Lisa Jardine - Temptation in the Archives: Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture

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: 978-1-910634-07-3

For Arnoud Visser

Amicus est tamquam alter idem

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 boxs 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.

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 guards 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.