On Feb 13 Jeroen Puttevils presents the project and some of its results at the Institute for Historical Research's @ihr.bsky.social Low Countries seminar. Live in London and also online! Register below.

📯Publication alert! What can 7,500 divine references in early modern letters tell us about how people imagined their futures? And how do you measure something as elusive as belief?

We have just put the Zotero bibliography of the Back2theFuture project online. www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/... Throughout the project we have built this bibliography which we hope can serve the scholarly community #skystorians interested in the following subjects:

Today @nicolozennaro.bsky.social presented his paper “Credo per la grazia di Dio farei bene”. Future thinking and knowledge of a risk (in)expert in late medieval Venice at the LVI Settimana di Studi
Gestione del rischio, insolvenza e bancarotta nel mondo premoderno (secc. XIII-XVIII) in Prato

This afternoon @nicolozennaro.bsky.social successfully defended his PhD dissertation “1400: Un Fortunoso Anno. Future Thinking and Risk Late Medieval Venice” and now goes through life as Dr Zennaro. @erc.europa.eu @urbanhistoryua.bsky.social @uantwerpen.be

Today the Conclave starts in the Sistine Chapel. In a previous post on our blog, @nicolozennaro.bsky.social & @jeroenputtevils.bsky.social wrote about the conclave of 1394. Jeroen now moves to that of 1559 and to the subject of betting on the next pope.

Something went wrong with the message on Friday: @nicolozennaro.bsky.social and @jeroenputtevils.bsky.social published an op-ed on parallels and differences between the death of the pope and the following events in the fourteenth century and today in @demorgen.be : www.demorgen.be/meningen/wat...

Our team member Nicolò Zennaro will defend his PhD dissertation next week, on Friday 9 May. You can attend when you're in Belgium! He has also written a blogpost on his dissertation for the blog of the Faculty of Arts @uantwerpenfsw.bsky.social of @uantwerpen.be . blog.uantwerpen.be/bladspiegel/...

The passing away of Pope Francis I and the funeral that is about to take place made a few members of the Back to the Future team think about historical futures and the deaths of popes, their funerals and the ensuing conclaves.

To end this thread and the conference: Nicolò Zennaro (Back2theFuture) presented a chapter from his PhD (which he was still writing at that time). Nicolò uses the wealth of the medieval Datini archive. The title of his talk: The Ermine’s game. Mercantile futures and warfare in late medieval Venice

Medievalist @kpo.bsky.social Klaus Oschema ( @dhi-paris.fr ) considered what the end(s) of time in the Middle Ages were and how this might takes us to rethink models of histories of the future.

Max-Quentin Bischoff (Back2theFuture & University of Antwerp) drew on the rich Tucher letters from the first half of the sixteenth century and consider the relations between futures in these letters and other types of sources such as testaments and contracts. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5F...

Penelope Corfield (Royal Holloway) presented Shifting views of time: From cyclical to linear and the future of prophecies. Spanning several centuries, Corfield pointed out the changing roles of prophets and how their ideas and those of their followers are related to changing ideas about time.

with @eheijmans.bsky.social we travelled to 18th C France, the period and place often emphasized as key shifts in the history of thinking about the future. Elisabeth presents empirical evidence on the future statements of French businesswomen and evaluates whether they wrote differently.

Medievalist Matthew Champion (Melbourne University) took us to virtual Melbourne where one can see the Triptych with the miracles of Christ (1491-1495) produced in the Low Countries. It served as starting point for a deep exploration of multiple futures in the devotio moderna

Day 2: Marek Tamm www.tlu.ee/en/node/105928 took us for a walk through the different historical theories for histories of futures www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaiP...

Back in November we organized our Conference Back to the Future: Thinking about Futures in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe and Beyond. We have permission to put (most of) the presentations online. We will announce one every day from now.

Hello World!