De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2003

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Summaries

Freek Schmidt
Reforming Correction: the eighteenth-century Amsterdam workhouse and Abraham van der Hart

In the late seventies of the eighteenth century, the Amsterdam magistrate commissioned the architect Abraham van der Hart to build a new workhouse, which became the largest building in the city. Its importance as an example of enlightened institutional and social reform in eighteenth-century architecture and as a vital stage in the ‘birth of the prison’, as described by Michel Foucault, has remained unnoticed.

The seventeenth-century predecessors of the building have received attention from specialists (Sellin 1944) and more recently the penal system of the seventeenth-century Amsterdam houses of correction was even presented as a characteristic of Dutch seventeenth-century culture (Schama 1987). However, around the middle of the century enlightened reformers were becoming aware that the penal system in the Dutch Republic was not functioning properly. All over Europe, disciplinary institutions were being examined and through the influence of prison reformer John Howard and others, the public was becoming aware that most prisons were not suited for their purpose: they were only capable of confining criminals, not of re-educating them. Although the seventeenth-century Dutch houses of correction were still being presented as a model for new institutions outside the Netherlands, in Amsterdam the shortcomings of these buildings were already widely discussed. The new workhouse demonstrates a newly arisen concern for the well-being of the homeless and bears witness to the growing international movement for the social reform of institutions. Its solution to specific problems of pauperism and crime could only have emerged in Amsterdam at that particular time, when discussions concerning pauperism, poverty and economic recovery were strongly entwined. In this article, therefore, the building is considered as a specific Dutch contribution to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a contribution that shows its delicate relation to the Amsterdam work house tradition.

Gijsbert Rutten
Vondel's ‘Volkomen voorbeeldt’
Transmission of Vondelianism in the eighteenth century: a didactical programme

The reputation of Vondel as the greatest Dutch poet of the seventeenth century, and indeed ever, was established in the second half of the seventeenth century and still defended at the end of the eighteenth. A set of mainly early-eighteenth-century linguistic and literary texts in which Vondel's normative status was propagated is to be held responsible for this ‘transmission of Vondelianism’. This is demonstrated in two ways: the texts contributed to the creation of a canon of Vondel and Vondelianists, and grammatical prescriptivism somewhat secretly preserved Vondel's linguistic norms well into the eighteenth century. The texts concerned covered linguistic, literary as well as stilistic and rhetorical aspects, as a result of which they constituted a full didactical programme for students of language and literature, especially those with literary ambitions. ‘Transmission’ is proposed as a more accurate analytical term to describe this process than ‘imitatio’, because it refers to the dynamic relation between teacher, student and exemplum (i.c. Vondel) in which imitatio is only the procedure the

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student should adopt in order to create Vondel-like poetry. Throughout the paper the unity of linguistics and literary studies with regard to the early modern period is argued.

René Vos
A Golden Age with large holes. Recent developments around the ‘Republic of Newspapers’ 1675-1800.

Amsterdam has the reputation of being the earliest newspaper centre of Western Europe. From as early as 1618, and particularly since the 1670s, Dutch newspapers were widely distributed and read all over Europe, and in some cases even translated and reprinted. The period 1675-1800 can certainly be considered the ‘Golden Age of the Dutch Press’.

It is, however, a Golden Age with large holes, in sources, knowledge and research. Dutch newspaper collections of the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries cover only small portions. For that reason, research on newspapers from the early modern period in Holland is rather thin and mainly relies upon the outdated publications of W.P. Sautijn Kluit from the late 1900s.

On the other hand, over the last 25 years there has been a substantial interest in the international influence and distribution of ‘les Gazettes de Hollande’ during the Ancien Regime. The Institut Pierre Bayle at the University of Nijmegen plays a major role in this international arena of publications, colloquia and exchanges.

Another major development is the discovery of very large collections of - in many cases unique - early modern Dutch newspapers, from Berkeley to Moscow and from Stockholm to Naples. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek and the Nederlands Persmuseum have joined forces in formulating a project proposal for a dynamic Digital Library of Dutch newspapers 1618-1869, including a bi-lingual catalogue and bibliography, microfilming of national and foreign collections and - eventually - full text digitization. A pilot project for seventeenth-century newspapers is in preparation.

Edwin van Meerkerk
Dyads, intermediaries and networks: a model for the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of the printed word in the eighteenth century

The history of the book has used various models for the analysis and description of the production, distribution, and consumption of texts. These models, however, such as Robert Darnton's ‘Communication circuit’ and Pierre Bourdieu's field-theory, fail to grasp the full complexity of the networks around the production of printed matter. This article proposes a new model for the analysis of writing, printing, and bookselling, using both concepts from Bourdieu and Darnton and concepts derived from sociological network theory. The main purpose of this new model is to grasp the dynamics of book production and to distinguish functions and processes from persons and institutions. Sociological network theory is a discipline that has its roots in the mathematical analysis of graphs. In the statistical analysis several key concepts are distinguished that can be used, mutatis mutandis, for the study of eighteenth-century book production. The most important of these are: centrality, which is the degree to which a ‘point’ (person, institution) is connected to other points in a network; intermediary, a point which is essential to the connection between others or other groups; path, the ‘route’ via which two point are connected; and the in- and out-degree, signifying the general direction of the contacts a certain point has. By focusing on these concepts, the force field around the production of a book is brought into view.