Temptation in the Archives: Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture

146 Pages·2015·1.46 MB·English

by  Lisa Jardine

Temptation in the Archives
Temptation in the Archives
Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture
Lisa Jardine
First published in 2015 by UCL Press
University College London
Gower Street London WC1E 6BT
Freely available online at: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press
Text © 2015 Lisa Jardine This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial
Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy,
distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher
attribution is clearly stated. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-910634-07-3
For Arnoud Visser
Amicus est tamquam alter idem
Preface
In spring 2013, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – home to unimaginable
treasures from the Dutch Golden Age – reopened after a ten-year closure for
refurbishment. Strolling through opulent rooms displaying towering blue-and-
white pyramidal delftware tulip vases, gorgeous jewel-like paintings by Vermeer
and Rembrandt, and ornately inlaid baroque furniture a week after the reopening,
I came upon an object which for me went to the heart of the seventeenth-century
cultural relationship between England and the Netherlands. If only I had known
of it a few years earlier, when I was writing my book-length study of Anglo-
Dutch relations in the seventeenth century, Going Dutch. I would certainly have
reproduced it there.
In a quite large glass display case all of its own sat a small rectangular block
of mottled grey stone, in a modest-sized, purposemade wooden box. Two
original hand-written labels, in a rather unconfident cursive hand, in fading
brown ink, are affixed – one inside the box’s lid, the other pasted on to the stone
itself. ‘A piece of the Rock on which William Prince of Orange first set foot on
landing at Brixham in Torbay Nov[embe]r 4th 1688’, the latter reads.1
The fragment of stone in its contemporary setting reminded me powerfully of
a similar fragment of stone on my own bookshelf – a piece of the Berlin Wall,
given to me by a friend who had raced from London to Berlin in November
1989, to witness the ‘people power’ which brought down the barrier between
East and West in that city. Like the resident of Brixham, I cherish that small relic
(complete with an obliging East German guard’s ink stamp on it) as a reminder
of a twentieth-century life-changing moment – an emotional turning-point for
many of us caught up in the European politics of the time, as well as a landmark
historical event.
The little box in the Rijksmuseum is lasting testimony to the fact that for its
original owner, the moment when a Dutch Stadholder set foot on English soil
was similarly charged with emotion, and similarly recognised from the instant it
happened as reshaping the lives of both the English and the Dutch.
Standing in front of that glass case – and I returned to it several times that
morning during the hours I spent wandering through the bright, airy rooms of the
Rijksmuseum – I was struck by how vivid material objects make historical
events. In my own work it is generally an archival document, handled and
deciphered for the first time, that gives me the particular thrill of connecting with
the distant past. Arlette Farge captures the tingling excitement of a fragment of
parchment or a bundle of papers in her Allure of the Archives, which is a book I
treasure and to which I regularly return.
I also realised from my encounter with the Brixham stone fragment how
strongly I feel emotionally about events in the Netherlands and in England in the
seventeenth century. We are all still complicit, I believe, in a pact sealed partly
publicly, partly socially and privately, between the Dutch and ourselves during
those eventful decades. I still detect today, in the easy relationship between my
graduate students and their counterparts in Leiden and Utrecht when we visit, a
sharing of cultural outlook and intellectual convictions which continues to shape
their attitudes and beliefs. It is not just an educational context that they share, but
also taste in gardening and cooking.
It is no accident, I feel, that both countries look back to a golden age, an age
of Imperialism, an age when their interventions counted on the world stage, and
that the two nations share today a mutual unease about loss of power and
influence, and uncertainty about their role in a global political arena. Yet the rich
cultural heritages of both continue to hold sway worldwide, and hordes of
international visitors flock to their great national museums.
Have I confessed to more emotional investment in things Anglo-Dutch than is
proper for a professional historian? Perhaps. The essays that follow are
scrupulous exercises in historical investigation, which craft the evidence I
uncover into narratives designed to shine a vivid light on those similarities
between English and Dutch cultures to which I am so committed. Readers may
decide for themselves whether they are prepared to follow me on my journey
into the nooks and crannies of Anglo-Dutch history. I would also encourage
them to keep an eye out for the moments at which I see lessons to be learned for
the Europe of today in the international cultural exchanges of the past.
Each of the essays here was written for a particular public occasion, either in
England or the Netherlands. ‘Temptation in the archives’ was my inaugural
lecture at University College London, where I have been happily ensconced
since autumn 2012. ‘Never trust a pirate’ first saw the light of day as the 2006
Roy Porter memorial lecture for the Wellcome Trust, ‘The reputation of Sir
Constantijn Huygens’ was the formal KB lecture I delivered at the Koninklijke
Bibliotheek in The Hague, at the end of my term as KB Fellow at the
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
(NIAS) in 2008. The research for ‘Dear Song’ was also carried out during the
tenure of my KB Fellowship, working with the invaluable archival resources of
the KB in The Hague, under the benevolent eye of their curator, Dr Ad
Leerintveld. It was first delivered at a conference at the University of
Amsterdam, though it has, I hope, benefited from further research and thought,
as well as dialogue with students and faculty in the UK and the Netherlands
since. ‘1688 and all that’ was first delivered as the Cundill lecture at McGill
University in 2010, one of the public events associated with my winning the
Cundill Prize in 2009. ‘The Afterlife of Homo Ludens’ was the Huizinga
Lecture at the University of Leiden, and described by that university as the
‘mother of all lectures’. It is delivered from the pulpit of the vast Pieterskerk in
Leiden, which is lit by hundreds of flickering candles, in front of an audience of
900 people.
The variety and sometimes grandeur of these occasions provided me with a
platform on which to perform with intensity – for every lecture is a performance
– the beliefs and understanding of the past I have acquired over many years in
academic life. Yet precisely because they began life on a public stage, they try to
carry their scholarly burden lightly, and to concentrate on enthralling an
audience that might otherwise not find time to muse on the scraps of paper I
have uncovered in dusty archives on either side of the Narrow Sea.
1 The inscription inside the lid reads: ‘The Stone on which King William III first placed his foot on
landing in England was long preserved in Old Market House of Brixham, and when placed in the
Obelisk now on the Pier a piece of it was kept by the Harbour Master & afterwards given to me & now
placed in this box of heart of English Oak for Her Majesty the Queen of Holland. R. Fenwick
Elrington Vicar of Lower Brixham Nov 4. 1868.’
Acknowledgements
I owe so many debts to colleagues and friends who have helped me with the
thinking behind this volume of essays that I hardly know where to start. By this
stage in my career, the debts to others have mounted up into mountain ranges.
The solution seems to be to limit myself here to thanking those without whom
this project could simply never have happened.
First and foremost among these is former President and Provost of UCL,
Malcolm Grant, who offered me and my research Centre for Editing Lives and
Letters a home in 2012 when we were homeless. Without him my career could
not have continued so happily, and there would be no book of essays. His
successor, Michael Arthur, has been equally warm in his welcome, and has
encouraged me in every project CELL and I have embarked on since we arrived,
including the present one.
To the librarians, archivists, scholars and graduate students who have
contributed to Temptation in the Archives, you all know who you are, and I hope
I have been consistent in footnoting my gratitude in the text wherever you
helped me. Most notably, in the Netherlands, Ad Leerintveld, Nadine Akkerman,
Arnoud Visser, Marika Keblusek and Jan van der Motten have helped and
supported my Low Countries work.
UCL Press staff have been immensely supportive and helpful in bringing this,
their first publication, to fruition. Any remaining errors in the text are, of course,
all my own fault. My agent Toby Mundy helped me sort out the complexities of
open access publication.
Above all, my colleagues at CELL and my graduate students past and present
have provided the kind of support that most people can only dream of. So it is to
Robyn Adams, Matt Symonds, Lucy Stagg, Jaap Geraerts, Louisiane Ferlier,
James Everest, Brooke Palmieri, Helen
Graham-Matheson, Nydia Pineda and Amanda Brunton that I extend my most
heartfelt and warmest thanks. You are always there for me, and I couldn’t do it
without you.
As for my immediate family, there are no words adequately to capture all that
I owe to them.