Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2012

Hun gelieve zich te errinneren, dat eenen yghelyke niet alles te voore komt, en vaaken de tydt yet verborgens oopenbaart, ’t welk, aanmerkelyk van zelf, ook dikmaals tot ontfouwing van ’t ouwde dient, en, daaronder gemengt als nieuw, de zinnen aanlokt tot leezen en herleezen van geschiedenissen, zonder ’t onthouden der welke ’s Lands behoudenis last lydt.2 [Maar zij zouden moeten beseffen dat iedereen niet alles onder ogen komt en dat de tijd vaak iets verborgens openbaart dat, uit zichzelf al de moeite waard, dikwijls tevens tot verheldering van het oude dient en daaronder als iets nieuws gemengd, de lust prikkelt tot het lezen en herlezen van geschiedenissen, zonder het onthouden waarvan het behoud van het land gevaar loopt]

During the last three decades, the question as to what extent historiography makes use of literary techniques and conventions has given serious food for thought. However, this article will try to invert that question: can literature also be a valuable means of acquiring historical knowledge? It is often assumed that a literary text can readily provide access to an ‘experience’ of the past. We want to ask how this works and whether the textual mechanisms that underlie this experience function differently in so-called non-literary texts. In our attempt at answering these questions, we bring together a variety of texts: a newspaper article, two memoirs, a historiographical work and a fairy tale – all of which cover a particular episode of the French Revolution. This entails moving away from traditional distinctions between these texts as literary versus non-literary or fictional versus non-fictional and instead analysing how each of them makes use of narratological effects, such as focalization strategies and narrative voices, in order to reconstruct the past. Accordingly, this article seeks to demonstrate that these texts’ engagements with the past, regardless of their form and associated expectations, consist of a complicated dialectics between distantiation and proximity. The theoretical inspiration behind this approach is historian Mark Salber Phillips’ recent work on textual constructions of historical distance. In presenting this article, we aim to elaborate on Phillips’ work by bringing literature into the methodological field that his work on conventional historiography has opened.

This paper compares representations of the life and death of Saint Ursula, who was mortyred in Cologne, in texts by two seventeenth-century Amsterdam intellectuals. In 1639, the famous playwright Joost van den Vondel staged the martyred saint as a young and courageous heroine in his tragedy Maeghden. We contrast this with a radically different picture of the saint which arises from newly found sources from the same time and place. In 1633, Father Leonardus Marius of the Amsterdam béguinage recounted Saint Ursula’s life in a few of his hagiographic sermons. Since Marius was probably instrumental in Vondel’s conversion to Catholicism, it is reasonable to assume that Vondel was familiar with Marius’s views on Saint Ursula. Due to their conflicting ideologies, however, Marius and Vondel depict her in completely different ways.

Jan Pieter van Male (1681-1735) was an ambitious inhabitant of Bruges who dreamed of being a painter, but who was ordained and ended up as a parish priest in some minor villages in the Flemish countryside. Because of the amount of spare time he had, the outstanding education he had received and his thorough familiarity with the history of Bruges, he was well-equipped to assess the history of Bruges – which he did. Among the many works he wrote are a history of Bruges (Naukeurighe Beschrijvinghe vande Oude ende hedendaeghsche ghestaethede Vande Edele ende vermaerde stadt Brugghe in Vlaenderen) and a work on the city’s great Bruges scholars and artists (Praelthoneel der gheleerde en doorluchtighe Brugghelingen). Both works are prefaced by an extensive introductions in which Van Male explains his aims with regard to historiography. Convinced that knowledge of one’s own history is beneficial, he endeavours to instruct his fellow countrymen in their history, and to be a guide for the youth of Bruges. In doing so, he assumes a critical and scholarly attitude to history and to the sources he uses. As a historian, Van Male worked in a period that is characterised by the transition from amateurish historical writing to a more scholarly historiography.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Western society and culture underwent a radical change, and, as Reinhart Koselleck argued, so did the meanings of political and ideological concepts. More recently, theorists such as François Hartog have linked this shift to a changing attitude towards the past, or the regime of historicity: from a continuity between past and present (ancien regime) to a discontinuity, a break between past and present (modern regime). Historians Peter Fritzsche and Frank Ankersmit have (independently) linked the historical experience of this break to paradoxical feelings of longing for something that has been irretrievably lost (melancholy, nostalgia, the sublime). In this paper, I will suggest that the close reading method of Begriffsgeschichte can contribute to an understanding of how this shift from the ancien regime to a modern regime is, in itself, full of paradoxes: the regimes as such were not monolithic constructs, and the meanings of the concepts that they claimed to explain were not unambiguous. To illustrate this point with a case study, I will analyse the concept of ‘patriotism’ in the correspondence between Dutch poets Willem Bilderdijk and Rhynvis Feith following Bilderdijk’s revised edition of Onno Zwier van Haren’s epic De Geusen (1785), and in a play written by Feith in that same year. At that specific moment, the term ‘patriotic’ not only referred to love for one’s country, but also to a specific political faction, of which Feith was a member but which Bilderdijk ardently opposed.

This article argues that ‘collective memory’ is a problematic term when referring to the commemoration of one of the greatest Dutch sea heroes, Michiel de Ruyter. Despite the recurrence of certain characteristics, such as patriotism, courage, piety and virtue, the representation of De Ruyter changed dramatically over time due to the shifting political landscape. Furthermore, an author’s personal background could strongly influence the De Ruyter’s literary depiction (the so-called ‘spokesmen dependency’). Consequently, it is necessary to adopt a radical historical and contextual approach when studying heroic images from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. This is illustrated by analysing two national epics written by the Haarlem bookseller Adriaan Loosjes: M.A. de Ruyter (1784) and De laatste zeetogt van admiraal De Ruiter (1812). In the first poem, De Ruyter is portrayed as a brave conqueror who espouses anti- Orangist sentiments, whereas his more conciliatory and domestic character prevails in the latter text. In this way, both external and domestic political conflicts as well as Loosjes’s own political preferences determine these changing representations of the past.