Early Modern Low Countries

Anna Maria Van Schurman’s Chinese Calligraphy

Thijs Weststeijn — 2023-06-26

Calligraphy is an understudied aspect of the reception of Chinese art in early modern Europe. Chinese visitors to Middelburg (1601) and Amsterdam (1654) first demonstrated it as a cultural practice. Other written samples circulated in the Dutch Republic, an emporium for Chinese goods. This article focuses on a previously unknown participant in this exchange: Anna Maria van Schurman, Europe’s first female university student, who had mastered various Asian scripts and was expected to try her hand at Chinese and Japanese. In 1637 Andreas Colvius sent her samples of East Asian writing to copy ‘by her own hand’. This exchange makes possible a transcultural study of the calligraphic gift. Via the popular writings of Matteo Ricci, Van Schurman’s correspondents may have learned about the role of calligraphy in fostering social relationships in late Ming China. Some of the visual and material qualities of East Asian writing must have made it look like a fitting tribute to a female European scholar of high profile and, in being exchanged as a gift, calligraphy acquired new meanings even while remaining illegible. In seventeenth-century China and Europe, the friendly exchange of calligraphy expressed new forms of sociability.

Worldly Threads

Cynthia Kok — 2023-06-26

This article examines the layered history of Japonse rokken, European silk production, and self-fashioning in Dutch-American portraiture. First imported from Japan and subsequently copied by European tailors, Japonse rokken became popular in the Dutch Republic as the Dutch East India Company developed an exclusive trade relationship with Japan. By the early eighteenth century, European weavers had begun producing silks, referred to as indiennes, with dynamic patterns inspired by Asian design motifs. On both sides of the Atlantic, elite Dutchmen fashioned themselves in these silk robes: a ca. 1700-1705 patroon portrait, for example, presents New York merchant Isaac de Peyster (1662-1728) wearing a Japonse rok cut from an indienne. While the Dutch community in early New York has been considered peripheral to the Dutch Republic, I argue that in adopting a garment styled after Japanese robes, tailored from silk woven in Europe, and painted in a Hudson Valley style, the Dutch-American elite signalled their ability to access, understand, and participate in intellectual and mercantile networks that spanned from Asia to Europe to the Americas.

Civic Babylonian Pride in Vondel’s Mars Tamed

Frans-Willem Korsten — 2023-06-26

In 1647, one year ahead of the official celebrations of the Peace of Westphalia, the Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel published a long panegyric called De getemde Mars (‘Mars Tamed’), a poem fully translated into English for the first time in this article. Despite celebrating the Peace, Vondel did not refrain from presenting extremely violent scenes of war in the middle part of the poem. Surprisingly, however, the war scene shifts from the wars that devastated Europe to a war which Mars wages against Jupiter and his circle of gods. Unable to control Mars, and on the verge of seeing his rule collapse, Jupiter looks for support and finds it in an allegorical maiden representing the Dutch Republic and its main hub Amsterdam. This article argues that the allegory employed by Vondel is set up against itself. The familiar allegorisation of classical material for Christian purposes turns into a baroque allegory that works against principles of theologically underpinned political sovereignty. Here, the poem testifies to a distinct civil pride, with Vondel considering the burgomasters of Amsterdam, which he takes as embodying civil government, as a prominent source of international peace. By 1648, however, the Dutch Republic had also become an imperial and global power that confronted other sovereign states in violent actions. In this context, the poem’s baroque contradictions multiply.

Writing Doom

Arthur der Weduwen — 2023-06-26

Reviewed books

Quintin Barry, From Solebay to the Texel. The Third Anglo-Dutch War, 1672-1674, Helion & Company, 2018, 128 pp. ISBN 9781911628033.

Theo Basoski, Voor de Heer en voor Oranje. Simon Oomius en zijn orangistische bazuinen (1672-1674), Verloren, 2020, 208 pp. ISBN 9789087048242.

Renger de Bruin, Lodewijk Gerretsen, and Willem te Sla, Branden of Betalen. Kasteel Amerongen en Slot Zuylen in het Rampjaar, W Books, 2022, 64 pp. ISBN 9789462584938.

Arnout van Cruyningen, 1672. Het rampjaar van de Republiek, Omniboek, 2022, 192 pp. ISBN 9789401918862.

Wouter van Dijk, Soldaten in de Vechtstreek, 1672-1673. Sporen van het Rampjaar in het archief, Waanders/Regionaal Historisch Centrum Vecht en Venen, 2022, 96 pp. ISBN 9789462624610.

Arjen Dijkstra and Joop Koopmans (eds.), Verzet en Vrijheid. Het Gronings ontzet van 1672 en de universiteit, University of Groningen Press/Universiteitsmuseum Groningen, 2022, 119 pp. ISBN 9789403429823.

Anne Doedens and Liek Mulder, Moordbranders in de Republiek. Het Rampjaar door de ogen van Andries Schoemaker, juni 1672-november 1673, Walburg Pers, 2022, 197 pp. 9789462497986.

Anne Doedens, Liek Mulder, and Frits de Ruyter de Wildt, Agenten voor de koning. Engelse spionage tijdens het Rampjaar, 1672-1673, Waanders, 2022, 176 pp. ISBN 9789462623934.

Ineke Huysman and Roosje Peeters (eds.), Johan de Witt en het Rampjaar. Een bloemlezing uit zijn correspondentie, Catullus, 2022, 272 pp. ISBN 9789492409720.

Sunny Jansen, De vrouw die Friesland redde. Albertine Agnes en het Rampjaar 1672, Balans, 2022, 320 pp. ISBN 9789463822060.

Jacob Knegtel and Jos Cuijpers (eds.), Rampjaar of jubeljaar? Brabant in 1672-74, Zuidelijk Historisch Contact/Pictures Publishers, 2022, 128 pp. ISBN 9789492576606.

Olaf van Nimwegen, De veertigjarige oorlog (1672-1712). De strijd van de Nederlanders tegen de Zonnekoning, Prometheus, 2020, 416 pp. ISBN 9789044638714.

Leen Ouweneel, Regenten en de Waterlinie in het Rampjaar. Hoe de Hollandse Waterlinie tot stand kwam, Historische Uitgaven Schoonhoven, 2022, 267 pp. ISBN 9789082309553.

Luc Panhuysen, Rampjaar 1672. Hoe de Republiek aan de ondergang ontsnapte, Atlas Contact, 2^nd ed. 2022 (1^st ed. 2009), 476 pp. ISBN 9789045045429.

Wout Troost, Hiëronymus van Beverningk tijdens het Rampjaar 1672, Walburg Pers, 2021, 170 pp. ISBN 9789462497900.

Daan Wolfert, Een ramp voor de Vechtstreek, 1672-1673, Verloren, 2022, 247 pp. ISBN 9789087049980.

Adam Sundberg, Natural disaster at the closing of the Dutch Golden Age

Maïka De Keyzer — 2023-06-26

Ruben Suykerbuyk, The Matter of Piety. Zoutleeuw’s Church of Saint Leonard and Religious Material Culture in the Low Countries (c. 1450-1620)

Carolina Lenarduzzi — 2023-06-26

Peter Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten. De religieuze identiteit van Nederlandse gereformeerde migrantengemeenten in de rijkssteden Frankfurt am Main, Aken en Keulen (1555-1600)

Johannes Müller — 2023-06-26

Frans Blom, Podium van Europa. Creativiteit en ondernemen in de Amsterdamse Schouwburg van de zeventiende eeuw

Freya Sierhuis — 2023-06-26

Alan Moss, Gemaakt op reis. Nederlandse jongeren op reis in de zeventiende eeuw; Michaël Green, Le Grand tour, 1701-1703. Lettres d’Henry Bentinck, vicomte de Woodstock et de son précepteur Paul Rapin Thoyras à Hans Willem Bentinck, comte de Portland

Gerrit Verhoeven — 2023-06-26