Abstract

Contributing to the history of the craft of historicisation, the present study explores connections between historical writing and historical experience. These connections are analysed through two youthful documents of historical writing by the Belgian medievalist Franccedilois Louis Ganshof (1895-1980), dating from his schoolboy days. The brief texts in question yield a unique perspective on the processes of learning and emulation that constituted young Ganshof's practical knowledge of historicisation. This knowledge pertained for example to his use of references to historical objects and works of art, the discursive means of which he disposed for describing actions and events, or, indeed, the affects and passions he inscribed into his juvenile elaborations. Specific modes of deploying history in bourgeois Bruges at the beginning of the twentieth century - modes on which scholarly practices of historical writing had already made their imprint - are shown to have been foundational for this intricate, local and particular constellation. Ganshof's later, ostentatiously dispassionate practice of historical writing was durably informed by his early learning experiences and the affectivity they had forged. The linkage between writing and historical experience was intimate and indissoluble.