History of the Low Countries

A Dutch trade mission to China

2010-11-19T06:04:00.000-08:00

This was the topic of my contribution to a recently published book on The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks.

What particularly interested me was not so much the mission itself, as the way that the report of it published a decade later was co-opted in different ways by certain Catholics in both Antwerp and Amsterdam as a way of giving a more positive spin to the activities of Jesuit missions in China.

That report, it must be said, was not only compendious, but also copiously and beautifully illustrated.

New edition?

2009-11-13T04:36:00.001-08:00

I'm preparing a proposal for a second edition. Does anybody have any comments about what they'd like to see in the book, or what they thought redundant?

Middle Dutch cookery

2009-05-28T04:21:00.000-07:00

Looking for something completely different, I just stumbled upon Coquinaria, a website dedicated to Middle Dutch cookbooks.

The main theme of the book

2009-03-27T01:42:00.000-07:00

In the comments box to an earlier post, a reader asks:

Would it be accurate to say your most consistent theme throughout The Low Countries is the effect of the Christian religion on Dutch culture, politics, and life?

The short answer is "not consciously". The central line or chain of thought that helped me get through writing the book was the internationalism of the Low Countries, their position as (North-)Western Europe's "crossroads, cockpit and marketplace", their openness to outside influences and their influences on other places. From the mix of "Northern" and "Western" archaeological finds in the Drenthe dolmens, to hosting the EU and NATO institutions, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court.

In my own mind, one of the worst distortions of this approach is that I fail to bring out with concrete examples just how provincial and parochial a lot of life and thought in the Low Countries is and has been (I do make a couple of bald references to provincial particularisms, but give no memorable specimens).

One thing that I did want to do, very consciously, was not be limited by subdsciplinary divisions into "Political History", "Social History", "Church History", etc., and I suppose Church History, partly because of my own (non-specialist) interests, is one of the main beneficiaries of that. I treat, briefly, sports, tourism, food, education, and all sorts of other issues that the standard overview leaves out (or at least, tended to leave out when I was cribbing from them 20 years ago - perhaps I'm just doing what everybody else does these days, without realising how permeated I am by the "spirit of the age").

The extensive coverage of Christianity in various forms (still, given the constraints, insufficient: the Mennonites don't get the coverage they deserve, let alone a lot of the smaller Protestant groups) is due solely to the historical importance of Christianity for most of the history of the Low Countries. From the 7th century to the 1970s, it's impossible to write about how people conceived of their world, their society, their duties and their hopes without writing about some variety or other of Christianity, or some sort of conscious reaction against it.

And thanks for this spur to reflecting on my own writing processes!

This just out

2009-03-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

Manchester University Press have just brought out the latest volume in the "Britain and the Netherlands" series (as it used to be known - I'm not sure it still functions as a series). The title is Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570 - 1720.

The volume contains papers from a conference held in Amsterdam and Leiden in late 2006 - among them a piece by me about how the Southern Netherlands (now Belgium) functioned as the prime point of contact and support in Counter-Reformation Europe for Catholic minorities of Britain and the Netherlands. Most of the other essays deal more with the internal (political, social, devotional) affairs of the Dutch and British Catholic communities.

Another review

2009-02-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

It has just come to my attention that the History of the Low Countries has been reviewed in European History Quarterly 39 (2009), pp. 119-120, by somebody called Johannes Koll. Hurrah! A notice! Now to find out what it says ...

Roman-German battle update

2009-01-08T00:11:00.000-08:00

It seems as though somebody has whipped out their history books and cottoned on that the Romans did send expeditions across the Rhine, most famously those led by third-century emperor Maximinus Thrax, who boasted about it by taking the name Germanicus Maximus.

Nevertheless, they're sticking to the story that the battle site at Kalefeld is the "find of the century", tracing the progress of the battle through finds of arrow heads, ballista bolts, broken harness, horseshoes, sandal nails, and other odds and ends (including an army-issue axe), scattered over an area of one and a half kilometres by 500 metres (suggesting that a substantial column came under attack and fought off its ambushers). They also say that the 600 finds already turned up barely scratch the surface. Gosh, exciting stuff. It brings to mind the opening scenes of the film Gladiator - as the less reputable German newspapers have hastened to point out.

Updating to add (oh irony!):

Projections of power

2008-12-13T01:15:00.000-08:00

Now, I'm no expert on late antiquity (as anybody reading this blog will have guessed), but I'm very excited to read (here) about the archaeological discovery at Kalefeld in Lower Saxony (well over 100 miles east of Cologne) of the wreckage from a 3rd-century Roman-German battle, unknown from historical sources.

View Larger Map

I was a bit taken aback by the broadness of the generalization that "the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which took place in 9 AD, resulted in the Roman’s Empire withdrawal from Germania without any further attempt to conquer the land beyond the Rhine River again". Even with the Rhine becoming the frontier of regular Roman rule, we've known for some time that Rome was able to project its presence some way beyond the frontier, both economically and militarily. There were six Roman invasions of Germania (including amphibious operations north through Frisia and then south up the Weser) between AD 9 and AD 50 alone (Paul Arblaster, History of the Low Countries (2006), p. 15 - but yes, there are more reputable sources for this and if anybody puts a comment in the box asking for them I'll dig them out). That this sort of thing was still going on in the 3rd century is, I admit, news to me - but there are hints of it in Sigrid Undset's Saga of Saints (tr. E. C. Ramsden, 1934), p. 7 (with reference there to a "Professor Schetelig").

History of News wiki

2008-12-10T17:58:00.000-08:00

Almost exactly a year ago I came home from a conference in Bremen and set about establishing a wiki with the purpose of sharing information from and about the early modern newspaper press. You can find it here. In odd moments since I've been posting transcriptions and summaries of news stories from early modern newspapers, and in particular from the Nieuwe Tijdinghen.

Having tried it out, I'm not convinced that the wiki format offers any benefit over xml tagging beyond a low user threshold (but wikis only come into their own on collaborative projects, and so far nobody else has contributed anything to this, so my mind is not entirely made up yet).

I got an email today about this picture, which ties in very nicely with this news story.

Belgium in Beijing

2008-11-16T08:11:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture of Peking University Library (or, as it says on the sign, Beijing daxue tushuguan). PKU hosted a Belgian Cultural Festival where I was invited to lecture, and the photograph shows me on my way to present a copy of the History of the Low Countries to the acquisitions librarian.

The lecture was on a number of books about China published in the Habsburg Netherlands in the 17th and 18th centuries, and how they reveal as much about the Low Countries as they do about China. In the early 17th century, Dutch and French works derived from Nicholas Trigault s.j.'s De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas. In the later 17th century a pirated (or more precisely: hijacked) Antwerp edition of Joan Nieuhof's account of a Dutch East India Company trade mission to the Manchu Emperor, Het Gezantschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie, aan den grooten Tartarischen Cham, den tegenwoordigen Keizer van China. And in the 18th century the Brussels printing of a letter from a Jesuit missionary about the history of Chinese script (in response to the hypothesis of the director of the Imperial and Royal Academy in Brussels that it was related to Egyptian hieroglyphs).

D. V. Coornhert

2008-11-16T07:15:00.000-08:00

Over the past many months I've been working at translating a book about Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert into English, to be published by Brill. Yesterday I signed off on the last revisions before the author gives her comments and a whole new raft of revisions have to be made: hopefully the last stage before sending the typescript to Brill, and waiting for the proofs ...

Coornhert is a figure I knew only vaguely as the man who got on Justus Lipsius's nerves so much that he decided to leave Holland and go back to Leuven. Having written a biography of a late-sixteenth-century Catholic controversialist who was also a humorist, moralist, translator and engraver, it's been fascinating to look at the Free Church equivalent. Coornhert was all these things - as well as being a notary public and secretary to the first assembly of the States of Holland to meet without royal warrant.

The book is about his two public disputations with Dutch Reformed clergymen, both organised under the aegis of ad hoc committees of the States of Holland. The established view is that the States organized the disputations to give Coornhert a platform to set out his views on freedom of religion, and keep the Dutch Reformed clergy from getting above themselves. The author of this book shows quite convincingly that the States organized the disputations at the insistence of the clergy, to give them a public forum in which they could once and for all reply to the public figure who had been slandering them in tabletalk and libelling them in print for years. The plan did backfire to some extent, in that Coornhert gave as good as he got, but the intention of the States was more to give the clergy an extra-ecclesial platform than to let Coornhert air his views.

Coornhert was certainly testing the limits of freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, but the States were hardly pleased with the way he was doing so. But comparing his fate to Campion's encounter with his Anglican opponents in the Tower Debates shows a lot about the differences between England and Holland in the 1570s and 1580s.

Eucharistic Miracle of Amsterdam

2008-10-16T05:57:00.000-07:00

The most embarrassing mistake in my History of the Low Countries is my account of the Eucharistic Miracle of Amsterdam, a 14th-century event that is still an important part of the identity of Catholic Amsterdam: after Catholic worship was outlawed around 1580, the old festive procession was replaced with a "silent procession", the Stille Omgang (the authorities could hardly object to people just walking, could they?), which is still going strong.

Anyway, there is an accurate account of the Miracle of Amsterdam here. My own version was written from memory, and tells the story of a different eucharistic miracle in the Rhineland (also involving the consecrated host and fire). That'll teach me to neglect everything I've ever been taught about note-taking and fact-checking! As far as I'm aware it's the only substantive error in the book, but I await reviewers spotting others ...

Dutch history website

2008-10-16T05:54:00.001-07:00

Just typed in "Dutch History" on yahoo, and one of the first things that comes up is the CarPark, a site providing structured lists of links to Dutch and Belgian (draw deep breath) genealogical, cultural, historical, linguistic and topographical sites. It's clearly a labour of love. I'll be putting a permanent link in the sidebar.

Reader review

2008-10-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

There's also a review by a reader, on amazon.com. It's wonderful to get the feeling that there are people actually reading the book that haven't been told to!

And another year later again ...

2008-10-08T10:37:00.001-07:00

Just to reassure anyone finding this page that it is still active and all comments are welcome -- I've just been glacially slow at posting!

And here's a handy link, to the current Low Countries History seminars at Senate House (London).

And one year later ...

2007-12-14T17:56:00.001-08:00

Immediately after creating this blog I forgot the username and password. All of a sudden they pop back to mind. No doubt a psychologist could explain it.

In the year since first posting, my History of the Low Countries has been translated into Bulgarian under the title, as far as I can make out, История на страните от Бенилюкс.

The arrival of the copies was a pleasant surprise: the publisher neglected to mention it beforehand.

first up

2006-11-24T01:21:00.000-08:00

About a year ago Palgrave published my History of the Low Countries (also available through amazon.com, .co.uk, etc. etc. etc., and all good booksellers: ask a bookseller or bookseller's assistant in person before buying it online).

The book was begun as A Traveller's History of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg, for a different publisher, but that's another story -- although you might come across it as a ghost title on search engines, since they offered it for presale before cancelling the series it was to be part of.

There was quite a lot of material that didn't go into the book, that this blog might be a way of sharing, but besides supplementations what I'd really like to share are corrections: if you spot mistakes, please let me know. Hopefully the blog will lower the threshold for such communication.

The book was recently reviewed on a Low Countries history listserv, in the most gratifying of terms, and a number of corrections offered: Limburg didn't join the United States of Belgium until 8 March 1790, for instance.

Other corrections I'm not so sure of: the papal bull authorizing the foundation of the university of Leuven was issued in December 1425, but teaching didn't start until September 1426. Surely this means I can say that the university was founded in 1426? Or am I misusing the verb "to found"? (Can a university be said to have been founded before the governing body has been constituted, the teachers hired and the classrooms made available?)

Anyway, that's all for now. Let's see how this goes ...