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Ranging across different countries and cultural domains (museums, opera, literature, history-writing), this collection explores the romantic-historicist complexities at the root of the modern nation-state: how the past became both colourfully exotic and a matter of national identification and public interest.

[...]well into the eighteenth century, the format of a letter was derived from the way classical orators organized their discourses. [...]letters would be passed on from hand to hand and read aloud in the family circle. Because of their exotic nature, travel letters in particular seem to have had a higher preservation rate, perhaps also because authors were more concerned with style, trying to make their accounts more attractive. [...]families were less inclined to throw them away as happened with ordinary letters. [...]we also find accounts of the inconveniences of life: the black-outs on the streets in the evening; the food shortages; the people's inventiveness in making existence a bit more tolerable - matters like these readily lie before us in family letters. Besides private letters becoming public, there are also dozens of examples of private letters whose contents had always been intended to become public knowledge.

Editing procedures for early Dutch literature went through four stages. Initially, in the eighteenth century, the main concern was the origins of the Dutch language. Next came a stage (decisively influenced by initiatives of German scholars) of collection and description with a view to the literary interest of early texts. This is the period when texts which nowadays still belong to the canon emerged from archival collections and libraries. The scholars involved also began to prepare editions by way of a scholarly and, as a rule, individual effort (third stage). By the 1840s this gave way to a concerted effort by five unruly Dutch junior scholars to professionalise editing procedures. They founded the 'Association for the Advancement of Early Dutch Literature', which made its mark with a feverish production of editions. The Association existed for a mere five years; yet in that short timespan it managed to alter editorial practice from the ground up and to effect a complete overhaul of the available knowledge of medieval Dutch literature. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The main reason whyjoep Leerssen, Marita Mathijsen, Dirk Van Hulle, and Geert Lernout, decided in collaboration with the Huygens Institute to organise an ESF conference on 14 and 15 December 2005 on the role of text editions in the establishment of the nation state was the fact that the editing and printing of medieval and renaissance texts plays such a crucial role in our own cultures. After the defeat of Napoleon in Waterloo, the Netherlands and Belgium became part of the same political entity for fifteen years and it was when the new Belgian kingdom became independent in 1830 that the first attempts were made to establish its own separate cultural identity on the basis of a tradition consisting of the same medieval texts that were considered to be part of the literary tradition in the Netherlands. The Canon of Medicine, as it was called, would become the most important book for the study of medicine in East and West and remain a standard until the development of medicine as a science in the eighteenth century. Jan Rock studies the history of Lodewijk van Velthem's contribution to a particular set of medieval texts, the Spiegel historiad which played an important role in the establishment of a national culture on the basis of a thorough knowledge of the glorious past of that nation.