Language as an Object of Empirical Study in the Dutch Republic

This article takes a dictionary by Joos Lambrecht, dating from 1546, as its point of departure. It argues that this dictionary, as well as other dictionaries and treatises produced in the wake of Lambrecht’s, did more than teach their young audience in the Dutch Republic the meaning of existing words and thus transfer cultural and linguistic knowledge as was already understood. They also taught youngsters how to obtain (new) knowledge from their own empirical observations. The Dutch books on morphology, orthography, phonology, and grammar – produced in large numbers – offered their readers the opportunity to use their own language as an object for empirical study. By charting the dynamics of language, knowledge, and empirical training, it is argued that the Dutch language was, for a short time, treated by writers not merely as a means to express and share knowledge, but also as an object of study in itself. What might have formed an accessible training ground for the development of skills in empirical observation and especially self-reflexive practice, was, however, soon snuffed out by a second wave of tutorial books which emphasised the prescriptive over the explorative.

A Network of Iconography

This article demonstrates how an expanding population of artists in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was connected artistically, and how such connections were translated into artistic innovations that fuelled the rapid flourishing of Dutch arts and the art market. It does so by conceptualising and visualising an art-historical network of iconography that, for the first time, connects artists not through social relations but through shared subject matters. Using network analysis, this study revisits the definition of product innovations used by the socio-economic art historian John Michael Montias. It further demonstrates that painters’ choices of subject matter, styles, and qualities were often unrelated while artists’ thematic connections had little to do with their social relations and the location of their residence. Rather, the choices of subject matter were subject to market forces and rooted deeply in an artist’s ability, ambition, and marketing strategy. Lastly, this article visualises the artistic network implied in Rembrandt’s rivals by Eric Jan Sluijter, which helps explain the breakaway success of the Dismissal of Hagar paintings.

Kindled by Catastrophe

Fire disasters were a major threat to eighteenth-century villages and towns. Following such conflagrations, writers, artists, and publishers were eager to represent the disaster in great detail. Printed poems and pamphlets did not only describe the flames’ destruction, but also put great emphasis on the solidarity during and after the catastrophe. The risks of looting and social disorder were acknowledged by authors, but received little attention overall. Instead, poets and writers focused on acts of care and charity in four phases of fire disaster management: firefighting, immediate relief, collecting for reconstruction, and remembrance. While the first two phases were characterised by local and regional solidarity, the latter two could encompass – in the imagination of the authors – the whole Dutch nation. Writers appealed to faith and nationhood to convince people to make charitable donations. Afterwards, they celebrated and remembered the generosity of various communities. This article concludes that authors appropriated destroyed lives and buildings to construct identities and solidarity.

A Spectral Spectacle

After Amsterdam’s late medieval Catholic monasteries were surrendered to the Protestant government in 1578, four of these properties were converted into an orphanage, mental asylum, and gender-specific reformatories respectively before the turn of the century. Portals with Dutch Mannerist expressions were installed at the principal entrances as a publicly visible feature of modernisation for the repurposed complexes. This essay is a study of these architectural objects and their socio-political value for the city’s philanthropic campaign that affirmed middle-class power. It argues that the portals, completed with narrative relief panels and didactic inscriptions, were a means for Amsterdam’s authorities to redefine the spectacle of social marginality. Once a concrete sight of panhandlers and vagrants occupying the urban landscape, to the general population underclass visibility became an abstract image of civic discipline. Such an image enabled sequestered and disappeared lives to reappear, with a spectral quality integral to Foucault’s analysis of modern society’s compulsion to stow away indigent bodies. Considering the seventeenth-century Dutch moral geography of moderating wealth through philanthropy, such a ‘spectral spectacle’ paralleled the Baroque theatricality of Counter-Reformation Rome as a spatial experience that advanced a more secular mode of devotion to the community.