the road to virtue. In Tspel dat ghespeilt was voor de Aragoenoysen (The Play Performed for the Aragonese), the audience is reminded that ‘we will be compensated in the manner in which we act, and we will die as we have lived’.²⁹ As Samuel Mareel has noted, the announcement is clear and makes the present into a fundamental sequence within the religious culture marked by the debates of the Protestant Reformation.

The preoccupation with the present was not only reserved for literature, but dominated many parts of society in the Low Countries of the late medieval and early modern period, including the visual arts. Initially, the inclusion of isolated contemporary motifs (fashion, city views) and references to the current moment (such as signatures) served to visualize the present.³⁰ Gradually, manners of visualizing the present became more intricate and comprehensive.³¹ In the wake of the Reformation, Protestant ideas about art, such as those that eventually led to iconoclasm, provided a definite stimulus to the development of new subject matter. Notably, many of these subjects are in some way related to the depiction of the present day.³² Scenes of everyday life, although always composed and often moralizing, are perhaps the most obvious example.³³ Hybrid representations of religious histories and daily life, such as Pieter Aertsen’s and Joachim Bueckelaer’s market scenes with biblical episodes in the background, illustrate how artists appealed to the audience’s awareness of their own life and time to deliver a religious message. As demonstrated by the example of Jan van Eyck’s words discussed at the beginning of this article, portraiture also included increasingly personalized and realistic features in an attempt to suggest the actual presence of the sitter. In fact, portraitists met the challenge of suggesting movement and momentum in portraits head on.³⁴ In addition to these examples of larger subject categories, we can mention ‘niche’ subjects like the kortegaerdjes that depict soldiers at rest, playfully recalling the state of war in which the Dutch Republic found itself for most of its existence.³⁵

Several ways in which artists interacted or reacted to the present seem to converge in landscape painting, which developed into an independent pictorial subject in the Low Countries over the course of the sixteenth century, on its way to becoming one of the most popular genres in the seventeenth century.³⁶ The remainder of this section on the visualization of the present time in the visual arts will focus on images of the breaching of the Sint-Anthonisdijk (also called Diemerdijk). This natural disaster took place near the hamlet Houtewael, just outside of Amsterdam, in the night of 5 March 1651. Jan Asselijn made at least six paintings showing different stages of the breach and the flooding of the polder, as well as one depicting the reconstruction works (figs. 3–4).³⁷ Willem Schellinks created one painting (fig. 5) and an elaborate drawing which served as the basis for a newsprint.³⁸ We can distinguish three levels on which these depictions of a natural disaster engage with the present: subject matter, visual tools, and artistic practice.

On the first level – the subject of these artworks – the connection of the artists to the present is straightforward: they depict a specific current event. Inundations were a frequent phenomenon in the Low Countries, an area with most of its land laying below sea-level.³⁹ Asselijn’s painting depicting the reconstruction of the dyke and land hints at a certain heroic narrative of the resilience of the Hollanders facing the terrible force of nature. Perhaps newsworthiness and sensation were sufficient motivation for this choice of subject. In fact, at least three illustrated newsprints concerning the breach were published in 1651, all visually very similar to these paintings. One, comprising three views, was invented by Roelant Roghman and published by Lodewijk Spillebout (fig. 6); two further prints after the inventions of Willem Schellinks and by Jacob Esselens and I. Colin were published by Pieter Nolpe.⁴⁰ The prints, each of which depicts the disaster from a different angle, explicate the illustration with letters and an accompanying legend. In addition, some editions of the prints by Roghman include a poem, and those after Schellinks a descriptive text. Both texts mention the meteorological conditions that caused the breach and the resulting damage on site (drowned cattle, flooded land, and the destruction of a farmhouse that left an entire family homeless) and further away in Amsterdam (flooded basements, barges in the streets), as well as the efforts to rebuild the dyke. The emphasis on the water damage within the city of Amsterdam and on the council’s supervision of the reconstruction were likely intended to appeal to the urban audience of the print – in a way bringing the disaster closer to home – and hints at a similar intention for the painted depictions.

The artists’ second level of engagement with the present is through the use of a visual tool typical of seventeenth-century art across Europe, one which takes on a specific meaning in the context of these artworks: the inclusion of spectators who are witnessing the disaster up close. It is extremely rare to encounter an early modern Netherlandish landscape painting without figures. Most of the time, people – often very small and in the distance – go about their business: travelling or working the fields, as well as the occasional artist drawing after nature. In his Schilder-boeck (1604), Carel van Mander advised artists to populate their landscapes: ‘Yes, make your land, city, and water elaborate, your houses inhabited, and your roads walked upon.’⁴¹ The presence of humans in a landscape painting allowed the viewer to connect this view of nature to their own reality. As a result, the landscape was no longer timeless and anonymous, but represented a palpable present. In the case of the depictions of the breach of the Sint Anthonisdijk, the figures served an additional role. The man with the eye-catching red cloak flapping in the strong winds, the one on the other side of the gap holding his hat (Asselijn), or the men hastily climbing to higher ground (Schellinks) stimulate the further emotional engagement (excitement or fear) of the spectator with the scene. In order to evoke empathy with the unhappy fate of these Hollanders, artists employed this visual tool in a manner not unlike painters depicting a scene from (religious) history or mythology.

Lastly, these paintings relate to the present because of the process underlying their conception. A key element of the practice of Dutch painters was to draw ‘after life’ (naar het leven), in addition to using their imagination and memory, which they had trained by copying the work of other masters. For landscape painters, this meant leaving the familiar urban environment behind and venturing into nature to study the flora and fauna, weather conditions, and different kinds of landscape (such as woodland, sea and lakes, mountains, and dunes), by means of extensive observation which they committed to portable sketchbooks as well as to memory. This practice greatly contributed to the level of realism visible in Dutch seventeenth-century painting, which in turn reinforced the viewer’s connection to the landscape. The artists depicting the breach of the dyke on 5 March 1651 went a step further: they hurried to the scene of the disaster and sketched this specific event, rather than collecting general motifs for future use. Nevertheless, as would be the case for a ‘regular’ landscape painting, they carefully composed the paintings back in their studio, and the paintings should not be considered a direct rendering of the event.⁴²

Amongst the painters witnessing the flooding first hand was Jan van Goyen. He made several drawings in his typical rough yet efficient manner, some of which he later worked out in greater detail (fig. 7). He had to travel from The Hague rather than neighbouring Amsterdam, as is apparent from the fact that he recorded a later stage of the event: the calm after the storm. In this particular drawing, men in small barges and others on the dyke are taking stock of the damage. Jan Asselijn and Willem Schellinks, both based in Amsterdam, arrived earlier in Houtewael than Van Goyen. Asselijn recorded two stages of the flooding: three paintings (currently at Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Hermitage St. Petersburg, and Gemäldegalerie Berlin) show the water rushing down to the lower polder in a small cascade, whereas in two other paintings (Schwerin and Amsterdam Museum) the water has levelled and the dark storm clouds have subsided. It suggests the painter hurried to the scene in the middle of the storm and carefully studied how the inundation advanced over the course of the early morning of 5 March 1651. Schellinks, like Asselijn mostly known for his depiction of foreign landscapes, rendered the disaster in a very different way. Apparently placing himself – and therefore the viewer – very close to the water gushing through the breached dyke, Schellinks focused on the emotions involved in experiencing a natural disaster. The resulting painting is more dramatic, but not necessarily less accurate. The two artists, who had known each other for a long time and had travelled together across Europe, likely stood side by side in Houtewael, yet they perceived and experienced the same event very differently. As such, these paintings also serve as a reminder of the necessity to attempt to reconstruct the perception of the present from the perspective of different individuals.

The examples of the literary and visual representation of the present discussed in the first two case studies offer a first glimpse of possible ways in which the perception of the present firmly anchored itself in the imaginaire of pre-modern people in the Low Countries. However, their ‘northern’ way of perceiving and conceiving the present did not dissipate at the foot of the Alps. The last case study will show how it spread much further.

When the St. Felix Flood on 5 November 1530 wiped several dozen villages in Flanders and Zeeland off the map, causing a great number of casualties and ruining essential wheat fields, the news spread fast. The Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris indicates that Parisians, informed by some lettres imprimées, talked about it the following week.⁴³ The catastrophe was of such a scale that it concerned more than the immediate environs of the flood. News of the disaster not only reached Paris, but also the city of Geneva, where a description of the deluge was published too.⁴⁴ The drama of the St. Felix flood stirred the minds of the inhabitants of this episcopal city of about ten thousand despite the fact that they had their own preoccupations. At the end of the 1520s, the population was torn between two competing factions, those who wanted to remain Catholic under the rule of the Dukes of Savoy, and those who wanted to rally with the Swiss cantons and join the Protestant Reformation.⁴⁵

In fact, it could be argued that this tense situation made them particularly aware of news from elsewhere. After all, events taking place in neighbouring countries at the same time could potentially be radical game changers for local politics. Still, their hunger for news – whether diffused in printed form, handwritten, or orally – was not limited merely to the immediate interests of the Genevans.⁴⁶ Several publications printed by Wygand Köln circulated throughout the city, informing the citizenry of events elsewhere in the world.⁴⁷ Originally from Franconia, this printer-bookseller complemented his earnings by producing publications like almanacks, astrological predictions, and abécédaires. All of these types of publication shared the characteristics of being short, cheap, and meant for everyday use by a large audience. In addition, he sometimes printed texts for the local urban authorities and religious institutions. However, his main contribution was the introduction of a novelty to Geneva and the Savoy territory: printed news reports – a medium already widespread in France, the Low Countries, and the Holy Roman Empire.

The invention and success of the printing press stimulated a general interest in what we now call ‘news’, as well as an acceleration of the spread of information (fig. 8). From the 1480s onwards, cheap booklets recounting recent events started to appear across Europe: French occasionnels, Spanish relaciones de sucesos, and German Neue Zeitungen.⁴⁸ These short texts, consisting of four to eight sheets of low-quality paper, were produced quickly and cheaply.⁴⁹ Before their appearance, recent news circulated by handwritten letters that were copied to reach more people. Printed news reports descended directly from that means of communication: they appropriated the tone, length, and habit of discussing a single event without any comment.⁵⁰ In fact, it was only with the arrival of periodicals in the seventeenth century that publications started to unite descriptions of different events and take a more analytical approach to the information provided.⁵¹

Wygand Köln was the first to publish these news sources in Geneva. Some reported on military events, like the siege of Pavia (1525), while in a series of booklets published between 1526 and 1532, Genevan readers were informed about the movements of ‘the dog with an insatiable taste for Christian blood, who calls himself the Emperor of Turkey’, Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (fig. 9).⁵² They described the westward advance of the Ottomans following the sultan’s victories at the Battle of Mohács (26 August 1526) and the Siege of Vienna (1529).⁵³ Köln also informed his readers about imperial events in the Holy Empire, with leaflets narrating the coronation of Ferdinand of Habsburg as King of Bohemia in Prague (1527), the joyous entry of Charles V into Bologna (1529, fig. 10), and his coronation as emperor by the pope (1530).⁵⁴ One publication, already mentioned, focused on a natural catastrophe: the St. Felix flood (1530).⁵⁵

Only a fragment of Wygand Köln’s production has come down to us; he must have published many similar booklets that are now lost. In fact, this type of printed work has a low survival rate, as it was not meant to be conserved and was discarded or reused in a similar way to newspapers today.⁵⁶ However, the aforementioned sample is probably quite representative and the remaining publications have two points in common. Firstly, all reported events are in some way related to the Holy Roman Empire: its army and wars against France (in Pavia) or the Ottoman Empire, the coronations of its Habsburg rulers, or natural disasters touching its territory (the St. Felix flood in the Southern Netherlands). Secondly, with the exception of the news about the flood (written directly in French), all leaflets are translated. The one concerning the battle of Pavia is translated from Latin to French by a certain Morillon, likely a local intellectual. All the other news reports were translated from German to French by the publisher himself, as indicated by references like ‘printed and newly translated from German to French in Geneva by Wygand Köln, German’. In most cases, moreover, it is possible to identify the original German news reports.

Köln obtained German news reports and translated them for the Genevan market, resulting in an unbalanced availability of information. For example, none of the extant texts provides news about France – even if this absence does not mean, of course, that he never sold French news reports. It is not surprising that Genevans were aware of what was happening in northern Europe, as this area was particularly dynamic with regard to the general print production. Indeed, the invention of the printing press took place in this region and the Protestant Reformation caused the production of German prints to soar from the 1520s onwards.⁵⁷ Moreover, Germany and the Netherlands were fast becoming the main centres of information exchange and diffusion of news on a large scale, while England also published many of these leaflets, often translated from German or French.⁵⁸

In fact, it was a military conflict ravaging southern Europe, the Italian wars (1494-1559), that instigated the need and desire for news in the north. In France, the first printed news bulletins served people’s need to know about the fate of their armies and kings fighting on the other side of the Alps, in the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan.⁵⁹ The news was certainly not transmitted in an impartial way, since those prints only reported favourable stories about the progresses of the French army.⁶⁰ As such, the war was not only fought on the battlefields, but also on paper.⁶¹ An avalanche of news reports favouring the Empire also appeared, especially from the Netherlands, where Antwerp was quickly becoming the publishing capital.⁶² Certain episodes of the conflict even initiated a veritable media war, such as Francis I challenging Charles V to a duel, with declarations of the monarchs appearing in both France and the Low Countries.⁶³ Italy, which formed the main stage for the conflicts, saw its own information system severely affected by the wars. Employing the printing press in a more traditional manner and privileging other forms of writing about news like the satirical pasquinades, it adopted the format of printed news reports much later than its northern neighbours.⁶⁴

This modest example of a Genevan printer’s contribution to the dissemination of news concerning events predominantly taking place north of the Alps illustrates how the manner of producing and consuming news as developed in north-western Europe during the first decades of the sixteenth century was gradually spreading towards other territories. Geneva was not particularly impacted by the advancing Ottomans, the ceremonies of the Habsburg family, or indeed natural disasters taking place in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, the Genevan citizens were unmistakably interested in these events. The bookseller-printer Wygand Köln had the insight to turn this hunger for news into financial profit. A new era had arrived, in which knowledge of what was happening at the same time on the other side of Europe had become a coveted commodity. This acceleration in the dissemination of information not only whetted curiosity, but also brought present events in distant places closer together, stimulating interest in current affairs and, indeed, in the present.

Is it merely a coincidence that the conception and perception of the present in the three cases studied in this essay is related to crisis situations (economic downfall, natural disaster, and war)? To a certain extent, yes and no. While there are numerous examples to choose from pertaining to the rhythms of everyday life and the temporal experience of celebratory events, times of crisis undeniably reinforce the acute perception of the present.

Crises have indeed often been perceived as revelatory moments during which an increased awareness provided an impetus for recovery and reform or, to quote Lampedusa’s famous paradox, for ‘changing all so everything stays the same’. But they were also the backdrop for a profound nostalgia made up of regrets, disillusion, and doubt. As such, the unprecedented cataclysm of the Black Death can arguably be seen as constituting a temporal marker. This interpretation was proposed by Etienne Anheim, a Petrarch scholar who, drawing on the poet’s correspondence, framed 1349 as a kind of year zero, a ‘fold in the order of time’.⁶⁵ However, although the whole continent was struck by a disastrous mortality rate, the pre-humanist world of Petrarch was distinctly different from that of chroniclers and poets active in the cities and courts of northern France and the Netherlands like Guillaume Machaut or, a couple of decades later, Gilles li Muisit, Eustache Deschamps, and Jan Moritoen. While Boccacio’s response to the plague is considered to be one of the first manifestations of the Renaissance, in northern France Machaut was thinking about mourning, regret, and melancholy, and advocating a language of truth, void of artifice.⁶⁶ To see and tell (voir dire), according to Machaut, is to renounce skilful speech and rhetorical perfection and instead bluntly express one’s feelings, sometimes in a crude and ungainly manner.⁶⁷ In his Prison amoureuse, Froissart confessed that he needed to write in a manner reflecting the time as he perceived it.⁶⁸ Other sources from north-western Europe testify of this emerging necessity to record the immediate present and to anchor literary production and writing in general. It is arguably this capturing of the present that distinguishes poets and writings in the north from Italian humanist culture. Since its arrival at the turn of the fifteenth century, the humanist movement presented itself as the creator and thereby commander of its history, turning the present into a moment of crystallization embedded in a historical continuum and advocating a fundamental ideology that mirrored ancient history.⁶⁹ These specific examples from the framework of literary studies open up stimulating paths to understanding what distinguishes one cultural habitus from another. The present, arguably a universal temporality, is nonetheless shaped by expectations and a variable attachment to particular historical past and location. A more systematic study of the perception of the present in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries will enable us to reassess the specificity of the countries of the north. ‘For if each of us lives in time, it is charged with memories and hopes that permeate each of us’, a self-evident observation by Jean-Marie Le Gall, but one that allows us to hypothesize that the present is experienced differently at the individual and community levels.⁷⁰

The reflections presented in this essay, encompassing both historiographical and methodological aspects, focus on a period and geographical area that have not been previously studied in the manner we propose. We contend that they should serve as an impetus for a renewed examination of how the question of the present is approached and explored within the field of humanities and social sciences, particularly within the realm of historical research. It is especially crucial, we argue, to relinquish the notion that ‘presentism’ and the associated implications only emerged in recent years, and to demonstrate that the profound interrogation of what we might term a ‘time in crisis’ has long been a prominent concern.

This brief survey has attempted to illuminate the distinct character of the Low Countries’ perspective on the present, setting it apart from other regions in Europe, while connecting it with the other north-western European countries with which they share borders, languages, and a common history. It is our proposition that this region constitutes a genuine koine – that is, a shared constellation of individual and collective values and references. North of the Alps, void of the Roman spirit, the perception of the present does not appear as a historical construct. Instead, it emerges as an imperative necessity to act, a command, a desire of men and women eager for news and wanting to understand the meaning of their life in light of an urgent present rather than through an exemplary past. By delving into this unique awareness of the present, our aim is to make a meaningful contribution to a more profound understanding of historical consciousness and the dynamic interplay between individuals and societies and the temporalities they inhabit. Undoubtedly, future research endeavours should further investigate the intricacies of this perception, in order to shed light on the complexities of the Low Countries’ experiences and their broader implications for historical understanding. This hypothesis stands at the forefront of our research agenda for the near future.