Culture in a Moving Rearview Mirror: A Historical Meta-Analysis of Canonicity

Discussions of cultural and literary canonicity usually extrapolate “historical importance” from applying axiological (ethical/aesthetic/pedagogical) value judgements to the available cultural heritage, including documentary heritage. As such they cloak their contemporary topicality in the discourse of historical importance, in the process eliding their own transience. This research looks at the documentation indicating historical importance. The documentation itself is a historically accumulated corpus, which provides one indicator to measure the rise and fall in “canonicity” of cultural figures over the decades and centuries. The chosen test case is that of Dutch literary and cultural history, as referred to in the holdings of the Netherlands Royal Library.