De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2003

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Summaries

Peter J.A.N. Rietbergen
De prophets of Jan Nomsz (1738-1803): Zoroaster and Mohammed.

The eighteenth-century Amsterdam writer Jan Nomsz (1738-1803) is mainly known as a prolific translator of, mostly, French plays, and as author of a smaller number of original literary works. On both fronts, historians of Dutch literature have not judged him kindly. This contribution tries to prove that their negative comments may have to be reviewed, at least if we consider two of Nomsz's own works: his tragedy Zoroaster (1768) and his ‘romantic’ biography Mohammed (1780). These texts have obvious literary merit; moreover, the ideas contained therein show Nomsz's surprising position in the eighteenth-century debate on the western and non-western views of man and society, within the context of a religious or, rather, an enlightened culture.

Joris van Eijnatten
The Church Fathers Assessed. Nature, Bible and Morality in Jean Barbeyrac

In his Traité de la morale des peres de l'Eglise (1728), the French-German-Dutch Huguenot Jean Barbeyrac (1674-1744) responded at length to critical reflections previously made by the French Benedictine Dom Rémi Ceillier (1688-1761) in the Apologie de la morale des pères de l'église (1718). Ceillier had made exception to what he regarded as the cavalier treatment of the Church Fathers in Barbeyrac's translation of Pufendorf's Le droit de la nature & des gens. Barbeyrac put forward his objections in the Traité de la morale, pointing out that the moral philosophy of the major patristic writers was both unbiblical and unreasonable. He assessed the Church Fathers' moral philosophy by judging it against both nature and the Bible as the two authoritative sources of moral knowledge. Barbeyrac juxtaposed Reason and Revelation, arguing that nature is normative in all matters unrelated to speculative doctrine. His historical scholarship and his views of nature implicitly seem to lead to quite radical interpretations, including a deist view of the Christian revelation and an affirmation of absolute political equality. Barbeyrac's own thought, however, does not appear to be free from religious and political ambiguities. The source of these ambiguities may well be his somewhat delicate position as a Hugenot refugee dependent on the support of foreign masters.

Hanco Jürgens
Which Enlightenment? Phasing and locating a concept.

This article is a ‘state of the art’ on the concept of Enlightenment. Although the study of the Enlightenment is embedded in a strong scholarly tradition, the concept itself has different meanings and is appropriated in different ways side by side, often even to explain mutual contradictory trends. The author discusses four different approaches of the concept. According to the first approach the Enlightenment is seen as a state of mind, the dawn over the darkness of the mind. The second approach considers the concept as part of a dichotomy, with Romanticism, with darkness or with the Counter-Enlightenment. The third approach considers Enlightenment as a step forward towards modernity. The fourth approach presents the Enlightenment in a more historicized, contextualized, and decentralized picture as an

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epoch. In this approach, the contradictory developments are included and the different historical approaches are integrated to achieve a more complete concept of the Enlightenment. The study of the global Eighteenth Century should not submerge in general over-all discussions but should be embedded in local contexts, in the details, which give most information on forms of interaction, differences in habits and customs, motives and means, styles and forms and experiences of similarity and difference. Finally, the author contextualizes Enlightenment-Studies within the context of Twentieth-Century history.

Eveline Koolhaas
‘Man, know thyself’
Anthropology as the source for the ‘volkskunde’ of Johannes Le Francq van Berkheij

This article deals with the concepts ‘volksbeschrijving’, ‘volkskunde’ and ‘volkskenner’, (to be understood as the description, the knowledge and the scholar of a nation) as used for the first time in Dutch in the ethnographical volumes of the Natuurlijke historie van Holland (Natural history of Holland) of the medical doctor and poet Johannes Le Francq van Berkheij, published in 1776. As far as we know at this early date this was unique. Berkheij's intention was to profile the ‘national’ (read Hollandish) identity. This he shared with other Dutch scholars. Berkheij however was the first to take the natural history of man as his starting point. Logically the content of his ‘volkskunde’ is to be examined in this context.

Berkheij starts his ethnographical description by quoting Linnaeus' appeal to scientists, using his slogan ‘Man, know thyself’, to study the natural, anatomical and medical aspects of the human species as well as its moral, political and religious qualities. A science encompassing both the physical and the cultural did indeed emerge. As far as we know it was labeled ‘anthropology’ for the first time in 1778 in a French dictionary. However if we look in the popular encyclopedia Huishoudelijk Woordenboek (Housekeeping Dictionary) and combine the entries ‘Anthropologia’ or ‘Menschenleere’ and ‘Mensch’, we discover that the new explanation of anthropology was introduced in Holland as early as 1768. The theoretical framework and method of Buffon's natural history of man are crucial to our understanding of Berkheij's wide ranging choice of subjects and the ‘modern’ character of his approach. Modern because of: - his interest in the geographical and social variety of the population of Holland, - the manner in which he describes the different groups synchronically as well as diachronically, - and his preoccupation with sexual reproduction as the cause of ethnic diversification or ‘degeneration’. At the same time however, Berkheij searched for things not changed, for the ‘pure’ relics of the Batavians, our supposed forefathers. He is highly original in his use of art and poetry as sources for the physiological and cultural description of the Holland's nation in the past.