Flanders gets its first humanist archives

With the Centrum voor Academische en Vrijzinnige Archieven (Centre for Academic and Humanist Archives), or CAVA, the Flemish humanist movement now has its own documentation centre. The centre brings together documents and objects that were important in the decades-long struggle for humanist values that fundamentally transformed Flemish society, long under the influence of Catholic dogmatism.

CAVA brings together the academic archives of the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and the cultural heritage archives of the Karel Cuypers centre, which collects the newspapers, annual reports and even the clothes of the more then 35 liberal humanist organisations spread across Flanders. The latter not only include study circles and charities, but also a production house as well as a student fraternity.

The documents are now being kept in a repository under one of the VUB campus buildings in Etterbeek, in optimal conditions of temperature and humidity. The archives will be available for consultation by appointment, and the organisers will make important documents available to exhibitions.

Although the roots of the humanist approach date back to the Age of Enlightenment, it wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that the movement broke through in Belgian society, at a time when the Catholic church started losing influence. “We have relatively little material from the early period,” says CAVA co-ordinator Frank Scheelings. “That’s why we recently organised evenings where people tell their stories, which we then recorded.”

Most of the local humanist organisations were founded in the 1970s, when the movement really began blossoming in Flanders. In this period, humanist houses began popping up in different cities across the region. Scheelings points out that the VUB also embraced research that other universities weren’t as eager to engage in for ethical reasons. “The VUB became an authority, with its research on topics like parent abuse and in-vitro fertilisation,” says Scheelings.

The centre will officially be inaugurated on 8 May.
www.cavavub.be

Photo: A 1908 illustration of Belgian suffragettes upsetting a ballot box

(c)Heritage Images/Corbis