Seventeenth-century Dutch Research Articles

Comparing the register of seventeenth-century Dutch business letters to private letters: formulaic language and French-origin items

Abstract In this article, we examine, quantitatively and qualitatively, Dutch business letters written by merchants, focusing on formulaic phrases and French suffix borrowing. The letters are part of the Prize Papers, the collection of documents confiscated by the English during times of warfare. We compare these business letters to private letters from the same source, and address the question whether the business letters constitute a particular register. The business letters, written by upper and upper-middle ranked male merchants from the seventeenth century, appear to differ from private letters written by people with a similar social profile. Frequent formulae highly characteristic of seventeenth-century private letters occur to a much lesser extent, if at all, in the business letters. Other formulae, some including Romance origin items (Laus deo, saluut, cordiale), occur more frequently in the business letters. The frequency of verbs with the French-origin suffix -eren is found to be higher in the business letters than in the private letters. Functional explanations are presented for these register differences: formulaic language is correlated with writing experience, and the use of French-origin items may be connected to the common vocabulary used in international trading networks. Similarities in phrasing are also revealed in a qualitative analysis of examples of private and business letters by the same writer. This finding demonstrates how similar private and business letters often were, thus challenging the idea of distinct registers.

The Liminal, The Licentious, and the Illicit

Despite the political, economic, social, and cultural importance of piracy, images of Atlantic piracy and privateering are rarely represented in seventeenth century Dutch visual culture. The illustrations created by Herman Padtbrugge for A.O. Exquemelin’s De Americaensche Zee-Roovers are a rare exception. The bestselling book, with its first-hand account of life as a buccaneer, was widely distributed throughout Europe and formed the basis of both our historical understanding of Caribbean piracy and its place in our poetic imagination. The transient distinction between piracy and privateering is linked to the cultural perception of the high seas as a freer, more open space, despite its increasing regulation and militarization. This article explores how the pictorial conventions used in the portrayal of pirates reflect their role as liminal figures – constantly shifting between licit and illicit, Old and New Worlds, and national affiliations – in the multicultural, rapidly evolving, and violent colonial context. Padtbrugge’s portraits borrow the visual language of the cult of naval heroes, only altering a few iconographical markers to indicate on which side of the law the subject and his actions fell upon. The minor nature of these differences reflects how heroic privateering in the service of national interests and criminal piracy in service of the individual were two sides of the same coin, shedding light on the legal paradox of the state-sanctioned right to pillage.

The roles of Dutch skippers as partners and principals in colonial endeavours: Lessons from Amsterdam to New Netherland (1639–1664)

While Atlantic skippers were vital to seventeenth-century Dutch imperial expansion, few histories address the roles of skippers in colonial ventures. Drawing on archival records in Amsterdam and New York, this study examines the activities of skippers along roughly 200 voyages between Amsterdam and New Netherland from 1639 to 1664. In Amsterdam, skippers in relationships with voyage outfitters functioned as trusted partners who offered continuity for operations. As principals at sea, skippers navigated hazards and managed contingencies during inherently risky transatlantic passages. In the colony, skippers collaborated with local merchants to facilitate trade, and with colonial authorities to provide maritime support. With an impact on every stage of the endeavour, skippers were key players in the colonial complex, which depended on them for its functioning. Beyond New Netherland, these findings have applications for evaluating other European colonial undertakings, and for understanding the wider mechanisms of imperial expansion into the Atlantic.

Donna R. Barnes and Peter G. Rose: Matters of Taste. Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life

Donna R. Barnes and Peter G. Rose: Matters of Taste. Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life: Syracuse University Press & Albany Institute of History & Art, 2002: ISBN 0815607474: 162 pp. plus a booklet of 32 pp., colour illus., p/b,, $49.95

Baranya, Slavonia and Syrmia in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish travelogues

Baranya, Slavonia and Syrmia in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish travelogues

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.

:Exchanging Words: Women and Letters in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting

:<i>Exchanging Words: Women and Letters in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting</i>

Escaping Reality? New Forms of Leisure and Recreation for Seventeenth-Century Dutch Youths

Escaping Reality? New Forms of Leisure and Recreation for Seventeenth-Century Dutch Youths

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

Miniature Crowd Frescoes from Knossos

This study discusses prevailing interpretations of the miniature frescoes from Knossos as depictions of some sort of ritual or ceremony, located topographically in Knossos’s Central and West Courts. It revises the question of the narrativity of Minoan frescoes, based on the interpretive approach developed by Alpers in her exploration of seventeenth-century Dutch art and ‘visual culture’. Applying Alpers’s insights for Minoan frescoes allows for an original interpretation based on a formal analysis of their non-narrative devices of representation, namely (1) vertical perspective, (2) map-like composition and (3) suppressed focalisation. The study demonstrates that once their representational strategy is recognised as non-narrative, it is no longer possible to interpret the subject theme of the Knossian miniatures by applying the frequently used narrative analytical category of ritual as a transformative ‘event’. Instead, the operation of these devices focuses our attention on the performative dimension of viewing as a testament to the knowledge of the land and society and the specific way in which the Knossian miniature frescoes absorb their viewer into this performance.

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.

Ars longa vita brevis

Abstract It is therefore nothing short of frustrating that the passing on 4 October 1669 of Rembrandt van Rijn, long considered the greatest among seventeenth-century Dutch painters, has left scarcely any traces. In her essay Stephanie Dickey reconstructs the circumstances of the artist’s death. Her piece amounts to a cultural history of death and burial in Protestant Amsterdam. Rembrandt was buried like any other citizen. No elaborate funeral ceremony took place; no eulogies were composed; no funeral monument was erected. He ended up in a rented grave with two other men. The now lost stone slab probably only included his name. The exact location in the Westerkerk went unrecorded. As Dickey almost ruefully concludes, ‘(…) Rembrandt’s modest burial suited his standing as one established artist among many in the busy city’.

Focalization and Embodied Viewing Experience in Exhibition Narrative: Asia &gt; Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum

This article shows the importance of focalization in understanding potential ideological undertones and subjective interpretations of museum exhibitions. Focalization is conceived here as both a narrative device that denotes the perspectival filtration of a museum presentation and an analytical tool that can explicate the potential ideologies behind an exhibition. To illustrate facets of focalization often manifested in the interplay between exhibition designs and viewing experiences, I provide a close reading of the arrangement in Asia &gt; Amsterdam (2015), a temporary exhibition on cultural contact hosted by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Drawing on cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s conception of focalization, I call attention to an instance of internal focalization in a gallery that juxtaposed Chinese porcelain of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) with seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes. This juxtaposition, along with the specific visual order of the showpieces, promoted an embodied spectatorship that is filtered by the subjective sensory impressions of the Dutch artists: a viewing experience that drew audiences into seeing the visual and material qualities of Ming porcelain as if through the eyes of Golden Age Dutch artists. In this way, the lens of focalization also offered a framework for examining the exhibition’s subtext regarding the Dutch domestication of Asian goods.

Experimentation and Innovation in Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat: New Findings from the National Gallery of Art

Considered within the context of his biography, his overall artistic production, and the seventeenth-century Dutch market for tronies, a recent multidisciplinary investigation of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat (National Gallery of Art, Washington) suggests that this small painting represents a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. Vermeer experimented here with bolder, more abstract brushwork and more highly contrasting pigments—an approach that grew out of his handling of the preparatory stages of the painting process and that he ultimately adopted in his high-life genre works as well. Positing the painting as an experimental foray that presaged Vermeer’s subsequent development also indicates a likely date of about 1669.

Experimentation and Innovation in Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat: New Findings from the National Gallery of Art

Considered within the context of his biography, his overall artistic production, and the seventeenth-century Dutch market for tronies, a recent multidisciplinary investigation of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat (National Gallery of Art, Washington) suggests that this small painting represents a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. Vermeer experimented here with bolder, more abstract brushwork and more highly contrasting pigments—an approach that grew out of his handling of the preparatory stages of the painting process and that he ultimately adopted in his high-life genre works as well. Positing the painting as an experimental foray that presaged Vermeer’s subsequent development also indicates a likely date of about 1669.

The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature ed. by Tomasz Bilczewski; Stanley Bill, and Magdalena Popiel

Reviewed by: The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature ed. by Tomasz Bilczewski; Stanley Bill, and Magdalena Popiel Kasia Szymańska Bilczewski, Tomasz; Bill, Stanley and Popiel, Magdalena (eds). The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022. xix + 450 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Index. £160.00; £35.99 (e-book). This is an unprecedentedly busy time for Polish studies abroad. In the past few years, at least three different English-language textbooks and companions to Polish literature and culture have offered new perspectives on its history and reception. To start with, the monumental textbook, Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 (eds T. Trojanowska, J. Niżyńska, P. Czapliński, Toronto, 2018), marked the centenary of Poland's regained independence and brought into discussion a wide range of new genres, topics and approaches (graphic novels, film, mass media, multilingualism, translation). In turn, Polish Literature as World Literature (eds P. Florczyk and K. A. Wiśniewski, London, 2023), looks at a relatively modest selection of sixteen essays concentrating only on explicit contributions of Polish authors to world literature. Somewhat bookended by these two volumes, The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature strikes the middle ground between the formats of the other two publications. On the one hand, this heavy tome replicates the panache and broad sweep of a comprehensive textbook of Polish literature. The editors have assembled a series of thirty-three case studies, all neatly divided into traditional literary epochs across an impressively long time-span from the Middle Ages to the present day, and incorporating many different literary genres (e.g. poetry, the novel, the short story, memoir, travel writing). On the other hand, the book offers a focused selection of case studies and close readings guided by the interests of world literature. By tracing the meandering history of how some authors and their works were transplanted into different languages and read by international audiences, the book aims to tell a different history of Polish literature: that written by its readers, translators and aficionados abroad. The key strength of the volume lies in its kaleidoscopic overview of micro-stories, as the volume treats its readers to a wide array of international encounters. Some of its more successful approaches stem from the following strategy: where a Polish author has engaged with intercultural material (e.g. Ryszard Kapuściński travelling to China, or Mariusz Wilk writing Polish-Russian prose), let us see the other side of the coin by examining how the work has been received in that other cultural realm. It is thus rewarding to read about the Italian fascination with Henryk Sienkiewicz's vision of Nero's Rome in his novel, Quo vadis (1895–96); to discover the Lithuanian counterpart of poet Adam Mickiewicz who completes his otherwise Polonized picture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; and to see how Dutch poets engaged with [End Page 747] Zbigniew Herbert's Mr Cogito (1974) in response to his essays on seventeenth-century Dutch art. While other combinations were more serendipitous, some of them proved equally fruitful, especially when foregrounding the role of translation and rewriting in the transfer. Who would have thought that Mickiewicz's poems could be reimagined and read against the historical backdrop of slavery in Brazil; that the so-called '9/11 poem' by Adam Zagajewski has travelled far and wide, resonating with so many distinct audiences; that dialogues between Jewish and Polish characters in Bolesław Prus's The Doll (1890) were translated into Japanese by means of katakana and hiragana scripts to render the novel's linguistic variation; and that one missing phrase across different translations and editions of Miron Białoszewski's Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1970) could bear such significance for its interpretation alongside other war testimonies? These literary excursions not only give us insight into how Polish works are circulated and read beyond their original context of publication, but they also reveal which of their themes and qualities lend themselves to sometimes surprising and unconventional readings. While I am largely enthusiastic about the ideas underpinning the volume, I would like to raise a few caveats related to its presentation...

Investing in Engenhos: Credit, Claims, and Sugar Mills in Dutch Brazil

This article examines the issue of private investment in the seventeenth-century Dutch colony in Brazil. For the first time, new archival discoveries allow for a reconstruction of the size of private investment in the colony, as well as a breakdown into distinct investment activities. The article argues that private investment was an absolute necessity for the West India Company in the hope of making its colony successful, as it could not provide the required funds by itself. Private individuals claimed to have invested over eleven million guilders in the colony, nearly one-and-a-half times the WIC’s original capitalization. A number of case studies elaborate the overall figures presented and show that Dutch investors did indeed move into sugar cultivation and even moved into agricultural property development. Presenting these data and sources will, it is posited, allow for a fuller picture of the role of former inhabitants of Dutch Brazil in the development of plantation systems in the wider Caribbean from the mid-1640s onwards.

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.

Prometheus Tamed: Fire, Security, and Modernities, 1400 to 1900 by Cornel Zwierlein (review).

Reviewed by: Prometheus Tamed: Fire, Security, and Modernities, 1400 to 1900 by Cornel Zwierlein Edward Tenner (bio) Prometheus Tamed: Fire, Security, and Modernities, 1400 to 1900 By Cornel Zwierlein. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Pp. 547. To scholars and lay people alike, the Enlightenment may mean many things—rejection of revealed religion, celebration of science and reason, and advocacy of human rights. In Prometheus Tamed, Conrad Zwierlein presents a radical reinterpretation of Central European thought and institutions in the transition from the premodern era to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Zwierlein, the key to the Enlightenment as a social and political movement lies not in philosophical theory but in a new urgency in the quest for material security. A survey of keywords in German-language periodicals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals a striking amount of attention to fires—a retrospectively obvious point given the tolls on life and property of the conflagrations that so often ravaged early modern cities. In the two decades from 1680 to 1700, Zwierlein finds a decisive turn from an old to a new framework for dealing with fires. Well into the eighteenth century, many pious Christians continued to see fires and other natural hazards as divine punishment for the sins of the community, recalling Sodom and Gomorrah and other Biblical chastisements. The rise of deism—which denied the intervention of the Creator in nature and human affairs—was among the sins said to bring down the wrath of heaven. Governments were already abandoning this religious interpretation of urban fires in the seventeenth century and moving toward an acceptance of their inevitability. Science and experience could reduce the number of fires and contain their damage, and the destruction caused by fires could be mitigated. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz summarized the new attitude when he wrote in 1680 of two kinds of security: "real-assecurationen," which prevented fires, and "verbal-assecurationen," arrangements like insurance policies that provided financial relief from fire losses. Fire policy marked the arrival of a new kind of public policy in the West, a role for the [End Page 925] state and private organizations in providing security—ultimately not only against fire and flood damage but against illness. Fire insurance and firefighting technology were first steps toward a new vision of society. The author's research in both original (including archival) sources and current theoretical issues is nothing short of prodigious, especially in the theory and practice of fire insurance in the early modern German-speaking world. This book will be indispensable for scholars of early modern administrative and urban history and the history of what the author calls the "normal secure society," as well as of innovations in fire prevention and suppression technology. It even contributes to art history in its interpretation of the changing iconography of urban fires. (Some of the most striking images were created by the inventor of the modern fire hose, Jan van der Heyden, an artist-entrepreneur and veritable seventeenth-century Dutch Leonardo, who also improved firefighting pumps and devised street lighting.) There are points at which the legendary thoroughness of the Habilitationsschrift genre may intimidate nonspecialists. The early history of insurance shows that our present idea of insurance arose centuries after the first maritime contracts in Italy, for example the requirement of paying the premium in advance. The discussion of jurists' efforts to squeeze insurance contracts within the framework of Roman law is important for understanding Leibniz's innovations, but details could have been presented in a separate paper for specialists. Conversely, the author does not do justice to some of the better-known figures in the technology and discourse of fire. Benjamin Franklin receives too little attention, despite his contributions to safety technology (lightning rods, improved stoves), fire brigades, and fire insurance, which exemplified the ideas of security that Leibniz had advanced. Voltaire's poem "On the Lisbon Disaster," which mocked Leibniz's optimism in light of that city's devastation by earthquake and fire in 1755, does not appear in the bibliography of published primary sources despite its contemporary impact. The physical book is also a case study in what Thomas Hughes called the reverse salient. Digital printing on demand makes possible a...