How did political actors speak when confronted with perceived threats to the existing order? And how did such speech, in turn, shape political outcomes over time?
For the early modern period, scholarly interest in political orality has been driven largely by the challenge of recovering political processes from fragmentary and mediated sources. For the modern period, by contrast, it has been shaped primarily by a sustained interest in democracy: its emergence, functioning, and durability.
This workshop aims to bring these traditions together and invites contributions, from both sides of the 1800 divide, that examine political speech (formal and informal, public and private) in which political authority was negotiated, challenged, and, at times, quietly reshaped. Rather than treating political change only as the sudden outcome of institutional crisis or ideological innovation, the workshop starts from the premise that change often took place in and through discourse, conversation and debate. It asks how political elites and their opponents identified threats, assessed their implications, and sought to persuade others of their chosen course of action.
The workshop is part of Quiet Rebels, a larger research project at Leiden University on political orality in the Netherlands and beyond, spanning the early modern and modern periods. It is organized by Jasper Dekker, Duvera Herfst, Anne Heyer, Lauren Lauret, Yann Ryan and Jasper van der Steen.
Themes and Questions
We welcome papers that engage with one or more of the following topics:
- Political speech both reflecting and driving processes of political change
- Oral interaction in which people deal with certain ideas, groups, or developments they consider threats
- Dynamics of persuasion, confrontation, and compromise in political settings
- Political orality in contexts where speech was only partially recorded or mediated through written sources
- Circulation and transfer of rhetorical practices and threat discourses across regions, polities, and empires
- Role of informal or private settings (households, correspondence, sociability) in shaping political conversation
- Changing perceptions of threat over time
- Differentiations between 'emotional' and 'rational' discourse
- New methodological approaches, including digital and computational tools, for recovering 'oral traces' and in larger source corpora
Scope
The workshop adopts a broad chronological and geographical perspective. We are especially interested in contributions that connect political speech and orality to political change and/or reflect on methodological challenges in studying political speech.
Format
The workshop will take place over two days at Leiden University. Papers (3000-6000 words) will be pre-circulated by 5 March 2027, and each session will be organised around a 15-minute presentation. The contributions will be considered for publication in a special issue of a leading journal of history.
Submission
Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a short biographical note (max. 150 words) to project assistant Duvera Herfst ([email protected]) by 16 October 2026. We aim to send notifications of acceptance by 30 October 2026. The research project aims to reimburse costs of travel and accommodation.
