Lieke van Deinsen

The Panpoëticon Batavûm was an eighteenth-century cabinet that housed the portraits of over 300 Dutch writers. The remarkable collection was started by the wealthy Amsterdam painter Arnoud van Halen (1673-1732) around the beginning of the century. It offered tangible proof of the power of Dutch literature in a period that has traditionally been described in terms of the Republic's decline, Frenchification and the loss of cultural identity. This helps to explain the popularity of the Panpoëticon Batavûm, which attracted many visitors and was the subject of several books. Lieke van Deinsen traces the history of the collection, offering valuable insights into eighteenth-century engagement with the literary past, the growing fascination with the author behind the work and the emancipation of women writers. 'The Panpoëticon Batavûm' is the first volume in the Rijksmuseum Studies in History.

De literaire canon, de lijst met de belangrijkste schrijvers en werken, houdt geregeld de gemoederen bezig. Lijstjeswoede en canonverkiezingen blijken echter van alle tijden. Omstreeks 1700 richtte de Amsterdamse schilder Arnoud van Halen bijvoorbeeld het Panpoëticon Batavûm op, een verzamelaarskabinet waarin gedurende de achttiende eeuw de portretten van ruim 300 Nederlandse schrijvers werden samengebracht. Diverse tijdgenoten bezochten de verzameling en waren vol lof over dit monument voor de Nederlandse literaire canon. De populariteit van het Panpoëticon illustreert de betrokkenheid bij het literaire verleden in de achttiende eeuw. In de vertrouwde omgeving van verzamelingen en bibliotheken gingen literatuurliefhebbers op zoek naar de hoogtepunten van de Nederlandse letteren.

Literaire erflaters beschrijft deze initiatieven tot literaire canonvorming vanuit een breed cultuurhistorisch perspectief en werpt een nieuw licht op de omgang met het literaire verleden in een eeuw die hoofdzakelijk is beschreven in termen van culturele crisis.

The early modern commercial book market was the cradle of authorial branding. Authors and publishers increasingly explored the construction of authorial brands: a set of recurring and recognizable characteristics associated with authorial images. This chapter looks at branding in the context of the media landscape of the early modern Dutch Republic. Authorial branding developed over time in conjunction with new conceptions of the individual, technological innovations, and the changing role of-amongst others-patrons and publishers. Analyses of the branding of Jan Jansz. Starter (1593-1626) and Sara Maria van der Wilp (1716-1803) illustrate how the non-formalized, dynamic constellation of the literary eld inspired various agents to create a range of (multifaceted) author brands on the spectrum 'economic-symbolic'.

This article discusses printed author portraits of women writers as vehicles of public image in the male-dominated eighteenth-century book market. It shows how Dutch women writers responded to the growing demand for author portraits and used their portrait engravings to shape their public image. It proved to be a fine line between showcasing literary aspirations and maintaining female modesty.

The literary fame of Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken (1721-1789) has been described in terms of rise and fall. In the decades following her death, her reputation rapidly changed from being one of the most popular and well-respected Dutch authors to a somewhat boring representative of the old-fashioned eighteenth-century literature. In 1828, over thirty years later, the Amsterdam Genootschap voor Uiter¬lijke Welspre¬kendheid managed, nevertheless, to erect a monument in honour of Van Merken and her husband, Nicolaas van Winter (1718-1795), in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. But why? A hitherto unknown manuscript in the collection of the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap in the Rijksmuseum sheds new light on the realisation of this project and allows us to place the initiative in the context of the growing desire for public memorials in the early nineteenth century and the still complicated relation between female authorship and celebrity culture.

In 1878 the Rijksmuseum acquired two objects related to the violent death of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt: the executioner’s sword allegedly used to behead the Land’s Advocate and an eighteenth-century album of poems about the weapon of execution. The article describes how these objects have functioned in the Oldenbarnevelt memory culture and shows how they have taken on new functions and meanings over the centuries – from a possible executioner’s weapon, to a republican and then national relic, to an objet de mémoire.

The authenticity of the portrait of the Amsterdam poet Roemer Pieterszoon Visscher (1547-1620) – depicted as an old man with a beard and distinctive hat – has been a subject of debate ever since it was printed in
Jacobus Scheltema’s Anna en Maria Tesselschade, de dochters van Roemer Visscher (1808). Although the portrait formed the basis for the likeness of Roemer Visscher in popular nineteenth-century depictions
of the mythical Muiderkring, its accuracy was quickly put into question. In 1887, the matter resulted in a heated argument between Joseph Alberdingk Thijm (1820-1889) and Nicolaas de Roever (1850-1893) in the journal De Amsterdammer. The latter suspected that the iconic portrait was one of many historical falsifications of Jan Stolker (1724-1785) and was thereafter falsely incorporated into contemporary images that featured literary and intellectual frontrunners of the nation’s Golden Age. According to De Roever, a far more likely representation of the seventeenth-century poet and
his coat of arms was included on the militia piece Schutters van de compagnie van kapitein Egbert Vinck (1586). Unfortunately, the painting was lost and the composition survived only through a drawing by Jacob Colijn from almost a century later. By that time only a sketchy en profil portrait of Roemer Visscher was available. Due to a lack of conclusive evidence, the dispute eventually ended in an impasse. Although later research supported De Roever’s suspicions and rejected the well-known
portrait of Roemer Visscher as an accurate likeness, knowledge about the real portrait of the popular poet was still limited. However, a long lost early eighteenth-century portrait by Arnoud van Halen (1683-1732) sheds
new light on the subject matter. The small oval painting was part of the so-called Panpoëticon Batavûm, an eighteenth-century collection of author’s portraits placed in a wooden cabinet, which features the highlights of Dutch literary and intellectual history. By presenting this portrait of Roemer Visscher, we can now, for the first time, connect the face with the words of one of the leading early modern Dutch poets.

The turn of the eighteenth century marked a transition in the conceptualisation of aesthetic taste in the European literary domain. During the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, the timeless and universalistic notion of literary taste was questioned and eventually made way for an essentially geographical, and predominantly national, conception of taste, strongly rooted in the (historical) context. However, this growing importance of vernacular literary taste provided ‘minor’ European languages with a challenge. By focusing on the Dutch Republic, this article provides insights into the often paradoxical and ambivalent search for a distinctive vernacular taste by minor languages. In an attempt to survive in the strongly competitive European book market and in direct response to the proclaimed French literary superiority, Dutch literati increasingly turned
inwards. Building upon the temporal and geographical demarcation of the aesthetics developed by predominantly French intellectuals and art theorists, Dutch authors searched for the boundaries of their own cultural
taste and tradition.

Until fairly recently, scholars of both modern and early modern literature hardly paid attention to anthologies as a distinctive or relevant source of historical knowledge. Of late, however, academics have begun to recognize that it might be fruitful to interpret anthologies not as largely ancillary (if not purely commercial) contributions to the literary marketplace but as premeditated documents that might be imbued with specific intentions. To illustrate this alternative reading strategy, this article focuses on the Vervolg van de Nederduitse keurdigten (1717), the second volume of what would prove to become a highly popular series of satirical poetry anthologies, and argues that an editor like Pieter van der Goes created completely new contexts (and, consequently, new meanings) for the poems that he included by ordering his texts in very specific ways and conflating various political and cultural debates. In doing so, this article not only reinterprets an early modern anthology as a calculated construct that embodies a self-conscious attitude towards the texts that it comprises, but also demonstrates that, in the early modern Republic, the realms of literature and politics tended to be intermingled, if not inseparable: they met each other, metaphorically speaking, on belletristic battlefields.

The large-scale digitisation of early modern Dutch texts has proved to be a controversial enterprise: despite its ambitious scope, the project’s efficacy has met with widespread criticism. This article attempts to assess the methodological advantages and drawbacks of mass digitisation by combing the Dagverhaal, a late eighteenth-century periodical detailing the proceedings of the National Assembly of the Batavian Republic, for strategic invocations of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the eminent Dutch states-man who had been executed eighty years earlier

The eighteenth century saw the production of over seventy plays depicting episodes from Dutch history, most of which were published between 1770 and 1795. During this highly turbulent period in Dutch politics, a cult-like strand of patriotism, which had been on the rise since the 1760s, pervaded Dutch culture and seized upon the nation’s history. By utilising Michael Rothberg’s concept of 'multidirectional memory', this article analyses pertinent trends in the production and publication of Dutch historical plays between 1770 and 1795. Accordingly, it is possible to discern three separate stages in the late eighteenth-century development of Dutch memory cultures. The first decade is marked by mnemonic multiplicity: in the absence of demarcated memory cultures, the pursuit of intranational concord still prevails. Between 1780 and 1787, however, we can trace the development of distinct memory domains that are claimed by Orangists and Patriots respectively. This trend persists between 1787 and 1795, when the erstwhile multidirectionality of memory cultures virtually loses its cogency.

Catharina Questiers en Cornelia van der Veer publiceerden in 1665 de dichtbundel Lauwer-stryt. Lieke van Deinsen is researchmasterstudent Letterkunde en Literatuurwetenschap
aan de Universiteit Nijmegen. In dit artikel analyseert zij aan de hand van rolpatronen hoe de twee schrijvende vrouwen zichzelf representeerden in Lauwer-stryt, een bundel die verscheen in een tijd dat literatuurbeoefening door vrouwen werd beschouwd
als een minderwaardige bezigheid.