Seventeenth-century Dutch Republic Research Articles

The ambassador and the press: printed diplomatic letters and the entanglement of public and private news provision in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic

ABSTRACT In 1669, the regents of the States General, the federal assembly of the Dutch Republic, instructed their printer (Statendrukker) henceforth to print all documents that they required in at least five copies. Amongst resolutions, placards and ordinances, this included the regular despatches from the Republic’s diplomatic agents. This remarkable printed correspondence, which has never before been studied in depth, is the focus of our article. The practice of printing diplomatic despatches was unique to the Dutch Republic: by drawing attention to this neglected source, we shed light on the circulation of news amongst the political elite of the Dutch Republic, as well as broader diplomatic and news networks in Europe. By directly comparing the content of the news provided in the diplomatic despatches with that publicly available in the commercial newspapers of the Republic, we also challenge a dichotomy between public and private news provision and a perception of the regents as obsessed with secrecy. We suggest that the printed despatches were not valued by the States General because they contained exclusive information, but rather because they could be used to verify news already available to the regents through other sources, and to facilitate the circulation of information from the States General in The Hague to the provincial States and city councils. This article also presents evidence that the States General’s printed despatches occasionally circulated among foreign agents and officials.

How Unique is VC’s American History?

VC: An American History, by Tom Nicholas, offers a compelling chronicle of the development of professional venture capital (VC) in the United States—from VC-like fore-bearers as diverse as eighteenth-century cotton manufacturing and nineteenth-century whaling up to the state of the modern VC market at the turn of the millennium. The book emphasizes America’s enduring advantage in VC as a consequence of these early developments and as a practical governance solution for investing in the long-tailed returns of risky new ventures. In this essay we discuss similar historical precedent and governance arrangements in the spice-trading voyages of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, calling into question the uniqueness of early American VC ancestors. Moreover, far from being a distinguishing feature of early ventures, long-tailed returns exist even in public equities, suggesting that the VC governance structure is about more than the distribution of returns. We conclude that the reasons for American dominance of contemporary VC remain unclear. Picking up where the book leaves off, we summarize facts and trends in twenty-first-century VC. (JEL G24, M13, N20, O16, O31)

Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660–1789 by Julie Hardwick, and: The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic by Karen Hollewand

Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660–1789 by Julie Hardwick, and: The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic by Karen Hollewand

Pieter de Hooch’s window shutter with the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (1661)

This article deals with Pieter de Hooch’s enigmatic painting Woman holding a basket with beans in a garden of 1661 (Kunstmuseum, Basel), and, more specifically, with the identity of the man depicted on the window shutter of the building in the foreground of the painting. The author argues that this portrait, which was hidden behind a layer of paint for a long time and only uncovered sometime between 1913-1927, represents the Emperor Charles V, whose portrait still decorates many buildings in the Netherlands. It is also argued that the building in the background of the painting can be typified as a ‘hofje’ or almshouse, and that its architecture resembles that of the Leiden Eva van Hoogeveenshofje, built by the architect Arent van ‘s-Gravesande in the 1650s. This suggests that De Hooch did not only paint locations in Delft and Amsterdam, but also in Leiden. The Dutch Republic’s seventeenth-century ‘hofjes’ were renowned, eliciting praise from foreign visitors, not only because of the way the Dutch Calvinist elite took care of the needy but also because of their superb architecture that enhanced the beauty of the Republic’s cities. Interestingly, De Hooch painted a servant girl in the garden of the almshouse, which at first may seem incongruous with an institution intended for the poor. However, as will be shown, residents of almshouses in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic were not as poor as is generally thought. Some were even quite well-off and did indeed keep servants. In fact, some contemporaries even likened the Dutch almshouses to palaces. The portrait of the emperor on the window shutter may thus have criticised this type of ‘poor relief’ and could well have been intended to bring out the resemblance between the ‘hofje’ and an emperor’s palace. The word ‘hofje ‘ after all means ‘small court’. As such an overt criticism is unique in De Hooch’s oeuvre, it may have been the artist himself who blotted the emperor’s portrait out, thus changing the image into a straightforward genre scene. It was precisely this type of scene that was to bring De Hooch some success following his move to Amsterdam in 1660.

Education in partibus infidelium

Catechisms and schoolbooks were essential tools for Catholics living in partibus infidelium, ‘in the lands of the unbelievers’, in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. While constant demand for these texts from parents, priests and schoolteachers sustained the livelihoods of many Catholic printers, their regulation and censorship became a battleground of doctrinal orthodoxy. In the 1690s, corrections to the catechism of the Archbishop of Sens led to printed polemical rebuttals and an audit of books used in Catholic schools. Using the remarkable archival evidence surviving from this controversy, this article demonstrates the importance of schoolbooks to the Catholic book trade in the Dutch Republic and how accusations of unorthodoxy and censorship can help to reconstruct lost titles and editions.

Anatomical study of a human skull with multiple osteomas in a seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting: bone morphology and artistic intention.

Skulls were frequently depicted in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings. Skulls were interpreted as symbols of vanitas-meaning the evanescence of life-but their morphological features have received little attention. This study analyzed a skull with abnormal tumors in a seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting by a renowned artist, Edwaert Collier (ca. 1642-1708), from anatomical, forensic, and pathological perspectives. The morphology of the cranium and teeth indicated that the skull likely belonged to a middle-aged female. We carefully diagnosed the abnormal masses as multiple osteomas on the skull and left femur, based on clinical studies and paleopathological literature, which reported lesions with a similar appearance to those observed in Collier's work. Furthermore, detailed observations of the cranial sutures and epiphyses of the long bones in his paintings revealed that the artist may have selected bones with a morphology that was suitable for the subject of vanitas. Collier repeatedly depicted the skull with metopism, the rare condition of having a persistent metopic suture in adulthood. A skull with a metopic suture is called Kreuzschädel, meaning the cross skull, because it forms a cruciform by connecting with the sagittal and coronal sutures. The artist might have chosen skulls with metopic sutures, which is reminiscent of the crucifixion of Christ, as an appropriate motif for the vanitas painting. This paper argues that anatomical analysis could explain the hidden meaning of the painting and disclose the fascinating collaborations between anatomy and art in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Professors Down the Aisle: Academic Marriage Patterns in the Seventeenth Century Dutch Republic

Misogamist discourse prevailed among western European early modern scholars. This article examines whether misogamist discourse translated into behaviour in the Dutch Republic. We identify marriage trends of professors employed by the universities of Leiden and Utrecht in the seventeenth century, using quantitative and qualitative approaches. We analysed a prosopographical dataset of professors and their wives, explored here through several case studies. Against views of exceptionality, seclusion and celibacy in scholarly culture, based on self-fashioning and a handful of memorable examples, we argue that scholars overall replicated and intensified the European Marriage Pattern, and marriage strategies of the Dutch civic elite.

The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic. Karen E. Hollewand. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 298. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xvi + 310 pp. €119.

The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic. Karen E. Hollewand. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 298. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xvi + 310 pp. €119. - Volume 75 Issue 1

A Network of Iconography

This article demonstrates how an expanding population of artists in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was connected artistically, and how such connections were translated into artistic innovations that fuelled the rapid flourishing of Dutch arts and the art market. It does so by conceptualising and visualising an art-historical network of iconography that, for the first time, connects artists not through social relations but through shared subject matters. Using network analysis, this study revisits the definition of product innovations used by the socio-economic art historian John Michael Montias. It further demonstrates that painters’ choices of subject matter, styles, and qualities were often unrelated while artists’ thematic connections had little to do with their social relations and the location of their residence. Rather, the choices of subject matter were subject to market forces and rooted deeply in an artist’s ability, ambition, and marketing strategy. Lastly, this article visualises the artistic network implied in Rembrandt’s rivals by Eric Jan Sluijter, which helps explain the breakaway success of the Dismissal of Hagar paintings.

Normalisation and Ambivalence: Tobacco in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

ABSTRACT This article questions the normalisation of tobacco use in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. The investigation shows that our present cultural ambivalence towards the intoxicant goes back to tobacco’s early introduction. The integration of tobacco use as an essential element in social rituals was situated on a line from general acceptance to social deviance. Tobacco use was successfully integrated in existing settings of alcohol use. However, because of the origins of tobacco use among specific social groups such as seamen, associations with deviance and marginality remained an inseparable element of the Dutch landscape of tobacco use.

From the Roof Tops: John Sloan and the Art of a New Urban Space. Exhibitions in Pennsylvania and New York

This article considers drawings and paintings made by the American artists Edmund Tarbell and John Sloan in relation to the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Claims about, interpretations of, and enthusiasm for ‘Dutch Pictures’ were prominent features of the transatlantic artworld in the years around 1900. Art critics, including George Moore, Charles Caffin, James Gibbons Huneker and Frank Jewett Mather, discussed the relationship between historical Dutch painting and contemporary art, while American collectors and museums purchased and displayed large numbers of paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer and their contemporaries. The article connects specific seventeenth-century Dutch ideas and objects to such paintings as Tarbell's New England Interior (1906) and Sloan's Scrubwomen, Astor Library (1910–11) and thinks more broadly about modern art's relationship to nationalism and to the past.

Imagineering, or what Images do to People: Violence and the Spectacular in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

This article studies the visual representation of violence in the Dutch Republic and the growth of a “staple market of images” in the early modern period. It introduces and employs the concept of imagineering for analysing what images can do to people when circulated in the context of a fast-expanding market. The advancement of the early modern print industry and imagery marketing produced a swirl of violent images. It was through this “spectacle of violence” and its related sensory and embodied experiences, that new ways of looking were introduced, which helped to craft new selves and realities. As the public manifestation of violence by ruling powers became less dominant, violence could become a matter of private consumption; a commodity to be enjoyed. Producers needed to create new markets as well as serve an existing one, satisfying clients in their inquisitive search for knowledge and excitement. Imagineering was not just a mimetic duplicate of its historical context, here, it performatively altered the imagination through the effective use of a new cultural infrastructure that enabled a visual abundance and continuous repetition and remediation of images.

Pathways to agency: women writers and radical thought in the Low Countries, 1500–1800

ABSTRACT Previous studies of radical thinkers have brought us few examples of female radicals from the Low Countries, even if the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was a hub for radical thought which offered a relatively female-friendly climate. In this article, we explore how new perspectives and modes of analysis, better adjusted to the restrictions and opportunities women experienced, make women’s radical thought visible. By doing so, we aim to present a more balanced perspective on what might count as female radical thought in the early modern Low Countries (1500–1800). Starting from the notion of “agency,” we analyze the life, work and relations of three Dutch authors, as well as representations of female radicalism in two literary works, in order to rebalance the notion of radicalism in a woman’s world. Anna Bijns, Meynarda Verboom and Margaretha van Dijk were not radically disruptive in the sense of operating completely outside of male-dominated domains. Instead, they gained agency by negotiating their position in patriarchal knowledge systems and by bending conventions within male-dominated networks so that their voices could be heard. To understand these voices, it is necessary to disconnect “being radical” from “the amount of disruption caused” by female agency.

Karen Hollewand, The Banishment of Beverland. Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

Karen Hollewand, The Banishment of Beverland. Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

Charlatan epistemology: As illustrated by a study of wonder-working in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

This article highlights the epistemic concerns that have permeated the historical discourse around charlatanism. In it, I study the term "charlatan" as a multivalent actor's category without a stable referent. Instead of defining or identifying "the charlatan," I analyze how the concept of the charlatan was used to make epistemic interventions about what constituted credible knowledge in two interconnected controversies. Focusing on these controversies allows me to thematize how the concept of "the charlatan" expanded beyond medical contexts and to bring a history of knowledge perspective to the history of medicine.The title of the article, "Charlatan Epistemology," indicates a historical epistemological approach to charlatanism as well as the existence of a charlatan's embodied epistemology. On the one hand, I historicize the epistemic characteristics of charlatanism, focusing on virtues as well as vices, knowledge as well as ignorance, by addressing the historical and contextual specificities of two case studies and the larger epistemic concerns at play. On the other hand, I show how references to charlatanism implied the existence of specific embodied knowledges, special skills and techniques to manipulate either natural secrets or the human psyche, and I explore the similarities and differences between charlatan epistemology and artisanal epistemology.

You can leave your hat on: Men’s portraits, power, and identity in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic

ABSTRACT This article analyses how citizens in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic used hats in portraits to display their socio-political identity. It demonstrates that in cities like Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, and Deventer, male sitters had themselves portrayed with their hats off to express their membership of the patrician class, or wearing their hats if they wanted to emphasize their status of private citizen. This “hat language” reflected the Ciceronian idea, commonplace in early modern Europe, that both a life devoted to public service and a life as privatus were honourable. Hat language presumably emerged in individual men’s portraits during the 1610s, when hats also gained meaning in group portraits. It derived from the older tradition of depicting helmets as symbols of military power. Hat language was employed by major portraitists, including Cornelis van der Voort, Michiel van Mierevelt, and Rembrandt, as well as Gerard ter Borch as late as the 1670s.

Unholy Territory

Abstract This article studies the mission of French Discalced Carmelite friars in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Established from 1647 onwards in The Hague, Leiden, and Amsterdam, the missionaries’ aim was to minister to the French-speaking Catholics of Holland, but they also sought to convert expatriate French Protestants as part of the wider Counter-Reformation campaign to win back souls lost to the Reformation. Despite conflict with the Walloon churches, however, the Carmelite mission was surprisingly successful in converting Huguenots to the Church of Rome, repatriating many of them to France in the wake of the Revocation. As such, this article sheds new light on the relationship between expatriate communities in Holland, arguing that the Dutch Republic was not only a safe haven for refugees, but also the scene of ongoing conflict between French Protestants and Catholics during the reign of Louis XIV.

Forms, Handbills and Affixed Posters

Abstract In 2018, we published an article that provided a first attempt to survey the whole output of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Our estimate was a minimum of 357,500 editions. This calculation did not yet include the world of ephemeral forms, handbills and posters. The survival of such commercial or private notices is microscopically small, compared to what must have been produced. It is nevertheless vital for our understanding of the print trade that we attempt to capture the complexities of this lost world: this was work that sustained printshops. It was also the form which most acutely influenced commerce, government and social life. Here we wish to offer an introduction to this most elusive genre of the early modern print world, document the myriad ways in which print infiltrated the daily life of people, and offer some hypotheses on the likely total output of certain forms of ephemeral print.

A theologian teaching Descartes at the Academy of Nijmegen (1655–1679): class notes on Christoph Wittich’s course on the Meditations on First Philosophy

ABSTRACT This article studies the extant class notes of a course on Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and (part of) the Principles of Philosophy (1644), which was given by the reformed theologian Christoph Wittich (1625–1687) at the former Dutch University of Nijmegen (1655–1679). This manuscript contains dictata, taken (presumably in 1664) under the title Observationes in Renati Descartes Meditationes de prima philosophia. Observations in ejusdem Principiorum philosophiae partem primam. This article mainly considers three themes surfacing in Wittich’s classes: (a) doubt and scepticism; (b) “vulgar” and “proper philosophy”; (c) philosophy and Scripture. On the one hand, this study explains how Wittich tried to harmonise Cartesian metaphysics with his Calvinist faith by defining them as two autonomous fields of knowledge. On the other hand, Wittich’s ideas are shown to have met with much resistance on the part of some of his contemporary theologians. The study of Wittich’s course supplies new knowledge concerning the teaching of one of the first theologians to openly seek to combine Descartes's ideas and Copernican astronomy with the Bible. In so doing, this article offers direct insight into the way in which the new philosophy was taught in Nijmegen, and in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic in general.

Competition, Choice and Diversity in the Newspaper Trade of the Dutch Golden Age

This article expands on the themes of choice and diversity within a national, competitive news market in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. It is often suggested that early newspapers largely copied one another. But that did not mean that these newspaper publishers all made the same choices, or that they adopted the same tone. Rather, they embraced and copied what they liked, and ignored what they did not. The newspaper trade in the Dutch Republic was driven by competition, innovation and diversity. The standards of what made a “good” newspaper were constantly refined during the seventeenth century. Publishers made conscious choices concerning the style, format, price and content of their papers in order to maximise their commercial potential. The diversity of titles was vital to the stimulation and later sustenance of the growing market for periodical news. News readers in the Dutch Republic were offered the greatest range of titles, complementing one another in content and style. If we look close enough at the titles available to us, we can come to a refined understanding of the early burgeoning business of news.