contributions

to the history
of concepts

Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 208-214 brill.nl/chco

Review Essay
Erfgoed: de geschiedenis van een begrip
Amsterdam University Press, the Netherlands, 2007.
Frans Grijzenhout (ed.). Volume 5 in the serie
Dutch History of Concepts, Amsterdam University Press

Hanneke Ronnes
University of Amsterdam

In the introduction to Erfgoed: de geschiedenis van een begrip (Heritage: The

History of a Concept), the latest volume in a Dutch series devoted to histo-
riographies of concepts, Frans Grijzenhout paraphrases David Lowenthal
when he writes: “Heritage, if it was ever an innocent term, has long since
lost its innocence.” Lowenthal, author of the often-reprinted The Past is a
Foreign Country (1985) and The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History
(1998), more than anyone else, can claim to be the father of the so-called
“Heritage studies,” an inter- and multidisciplinary subject area that has
taken flight in the Netherlands in recent years, and spawned graduate
courses in various universities. Beyond the academic realm, on a public
level – in monument care, city planning and museology – it is possible to
discern strong, cultural and political heritage discourses. While Dutch
public heritage management, guided by the adagium “preservation through
development” busies itself with the “past in the present” – that is, using the
remnants from the past to empower contemporary local and national
identities in the context of city and landscape planning – Lowenthal argues
that heritage is decidedly different from history. Heritage, in his view, is
malleable, consisting mainly of present-day constructions of pasts, serving
present-day people, and often comprising contemporary “inventions of
tradition” (a recurring phrase in the contributions to the volume here
discussed): “heritage everywhere not only tolerates but thrives on historical

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/180793209X12599171659655

 H. Ronnes / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 208-214 209

error.”1 Grijzenhout approaches the concept of heritage from yet another

possible angle, looking at it, not synchronically but – for the most
part, except in his discussion of contemporary concerns with heritage –
diachronically, as the past in the past or, put differently, the historical
past.
Generally, the approach to heritage has been one of “alarmism.” In the
Netherlands a broad awareness of the ephemeral nature of the residues
from the past came late, especially in the opinion of those sounding the
alarm. Even though people like Alberdingk Thijm, inspired by Victor
Hugo, had brought attention to the need to protect and build the environ-
ment as early as in the first half of the nineteenth century (such forms of
custodianship are, as shall be seen, not exclusively a modern phenomenon),
it was one man especially, Victor de Stuers, who raised awareness of the
lamentable condition of many of Holland’s remaining relics and of the the
sheer amount of destruction that had already taken place. In a legendary
article published in 1873, de Stuers, on his part stirred by the work of
Viollet-le-Duc, compared the deplorable state of Dutch museums and
collections, and the demolition of period rooms, city gates, and churches
to the successful contemporary policies that were being carried out in
Belgium and France. He thereby single-handedly initiated an embryonic
form of monument care that had long since come to fruition in many of
the other European countries in the wake of the French Revolution, in
addition to a pro-active cultural policy.2
One of the paradoxes of the concept of heritage, running also through
Grijzenhout’s volume, is that heritage management often follows destruc-
tion – the demolitions that formed part and parcel of the French Revolution
are perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon. The opposite,
however, is equally true: more often than not, curatorship itself leads to
destruction. Two examples illustrate this point. Coert Peter Krabbe, in his
chapter on nineteenth and twentieth-century architectural monuments,
refers to an eighteenth-century baroque tower adorning an earlier church
in the city of Roermond, which had to make way for two more fitting –
according to Cuypers and confirmed by Viollet-le-Duc – yet invented,

1)
David Lowenthal (1998), 3.
2)
Victor de Stuers (1873), 320-403.
210 H. Ronnes / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 208-214

medieval towers. A second example provided by several authors concerns

the city abode of Constantijn Huygens Sr., the illustrious seventeenth-
century secretary to a string of princes of Orange, and, true to his times, a
man of extreme versatility, busying himself amongst others with architec-
ture. It was in fact de Stuers, the aforementioned saviour of Holland’s
material culture, who envisaged a typically Dutch-style house for the famous
square in The Hague, just around the corner from the country’s past and
present administrative centre, instead of Huygens’ international-style, clas-
sical house. Its loss is still felt, not least by the contributors to the volume,
given that it was amongst the first classical houses built in the Netherlands,
erected at the same time as the neighbouring Het Mauritshuis, a construc-
tion exemplary both in Holland and abroad.
Not only were the Dutch slow to initiate and later to institutionalise
heritage custodianship, the same is true for the use of the concept erfgoed
(heritage) itself. Victor de Stuers did not employ it; instead, he spoke, for
instance, of monumenten. It was only in 1975, the European Architectural
Heritage Year, in a volume commemorating a century of monument care
(the century since the groundbreaking article by de Stuers) that “erfgoed ”
was, if not coined, first used in its present-day connotative meaning. This
meaning seems to derive from the French words heritage and patrimoine,
and from English, which only has the term “heritage.” The German lan-
guage has Erbe, closest to the Dutch term linguistically, if not necessarily
in meaning (Erbe being used to refer to music above all).
In his chapter on the legal origin of erfgoed, Peter van den Berg eluci-
dates that in previous times this concept referred to family property. He
directly links this usage to a budding movement towards individualisation
in the sixteenth century at the expense of the family and family possessions
and the wish by some, especially the nobility, to prevent a “loss of herit-
age.” Willem Frijhoff, in his contribution entitled “Heavenly heritage,”
illuminates the use of the parallel religious concept of erfdeel: the promised
(material) land; the Word and eternal life (immaterially). The forms of
heritage Grijzenhout distinguished in the introduction to the volume con-
sist of a modification of the 1975 definition, yet are not unrelated to the
early uses mentioned. Grijzenhout recognises materieel erfgoed, immaterieel
erfgoed (rare customs, rituals and folklore), and geestelijk erfgoed (intellectual
heritage). The latter, not to be confused with immaterieel erfgoed, entails
amongst others things poetry and wisdom which, according to Seneca,
 H. Ronnes / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 208-214 211

would be more resistant to the passing of time better than monumentum

aere perennius.
The custom to draw on heritage for local, national, or supranational
identities seems, perhaps surprisingly, ageless. Not only identity politics
formed part and parcel of heritage approaches in the 1930s (at the local
level), in the nineteenth century (at the national level), and during the
most recent past (at the supranational European level), this was already
true much earlier. Sandra Langereis, in her fascinating contribution on
Dutch approaches to the concept of antiquitates from the fifteenth century
onwards, introduces Matthaeus Herbenus (ca. 1451-1538) who, with his
Libellus de Traiecto instaurato (Boekje over het herbouwde Maastricht) on the
historical topography of the city of Maastricht, emulated Roma instaurata
(1446) by Biondo, whose grave he had visited in Rome whilst he was a
servant to the pope. Like Biondo, he wrote for those who would live after
him, aiming to instil a love of the patria, or, in his case, Maastricht. Biondo,
on his part, followed the Antiquitates of Varro about whom Cicero wrote
that his works on the antiquity of the patria, provided the Roman popu-
lace with a sense of home; an identity. Wilhelmus Heda (1460-1525) and
Cornelius Aurelius (ca. 1460-1531) began the actual registering and con-
servation of antiquities in the Low Countries. These men were the first to
categorise and publish Roman artifacts (although they were bogus, as it
turned out). A century later, Smetius, who had assembled a vast collection
of Roman artifacts amassed during excavations of Roman ruins as they
could still be found in the Netherlands in the 1620s, tried to spark the
enthusiasm of his affluent fellow-countrymen – potential protectors and
benefactors – by arguing that a study of these findings would contribute to
the glorification of the honestandae patriae, the homeland, both that of the
city of Nijmegen (local) as that of the land of the Batavieren (national).
However, despite the help of Constantijn Huygens – him again –, Smetius
received no support from the stadholder Frederik Hendrik. The latter’s
predecessor Maurits was the only one to show an interest, unfortunately by
ordering a piece of a dolmen.
Grijzenhout notes that in the course of the sixteenth century the con-
cept of “antiquitates” was used more and more refer to the material past in
general, and not only to Roman and Greek artifacts. Later still, Lisa Kuit-
ert in her chapter on literary heritage states, the term “klassiek” acquired a
positive descriptive quality rather than merely a reference to a long gone
212 H. Ronnes / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 208-214

past. Arnoldus Buchelius (1565-1641), for one, showed a great concern

for medieval remnants. It was his aim to bring together in one book, Rel-
liquias [sic] monumentorum Batavicorum, all the remaining monuments of
the Northern, Batavian provinces. Langereis argues that it is with Buche-
lius’ work that we find, for the first time, a nascent monument care and a
level of alarmism in the Low Countries.
In the seventeenth century local and national interpretations of histori-
cal artifacts went hand in hand with regional arcadias, country house
poems, and the more nationally-orientated overviews of antiquities. A
proto-nationalistic explanation of antiquities, Grijzenhouts argues, only
became more serious in the eighteenth century, when historical artefacts
were increasingly presented in conjunction with Dutch historical heroes.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century this led to one of the first acts
of monument care when it was decided that the castle Het Muiderslot was
not to be demolished on the basis that it was here that P.C. Hooft, the
well-known literary figure (contemporary to and a friend of Huygens)
used to live. Though generally known as the century of the rise of the
nation, several contributors remark that the nineteenth century (especially
during its beginning) is equally a time of universalism (at least in rhetoric).
Martijn Eickhoff, writing on professional and academic archaeology vis-
à-vis heritage, takes notice of the museological focus on universal knowl-
edge of and inspiration by ancient examples. Langereis mentions that the
destruction of, and damage done to, historical monuments was, for the
first time, dubbed a crime towards “all people.” Even still, a national(istic)
approach to heritage in the nineteenth century was, as expected, omnipresent.
Kuitert mentions one humorous example featuring a German researcher
ordering a manuscript from the Dutch Royal library, which was promptly
refused by one of the librarians. The minister subsequently agreed that it
was the privilege of a Dutchman to first look into this document before a
German scholar could do so. Wessel Krul, additionally, describes how
paintings by Dutch caravaggisten and italianisanten were destined for the
Dutch Indies where they would be displayed as Dutch heritage, while citi-
zens of the Netherlands could do without this “bastard art.”
Much happened during the nineteenth century: libraries and archives
were institutionalised; the first journals and societies devoted to antiquities
were launched; and museums and temporary exhibitions produced other
novelties. The nineteenth century was, in the Netherlands as elsewhere, the
 H. Ronnes / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 208-214 213

time when an academic conceptualisation of and approach to antiquities

developed. Haitsma Mulier, in his contribution to the volume on the his-
tory of biographies of famous Dutch figures, notes that such works – by no
means a new phenomenon – were now, following the German model, for
the first time based on historical documents; F.C.J. Ketelaar, writing on
archival heritage, recognises a growing attentiveness towards the value of
historical documents for historical research and describes the shift from an
administrative interest in archives (as safe-deposits for documents such as
those that listed town privileges), to an academic interest. In terms of
monument care and its conceptualisation, Krabbe observes a shift from an
association between a building and a famous historical figure in the evalu-
ation of a structure’s monumental status – as was the case with Het Muid-
erslot – towards an art-historical based evaluation of constructions a few
decades later. Willemien Roenhorst in her chapter on the conceptualisa-
tion of natural monuments fine-tunes this development, adding that an
(art-)historical appreciation was either based on the art-historical canon or
on the intrinsic historical value of a remnant from the past. In the latter
years of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, Roen-
horst adds, an appreciation for monumental “ensembles” developed. The
recognition of ensembles stirred a hot debate. The destruction of entire
urban areas was, on the one hand, considered a crime, yet, on the other, it
was defended as an infrastructural and hygienic necessity. To what extent
futurist sentiments played a part in this discussion is not entirely clear
in Krul’s final chapter on the concept of vandalism. These sentiments par-
allel those of the early twentieth-century in which preservation is pitted
against (infrastructural) development. Yet, they are no longer thought to
be conflicting but complementary developments, hence the adagium “pres-
ervation through development.” Several authors hint it is not all that
simple. It turns out that “preservation through development” is often a
contradictio in terminis. Moreover, a concomitant chauvinistic idiom of
heritage buttressing local and national identities is, for some, ideologically
suspect. In the introduction to the volume Grijzenhout cites Seneca who
was a believer in the positive power of intellectual heritage. However, this
collection of essays, rich in information on past conceptualisations of and
approaches to native heritage, suggests that erfgoed was indeed never an
innocent concept.
214 H. Ronnes / Contributions to the History of Concepts 5 (2009) 208-214

Bilbiographical References
David Lowenthal. 1998. “Fabricating Heritage” (Inaugural Heritage Lecture, St. Mary’s
University, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 7-12-1995). History & Memory, 10(1): 3.
Victor de Stuers. 1873. “Holland op zijn smalst.” De Gids 37, 3rd series, 11(3): 320-403.