Back to the Future

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.

@urbanhistoryua.bsky.social

The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the pe...

And the second one is the rich version, including the code and the data: journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/article/j...

The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters Article The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters was published on November 6, 2025 in the journal Journal of Digital ...

There are two versions (both open access): one is the pdf at the publisher www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

When combined, these fragments reveal how divine appeals declined unevenly - fading from everyday formulas, but persisting in moments of personal crisis, illness, or war.

Through careful cleaning, annotation and contextual study, she compiled a dataset of 7,500 references to divine entities like “God,” “Lord,” and “Jesus.”

Using the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, Sara Budts combines digital text analysis and historical interpretation to measure how often—and in what ways—letter writers invoked God when talking about what was to come.

📯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?

The bibliography is definitely not extensive and reflects the research trajectories and interests of the team members. @urbanhistoryua.bsky.social

- histories of the future/futures
- theories of history
- histories of merchants and merchant correspondences from the later Middle Ages until the modern period
- histories of risk and uncertainty
- histories of knowledge
- histories of emotions and time
- histories of time and temporality

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

The Antwerp Bourse The Antwerp Bourse

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.

@urbanhistoryua.bsky.social

Trump criticised after posting AI image of himself as Pope The image, shared by White House social media accounts, comes as Catholics prepare to pick the next pontiff.

And this is what happened the next day...

Wat een nieuwe paus voor de wereld kan betekenen Nicolò Zennaro is doctoraatsstudent en Jeroen Puttevils is hoofddocent, beiden in middeleeuwse geschiedenis, verbonden aan de Universiteit Antwerpen en het Centrum voor Stadsgeschiedenis. ‘Hoe zal de ...

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...

Confirm your presence at the public defense by sending an e-mail to nicolo.zennaro@uantwerpen.be

Pandemics, Natural Hazards, and Wars. Past Futures to Cope with Present-Day Disasters - bladspiegel Nicolò Zennaro studied how medieval merchants created and used future expectations concerning their private lives and business to react to risks and disasters in late medieval Venice.

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/...

Also online on our own website! www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/...

Returning to the Home of the Father. This blogpost is intended for our project website Back to the Future | Back to the Future | University of Antwerp (due to technical…

Nicolò Zennaro is the first in line and he has found stunning details in the famous letters of the Datini company on the death of Antipope Clement VII in Avignon in 1394. This leads him to reflect on parallels to what is happening today and in the near future. medium.com/@JeroenPutte...

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.

YouTube video by Jeroen Puttevils Nicolò Zennaro: The Ermine’s Game: Mercantile Futures and Warfare in Late Medieval Venice

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

This concludes this thread. One can find all the links and the program of this past conference about histories of the future here www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/... /fin

Nicolò’s presentation includes many images but one of them is a really modern one. Can you find it?

YouTube video by Jeroen Puttevils Nicolò Zennaro: The Ermine’s Game: Mercantile Futures and Warfare in Late Medieval Venice

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

YouTube video by Jeroen Puttevils Klaus Oschema: After the End: Medieval Ideas about the Limits of the Future

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.

@kpo.bsky.social also drew parallels with apocalypticism in contemporary culture.

YouTube video by Jeroen Puttevils Klaus Oschema: After the End: Medieval Ideas about the Limits of the Future

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.

YouTube video by Jeroen Puttevils Max-Quentin Bischoff: Letters, Contracts and Testaments: The Future Horizon of a Family Firm

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...