Max Kade German Culture and Media Center
3401 Walnut Street, Room 329, A Wing 
(entrance next to Starbucks)

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3:00 pm           Welcome and brief introduction
                        Prof. Eric Jarosinski (University of Pennsylvania)

3:10 pm           Pieter Bruegel’s Old Testament
                        Prof. Larry Silver (University of Pennsylvania)

3:50 pm           Language conflicts in medieval times. The sociolinguistic impact of the Battle of the
                        Golden Spurs (1302)
                        Dr. Catharina Peersman (University of Leuven)

4:30 pm           Teaching English and Dutch as a second language in 18th-century New Jersey
                        Dr. Rob Naborn (University of Pennsylvania)

5:10 pm           ‘L’union fait la force’? A rough guide to the historical roots of the Belgian                               language conflict
                        Prof. Rik Vosters (Vrije Universiteit Brussel/University of                                        Pennsylvania/Université de Liège)

5:50 pm           Belgian beer reception

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Pieter Bruegel’s Old Testament

Dr. Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of Art History
University of Pennsylvania

Pieter Bruegel’s rare Old Testament paintings, the Suicide of Saul (1562) and Tower of Babel (1563) are unusual subjects to begin with.  But viewing them together and noting their nearly exactly overlap in date strongly supports the notion that the artist used these subjects to comment indirectly and instructively on the institution of kingship at the very time when the Netherlands was beginning to chafe under the increasingly stringent rule of the King of Spain – only half a decade before the armed beginnings of the Dutch Revolt.

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Language conflicts in medieval times. The sociolinguistic impact of the Battle of the Golden Spurs (1302).

Dr. Catharina Peersman         
University of Leuven

In the collective memory, the Battle of the Golden Spurs (1302) seems to mark the historic beginning of the ‘Flemish’ identity and of the Belgian language problems up to the present day. After the 2010 elections, several journalists and cartoonists made references to the Battle, comparing right-winger De Wever to medieval Flemish heroes, who beat their French(speaking) enemies.

The 1302 story has amply been analyzed by historians, but not by sociolinguists, although the choice of a written (and spoken) language, Dutch or French, became more significant from that moment on. Did medieval Flemish people change their linguistic habits, their perception of French (which was a culturally and politically prestigious language) and of their own identity after the Battle of the Golden Spurs? Or was the battle of little consequence in their everyday language use, and thus not the so called origin of the Belgian language problems?

In order to be answered, these questions need detailed qualitative research on medieval sources. These sources reveal certain ways of constructing a medieval Flemish identity: language perception through language judgments (“French is a false language”), the manner in which people refer to speakers of a certain language and the actual use of a language. We will examine these building stones of identity, so eventually the medieval Flemish identity may be known and (to a certain degree) be compared with the actual identity.

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Teaching English and Dutch as a second language in 18th-century New Jersey

Dr. Rob A. Naborn
University of Pennsylvania

In spite of a reprint in 1976, Francis Harrison’s The English and Low-Dutch School-Master//De Engelsche en Nederduytsche School-Meester, published in New York in 1730, remains relatively unknown. In this lecture I will examine the contents and history of the two known copies of the book, and I will argue that Harrison, a teacher in New Jersey, borrowed heavily from a number of 17th-century predecessors in Europe. Although the book is a unique document about second-language learning in Colonial North America, it is doubtful that it can be used to prove language change there in the eighteenth century.

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‘L’union fait la force’? A rough guide to the historical roots of the Belgian language conflict

Dr. Rik Vosters, Brueghel Visiting Assistant Professor
University of Pennsylvania/Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Université de Liège

Although the conflict between Dutch-speaking Flemings in the North and French-speaking Walloons in the South of Belgium has not led to significant violent confrontations in the past, political tensions have run high at various points during this nation’s short history. Language has played both a central and a symbolic role in these disputes, and in spite of strict language laws implemented in recent decades, aiming to appease both parties, linguistic antagonism keeps surfacing on a regular basis.

Societal multilingualism and the different foreign rulers – Spanish, Austrian, French and Dutch – have made the Southern Low Countries into the testing ground par excellence for language planning on the European continent. This talk will provide historical insight into the roots of the conflict by presenting an overview of such language planning efforts since the ancien regime. Both status and corpus planning issues will be addressed. The status of Dutch vis-à-vis French changed drastically over the years, and we will examine the how different governments and societal pressure groups tried to manipulate the linguistic playing field. But also the language itself often came into focus: we will see how debates about the linguistic form and orientation of Dutch in Flanders significantly influenced language political debates as well.