GHIL Fellows – German Historical Institute London Blog

Life Squared: Early Modern Utopian Ecologies

How can people and animals live alongside each other? How should land and resources be distributed in society? People searched for answers to these questions in both literary and built utopias from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and utopian projects were ways of developing and testing out alternative models for society. The new designs for islands, settlements, cities, or mining projects that they contained were generally a response to criticism of contemporary conditions. I aim to show that non-human entities were part and parcel of such projects, though they have often been overlooked. Whether found in literature or implemented in practice, early modern schemes for better collective living are teeming with animals, plants, and minerals—as well as buildings and infrastructure designed to control them. In order to explore these kinds of utopian ecologies, which address humans in their relationships with organisms and infrastructures, I employ an approach based in transnational microhistory. My goal is to understand local utopian projects—whether a book, a mining project, or the founding of a new colonial city—in their global contexts.

Measures of Success and Failure: Remembering Money in Medieval History Writing

At the beginning of February, Marcus Meer’s project ‘Money, History, and Moral Economies: Communicative Functions of Monetary Information in the Institutional Historiography of the Later Middle Ages (1250–1530)’ welcomed Gabriele Passabì to the team. Together, Dr Meer and Dr Passabì will look at why medieval chronicles abound in specific numeric references to sums of money (such as prices, taxes, debts, exchange rates) and broader discussions of monetary topics (about the debasement of currency, or problems with inflation or deflation, for example). Monetary rhetoric, the project argues, was a versatile communicative tool used in medieval chronicles to serve institutional strategies of remembering the past for the needs of the (medieval) present and to frame aspirations for the future. By investigating the monetary rhetoric of chronicles produced by and for cities, monasteries (both men’s and women’s), and courts in England, the Low Countries, and northern Germany between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the project will trace different manifestations of expanding monetary consciousness(es) and the economic thought and practice that accompanied them. In this post, they give a glimpse of their current work.

Expanding the Archive: Fact and Fiction, Reading against the Grain, and Formats of Engagement

A Roundtable Discussion

Mirjam Brusius, Mirjam Hähnle, Mallika Leuzinger, Markus Mößlang, Ole Münch, Michael Schaich, Indra Sengupta, Pascale Siegrist, Clemens Villinger, Christina von Hodenberg

The archival repositories historians work with, and the methods they use to analyse their source base, have undergone significant changes in the past few decades. Increasing efforts are being made to reconstruct the history of groups which are historically under-documented in institutional archives, such as women, the poor and the aged, immigrants, or lower-caste and marginal community groups. Alternative sources and methods are being sought to supplement or challenge official records, not least in colonial, pre- and postcolonial settings, and regions where formal archives are sparse or difficult to access. At the same time, historians are being confronted with a range of new, often still untested digital history and artificial intelligence-led tools which promise the possibility of processing large corpora of sources. Our projects focus on the analysis or re-analysis of diverse sources, such as social science-generated data, quantitative databases, websites and social media, oral history interviews, visual sources such as photographs, locally produced tourist brochures, serial data, and material objects. We engage critically with questions of method, theory, digital history, and archival practice in this regard, and we look at power as an epistemic force undergirding the modern archive.

This discussion between GHIL historians on the institute’s cross-cutting research theme ‘Expanding the archive’ was recorded in January 2025. The questions were asked by Clemens Villinger and the answers collated by Christina von Hodenberg.

(De)Constructing Europe? Some Findings . . .

Bringing together nine researchers based in Hamburg, London, Rome, and Warsaw, the (De)Constructing Europe project (also known as the ‘Euroscepticism project’), sought to view the history of European integration through different lenses. Challenging and moving beyond what some, such as Mark Gilbert, have termed the ‘progressive narrative’, whereby the European Union is portrayed as inexorably heading towards closer integration, the project sought to cast light on alternative viewpoints and underappreciated actors.

Museums Under Construction: On Loss, Disorder, Destruction, and Objects in Storerooms

Archaeological artefacts from the Ottoman Empire have only recently attracted attention in current debates over decolonization and restitution. Mirjam S. Brusius of the German Historical Institute London is researching the excavation of objects, the role of the local population, and why certain items have languished for decades in the storerooms of European museums.