About the project

The aim of this project is to better understand how reconstructions of past floods enabled people in early modern Holland to reflect on environmental change over time. I will focus on the ‘Cimbrian deluge,’ which supposedly struck the East coast of the North Sea around 120 BCE, felling trees, flooding the lowlands, and casting the resident tribe of the Cimbrians into exile. From the sixteenth century onwards, scholars referred to this ‘deluge’ as the greatest disaster in the recorded history of the Low Countries, even if the only textual evidence was a vague remark in Strabo’s first-century Geographica. By the eighteenth century however, the flood was invoked by Dutch antiquarians, historians, surveyors and hydraulic experts as a cautionary tale, illustrating the consequences of negligent water management. The history of the Cimbrian deluge served to instill environmental reflexivity—to teach audiences how human interventions in the environment could have long-term effects.
As a Vossius Research Fellow, I will chart the scholarly and scientific debates about this purported flood in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Low Countries, seeking to understand how the human history of the Cimbrian deluge was reimagined as an event in the natural history of the Low Countries. What enabled this shift? How did changing evidentiary standards transform the historical narrative? And what purpose did this history serve for the authors who invoked it?
The little-studied history of the Cimbrian Deluge is remarkable in several ways. First, it offers a case study of 'environmental reflexivity,' illustrating the complexity of historical notions of environmental change. Second, since many assumed that flood had impacted the entire North Sea basin, it fostered inquiry into traces of environmental change at a regional scale. Third, the dating of the flood to the second century BCE drove historians and naturalists to think about changes in the landscape over long timescales. And fourth, it emerged from debates across early modern disciplines, which combined textual and material remains of the ancient past—ranging from Strabo to fallen trees in peat bogs.
This episode offers a rare instance of an early modern ‘deluge’ that had no connections whatsoever to the biblical deluge of Genesis. Thus it offers an significant counterpoint in the history of environmental and planetary thinking.

About the researcher
Mathijs Boom is a postdoctoral researcher at the International Insitute for Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. His research interests revolve around environmental knowledge, environmental politics, and the history of extraction and energy. His dissertation, titled 'A Diluvial Land: Earth History in the Early Modern Low Countries,' defended in November 2023 at the University of Amsterdam, explored the underpinnings of geological thinking in the early modern Dutch Republic and Austrian Low Countries, ranging across histories of biblical scholarship, hydraulic expertise, and mineral knowledge. His current research project delves into the twentieth-century archives of anti-nuclear activists. It asks how debates about nuclear energy facilitated new forms of environmental reflexivity and politics at transnational and even globe-spanning scales. At the Vossius Centre, Mathijs plans to return to undeveloped strands of his PhD research and to prepare the publication of his dissertation as an academic monograph.