Jacobus Capitein: Champion for Slavery and Resisting Mimic?

Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein (1717-1747) was a man of many firsts-the first black student of theology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, the first black minister ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands, the author of the first Fante/Mfantse-Dutch Grammar in Ghana as well as the first translator of the Ten Commandments, Twelve Articles of Faith and parts of the Catechism into Fante/Mfantse. However, he is also remembered as the first African to argue in writing that slavery was compatible with Christianity in the public lecture that he delivered at Leiden in 1742 on the topic, De Servitute Libertati Christianae Non Contraria. The Latin original was soon translated into Dutch and became so popular in the Netherlands that it was reprinted five times in the first year of publication. This contribution will pose the question: Was Capitein a sell-out who soothed the Dutch colonial conscience as he argued with scholarly vigour in his dissertation that the Bible did not prohibit slavery and that it was therefore permissible to continue with the practice in the eighteenth century; or was he resisting the system by means of mimicry due to his hybrid identity - as an African with a European education - who wanted to spread the Christian message and be an educator of his people?

Scholars and Literati at the University of Leiden (1575–1800)

This note is a summary description of the set of scholars and literati who taught at the University of Leiden from its inception in 1575 to the eve of the Industrial Revolution (1800).

The gender system of Durop

This paper presents an analysis of grammatical gender and agreement in Durop, a language of the Upper Cross subgroup of Cross River. The data used are drawn from Kastelein (Kastelein, Bianca. 1994. A phonological and grammatical sketch of DuRop. Leiden: University of Leiden Scriptie), whose analysis treats gender as the singular – plural pairings of nouns different from the present approach. Kastelein identifies eight concord classes (agreement classes); these form the basis of gender in Durop in the present analysis; as many as 24 agreement classes are identified here. The various systems comprising nominal classification, agreement and gender in Durop are compared and discussed. The agreement system comprises three subsystems of differing numbers of agreement classes.

‘Haar geheele geest ademt deftigheid en waardigheid’

Joannes Matthias Schrant (1783-1866) became the first professor of Dutch Language at the University of Ghent from 1818 to 1830 and was appointed professor at the University of Leiden from 1831 to 1853. Several scholars of Dutch studies have discussed Schrant’s scientific work and concluded that he was an unimportant and uninteresting figure, mainly for his insignificant role in the development of Dutch studies, because he only built upon the scientific ideas of Matthijs Siegenbeek and did not offer his own insights on language and literature. In this article, I adjust this negative view of Schrant as an insignificant figure by studying his scholarly work in the context of the ‘cultivation of culture’ (). Schrant was a typical cultivator of national culture: his speeches, literary histories, and editorial work show he was an active scholar who disseminated, sustained, and extended existing ideas about national culture. He did not just disseminate these ideas in his function of professor, but also as a member of the literary societies Regat Prudentia Vires and the Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde, and as a public intellectual.

The fictions of corporate taxation and three ideas to make it fit for the challenges of the digital era

During the International Conference organized by the Institute of Public Administration and Civil Service of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, the author presented a research project he was carrying out and presenting at several international institutions (among others, the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, and the Lomonosov State University, also in the Russian Federation). The work is still in progress and is expected to be completed not earlier than 2022, in the form of one or more publishable articles. The presented article is brief report on the presentation held. Firstly, the author discusses the reasons why the solution to the taxation problems does not lie so much in redesigning the allocation rules and adopting new anti-avoidance measures in corporate income taxes. In a second part, the author argues that solutions may arise from reforming existing indirect taxes, based on the production, sale, use or ownership of goods and services and explores the possibilities to solve the current corporate taxation problems.

Morpho-syntactic Variation in Romance v: A Micro-parametric Approach

This paper discusses a series of morpho-syntactic properties of Romance languages that have the functional projection vP as its locus, showing a continuum that goes from strongly configurational Romance languages to partially configurational Romance languages. It is argued that v-related phenomena like Differential Object Marking (DOM), participial agreement, oblique clitics, auxiliary selection, and others align in a systematic way when it comes to inflectional properties that involve Case-agreement properties. In order to account for the facts, I argue for a micro-parametric approach whereby v can be associated with an additional projection subject to variation (cf. D’Alessandro, Merging Probes. A typology of person splits and person-driven differential object marking. Ms., University of Leiden, 2012; Microvariation and syntactic theory. What dialects tell us about language. Invited talk given at the workshop The Syntactic Variation of Catalan and Spanish Dialects, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, June 26–28, 2013; Ordóñez, Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan. In Sergio Baauw, Frank AC Drijkoningen & Manuela Pinto (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2005: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’, Utrecht, 8–10 December 2005, 259–280. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). I label such projection “X,” arguing that its feature content and position varies across Romance. More generally, the present paper aims at contributing to our understanding of parametric variation of closely related languages by exploiting the intuition, embodied in the so-called Borer-Chomsky Conjecture, that linguistic variation resides in the functional inventory of the lexicon.

Jacob Arminius

This chapter surveys the works of Jacob Arminius, a figure infrequently associated with covenant theology. Through his labors at the University of Leiden, Arminius and his colleagues continued to develop the covenant of works based upon a number of different texts and thus acted as a dissemination point for the doctrine. But the chapter also coordinates Arminius’s doctrine with the formulations of his colleagues at Leiden, Franciscus Gomarus, Francis Junius, and Lucas Trelcatius. Arminius’s doctrine was common and relatively uncontroversial. Instead, later Reformed theologians critiqued his theology because they believed his doctrine of the covenant of grace too closely resembled the covenant of works. Later theologians also critiqued Arminius’s understanding of the precise nature of Adam’s natural state, namely, that he received the supernatural grace of God.

Cerita Panji, Memory of The World, dan Pembelajaran Vocabulary di Perguruan Tinggi

Cerita Panji adalah satu-satunya karya sastra asli Indonesia yang telah tersebar dan terkenal di seluruh Asia Tenggara sejak abad ke-15. Pada 30 Oktober 2017 cerita ini ditetapkan sebagai Memory of the World oleh UNESCO. Penelitian ini bertujuan mendeskripsikan teks-teks berbahasa Inggris apa saja yang muncul diseputar diusulkan dan ditetapkannya Cerita Panji sebagai Memory of the World dan bagaimana memanfaatkanya sebagai pembelajaran vocabulary di Perguruan Tinggi. Dari penelitian ini diketahui bahwa teks-teks berbahasa Inggris yang muncul berasal dari laman UNESCO, dari surat kabar Jakarta Post, dari laman University of Leiden, dan dari Southeast Studies. Cara pembelajarannya adalah dengan menggunakan model pembelajaran Task-Based Language Teaching.

Business Rescue Recommendations

These recommendations are the result of a comparative and normative research, recorded in an Instrument, which has been developed under the auspices of the European Law Institute’s ‘Rescue of Business in Insolvency Law’ project (2014–2107), co-funded by the European Union, and drafted by Professor Dr em Bob Wessels, University of Leiden, the Netherlands, and Professor Dr Stephan Madaus, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.