Early Dutch Research Articles

Early Dutch Exploits in the Western Archipelago of the Indies: In Praise of Equal Partnerships

Early Dutch Exploits in the Western Archipelago of the Indies: In Praise of Equal Partnerships

Early Dutch Encounters with Islamic Law: The Text and Translation of Mogharaer Code or Semarang Compendium

Early Dutch Encounters with Islamic Law: The Text and Translation of Mogharaer Code or Semarang Compendium

Book Review: Early Dutch Maritime Cartography: The North Holland School of Cartography (c. 1580–c. 1620)

Book Review: Early Dutch Maritime Cartography: The North Holland School of Cartography (c. 1580–c. 1620)

For Wagrassero’s Wife’s Son: Colonialism and the Structure of Indigenous Women’s Social Connections, 1690–1730

This article utilizes digital humanities social network analysis to examine Native women’s roles in overlapping familial and economic social ties revealed in two early Dutch account books. Taken individually these records are difficult to fit into broader analyses; many of the individual Native people who appear in early account books are recorded only once or at most a handful of times and rarely appear in other documentary sources. The contrasting structures of two contemporary Iroquois and Munsee social networks reconstructed from these account books illustrates the extent of colonial views into indigenous social life and colonial perceptions of indigenous women within their communities. Where Iroquois women were visible in these networks as bridges between indigenous kin groups, Munsee women were perceived as pushed to the margins of their own kinship networks, illustrating the process of erasure in the settler colonial archive.

The Disputed Origins of Dutch Calvinism: Religious Refugees in the Historiography of the Dutch Reformation

According to historiographical convention, the experience of exile by Protestants from the Habsburg Netherlands between the 1550s and the early 1570s played a critical role in promoting confessional Calvinism in the early Dutch Republic. But there are too many problems in the evidentiary basis to sustain this conclusion. This essay traces the historiography on the Dutch Reformation in order to isolate where and why this idea emerged. It demonstrates that no specific role for religious refugees in the development of Dutch Calvinism can be found in historical writing from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Only in the late nineteenth century, during a debate about the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands, did the experiences of religious refugees come to take on a specific role in explaining the development of Dutch Calvinism. The idea first emerged among Neo-Calvinists who critiqued state supervision of their church. By the twentieth century, it came to be used by orthodox and moderate Reformed Protestants, as well as liberal and secular academic historians. This paper thus demonstrates that this key interpretive framework for understanding the Dutch Reformation was the product not of developments in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Netherlands, but of religious politics in the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century.

Rembrandt’s faceless faces

ABSTRACTThis article examines Rembrandt’s investigation of his own face in tandem with his studies of outcast populations in and around Amsterdam. While historians have titled these latter studies as “beggars,” I contextualize these figures within a history of migration, early modern Dutch globalization and shifting concepts of poverty and charity. Understanding these figures in a larger historical framework illustrates how Rembrandt used his own face to visualize the increasingly faceless populations passing through Amsterdam.

Representation of an Early Dutch Colonial State in the East, 1778-1826

This paper is a critical examination of the bi-polaric view of the Indonesian archipelago: Java being the center and the rest of the territory as outer islands. A discourse surrounding the centrality of Java within the conception of Indonesia is created through a variety of mediums, including through education and the arts. Anti-New Order thinkers have attacked this image as part of the way in which the state rams down an essentialist Javanese image to everyone in the archipelago. Yet to say that this was the creation of an elite-Javanese controlled state is misleading. Instead of being a primordial expression of an ur-nationality smothered under the weight of a colonial empire, this paper wants to show that this process was contingent upon a series of historical development in the eitghteenth and early nineteenth century that allowed for the creation of territorial image of a state.

Domesticating the Virgin in Early Modern Netherlandish Art

This essay examines the phenomenon of Protestant Marianism in early modern Dutch visual culture. Assumptions that devotion to Mary must have waned after 1581 when the Calvinist regime of the Dutch ...

Review of 'Four Histories About Early Dutch Football 1910-1920: Constructing Discourses'

Review of 'Four Histories About Early Dutch Football 1910-1920: Constructing Discourses'

The Dutch: The Framers of Racial Superiority in South Africa

For centuries, the South African social order was shaped according to the needs of the White colonizers. It was based on legal separation of the White race from the Black one. Moreover, the Whites officially introduced racial segregation to legalize its racist practices. This complex situation led to a divided society that infringed the rights of the Black South Africans. Then, it changed The South African society for a very long time. Indeed, the Whites became the new masters of the country, and it was important for them to preserve this “privileged” position to ensure their dominance. At this level, it is noteworthy to mention that this became possible thanks to the early Dutch who were the first colonizers to shape a racially segregated South African society.

De sociale positie van stadsvroedvrouwen in vroegmodern Dordrecht

The social position of city midwives in early modern Dordrecht Most early modern Dutch doctors portrayed city midwives in their writings as illiterate, poor, ignorant, and unprofessional. It was believed that their low position made them unable to give adequate medical advice to pregnant women and to assist them in giving birth. For this reason, city governments would have felt compelled to issue several ordinances aimed at raising the level of professional knowledge and behaviour of midwives. This article uses two approaches to challenge these stereotypes regarding city midwives by means of a case study of early modern Dordrecht (1620-1720). In the first part the ideas of the Dutch city doctor Johan van Beverwijck (1594-1647) are explained. He was one of the first writers to present a moderately positive image of the medical responsibilities of city midwives. In the second part their social background is investigated with the help of prosopographical material (income, marital status, husband’s occupation, and home address). Furthermore, it is argued that, in addition to medical tasks, city midwives also had legal and religious duties. The combination of these sources illustrates that city midwives, as city servants, formed an integral part of society in early modern Dordrecht.

Power of the Past

The Hobsbawm-Ranger framework of invented traditions is a suitable perspective from which to examine masonic traditions. Examples from early Dutch lodges show how they strove to gain primacy by anchoring their origins as far back in the past as reasonably possible. Though the formal establishment of a Dutch grand lodge in 1756 appeared to consolidate positions, the final act of this struggle for masonic pre-eminence played out as late as the 1930s.

“Swarms of Negroes Comeing about My Door”: Black Christianity in Early Dutch and English North America

“Swarms of Negroes Comeing about My Door”: Black Christianity in Early Dutch and English North America

Thread: Somatic Lives of a Thing

Thread: Somatic Lives of a Thing

"Lands fit for use": Native Subsistence Patterns and European Agricultural Landscaping in the Colonial Hudson Valley

"Lands fit for use":Native Subsistence Patterns and European Agricultural Landscaping in the Colonial Hudson Valley Jason R. Sellers (bio) The French Jesuit Isaac Jogues visited New Netherland in 1643, later writing of the Dutch colony's history, "The first comers found lands fit for use, deserted by the savages, who formerly had fields here. Those who came later have cleared the woods." Even the visiting missionary quickly recognized the colonists' good fortune in finding lands cleared by previous Native inhabitants. But his description also illustrated the rapidity with which the limited European population began transforming the Hudson Valley's other environments to facilitate farming. That process would be neither systematic nor entirely predictable, creating challenges for the valley's inhabitants.1 Scholars considering the environmental history of New Netherland and colonial New York often extrapolate from William Cronon's classic study of New England, Changes in the Land. Scholarship more explicitly grounded on the Hudson River corridor tends to focus especially on the dramatic changes Americans engineered to advance industry and facilitate river navigation during the nineteenth century. Recently, scholars such as Theodore Steinberg have pushed back the timeline of environmental changes to the colonial era, the area around today's New York City drawing most of the scrutiny because of its long, thoroughly transformative, and relatively well-documented history. Although fewer studies have considered the colony as a whole, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall have argued that the combined influences of Native, European, and African cultures necessarily [End Page 293] produced in New Netherland a unique physical landscape, albeit one reminiscent of the United Provinces.2 This essay contributes to these conversations by considering the small-scale changes colonists introduced throughout the Hudson Valley, and the localized environmental impacts of an expanding agricultural landscape. Using colonial administrative and land records, correspondence between colonial officials, and narrative accounts, it argues that Native Americans of the Hudson Valley repurposed their disused agricultural lands to position European colonies as new resource zones within a diverse regional landscape. Over the course of the seventeenth century, colonists clearing additional forests and draining wetlands to expand their agricultural capacity initiated changes to the physical landscape that altered local environments. Colonial farmers and Native neighbors alike struggled with the unintended consequences of those changes, but the former continued to expand the valley's farmlands, undermining the multifaceted Native subsistence strategies that had originally allowed for the integration of Dutch settlements into the regional landscape. ________ Both Native and European manmade agricultural landscapes overlaid geological formations that shaped colonial geographies. The Hudson River begins in the Adirondack Mountains and flows south for over 300 miles before reaching the Atlantic Ocean, its watershed draining over 13,000 square miles. Moving south from its rugged mountainous origins, the river flattens and widens as it reaches the lowlands of the Hudson Valley, and most of its tributaries. The softer sedimentary rock bed from Albany to the northern Catskills allows the channel to meander and expand horizontally, forming bordering marshes and swamps. Swelling seasonally with heavy rains and snowmelt, it deposits the alluvium that forms the fertile soil of the upper estuary's banks, and islands, shoals and sandbars in the [End Page 294] main channel. Harder rock formations less subject to erosion underlie the straighter, narrower sections of the river at the Palisades and Highlands. The transition between those zones allows the river to widen to form Haverstraw Bay, Newburgh Bay and the Tappan Zee. The distinct geological formations gave rise to a wide variety of terrestrial and marine habitats throughout the Hudson Valley, European visitors commenting particularly on wetlands and heavy forests. It was along the lower 150 miles, where the river becomes a tidal estuary after its confluence with the Mohawk River, that colonists created Dutch New Netherland and English New York.3 Focused on extending their maritime world via small outposts that tapped into an independent arena of land-based Native trade partners, early Dutch visitors rarely ventured far from the Hudson River's main channel. Sparse settlement clustered around trading posts limited their contact with Native Americans, and Dutch authors often generalized the Hudson Valley's inhabitants as "River Indians." Although their descriptions...

Defeat, Honour and the News: The Case of the Fall of Breda (1625) and the Dutch Republic

The honour of the polity, closely tied to military success, was of great importance in seventeenth-century European international relations. This article provides an analysis of the importance of the honour of the polity in the early Dutch Republic – the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth-century – and the role of military success and failure as crucial matters in this. It also contributes to the debate about the position of the Republic, now no longer seen as an anomaly, in European relations. In existing research scant attention is paid to the role of military glory in this. A military defeat, the loss of Breda in 1625, functions as an analytical tool. Analysing the manner in which this defeat was dealt with enables an assessment of the importance of the Republic’s honour in a ‘national’ and international context.

Editors’ Introduction

New York History Summer / Fall 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 261 Editors’ Introduction D.L. Noorlander, Thomas Beal, Susan Goodier New York History has been an important forum for reflective essays and original research on New Netherland and Dutch New York for many years. The New Netherland Institute currently lists in its online bibliography at least twenty-six articles that this journal published between the 1970s and today.1 Among them we find, for example, David Steven Cohen’s influential essay on the colony’s ethnic makeup, “How Dutch were the Dutch of New Netherland?” (1981), and Joyce Goodfriend’s excellent historiographic essay, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History” (1999).2 More recently, New York History commemorated the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage with a special issue dedicated to Dutch topics. And in 2014 the Editors organized a panel of seven experts from across the United States and Canada for our first-ever roundtable discussion on the current state of New Netherland studies.3 In this issue we continue our long-time commitment to Dutch American scholarship with twice the usual content: seven essays, plus book reviews, an exhibit review, and a glossary of potentially-confusing Dutch terms. The issue opens with an essay by Jeroen van den Hurk, who writes about early Dutch activities on Manhattan Island in “Plan Versus Execution: The ‘Ideal City’ of New Amsterdam.” Van den Hurk examines the history of European town planning and how the Dutch West India Company drew on various influences from the Italian, Dutch, 1. The NNI bibliography is not comprehensive. It is missing, for example, Irmgard Carras, “Who Cared? The Poor in 17th-Century New Amsterdam, 1628–1664,” New York History 85, no. 3 (Summer 2004), 247–263, and Noah Gelfand, “A Transatlantic Approach to Understanding the Formation of a Jewish Community in New Netherland and New York,” New York History 89, no. 4 (Fall 2008), 375–395. A thorough comparison would probably turn up more missing titles. See http://www.newnetherlandinstitute .org/research/new-netherland-bibliography/ (accessed February 18, 2016). 2. David Steven Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?” New York History 62, no. 1 (Jan. 1981): 49–60; Joyce Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History 80, no. 1 (Jan. 1999): 5–28. 3. The special Dutch issue was vol. 89, no. 4 (Fall 2008). See also “Roundtable: The Past, Present, and Future of New Netherland Studies,” New York History 95, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 446–490. 262 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY and Spanish worlds to design a colonial capital that did not, in the end, resemble the original schemes and proposals. The next three essays describe religious and social developments somewhat later in the colony’s history. In “‘Hot Pestilential and Unheard-Of Fevers, Illnesses, and Torments’: Days of Fasting and Prayer in New Netherland,” Jaap Jacobs uses Peter Stuyvesant’s proclamations about fast and prayer days to explore the events and developments that colonists believed to be especially important. Jacobs also argues that fast and prayer days were not strictly Calvinist in nature. Rather, they built on a widespread belief in divine providence and fostered a kind of non-denominational, civic religion. Harm Zwarts writes about religion and the economy in “Reformed Deaconries as Providers of Credit in Dutch Settlements.” The deaconries did not have access to the same investment opportunities as their counterparts in Europe, Zwarts shows, but by lending money to colonists they created their own markets and grew their funds gradually through the receipt of interest payments. In Zwarts’s account, the deaconry serves to illustrate, on the one hand, the successful recreation of Dutch institutions in America, and on the other, the need for flexibility and adaptation in a colonial setting . Deacons sometimes used their funds on behalf of poor widows, who are also the main topic of the next essay, “‘Her Humble Estate’: Poverty and Widowhood in Seventeenth-Century New York,” by Abby Shelton. Shelton uses colonial court records to study the experiences of three different women, all widows, who did not have the resources and family networks to support themselves after the death of a husband. Despite some legal and...

Towards a Complete Bibliography of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Newspapers: Delpher and its Applications

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic provided fertile ground for the expansion of the serial press. In 1946, the Swedish bibliographer Folke Dahl documented this extraordinary dynamism in Dutch Corantos, 1618-1650 . He provided the first tentative bibliography of early Dutch newspapers. Since Dahl’s publication, repeated calls have gone out for the extension of his bibliography to the end of the seventeenth century. The failure to do so is in part due to the dispersed nature of the holdings of seventeenth-century newspapers. Here Delpher is an enormous aid to the compilation of a bibliography of all seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers. It provides a unique platform on which dispersed collections are brought together. Scans of newspapers in Moscow, Oldenburg, London, and Amsterdam are displayed on one digital database where content can be rapidly described, typographical developments observed, publication trends easily compared, and variants discovered. Still, the creation of a bibliography can in no way rely purely on Delpher. The resource will not replace the valuable insights gained from detailed book-in-hand inspection of newspapers.

The Relocation of VOC-Era Bosheuvel Farm in the Liesbeeck River Valley, Cape Town: A Land Surveying Approach

The article reports on the relocation of Bosheuvel, the most southerly of the original farms granted by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) along the Liesbeeck River in Cape Town between 1657 and 1660. These are represented on Pieter Potter's general plans of 1658 and 1661. An original beacon that is still in use in the current cadastre is identified. This beacon is thought to be the oldest surviving cadastral beacon in South Africa and is worthy of heritage recognition. The alignment between this beacon and mountain features in the original choice of boundary directions, as well as other reconstructed boundaries and beacons of the farm, are speculative conclusions which cannot be verified without further spatial historical evidence coming to light. This contribution is significant in adding to the body of work on early settlement at the Cape and its spatial effects on the current city-scape. The addition of geo-spatial evidence and processing using land surveying methods of property relocation and mathematical beacon and boundary reconstruction bring geo-spatial rigour to locational information of historic farms at the Cape in the early Dutch period.

Mare Liberum

Bringing a performance studies perspective to bear on the emergent area of oceanic studies, this essay theorizes the oceanic imaginary and its particular resonance for Asian American performance. It offers a study of the mare liberum, or free sea: an insovereign zone that belongs to no one because it is common to all. Organized around a reading of musician Karen O’s performances, the essay identifies the emancipatory kernel at the heart of her performance practice. Reading the oceanic aesthetic within Karen O’s performance practice and situating this within of a brief intellectual history of the free sea—and the work of early modern Dutch jurist Hugo Grotious, in particular—the author suggests that Karen O’s playful performance atop a figurative ocean stages the speculative emancipation of the body from the limits of racial and national subjection.