Het Boek. Serie 3. Jaargang 36

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Leonard Forster
An unique copy on vellum of Constantijn Huygens's poem on the new town hall of Amsterdam, 1657

In 1961 I was privileged to spend four weeks searching for German seventeenth Century literature in various Czechoslovak libraries, the results of which I have published elsewhere¹. In the course of my search I visited the old Lyceal Library at Levoča (German Leutschau, Hungarian Löcse) in the Zips in Eastern Slovakia (Slovak Spiš, Hungarian Szepes)². The Lyceum was a Lutheran institution of higher education founded in the sixteenth Century³; its library consists of some 20 000 volumes housed in the protestant church in the charge of the pastor, Dr Jurkovič, now under the supervision of the city archivist, Dr Niederland. It proved extremely rewarding for my purposes and I was able to spend two days in it. At the last moment, just before I had to leave for Prague, as I was rapidly looking through a quarto volume of German and Latin theological tracts bound in vellum over pasteboard⁴, I realised that the vellum of the binding bore a printed text. The text was evidently printed on the rough ‘hair’ side of the vellum, and the binder had understandably arranged it so that the smooth ‘skin’ side, which is more agreeable to handle, was outside. The text was visible in looking-glass fashion through the vellum. I would not have troubled with it in the few minutes that

1 ‘German Baroque Literature in Czechoslovak Libraries’, German Life & Letters April 1962, p. 210 ff.

2 Readers of this Journal will I trust excuse the apparent pedantry involved in giving place-names in three languages; in fact, the literature dealing with this part of the world uses all three names fairly indiscriminately and they are not always easy to identify. I hope in this way to save others some of the trouble I have myself incurred.

3 For those who - unlike myself - can read Hungarian, there is a history of the Lyceum by Demkó-Kupecz, A löcsei egykori ág. ev. gimn. története, Löcse-Leutschau 1896, and a standard work on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the Zips by Gy. Bruckner, A reformáció és ellenreformáció története a Szepességen, Budapest 1922, neither of which I have been able to consult.

4 Press-mark: Levoča, Knižnica evangelického cárkévného sboru, býv. lyceálna, 13885.

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remained to me had I not recognised a word standing alone at the end; it read: Constanter in small capitals. This could mean one thing and one thing only - a text by Constantijn Huygens. I therefore devoted what time there was to deciphering it with the aid of a small hand-mirror.

It was evidently verse, fortunately in large and luxurious roman print which made it relatively easy to read. It was apparent that only half of it, at most, was there, and that the top of the binding cut through one line of verse horizontally. The vellum was loose at this point and I was able to lift it at the edge and satisfy myself that this was so, and to glimpse the actual print on the ‘hair’ side. The print ran horizontally right across the spine of the book and only reached about half way down; it seemed to have consisted of a shortish poem printed on a piece of vellum of more than folio size, well centred with wide margins, which the binder had cut in half. I read as follows:

Des Aerdtrijcks uytterste niet hebben te verduuren
En werdt het noodig dat het [..]gende verschijn
Om 't achste Wonder-wercks nakomeling te zijn
God uwer Vad'ren God, God uwer kind'ren Vader
God soo na by u, zij die kind'ren soo veel nader
Dat hare welvaert noch een Huys bouwt en besit
Daer by dit nieuwe s[..] als toude stond by dit.

Constanter

Not only was time short, but the light was very poor; I cannot vouch for the literal accuracy of my transcription, especially as regards punctuation. The volume contains various items, which I had no time to record; Professor Josef Polišenský of Prague, who visited Levoča in the autumn of 1962, very kindly sent me some supplementary information about the volume which has been utilised in what follows.

I was able to identify the poem on my return to England as Huygens' Geluck aende E.E. Heeren Regeerders van Amsterdam, in haer niewe Stadthuijs, written on January 10 1657 and printed by J.A. Worp in his edition of Huygens' works (volume VI page 108) after the poet's manuscript. Worp observes in a footnote that the poem was published as a broadsheet, and F. Vander Haeghen (Bibliotheca Belgica 1.13, H. 138) recorded one copy of the broadsheet, at that time (1880-90) in the private collection of Dr Unger at Rotterdam. This copy is no longer traceable; the Gemeente-Archief, Amsterdam, does however possess a copy, the provenance of which is unknown, which may perhaps be the copy from the Unger collection¹. The Amsterdam

1 I am most grateful to the staff of the Royal Library at the Hague for tracing this copy for me, and to the Gemeente-Archief, Amsterdam, for providing a photostat and supplementary information.

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copy is on paper; Worp and Vander Haeghen do not mention that the copy (or copies) they record were on vellum, so the presumption must be that they too were on paper.

The text of the Amsterdam copy of the broadsheet reads as follows:

Doorluchte Stichteren van 's Werelts Achtste Wonder,
Van soo veel steens om hoogh, op soo veel houts van onder,
Van soo veel kostelijcks soo konstelijck verwrocht,
Van soo veel heerlijckheyts tot soo veel nuts gebrocht:
God, die u macht en pracht met reden gaf te voegen,
God gev' u in 't Gebouw met reden en genoegen
Te toonen wie ghy zijt; en, daer ick 't al in sluyt,
Heyl zy daer eeuwig in, en onheyl eeuwig uyt.

Is 't oock soo voorgeschickt dat dese marm're muuren

Des Aerdtrijcks uytterste niet hebben te verduuren;
En werdt het noodig dat het negende verschijn,
Om 't achtste Wonders-werck nakomeling te zijn;
God, uwer Vad'ren God, God, uwer kind'ren Vader,
God, soo na by u, zy die kind'ren soo veel nader,
Dat hare welvaert noch een Huys bouw', en besit.
Daer by dit nieuwe sta, als 't oude stondt by dit.

Constanter

Tot Haerlem, Wt de Boeckdruckery van Pieter Casteleyn, 1657.

It seems that what is preserved at Levoča is a vellum copy of this broadsheet. It does not however seem to be identical in all points. Apart from differences which may be accounted for by my errors in reading under unfavourable conditions, it is noticeable that the piece of vellum on which it was printed was much larger than the paper copy in the Amsterdam Archives; this measures 26 × 30 cm; the overall measurements of the Levoča binding are 37 × 18,8 cm, and this can only represent half the original piece. Moreover, the printer's name, which in the paper copy comes under a rule no more than a centimetre and a half below Constanter, does not appear

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in the Levoča copy at all, though there is ample room for it as Constanter is about half way down the cover; there is also no sign of a rule. This would suggest that it was originally a presentation copy, on which the printer's name was omitted as being irrelevant to the occasion of the presentation - the more so, perhaps, as he was not even an Amsterdam printer¹.

Poems of this kind can only have been printed on vellum for specially favoured recipients, and one may well speculate on who they might have been. The poem is addressed to the Burgomasters of Amsterdam on a specially festal occasion, the opening of the new Town Hall. Miss Fremantle has well brought out the importance of this occasion, the personal interest which Huygens took in it and even the influence he had on the style of architecture of the new building. A copy of his poem in manuscript, set in an ebony frame, hung in the Burgomasters' council room in 1663; the verses were even graven in stone, of which there is a specimen in the Amsterdam Archives². It seems reasonable to suppose that there would have been copies printed on vellum for each of the Burgomasters themselves,

Ghy Heeren, die de stadt, gelyck vier hooftpylaeren,
Met raet en wysheid stut,

as Vondel wrote³. There were only four ‘hooftpylaeren’: Cornelis de Graef, Joan Huydecooper heer van Maersseveen, Joan van de Poll and Hendrik Dircksz. Spiegel. They were presumably the recipients of vellum copies; perhaps there was one for the Pensionary too. It seems unlikely that there can have been more than five copies in all on vellum, and this seems to be the only one which has survived, mutilated though it is; of the copies on paper, which must have been very much more numerous, only one, as we have seen, is still available. It seems improbable that any of the five eminent recipients disposed of his copy to a bookbinder. It seems more likely that this copy was discarded by the printer as waste because it had been spoilt in some way no longer discoverable - perhaps because the print should have been on the ‘skin’ side of the vellum - and came for this reason into the hands of the binder. But there is, as will be seen, no certainty that the book was bound in Holland.

The question of how this piece of vellum reached Slovakia cannot be solved on the information available. Many of the thirty-four

1 The circumstance that a poem so intimately concerned with the affairs of Amsterdam was printed at Haarlem leads Professor W. Gs. Hellinga to suggest to me that the extant paper copy may be a reprint. The circumstance that it contains one evident misprint (the full stop at the end of the last line but one should be a comma) lends colour to this suggestion.

2 Katharine Fremantle, The Baroque Town Hall of Amsterdam, Utrecht 1959, pp. 68 and 98; Worp. loc. cit.

3 Vondel, Werken (W.B.) vol. V, p. 860.

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pamphlets bound in it bear the signatures of either Daniel or Christoph Klesch, two brothers who were prominent in the literary life of the Zips in the seventeenth Century¹. The library contains a number of their works and they also contributed a good deal of quite accomplished verse to pamphlets on local births, deaths and marriages. They came from the town of Spišská Nová Ves (German Zipser Neudorf, but usually referred to by its Hungarian name of Igló, whence much confusion with Iglau-Jihlava in Moravia) a few miles from Levoča. Daniel was born in about 1620, studied in Strassburg and Wittenberg and was for more than ten years Lutheran pastor in Western Hungary on the borders of Austria, first at Sopron (Ödenburg) and later at Köszeg (Güns). Christoph was born in 1632, was at school at the Magdalenengymnasium at Breslau, and after studying at Wittenberg became pastor of Spišská Sobota (Hungarian Szepessi Szombáth, German Georgenberg) in 1661 and was an important figure in the life of the Lutheran church in the Zips. Both the brothers were forced to emigrate when the Counter-Reformation began to spread in Hungary; Daniel left Köszeg in 1673 for Jena and Christoph left Spišská Sobota for Wittenberg in 1674. Daniel held posts at Weissenfels and Heldrungen/Unstruth, travelled to Hamburg, Denmark and Sweden, and was later supported by Spener in Berlin, where he died in 1697. Christoph held posts in Jena, Tennstedt near Weimar, and finally from 1684 in Erfurt, where he died in 1704. Both brothers were members of Zesen's ‘Deutschgesinnte Genossenschaft’²; the library contains a four page pamphlet, Der lieblichen und löblichen Lorbern, wie auch weissen Lilien und Nägelein Danck-Geruch (Jena, Johann Jakob Bauhofer, 1678), in which Christoph Klesch and another Zipser, Philip Heutsch of Kirchdrauf (Sp. Podhradie), express their thanks to Zesen for their election to this society (press-mark 13847 no. 61). Despite this (rather tenuous) connexion with Zesen, there is nothing to show that either of the brothers spent any time in Holland. Unfortunately there is no name on the fly-leaf of the volume, nor is there any indication of who caused the pamphlets to be bound together, or at what time. Presumably Christoph came into possession of some at least of his brother's books after the latter's death in 1697; as the brothers seem to have been seldom together and emigrated to Germany independently, it is not very likely that Christoph would have had them before. This would suggest that the volume could not well have been bound before 1697, perhaps in Erfurt, as it contains pamphlets which belonged to both brothers. Christoph is said to have taken the

1 The best account of the brothers Klesch which is easily accessible is that in Zedler's Universal-Lexicon. Bruckner, op. cit., gives a more up-to-date account, for details from which I am indebted to Professor Polišenský.

2 Karl Goedeke, Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, Dresden 1887, vol. III, p. 17.

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archives of the protestant communities with him into exile; part of them were brought back to Levoča in 1775, and possibly some of his books came with them. Where the vellum copy of Huygens' broadsheet spent the intervening forty years between 1657 and 1697 it is impossible to guess; perhaps somewhere in Germany. It is even more unprofitable to speculate on what became of the other, top, half of the broadsheet but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that it may form the cover of another volume of tracts in the same library, also from the collection of Christoph Klesch.

Cambridge