European Perspectives

This project explores institutional medieval chronicles as transmitters of economic thought and practice by which pre-modern societies brought about any (potentially more moral) political economy. The monetary information contained in these sources will serve as the project’s heuristic key to pursue a comparative, trans-regional investigation, analysing institutional chronicles in England, the Low Countries, and the northern parts of the Holy Roman Empire written from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries.
Marcus Meer and Gabriele Passabi share this project, with Marcus focusing on the European side, while Gabriele turns the spotlight on ‘Historiography and Monetary Consciousness in Plantagenet England’.

To what extent did old people, especially ageing women, play an active part in the processes of value change that transformed West Germany and Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s? Contemporary historians have often pointed to student protests and generational conflict between fathers and sons to explain cultural change. In contrast, this project explores the gendered subtext of value conflicts and the agency of women and the elderly.

Historians working on the second half of the 20th century are confronted with new types of sources: so-called social data. These are the remains of state-sponsored data collection or social science research projects, and include tax data, polls, psychological interviews, and participant observations. Such data can appear in obsolete formats such as punchcards or magnetic tapes, and may be found in retired researchers’ attics rather than in archives. The GHIL has teamed up with external partners to tackle the challenges tied to the re-use of social data by historians.