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On Thursday 20 November, Danielle van den Heuvel, Chair of Early Modern Social and Economic History at the Faculty of Humanities, will deliver her inaugural lecture, titled ‘Laundry Stories. On the Role of Evidence, Perspective and Experiment in writing Invisible Histories. In this lecture, she explores how something as seemingly ordinary as doing laundry can reveal surprising insights into the past.

Digitalisation and AI in historical research

Archives hold hundreds of thousands of kilometres of historical records, waiting to be rediscovered. To make this enormous wealth of material manageable, social and economic historians have long relied on numbers and statistics. For Van den Heuvel, this approach has offered valuable insights into the history of work.

Yet that focus also had its limits. Historians often drew on tax registers or population listings, for example, which usually list only the occupation of the head of a household. As a result, other experiences and perspectives disappeared from view – such as the story of the laundry.

Recent advances in digital technology and artificial intelligence have made it far easier to explore large collections of sources. A well-known example is the online database , which makes millions of notarial deeds written between 1578 and 1915 searchable in just a few clicks. Collections like this are helping to recover the stories of people who were once invisible, creating a richer and more diverse view of the past. Still, as Van den Heuvel points out, there is more work to be done.

Experimentation and interdisciplinary research

Even with the help of all that data, blind spots remain – including in the documentation of the laundry. Most historical records were written by men, such as clerks and civil servants. They probably never did the washing themselves, but they did decide what was recorded and preserved. As a result, we know remarkable little about such an ordinary part of daily life.

That is why Van den Heuvel calls for a broader approach to social and economic history. Collaboration with other disciplines can be particularly fruitful. Architectural historians study the spaces where laundry was done and urban historians look at the infrastructure that supported it. Art historians can offer inspiration through their use of visual sources. And archaeologists often experiment with old techniques to better understand the past.

So try it yourself, Van den Heuvel also suggests. Experimentation is not just for scientists – scholars in the humanities can gain valuable insights too. For example, by washing clothes as people once did. Only then can we start to answer questions such as: how hard was the work? What skills did it require? And what difference did new technologies and fabrics make?

By reconstructing and critically examining past practices, new insights emerge. In doing so, historians can uncover new perspectives and develop knowledge that goes beyond written sources alone – deepening our understanding of the past, Van den Heuvel concludes.