Seventeenth-century Netherlands Research Articles

A Trip to Jerusalem

Medieval and Renaissance depictions of the episodes of Christ’s Passion often seem to invite the devout beholder to participate in the events portrayed. To explain how such an approach can be extended to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlands, this essay shows how Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s Last Supper invites the beholder to take the seat that Judas has left vacant. A comparison with other Last Supper scenes shows how effectively Van den Eeckhout’s composition invites viewers into the imaginary space and time represented in the painting.

Lewke's Cannon: A Visual and Political Dialogue Captured in Gold and Silver

The Lewke cannon was one of the selected items in the Pilot Project Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era launched in 2019. This cannon has gained attention globally because of its unique and unmatched decorations. While its history of being looted from the palace of Kandy has been recorded by various historians, very little attention has been given to the actual decoration on the cannon. This article shows that the decoration and inscription on the outer surface of the cannon were applied as a gift from the prominent Sri Lankan figure Lewke to King Sri Vijaya Rajasinha of Kandy in 1745-46 and as such represents an internal political moment in the Kandyan kingdom. The research into the cannon brings to the fore the Sri Lankan craftsmanship of this eighteenth-century South Asian region. While ancient Lankan motifs have been applied, the craftsmen were able to emphasize the motifs already present in the bronze cast from the seventeenth-century Netherlands, amongst which Lankan emblems, as well as adapt their motifs to better suit the decoration already present. In all, this contribution shows how an analysis of the decoration and the inscription provides us with new insight into the mid-eighteenth-century Sri Lankan social-political and cultural context, while at the same time revealing a global history of cultural diplomacy.

Prints and Printedness: Mark Making, Meaning, and Perceptions of Print in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

Prints and Printedness: Mark Making, Meaning, and Perceptions of Print in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

Saint Confucius, the Chinese Adam, and a Broken Mirror: Writing World History in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

Early European attempts at writing a comprehensive history of the world struggled in particular with China, whose greater antiquity was difficult to accommodate with the biblical chronology of Creation and the Flood; the Chinese might also have traveled to the Americas before the Europeans. The fulcrum of this debate was the Dutch Republic, where innovative schools of historiography and biblical criticism went hand in hand with interest in East Asian material culture, antiquities, and books. Around 1650, Jacob Golius, Georg Hornius, and Isaac Vossius quarreled about China in relation to Egypt, Israel, and the Americas. The debate flared up again fifty years later when Nicolaes Witsen and Gijsbert Cuper confronted the Republic of Letters with a rare bronze mirror from Han Dynasty China. Dutch attempts to engage with Chinese written and material sources, and even with a handful of early Chinese visitors to Europe, arguably made this exchange an early example of global history.

렘브란트의 〈성가족〉 장면에 반영된 17세기 네덜란드의 가족

The seventeenth-century Dutch Holy family scenes and genre painting depicting family theme show a nuclear family consisting of an average of three parents and children as main characters. The nuclear family was a unique family structure in the Netherlands and England in the seventeenth century different from other parts of Europe, and their ties served as a link between society and the state. This paper examines the social background of the Netherlands to find out why Rembrandt produced Holy Family scenes several times, and the reason why Holy Family scenes increased in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. In addition regarding the reason why Holy family scenes were depicted in the domestic household as in a genre painting and why father Joseph was depicted as a carpenter devoted to his family will be discussed in relation to the contemporary Dutch society. Holy family scenes and Dutch genre painting demonstrate the ideal of Dutch family and the role of father emphasized in the Netherlands.

Grinling Gibbons: a Dutch master in England

Grinling Gibbons’s still-life sculpture emerged out of the artistic and proto-scientific culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands and was understood in these intellectual terms by the sophisticated, courtly consumers of his work in Restoration England. Our fondness for a myth of Gibbons as a dazzlingly skilful but intellectually vapid artist should not blind us to the intellectual focus of his sculptures. The carved frame for Elias Ashmole’s portrait in the Ashmolean collection is a sophisticated engagement with European cultures of collecting. The Cosimo panel for Charles II engages with the witty and formidably advanced scientific discourses of the Caroline court, while the limewood reredos in St James’ church, Piccadilly reaches back to the devotional roots of floral still life, reinterpreting it in the context of English Protestantism.

Out of the Closet, into the World: The Power of Puppets in Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist

The present paper examines the tropological significance of miniature figures in Jessie Burton’s novel The Miniaturist. By highlighting the ways in which the narrative’s figural system negotiates the structural and conceptual dichotomies of human/doll, object/thing, interiority/exteriority, authenticity/artificiality, and mobility/stasis, this reading of Burton’s novel attempts to show how the literary text rethinks the social life of things and the ambiguity of subject-object relations in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Aligned with the commercial circuits of material culture, which underscore the moral ambivalence of the novel’s Dutch society, material objects are shown to exceed their decorative function and reveal their destructive purchase on human life.

Hudde en zijn gesmolten microscooplensjes

In this article, the role of Johannes Hudde as material instigator of the blossoming microscopic cul- ture in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands is examined. The simple ball lens microscopes that Hudde developed in the late 1650 s saw widespread adoption, yet surprisingly little is known about their origin. After reflecting on the contemporary literature on Hudde’s lenses, their optical properties are discussed and compared with those of thin, ground lenses. Next, an account is given of a reconstruction experiment, performed in the Corning Museum of Glass (NY), where the manufacturing processes for both Hudde’s flameworked lenses and for common ground lenses were put to test. It is explained how this gave insight in the unique advantages of Hudde’s lens making innovation. Taking this further, the significance of glass melting techniques for the broader historiography of the microscope and its lens production is evaluated. Finally, it is argued how shifting demands in the c. 1700 microscope market meant that Hudde’s, otherwise very successful, lenses were gradually abandoned.

Spruces, pines, and the picturesque in seventeenth-century Netherlands

In early modern Europe, nature began to be viewed as something of its own. It could be studied, represented in painting as a scenery or even redone in a garden as a three-dimensional picture. Highl...

The Travesty of Egoism: Same-Gender Passion and Homosocial Desire in a Dutch Seventeenth-Century Morality Play

AbstractIn the seventeenth-century Netherlands, drama and politics were interwoven with one another. This was also the case with the controversial morality play Tieranny van Eigenbaat (Tyranny of Egoism, 1679), which opposed the House of Orange, and especially William III, Stadtholder of the Netherlands and King of England (who was, according to the writers of the play, a true example of uncontrolled egoism). Although the main character Eigenbaat (Egoism) disguises himself as a warrior woman (an Amazon) to seize power, his cross-dressing has not been discussed in relation to rumors surrounding William's alleged sexual preferences. By “reading against the grain,” this article discusses the so-called faultlines, where the characters display same-gender passions for each other. The article focusses on two examples of such relationships: Egoism, who seduces Lady Will, while in female disguise, and the intimate nature of Egoism's relationship with his male servant and slave, Vice. As such, the article offers an elaboration on the thesis that Tieranny van Eigenbaat was used by the republican authorities of Amsterdam as a propaganda play to discredit William III for rule, as well as his offspring.

Criticisms towards the Idea of Proper Woman in Jessie Burton�s The Miniaturist

A discussion about a proper woman always includes the discussion of the concept of separate spheres. In Victorian Age for instance, a proper woman is perfectly described by the term Angel in the House. Seventeenth century Netherlands also expected the same thing for women in that era. The concept of separate spheres along with its expectations of womens proper roles is an example of social construction of gender which defines women. This study is conducted to reveal the criticisms towards the idea of proper woman in The Miniaturist.The results of this study are: first, women who are considered proper by the society in The Miniaturist have two roles, which are being a wife and being a mother. Moreover, women are also expected to have five characteristics: obedient, powerless, submissive, dependent, and domesticated. Second, The Miniaturist, using the setting in the 17th century Netherlands as a tool to criticize people in the 21st century, tries to redefine the way society thinks, including women, about womens life. The criticisms found in the novel cover four things: criticism towards womens expected roles; criticism towards womens obedience; criticism towards womens powerlessness, submissiveness, and dependence; and criticism towards womens domestication. The text tries to make women more aware of their own value. Women are also suggested to have self-dominion over themselves, and be more critical, independent, and tougher. Societys mindset regarding womens value and capability in the present time is also redefined. The most important thing is the text tries to make people in the 21st century understand women as individuals or persons who have their own right and independence.Keywords: criticism, proper woman

Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies as property?

ABSTRACTThe hype over bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies has been compared to the tulip mania in seventeenth-century Netherlands. As they have gained popularity, the law has approached the subject warily, mostly from a regulatory perspective. However, there has been no comprehensive consideration of the fundamental nature of a cryptocurrency owner’s private law relation to his cryptocurrencies. Whether or not cryptocurrencies achieve mainstream adoption, this question will inevitably have to be addressed. This paper considers if bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies might be recognised as the subject of property rights by Commonwealth courts and if so, what such rights ought to entail. It begins with a consideration of the controversial question of the scope of the law of property before considering bitcoin’s place within it. It suggests that the common law adopts a more expansive view of property than civilian systems and that it is thus able to accommodate bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies within its law of property. However, owing to their unusual nature, legal rights to them must take on a unique and unorthodox form. This paper also addresses the particular challenges to the law that are posed by the code underlying bitcoin.

Knowledge and practice pictured in the artist’s studio. The ‘art lover’ in the seventeenth-century Netherlands

This article examines the long overlooked representation of the ‘art lover’, or liefhebber, in the artist’s studio in the seventeenth-century Netherlands and the ways in which the liefhebber’s image coalesced with a larger cultural discourse of connoisseurship, amateurship, and artistic practice. It situates these images in the iconographic tradition of the Flemish collector’s cabinet, and demonstrates how the values inherent to the konstkamer became part of the visual language and meaning of the studio visit. Drawing academies, manuals, and art theoretical treatises reshaped the role of the art lover in and outside of the studio, ennobling artist and art lover alike. In this way, Dutch and Flemish artists, such as Pieter Codde, Frans van Mieris and Michael Sweerts, ‘pictured’ a new form of artistic knowledge and modernized an iconographic tradition.

Domesticating Goods from Overseas: Global Material Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands

This essay is based on the notion that the early modern world was shaped by connections that stretched across geographical, political and cultural boundaries. The mobility of early modern people, ideas and things, and the networks they created and relied on, facilitated flows of material and immaterial interactions. Within that early modern connected world, material culture played a key role. Goods ranging from treasured, unique objects to commodities traded in vast quantities always accumulate layers of meanings as they move through time and space. By looking at a number of things in circulation in the early modern Netherlands, we can identify them as both ‘global’, in the sense of having travelled across long distances, having accumulated associations with the exotic, and as ‘local’, part of the cultural practices we have come to think of as Dutch. Methodologically, this essay combines a close reading of the idealized representations of things in domestic spaces we encounter in paintings with an analysis of the materiality, design and historical trajectories of the things themselves. Tracing global and local aspects of design as it appears in idealized representations and in early modern Dutch historical objects, I argue that embodied experiences play key roles in the domestication of goods from overseas. I seek to show that through vision and touch, and the proximity of objects to bodies in domestic environments, goods from all over the world become part of the material culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. As exotic goods and materials become part of the domestic environment, global goods gain local meanings, and simultaneously bestow new layers of meaning on the material culture of the early modern Netherlands.

“With & alongside his housewife”: Claiming Ground in New Netherland and the Early Modern Dutch Empire

Gender relationships fundamentally supported the Dutch seaborne mercantile empire. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, housewives and households anchored the civic world on which commerce depended. As Dutch traders, planners, and merchants sought to build profitable footholds around the world, they repeatedly turned to the idea that colonial outposts needed female inhabitants; transatlantic migrants similarly sought to further their own interests through family settlement and individual territorial claims. On the mid-Atlantic coast of North America, these ideas created an early and consistent emphasis on female migration and the creation of homes and villages along contested frontiers. The consequent creation of New Netherland’s physical “gender frontier” gave martial significance to women’s presence and family homes. Indigenous women’s agricultural fields became principal targets of Dutch forces as the colony expanded by relying on the establishment of immigrant households and villages. The women of New Netherland thus provide the opportunity to assess the key role of gender in the establishment of early modern settler colonies and the extension of imperial land claims.

Unique Information on a Seventeenth-Century Printing House in Arnhem. The dedication by the Arnhem printer Jacob van Biesen (d. 1677) in the 1669 edition of Fonteyne des levens by Arthur Hildersham (1563-1632) and its implications for the history of books

AbstractHaving first briefly informed the reader on the life of the Puritan Arthur Hildersham (1563-1632), author of Fonteyne des levens, and of its Dutch translator, the Reformed Pietist Arnhem minister Daniel van Laren (b. 1585), and its Arnhem publisher Jacob van Biesen (d. 1677), this article deals in detail with the complicated history of its editions. Furthermore, it examines the relation between Van Laren and Van Biesen and between Van Laren and Hildersham. Its central theme is Van Biesen’s dedication in the 1669 edition of Fonteyne des levens, a book of 780 pages in a quarto format, in which the publisher gives unique information on the total number of copies in the print runs of Fonteyne des levens and on the history of his printing house. His father-in-law Jan Jansz (d. 1629) had founded it in 1599. After the death of his father-in-law in 1629, he was his successor. By the time of writing of his dedication, both men combined had printed a total sum of over ‘five tons of gold worth’ of books in several subject areas and languages. In his dedication, the publisher also sets the total number of copies in the book’s print runs since 1646 at over 4,000. This figure in fact covers three editions and means that Van Biesen printed the Dutch translation of Hildersham’s work in runs of roughly 1,400 copies at a time. Fonteyne des levens was only one of the many Dutch translations of Puritan works in the seventeenth century, of which nearly 850 distinct editions are known. Print run numbers, however, were hitherto unknown. The discovery of Van Biesen’s information enables us to conclude that there were in the order of 1,275,000 copies of Puritan works circulating in Dutch translation in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.

The Secrets of Success: Microinventions and Bookselling in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

The Secrets of Success: Microinventions and Bookselling in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

Rembrandt's bankruptcy: the artist, his patrons, and the art market in seventeenth-century Netherlands

1. Bankruptcy and Rembrandt's critical fortune 2. The perils of the Dutch art market 3. The foundation of Rembrandt's financial problems 4. Rembrandt's house on the Breestraat 5. Rembrandt's collecting habit 6. Rembrandt's disputes with his patrons 7. The effects of Rembrandt's financial problems.

The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Post Medieval Vernacularity

Contents Preface: On Acknowledgments Introduction: King Solomon's Tablets Nicholas Watson Part I: 1100-1300: The Evangelical Vernacular 1. Using the Ormulum to Redefine Vernacularity Meg Worley 2. Talking the Talk: Access to the Vernacular in Medieval Preaching Claire M. Waters 3. The of Conversion: Ramon Llull's Art as a Vernacular Harvey Hames 4. Mechthild von Magdeburg: Gender and the Unlearned Tongue Sara S. Poor Part II: 1300-1500: Vernacular Textualities 5. Creating a Masculine Vernacular: The Strategy of Misogyny in Late Medieval French Texts Gretchen V. Angelo 6. Teaching Philosophy at School and Court: Vulgarization and Translation Charles F. Briggs 7. Vernacular Textualities in Fourteenth-Century Florence William Robins 8. Moult Bien Parloit et Lisoit le Franchois, or Did Richard II Read with a Picard Accent? Andrew Taylor 9. Professionalizing Translation at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century: Ullerston's Determinacio, Arundel's Constitutiones Fiona Somerset Part III: 1500-2000: Making the Mother Tongues 10. Purity and the of the Court in the Late-Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Netherlands Jeroen Jansen 11. The Politics of ABCs: Language Wars and Literary Vernacularization Among the Serbs and Romanians of Austria-Hungary, 1780-1870 Jack Fairey 12. Indian Shakespeare and the Politics of in Colonial India Nandi Bhatia 13. Poets Laureate and the of Slaves: Petrarch, Chaucer, and Langston Hughes Larry Scanlon Further Reading About the Contributors Index

Puritan Church Architecture and Worship in a Dutch Context

English Puritans have only a small reputation for aesthetic contributions to architecture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they worshiped God without making a show of buildings or beautiful ceremonies; consequently, there are few grand Puritan architectural monuments. Nonseparating Puritans, blending into the larger church, put their emphasis on the pure preaching and practice of biblical religion, not on outward appearances. And the Separatists, the strictest of the Puritans, gathered in disguised house-churches. Because of this artistic silence it is easy to downplay the importance of architectural concerns in the early history of Puritanism. Whenever historians mention “Puritan” architecture or “nonconformist” architecture, they are likely to describe it as simple, plain, functional, humble, austere, and practical. While true as far as it goes, this description is not the whole story. An examination of Puritan discussions about architecture in early seventeenth-century Netherlands reveals the interplay of theological and practical factors in creating the “proper” church architecture.