De woonplaats van de faam : grondslagen van de stadsbeschrijving in de zeventiende-eeuwse republiek Verbaan, E.

De woonplaats van de faam : grondslagen van de stadsbeschrijving in de zeventiende-eeuwse republiek

Verbaan, E.

Citation

Verbaan, E. (2011, December 15). De woonplaats van de faam : grondslagen van de stadsbeschrijving in de zeventiende-eeuwse republiek. Uitgeverij Verloren, Hilversum. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/18256

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Summary

This study examines the ‘descriptions of cities’ or ‘urban historical topographies’ pub- lished in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

With no less than 18 titles exclud- ing reissues and translations, this is one of the most striking but also under-researched genres in early modern Dutch history writing. Even measured against a European context it is a noteworthy phenomenon: in England a similar body of works did not achieve prominence until the eighteenth century, whilst in France a comparable genre of antiquités existed since the early sixteenth century, but never reached the level of pop- ularity it gained in the seventeenth-century Northern Netherlands. In Germany the genre never got off the ground. It is therefore remarkable that the Dutch descriptions of cities have attracted little scholarly attention to date. The present study seeks to fill this gap. Its questions are: What are the conceptual foundations of the genre? What are the underlying principles that determine the topics that the authors choose and how they approached them? This study therefore mainly concerns the history of historical writing (historiography). More widely it contributes to the fields of cultural history and the history of ideas. It focuses on urban historical topographies as a genre, with its own set of methods, themes and sources, and it considers the products of this genre to be literary artefacts with a rhetorical structure.

In the chapter-length introduction the genre is defined and an overview is given of the urban topographies published before 1700, situating them in their political and social context. Aspects of production and reception, belonging to the field of book his- tory, are also discussed.

An answer to the study’s main questions is attempted in six chapters. Chapters 1-4 discuss the four most important disciplines that influenced the genre: chorography, encomiastic literature, travel methods, and antiquarian research. Two concluding chapters present two case studies, focussing on the cities of Delft and Leiden in the province of Holland. The first shows how these disciplines converged in urban histor- ical topographies. The second situates them in an international context.

1 Van Nierop, ‘How to honour one’s city’ (1993) uses the term ‘historical topography’ while Haitsma Mulier, ‘The de-

scriptions of towns’ (2000) gives a literal translation of the Dutch stadsbeschrijvingen: ‘descriptions of towns’.

t h e s u b j e c t - m a t t e r 3 4 7

The Subject-Matter

According to Marco Polo, the narrator in Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972), it is impossible to describe the city of Zaira by focussing on appearances only. One could tell how many steps there are in the streets that rise like stairways, discuss the curvature of the arcades, or mention the kind of tiles that cover the roofs. But it would be to no avail. After all, every building and every street is filled with memories. A city is a space with a history, a mixture of the present and the past.

The authors of the Dutch urban historical topographies would have agreed. The first two of these books, which discuss the city and its history in a large number of facets, were published in the 1610s. Appearances are the focus of much of their atten- tion, as is the underlying history. The impetus came from the two leading cities of the recently established Republic: Leiden with its influential university and Amsterdam with its busy overseas trade. In 1611 the scholar Johannes Isacius Pontanus (1571-1639) published an erudite description of Amsterdam in Latin. His book contained many references to authorities from antiquity and numerous quotations from other sources.

Three years later, in 1614, he published a translation in Dutch. That same year a Descrip- tion of the City of Leiden (Beschrijvinge der stad Leyden) appeared. The text was written and pub- lished by the publisher, bookseller and historian Jan Orlers (1570-1646). This was the first urban historical topography to be published originally in Dutch.

Orlers and Pontanus initiated a genre that was to become very popular in the early modern period. During the seventeenth century no less than sixteen descriptions of cities were published that followed their example. Most concerned the cities in the dominant province of Holland. Amsterdam was well ahead, with six urban topogra- phies, whilst other cities followed at a considerable distance: Dordrecht with three de- scriptions, Haarlem and Leiden each with two, Delft, Heusden and Rotterdam with just one each. Outside of the province of Holland, only two cities had their historical topography published, but they were located in the so-called Generality Lands, gov- erned by the States-General in The Hague in Holland. Especially in Amsterdam, where the city council decided in 1662 to enlarge the city and complete its ring of canals, the 1660s and 1670s represented a peak in the production of such texts. This was also the period in which elaborate wall maps of many of the Republic’s cities were produced.

All these books had a common approach. They were written in Dutch, they were

several hundreds of pages long, and their focus was entirely on a single city. Further-

more, they should be distinguished from the urban histories that offered a chronologi-

cal narration of the city’s past. These histories usually carried titles that contain words

such as ‘chronicle’ or ‘history’, whilst the urban historical topographies were mostly

labelled as a ‘description’. The urban historical topographies typically discussed the

city in a large number of different respects in a thematically structured account. Gen-

erally, their material was divided over three books, containing a chronological history,

a historical topography, and an explanation of the form of government. Jan Orlers, for

example, discussed the topography of Leiden in his first book. He described the loca-

tion of the city in its surrounding area, and he continued with a chronologically con-

3 4 8 s u m m a r y

structed narrative on its urban development from the foundation of the city to its most recent enlargement. A thorough discussion of the ecclesiastical and secular buildings and institutions followed, including their history and relevant documents. He con- cluded his topographical book with a discussion of the city’s university, its economic life, and its many famous men. In his second book Orlers gave a chronological history, and in the third he discussed its administration, with numerous quotes from the privi- leges granted by the counts of Holland, and by-laws decreed by the local authorities, as well as lengthy lists of the city’s councillors and other officials. This third book he had planned in 1614 but he did not produce it until the second edition of his book in 1641.

There are a number of factors that encouraged the emergence of the new genre. The Dutch Republic, and the province of Holland in particular, were amongst the most urbanised regions in Europe. Here were a large number of relatively small cities lying in close proximity to one another. They formed a network of dependency, where the cities were often each other’s rivals. At the beginning of the seventeenth century these cities started to experience a stormy economic, demographic and topographic growth.

They also shared the sovereignty of the state, because in 1588 the Provincial States in the Northern Netherlands had assumed this sovereignty, and the cities were well rep- resented in the Provincial States. The enormous growth, the need to justify their newly acquired political influence, and the drive to give expression to a growing sense of civic pride are some of the factors that explain the emergence of the new genre.

These city descriptions were published for a relatively small readership, located for the most part in the city itself and consisting of the reasonably well-to-do (the prosper- ous burghers) and the echelon of families involved in the city’s administration. Most authors belonged to these groups themselves. Their books were fairly expensive and the average number of copies printed does not seem to have exceeded much more than 200. (It has been calculated that in this period a publication needed a circulation of at least 1,000 copies to be financially viable.) Furthermore, the authors often addressed their fellow citizens directly. They even defended the detailed nature of their accounts by pointing to their readership: the city’s inhabitants would enjoy detailed accounts of topics that were of no interest to outsiders, who were therefore advised to skip pas- sages with too much detail. This indicates that a readership outside of the city was in- tended as well. Some authors even saw their books as promotional material for urban trade and industry, but given the number of copies that were printed such a readership was necessarily limited.

Four Disciplines

The genre rests on four conceptual foundations. First, Dutch urban historical topo- graphies were part of the tradition of chorography, an interdisciplinary genre that stem- med from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanism. Chorography (derived from the Greek word choros, meaning a land, country or place) can be defined in two ways.

First, the term denotes a description of a region or a specific location, in any case not a

f o u r d i s c i p l i n e s 3 4 9

description of the earth as a whole (geography) or as part of the cosmos (cosmography).

Secondly, chorography implies a certain approach towards its topic: it entails giving a highly detailed description, and applying a mixture of historical and geographical information. It was therefore part of the broader disciplines of both geography and history writing. This interdisciplinary co-operation could veer towards one approach or the other, and accordingly it could have a greater preoccupation with history and antiquarian research, or with geography and cartography. From this point of view, I have identified three different roads that converge in the crossroads that constitute Dutch chorography. There is a ‘Junian’ chorography – after the scholar Hadrianus Ju- nius (1511-1575) who compiled a chorography of Holland under the title Batavia (1588) – which is predominantly textual and that tends towards an antiquarian approach.

There is a more general and all-encompassing ‘Guicciardinian’ chorography – after the Italian-born Antwerp merchant Lodovico Guiccardini (1521-1589) who published an influential Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567) – which is also primarily textual but is less inclined towards the antiquarian quest for trustworthy sources and more towards a panegyric approach. Lastly, we can discern an ‘Ortelian’ geography – after the Ant- werp creator of the first modern atlas, Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) – closely related to the Guicciardinian approach, but in which not text but map serves as the main bearer of information.

Secondly, the seventeenth-century descriptions of cities were steeped in the classical tradition of urban encomia, that is: the rhetorical praise of cities. In the Northern Nether- lands, poetry praising cities became popular in the sixteenth century, but it wasn’t un- til the years around 1600 that independently published, lengthy city poems in the trad- ition of the classical encomium were published. The authors followed the rhetorical principles that were developed in antiquity, but adapted them to the demands of their own time. My discussion is based on an in-depth analysis of three lengthy city poems by the virtually unknown Cornielie Brandt on Leiden (1594), by the Reformed minis- ter-to-be Samuel Ampzing (1590-1632) on Haarlem (1616), and by the future town sec- retary and councillor Cornelis Schaghen (1599-1665) on Alkmaar (1621). I demonstrate that the poets strove to present a picture that was as positive as possible, consisting of general impressions and a number of positive characteristics that were – important- ly – never developed in detail. The authors were by no means concerned with a his- toriographical pursuit of objectivity in which their pronouncements would be sub- stantiated by evidence drawn from appropriate sources. Nor did they emphasize the appearance of the city and its buildings. They focussed on the moral excellence of its inhabitants. The ethical profile of these inhabitants was an important feature. Often, the citizens were depicted as courageous, especially as proven by their behaviour dur- ing the tumultuous events of the Dutch Revolt. They were also described as economi- cally astute, and as paragons of both individual wisdom (because of their achievements in the arts and sciences) and civic wisdom (because they were ruled by a just adminis- tration and they had a well organised system of social care).

Thirdly, travel methods or arts of travel (‘ars apodemica’) influenced the make-up of ur-

ban topographies. This kind of treatise was developed in the late sixteenth century in

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the wake of Petrus Ramus’s revolutionary ideas on education. Travel methods were mainly written for young men undertaking their grand tour, and sought to ensure that they would put the educational aspects above the recreational ones. Furthermore, they aimed at systematizing the gathering and representation of new information about the world, by giving the traveller advice on what to observe, how to make notes, and what to put in their travel accounts. Travel methods therefore presented the travel- ler with descriptive schemata. These could take the form of the dichotomous tree dia- grams that were so popular in Ramism.

The schemata were partly based on the rhetorical model used in the urban encomia but adapted to their new function. Just as in the encomia, the travel methods took the distinction between the land and the people as its basis. After an account of the city’s location in its surrounding area, one could discuss the city’s name and the story of its foundation, as well as its further growth and development. Next were the public buildings and institutions, subdivided into ecclesiastical and secular. Finally, the form of government was to be discussed. This included (1) the urban administration – for many writers of travel methods the most important topic –, (2) the educational system and the artists and scholars that were born in the city or had worked there, and (3) the customs of the people, including their economic activities. There are some striking dif- ferences between the travel methods and the urban encomia. First, travel methods ex- pected objectively determinable data such as geographical coordinates or the distanc- es to other cities and places. Secondly, they put more emphasis on the description of buildings and places of interest, and they divided these into ecclesiastical and secular institutions. Finally, the descriptive schemata in travel methods pay little attention to the superior and virtuous character of the populace, but focus on useful information on administrative, economic and ethnographic aspects.

Although this paradigm was developed for use by young men on their grand tour, an analysis of passages from their travel accounts reporting on their visits to Paris shows that by and large they did not use it. The similarities of the schema with the urban his- torical topographies, however, are striking, although the authors brought certain as- pects to the fore – such as the urban administration – and added a chronological his- tory of the city. Indeed, as we have seen, topography, history and administration were grosso modo the main topics in the urban descriptions.

Presenting evidence from trustworthy sources, a practice stemming from the discipline of

antiquarian history writing, is the fourth and last major influence on Dutch urban to-

pographies. The author-researchers aimed for a comprehensive and detailed narrative,

to such an extent that some of their books acquired the character of a reference work

for councillors and civil servants. Collecting these source materials, however, was a dif-

ficult task. The archives of the local authorities were not open to the public and many

relevant documents were in private hands. It was therefore difficult both to trace the

sources, and to consult them. Local authorities were usually unwilling to grant per-

mission for reasons of secrecy. Furthermore, they did not play a role in initiating these

works. Urban topographies appeared under the responsibility of the author and did

not receive an official imprimatur. It was not until the eighteenth century that the first

f o u r d i s c i p l i n e s 3 5 1

official urban historians were appointed.

An in-depth analysis of Orlers’ considerable collection of notes and documents, in- cluding a reconstruction of the materials that no longer survive, shows how essential but problematic such research was. This collection has never been studied. At the start of his project in the early 1610s, Jan Orlers did not have much material at his dispos- al that came directly from the official administration. He relied heavily on the help of the antiquary, Petrus Scriverius (1576-1660) and the notes of his uncle, the late Jan van Hout (1542-1609). Van Hout had been the city’s secretary. During this employment he had thoroughly restructured the current and non-current records, which were kept at the town hall. He had also made many historical notes. The information that Orlers took from these papers he later supplemented with newly obtained data. By this time he was a member of the local council, to which he was appointed in 1618, and even served as mayor and alderman. In as far as the material that has survived allows us to draw conclusions, Orlers seems to have obtained his information from fellow council- lors and only to a very small extent from the records at the town hall, where he some- times paid a clerk for copying documents. Further information he acquired from in- terviews and conversations with people in key positions throughout the town. This sometimes yielded documents, inscriptions, facts and insights, but often nothing at all. These findings support the idea that most urban historical topographies were in- dividual undertakings that depended on help from well-disposed informers, even if (as in Orlers’ case) the author himself was part of the ruling elite and had a seat in the council or its executive board.

Finally, Orlers’ papers enable us to reconstruct Jan van Hout’s historical project. My research shows that Van Hout had been planning a complete urban historical topogra- phy cum diplomatic edition of source material. By the time of his death in 1609 he had already collected an extensive amount of information and written some of the text for publication. Van Hout’s book would have been a ground-breaking publication, but he only managed to print the first part of the first book on his own printing press at the town hall. The City of Leiden’s Book of Offices (Der stadt Leyden dienst-bouc) from 1602 was to start with a history of the topographical development of the city, but only the first part of this history was actually printed in his book. This topographical history, interspersed with very conscientious editions of relevant documents from the city’s non-current records, would have been followed by long lists of all councillors and functionaries as from the moment their offices had been created – a book of offices in the sense that the term was used in the Leiden administration. The second part of this Book of Offices was to have contained a strictly chronological history of the city. We can very clearly dis- cern here the seeds of the later urban historical topographies of Orlers and Pontanus.

The history of the genre in the Dutch Republic, in as far as these texts were published,

starts with Van Hout.

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A Method

How did these four disciplines converge in urban historical topographies? In a general sense, geography and history were complementary disciplines that had close connec- tions to travel and travel literature. Autopsy (eyewitness observation) and educational goals were central to this relationship. In descriptive geography, empirical observation slowly became the norm, and travel – of course – was an important source of empiri- cal information. At the same time, in history writing the idea emerged that an author ought to base his narrative on sources that were written by eyewitnesses of the events, thus highlighting a comparable emphasis on autopsy. For these reasons, the three gen- res discussed fell under the epistemological concept of historia, which referred to the idea of obtaining and communicating empirical information.

Furthermore, these three genres aimed at giving moral lessons, or examples to fol- low or avoid; descriptive geography, history writing, and travel accounts were thus of a didactic nature. They shared this educational purpose with the urban encomia and the travel methods, which delivered the rhetorical models that could be used in the differ- ent forms of chorography. There were important differences between the two models, as dicussed above. Both in the choice of their topics and in the way to discuss them, urban historical topographies conformed to the travel methods rather than the urban encomia. After all, travel methods focused on providing the reader with useful and truthful information rather than well-phrased praises without well-founded evidence.

The descriptive models found in travel methods thus determined the choice of top- ics as well as the detailed and accurate nature of the narrative of urban historical topog - raphies. Their ultimate goal was twofold: to provide moral lessons and to praise the city, a goal which was – of course – similar to the aim of the urban encomia.

How this could work in the practice of urban historical topographies is shown by the first of two case studies: an analysis of Dirck van Bleyswijck’s Description of the City of Delft (Beschry vinge der stadt Delft) published between 1667 and 1680. Van Bleyswijck (1639- 1681) explicitly conformed to the tradition initiated by Orlers and Pontanus, but more clearly than that of his predecessors, his work illustrates the extent to which these books are located at the multidisciplinary intersection of history writing, mathemati- cal and descriptive geography, encomiastic literature and travel methods. First, there were clear connections with the mathematical-geographical discipline of cartography in the form of an elaborate wall map of Delft. This so-called figurative map (figuratieve kaart) was produced between 1675 and 1678 under the leadership of Van Bleyswijck.

There are striking similarities between the map, which consists of many pictorial and even textual components that could be put together in various ways, and the structure and content of his historical topography. Furthermore, a large number of the engrav- ings made for the wall map were also used as illustrations in Van Bleyswijck’s book.

Secondly, on his figurative map Van Bleyswijck quoted two laudatory poems on the

city of Delft that had been composed specifically for this purpose. He himself added a

concise description in prose that followed the guidelines of the urban encomium, at

the end of which he referred the reader to his far more elaborate Description of the City of

a c o m p a r i s o n 3 5 3

Delft for more information. Thirdly, the genesis of his book on Delft was influenced to a large extent by travel and travel method. At the time of writing, Van Bleyswijck was a young man in his mid-twenties who was about to round off his university studies with a grand tour through France and Italy. In his lengthy prefaces, Van Bleyswijck made it clear that his work was inspired by his preparations for this grand tour: he thoroughly prepared it by reading historical and topographical works on both foreign countries and his own, but due to a severe illness he had had to postpone his venture. Instead, he compiled a description of Delft, using many of the notes he had made during his preparatory readings. It is therefore not surprising that the structure of his book con- forms to the descriptive paradigm found in travel methods. This is confirmed by the addition of a remarkable table of contents in the form of a Ramist tree diagram, which as we have seen was a popular method in the art of travel. The buyer could insert this General Table of the Description of the City of Delft (Generale tafel over de beschrijvinge der stadt Delft) as a large, foldable plate into the end of his copy of the book, or cut it into pieces and insert them at the appropriate places.

Lastly, in one of the cartouches on this General table Van Bleiswijck wrote that order is the mother of memory (‘ordo est mater memoriae’). This ‘order’ referred to a humanist way of reading and writing and to an art of mnemonics going back to the work of Cic- ero, both of which were based on commonplaces (loci communes). Commonplaces were empty categories of information that could be filled during the process of reading in order to support our fallible memory. Notes were gathered in a commonplace-book and thematically structured. Keeping such a topically organised notebook was one of the cornerstones of humanist education at Latin schools and university. It was also the preferred method of the arts of travel. It is noteworthy that Van Bleyswijck explained this procedure of commonplacing, which he used when he was researching his grand tour and his description of Delft, on several occasions. It is also noteworthy that he ap- plied it in a Ramist way, which reminds us again of the Ramist nature of most travel methods: he continuously subdivides the categories of information into subcatego- ries – a procedure that he uses to structure his book, and that he visually represents in the General Table. Ultimately, this method of commonplacing, which uses informa- tion categories derived from the ‘apodemic’ arts, had a didactic purpose: it was meant to support the reader’s memory and to facilitate the application in daily life of the les- sons learnt.

A Comparison

A second case study situates the seventeenth-century urban topographies in an inter- national context, and highlights the educational and laudatory aims of these books.

It compares the first urban topography written in Dutch – Jan Orlers’ description of

Leiden (1614) – with the first urban topography written in English – John Stow’s A Sur-

vay of London (1598). Both books belonged to a national chorographic tradition, but the

English tradition took a different form. Stow’s examples had their roots in the anti-

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quarian tour, going back to the travels of John Leland in the 1530s and 1540s, whilst the chorographies in the Northern Netherlands tended towards a thematic descripti- on. Consequently, Stow described the city of London largely within the framework of a walk through its many boroughs, whilst Orlers chose a topically arranged narrative that was inspired by the travel methods. Using such a commonplace-based structure, Orlers highlighted the central points of the city’s self-image. This consisted of a num- ber of lieux de mémoire such as the city’s university, its textile industry, and the famous siege by Habsburg troops in 1573-1574. These topics received ample attention in text and illustration. Also part and parcel of this urban self-image was a favourable ethical profile of the Leiden citizenry, which, as my analysis has shown, emphasised the cardi- nal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, and the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this analysis. First, there was a lesson to be learnt. Orlers called on the Leiden population to apply the virtue of charity, which he related to ideas of justice and the common good of the urban community. Secondly, the ethical profile was not inspired by the travel methods, but by the urban encomia.

Indeed, although there was scope for criticism of past and present situations, one of the aims of urban historical topographies was borrowed from these encomia: praising the city and its inhabitants. Orlers stated this explicitly in his preface: he wanted ‘to de- scribe, praise and glorify’ his ‘fatherly city of Leiden’.

The urban topographies thus followed the travel methods in their choice of top- ics, in the structure of their narrative and in their detailed and veracious descriptive approach, but their ultimate aim was to provide moral lessons and to praise the city.

2 Orlers, Beschrijvinge (1614), fol. *2r: ‘omme mijne Vaderlicke Stadt Leyden […] te beschrijven, te loven ende prijsen’.