Historiography and the Shaping of Regional Identity in Europe: Regions in Clio's Looking Glass ed. by Dick E. H. de Boer and Luĺs Adão da Fonseca

Abstract

Reviewed by: Historiography and the Shaping of Regional Identity in Europe: Regions in Clio's Looking Glass ed. by Dick E. H. de Boer and Luĺs Adão da Fonseca Patrick Ball de Boer, Dick E. H., and Luĺs Adão da Fonseca, eds, Historiography and the Shaping of Regional Identity in Europe: Regions in Clio's Looking Glass ( Early European Research, 16), Turnhout, Brepols, 2020; hardback; pp. 301; 38 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €85.00; ISBN 9782503590714. This book emerges from the EuroCORECODE programme, which funded research, under the European Science Foundation, into the development of regional cohesion from the Middle Ages to the present. EuroCORECODE comprised three 'Collaborative Research Projects': CURE (investigating the history of regional cohesion); CULTSYMBOLS (saints' cults as a focus for regionality); and UNFAMILIARITY (exploring perceptions of otherness). Contributions to this miscellany come from all three, though primarily the first: the volume's editors were CURE's project leaders. The scheme's nature was such that scholars from a nation were funded by that nation. Therefore, if a state chose not to participate there would be no research (generally speaking) on its regions. Since countries that opted out included France, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy, those parts of Europe are not represented (Catalonia excepted). While this detracts from the volume's comprehensiveness, it is welcome to see a study go beyond the usual suspects and consider places that might otherwise receive less attention. As the foregoing perhaps suggests, the volume reflects strongly the institutional framework within which it arose. It opens with two chapters from the editors that introduce EuroCORECODE and the work's topic: regional history. The brief given to contributors was to describe how the historiography of their chosen region influenced its history. Then follow ten chapters, broken into two sets of five each. Part 1 deals with the medieval and early modern, as regional identity took shape; these manifest a close engagement with sources and chroniclers. Part 2 concerns nineteenth century attempts to enlist (pseudo-) historiography for nationalist purposes, with emphasis on the struggles of the day. The second section may be of less interest to Parergon's subscribers, except insofar as the material that nationalist historiographers drew upon referred, by definition, to the times that preceded their own. The focus, however, is the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the two most intrinsically fascinating chapters in this section (Michael Bregnsbo on Schleswig-Holstein and Ad Knotter on Dutch Limburg) have the most incidental connection to these earlier periods. As large tracts of Europe are excluded from consideration, the contributions tend to cover broadly neighbouring districts: Bohemia, Silesia, and Upper Lusatia (and Transylvania); Guelders and Limburg; Schleswig-Holstein, Scandinavia, and Livonia. This potentially sets up resonances between chapters. Catalonia is the only wholly outlying region; it had been intended to pair Flocel Sabaté's chapter with one on Portugal, but the latter was omitted following the illness of one of the editors (Fonseca), who was to have co-authored it. To my mind, the best chapter of the first section is Job Weststrate's on Guelders. It also features a useful conceptual overview of the whole volume, possibly because Weststrate had a postdoctoral position within the CURE project. [End Page 204] It is possible to lose sight of the work's broader objective, so his restatement of its aims is valuable. The first three chapters concern contiguous regions, whose politics and history are related, so these are well considered together. Jana Fantysová-Matějková examines the chronicles of Bohemian writers such as Cosmas of Prague, noting that their search for a 'better identity' (p. 86) led them to suppress or highlight different aspects of regional identity—linguistic, ethnic, or religious—as circumstances changed. Przemysław Wiszewski contends that in the Middle Ages the notion of 'Silesia' did not play a significant role in promoting regional cohesion. Lenka Bobková, Petr Hrachovec, and Jan Zdichynec explore how Upper Lusatian towns' chronicles reflected awareness of a common regionality. Cornelia Popa-Gorjanu argues that sixteenth-century accounts of Transylvania aimed at persuading outsiders it was worth defending from the Ottomans, who then threatened it. The chapters in Part 2 constitute medievalism, aside from Bregnsbo...