In the summer of 2020, when the editing for this volume was began, the Dutch minister of Education, Culture and Science received the “new” canon of Dutch history. It was compiled by a committee consisting of professional historians who worked on this revision for several years. The new canon was front-page news. Discussions about its content made the headlines of all the national press and resulted in many opinion pieces and reactions, in newspaper articles and via online platforms. The first canon of the Netherlands had been presented in 2006 with the primary goal of serving as a tool in (high school) education. However, it was clearly also meant to serve as a guiding principle for a country that, at the time, was only slowly discovering that it was less confident about its identity than it had always thought it was. “The Dutch canon” consists of 50 windows into the past. These windows are constituted by individuals, objects, movements or important events. Taken together, they are meant to illustrate the essence of what the Netherlands and Dutch identity are about. For this most recent revision, which started only after a decade, 36 windows were rewritten; 4 changed in name and 10 (that is 20% of the total) were replaced. Among the most eye-catching replacements was that of Willem Drees, Dutch prime minister after WW II and founder of the welfare state, famous for his simplicity and thriftiness, by Marga Klompé, the first and very influential female Dutch minister. There was also the addition to the canon of Anton de Kom, an anti-colonial writer and activist from Surinam, son of a former slave, who joined the communist resistance in WW II and died in a concentration camp in 1945. In many important ways, the canon is responding to new values in Dutch society. Most discussions in the press focussed on individual examples, yet ultimately they were about the tension that is inherent in the very process of canonisation itself. On the one hand, a canon is supposed to be stable or even immutable to retain its authority; excluding Drees was considered most inappropriate by the leader of the socialist party and others. On the other hand, a canon constantly needs to change if it wants to remain relevant; the inclusion of more women like Klompé was widely applauded. The committee of historians responsible for the revision was very explicit with its advice to the minster to revise the canon in yet another decade, once again. In a reader’s letter to a newspaper, a high school teacher even suggested to always keep one window of the canon open for people to be able to add their own content. Current opinion, therefore, seems to favour the idea that the ideal canon is a moving canon that is constantly in flux. It is important to realise, however, that this seemingly contradicts what has often been considered as the defining characteristics of canons, such as they have been functioning throughout history: their stability and coherence. It would be rather difficult to imagine, for instance, a blank Chapter at the end of every New Testament Bible for each reader to add his or her own book to the canon of 27.
This volume is about that intriguing tension and investigates how canonisation is able to work as innovation. Our main hypothesis is that we should understand this innovation as a form of anchoring cultural formation. As the 50 Dutch windows illustrate so well, canonisation takes identity from the past in an attempt to explain the present. As such, it is mostly part of the inward-looking processes of convention and tradition that characterise cultural formation. The other part of how cultures are formed, function, and develop, however, is constituted by outward-looking processes of divergence and innovation. With canonisation, we argue, these two come together. Often, but not always, as a process of creative friction through which convention and divergence, tradition and innovation are mediated through anchoring. Canonisation is therefore fundamental to the sustainability of societies. When the Dutch minister received the new canon, she remarked: “History doesn’t change but the way in which we view our history does”. With this remark, she seriously underestimated the ability of canonisation to change history, as this book will illustrate at length.
This volume, therefore, is meant as a (theoretical) exploration of the concept of canonisation, with Afro-Eurasian societies from roughly the first millennium BCE constituting our case study. It focuses on canonisation as a form of cultural formation, asking why and how canonisation works in this way and explaining the importance of the first millennium BCE for these questions – and vice versa. As a result of this particular focus, notions like anchoring, cultural memory, embedding and innovation play an important role throughout the book. By paying attention to a variety of specific, local contexts – Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Roman – we have purposefully opted for a “cross-cultural perspective”. It is important to underline, however, that we see all these particular examples of canonisation as being related and part of a more global, Afro-Eurasian development during this first millennium BCE. To test and develop this idea further, it would be commendable to also add examples from Central Asia and East Asia (China) to the tableau here presented. This was something we certainly aimed for but did, for practical reasons, not achieve in the two workshops on which this volume is based.
The introduction presents, in two articles, an overview of the various definitions and earlier opinions concerning canon and canonisation, as well as many examples that show how canonisation works as a socio-cultural process – what it did and why. The essays suggest that increasing Afro-Eurasian connectivity and the development of a cosmopolitan world that stretched from the Atlantic to the Oxus, one of the hallmarks defining the first millennium BCE, necessitated canonisation as cultural formation more than ever before. It is interesting to compare this to Globalisation processes in our own era. The eight specifically commissioned case studies, ranging widely but all consistently focussing on canonisation as a form of anchoring cultural formation, illustrate this in a variety of ways. They converge in a concluding essay that brings the individual case studies together and critically evaluates the aims of the volume as a whole, especially also with regard to the notion of increasing connectivity. Note that we have not standardised the spelling of canonisation versus canonization throughout the volume.
The first expert meeting on which this book is based was held at the University of Nanterre on 21 September, 2018; we would like to thank ARSCAM (UMR 7041) for its (financial) support. The second expert meeting was held at Leiden University on 7 June, 2019; with many thanks to the Leiden University Profile Area Global Interactions for its generous funding and assistance. The compilation of this volume was supported by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) through the Dutch Research Council (NWO), as part of the Anchoring Innovation Gravitation Grant research agenda of OIKOS, the National Research School in Classical Studies, the Netherlands (project number 024.003.012).
We are grateful to the editors of Euhormos for accepting this volume as part of their series and to Ineke Sluiter and André Lardinois for their critical feedback on the volume as a whole. Anchoring Innovation PhD candidates Suzan van de Velde and Merlijn Veltman were of great assistance with the editing process and the preparation of the index. Many thanks, lastly, to the contributors of this book for taking up the intellectual challenges we posed them and for two memorable days in Nanterre and Leiden. Let our discussions continue.
Canonisation is a contested issue and canons are always debated, as illustrated by the recent events in the Netherlands briefly described above. We are confident that by providing a “deep history” of canonisation and anchoring cultural formation, this volume can significantly add to those current debates by providing them with chronological depth – and thus placing them into sharper relief.
Damien Agut-Labordère (Nanterre) & Miguel John Versluys (Leiden)
February 2022