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Dutch Humanists' Knowledge of America*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2011
Extract
Recent decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the need to study the impact of the New World on the Old, instead of the other way about. Yet surprisingly little is known about the whereabouts of books on America, or of atlasses and maps of this new world, in the libraries of European intellectuals from, say, 1500 until 1700 (the same holds true, incidentally, for texts about Asia). A possible explanation for this state of affairs might be that it is easier, although difficult enough, to compile a reliable bibliography of printed sources on America, as the splendid European Americana amply proves, than to ascertain what books figured in private libraries which are no longer intact. Furthermore, research into the private libraries of the past is still a somewhat modest sector of the province of intellectual history, in spite of the fact that Mario Schiff's brilliant study of the Marqués de Santillana's library dates from 1905 and that Henri-Jean Martin's seminal works have been published since 1958.
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- Historiography
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- Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1992
References
Notes
1 Alden, John ed., European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1776 (6 vols. New York 1980–1991).Google Scholar
2 Schiff, Mario, La bibliothèque du marquis de Santillane (Paris 1905)Google Scholar; Febvre, L. and Martin, H.-J., L'apparition du livre (Paris 1957).Google Scholar
3 Auction-catalogue of Professor Bonaventura Vulcanius (Leiden 1610).
4 Cf. Alden ed., European Americana I, 44–46 and 321–323.
5 We have examined 23 catalogues of 26 persons for the period 1599–1610; 14 of 19 persons for 1611–1620; 11 of 14 persons for 1621–1630; 28 of 28 persons for 1631–1640 and 38 of 41 persons for 1641–1650.
6 B. van Selm, Een menighte treffelijcke boecken. Nederlandse boekhandelscatalogi in het begin van de zeventiendc eeuw [A great number of excellent books. Booksellers' catalogues from the beginning of the seventeenth century] (Utrecht 1987) 20. This study received the Menno Hertzberger Prize for Bibliography for the triennium 1985–1989.
7 Cornelis Claesz, Amsterdam, catalogue from the end of 1603 or the beginning of 1604; 2 catalogues of Hieronymus Commelinus Heirs, Leiden, 1606 and 1607; Louis Elsevier, Leiden, 1606, and Broer Jansz, Amsterdam, ‘Catalogus universalis' from the years 1640 until 1652.
8 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Renaissance Thought. The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains (New York 1961) 3Google Scholar, reprinted in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton 1990) 2Google Scholar; Bolgar, R.R., The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (New York 1964) 365.Google Scholar
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19 Of the other 28 domiciles, 15 were located between Amsterdam and Rotterdam and 4 others in Zeeland; the rest were more peripheral.
20 For more details about this important bookseller: Van Selm, Een menighte treffelijcke boecken, Chapter 4, 174–230.
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33 We soon hope to publish an article about books on Asia in Dutch libraries from 1599 to 1700, on the basis of 212 auction-catalogues.
34 van Praag, J.A., La comedia espagnole aux Pays-Bas au XVIIe el au XVIIIe siecle (Amsterdam 1922)Google Scholar is still a fundamental study; Shannon, Robert M., Visions of the New World in the Drama of Lope de Vega (New York etc. 1989) 6–7.Google Scholar
35 J. Lechner, ‘La imagen de America: los atlas presentes en bibliotecas de los Paises Bajos 1550–1650’, Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispánica, forthcoming.
36 van Heukelom-Lamme, C.A. Siegenbeek, Album Scholasticum (Leiden 1941) 190–197.Google Scholar
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38 As for Rome, See Jaime González, La idea de Roma en la Historiografia Indiana (1492–1550) (Madrid 1981).
39 Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries, 202.
40 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Renaissance Thought II. Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York 1965) 5–6Google Scholar, reprinted in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton 1990) 5–6.
41 Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries, 375.
42 Ibidem, 506–541. The 12 Greek authors are: Aristotle, Euripides, Galen, Hippocrates, Homer, Isocrates, Josephus, Lucian, Plato, Plutarch, Sophocles and Xenophon. The 10 Latin authors are: Boethius, Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Seneca, Tacitus, Terence and Virgil.
43 On the basis of European Americana I, 1493–1600, we have counted 96 editions of works by Anghiera, Acosta, Cieza de León, Cortés, Oviedo, Lòpez de Gómara and Zárate.
44 The passage occurs in an appendix of the first Spanish translation of Bataillon's doctoral thesis Erasme et l'Espagne (Paris 1937): Erasmo y Espa˜ a (Mexico City 1950) 817.