prof. dr. Herman Pleij

About Herman Pleij

Herman Pleij passionately engages the public’s interest in topics such as: medieval literature, cultural historical subjects, and our (historical) Dutch identity. He reaches this audience, for example, by giving lectures and through television. Herman is regularly seen in the program De Wereld Draait Door, where he enthusiastically and understandably shares insights about Dutch history and his perspective on contemporary society.

Herman studied Dutch Language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD in 1979 with the dissertation ‘Het Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit. Literature, folk festival, and civic morality in the late Middle Ages’ (reprinted in 1983 and 2009). This study particularly focuses on carnival texts and the meanings of temporarily establishing inverted worlds. From 1981 to 2008, he was a professor of Historical Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He served as dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1990 to 1992. In 1993, Herman Pleij was awarded the Francqui Chair for foreigners by the Belgian government, and in 2000, he received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Brussels. Upon his retirement from the university, he was honored with a royal distinction as Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion. Herman Pleij is especially interested in folk literature and folk culture, theater, the rederijkers, the significance of the early printing press, the development of civic morality, and Dutch identities in general.

In 1991, Herman created a six-part radio and TV series for TELEAC titled ‘Sprekend over de middeleeuwen’, which was also published as a book under the same title. Two separate CD boxes with lectures on the Middle Ages (2005) and on the Cultural History of the Netherlands (2010) were published by NRC-Academy. In 2012, a CD box about Erasmus was released by LuisterWijs in Leusden. Herman also contributed to the CD box on Dutch History from the Historisch Nieuwsblad (2010).

Herman also writes in daily and weekly publications about cultural historical topics. Essays on Dutch mentalities and national civilization history have been collected under the titles ‘Het Nederlandse onbehagen’ (1991), ‘Hollands welbehagen’ (1998), ‘Tegen de barbarij’ (1999), ‘De herontdekking van Nederland’ (2003), all reprinted, and most recently ‘Erasmus en het poldermodel’ (2005). Furthermore, Herman has published several books including “Anna Bijns, van Antwerpen” (2011) and “Moet kunnen op zoek naar een Nederlandse Identiteit” (2014).