Fire warms, feeds, protects, transforms, and destroys. Long before fossil fuels and electricity, societies across Europe lived with fire in ways that demanded ingenuity, vigilance, and collective forms of care and control.
Our next NEH Community Meeting turns to the elemental force of fire and the historical techniques, knowledges, and governance structures developed to manage its dangers and possibilities.
📅 Thursday, 19 February
⏰ 15:00–17:00
📍 Kabinet van de Koning (University Library, room 0.73)
This session features two talks that bring environmental history, urban history, and the history of technology into conversation.
🔥 Janna Coomans
Fire Risk, Material Adaptation and Policing Agents in the Late Medieval Netherlands
Before the introduction of fossil fuels and electricity, the use of open fires was as indispensable as it was dangerous in preindustrial towns. The threat was especially urgent where building with wood and thatch was standard and building density was often high, which was the case for many larger and smaller towns in the Low Countries between 1300 and 1600. Fires resulted in crises of various kinds. At the same time preventative policies, policing strategies and elaborate investments sought to make communities safer and reduce fire risk. This paper examines these social and material policing tactics in several Netherlandish cities.
Janna Coomans is Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on social and urban history and public health in premodern cities. Her award-winning monograph Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2021) received the John Nicholas Brown Prize 2025. She currently leads the NWO VENI project Inflammable Cities: How Fire Risks Transformed the Low Countries, 1250–1600, and is also the author of the prize-winning trade book Dievenland: Overleven in de middeleeuwen (De Bezige Bij, 2025).
🔥 Thijs Hagendijk
Holzsparkunst and Fire Management in the 1700s: Sustainability avant la lettre?
General concerns about fuel scarcity and deforestation in the early modern period were closely linked to a refined pyrotechnical research program that emerged in the seventeenth century. What began as Holzsparkunst in the German territories in the sixteenth century soon developed into advanced pyrotechnological experimentation, giving rise to devices such as “smoke-consuming engines,” “artificial furnaces,” and “bone digesters.” In this talk, I argue that a key pyrotechnological breakthrough was the application of pipes and enclosed spaces to channel wind, smoke, and heat, thereby enabling more effective manipulation of fire. Containing fire became a new paradigm, which should be understood as a historically specific response to material conditions of scarcity.
Thijs Hagendijk is Assistant Professor of Technical Art History at Utrecht University. His work explores the history of practical knowledge and sustainable developments in the historical arts, often through performative methods such as reworking and re-enacting historical techniques. He is also known to Dutch audiences as an expert on the TV programme Het geheim van de meester (AVROTROS).
These monthly NEH meetings are open, informal spaces to share research, spark conversations, and build connections across disciplines. All colleagues and students are warmly welcome.
Save the date: The next Community Meeting will be on Thursday 19 March.