Temptation in the Archives. Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture

162 Pages·2015·1.42 MB·English

by  Lisa Jardine

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‘in these sparkling essays, lisa Jardine uses letters, diaries and other archival e
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the delights of the scholarly enterprise. a wonderful read.’
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Natalie ZemoN Davis, UNiversity of toroNto m TempTaT ion
in Temptation in the Archives, lisa Jardine takes readers on a journey through p
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the dutch Golden age. this collection of essays and lectures, previously
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unpublished in English, explores the fascinating cultural exchange that took
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place between the English and dutch in the seventeenth century. through i n T he
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a range of primary sources the reader is given a rare and intimate glimpse
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of the key players of the new dutch ruling elite. Most notably, through
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the study of sir constantjin huygens, a dutch polymath and diplomat,
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and his family – including the brilliant scientist christiaan huygens – we i
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begin to see the anglo-dutch cultural connections that formed against the
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backdrop of unfolding political events in England. lisa Jardine compares h
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the public and private lives of these eminent figures, and challenges us to
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look beyond the surface with a critical eye. the duality of archival research r Essays in GoldEn aGE
is also revealed; the excitement at the link it provides to the distant past but
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also the underlying uncertainty at its heart. Temptation in the Archives paints dutch culturE
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a picture of a unique relationship between the netherlands and England in
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the seventeenth century forged through a shared experience – and reveals to v
us the lessons we can learn from it today. e
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lisa JarDiNe cBE is Professor of renaissance studies at ucl, and
director of the ucl centre for Editing lives and letters. she is a Fellow
of the royal society and the royal historical society and an honorary
Fellow of King’s college, cambridge and Jesus college, cambridge. she
is the author of many works, including Going Dutch, Ingenious Pursuits and
Worldly Goods.
froNt aND back cover image: cover DesigN:
Jan davidsz. de heem, Still Life with Books, oil rawshock design
on panel, 1625-30. rijksmuseum, amsterdam.
£10.00
www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press
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 http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from The British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-910634-02-8 (Hbk.)
ISBN: 978-1-910634-03-5 (Pbk.)
ISBN: 978-1-910634-09-7 (PDF)
ISBN ebook: 978-1-910634-07-3 (epub)
ISBN ebook: 978-1-910634-08-0 (mobi)
DOI:10.14324/111.9781910634035
For Arnoud Visser
Amicus est tamquam alter idem

Preface
In spring 2013, the rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – home to unimagin-
able 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, purpose-
made 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’
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.’
PrEFACE vii
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
viii TEMPTATION IN THE ArCHIVES
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.
PrEFACE ix