The eighteenth-century Dutch Republic and its inhabitants in the eyes of Teodor Anzelm Dzwonkowski

Teodor Anzelm Dzwonkowski was an average-educated nobleman who left Poland at the end of the 18th century in search of wealth. In Amsterdam, he enlisted in the army and, with the rank of corporal in the infantry, travelled to the Dutch East Indies (1787–1793) — the account of this expedition forms the main part of his memoirs written years later. The article shows how Dzwonkowski viewed the Netherlands, its people, and the way the Dutch East India Company (whose officials he considered to be an extension of the arm of the Republic’s government) operated. His remarks concerning them are present in a small part of his diary (and, in addition, not always expressed directly), because the author’s main interest was in the exoticism of southern Africa and the Far East, and in the Poles he met during his travels. Dzwonkowski was impressed by the management and wealth of the United Provinces, especially by the ease of making a career, although he could hardly be called uncritical: he also saw the dark sides of the local reality, including the loosening of moral norms and corruption. Interestingly, despite his noble background, he seems to be free of state and religious bias against the people of the United Provinces. His view of the Dutch does not differ from the way they were described by British tourists visiting the Dutch Republic during the Stuart Period.

Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety

This Introduction opens with an account of the consecration of Exeter College Chapel in 1624 and explains why the ceremony cannot accurately be described as either ‘Laudian’ or ‘Puritan,’ since it reflects theological emphases associated with both groups. It goes on to establish that the historiography of the Early Stuart period has generally acknowledged the presence of English clergy who were committed to both an orthodox Reformed understanding of grace and the established polity of the Church, although no dedicated analysis of their religious tradition has been undertaken before the present study. The ten significant Reformed Conformist theologians who will be the focus of the study are then introduced, and the personal links between them set out.

Translation and Genettean Hypertextuality: Catherine Magdalen Evelyn, Catherine of Bologna, and English Franciscan Textual Production, 1618–40

Drawing on the ideas of Gérard Genette, this article argues for the value of reading translations as “hypertexts,” or as works grafted onto earlier texts (“hypotexts”), on the basis of the intriguing case study of The Admirable Life of the Holy Virgin S. Catharine of Bologna (1621), translated by Catherine Magdalen Evelyn of the Gravelines Poor Clares. Little-known today despite Evelyn’s importance as the most prolific female translator of the early Stuart period, this publication sublimates the voice of the translator through its laconic paratextual materials and its misattribution of Evelyn’s work to another nun. In spite of this carefully engineered authorial opacity, the stakes of Evelyn’s translation become clearer when it is read as part of a hypertextual system of Franciscan writings published in English, French, Italian, and Portuguese over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An analysis of how her text is grafted onto this series of hypotexts through bibliography, intertextuality, and translation results in a detailed, albeit speculative, account of Evelyn’s motivations for reading, translating, and publishing The Admirable Life. This seemingly modest publication is thus revealed as a rich hypertext that participated in a wider European project to chronicle the history of the Franciscan order. A concluding discussion of hypertextuality in early modern England briefly gestures more broadly toward the relevance of this method for studies of Renaissance literature.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the qualifications that the book has made on the modernity of the 1688–9 revolution and of chronological perception in the late Stuart period. It also attempts to resolve the paradox that people with a largely static view of time supported and implemented a large number of profound changes during the revolution and its aftermath. It suggests that static chronology could, in some circumstances, demand radical action, and ends with the suggestion that we need a far more subtle account of changes in chronological awareness and their impact on human responses.

Introduction

The introduction places the controversy in its historiographical context and it explains its relative neglect by historians of the Tudor/Stuart period. It then moves to connect the controversy with its immediate and longer-term contexts, and it tries to explain why the topics at the centre of the debate had long-term resonance through the rest of the post-Reformation period.

Parchment, Pamphlets, and Plays: Into the Early Stuart Period (c. 1580–1641)

Chapter 2 begins by exploring the literary fate of George Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey from the time of its composition at the end of Queen Mary’s reign through its first appearance in print, in a highly expurgated, theologically and politically partisan edition of 1641. Both manuscripts and printed editions of the Life are analyzed in detail. But the chapter’s broader concern is the representation of Wolsey under the first two Stuart monarchs. The years leading up to the outbreak of the English civil wars witnessed the publication of numerous texts featuring the cardinal, including several pamphlets critical of the churchmanship of Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. The chapter considers these popular publications alongside early Stuart dramas, especially William Shakespeare’s and John Fletcher’s King Henry VIII, as well as learned texts like the church histories of Francis Godwin (1630) and Edward, Lord Herbert (written 1639, published 1649).