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Summaries
Isabella van Elferen
Thou shalt weep on my tomb...
Sentimental, metaphysical and performative tears in Elisabeth Maria Post's Het Land
The eighteenth century has been referred to as ‘the weeping century’, as no other period in cultural history contains so many literary, musical and artistic accounts of tears and crying. Theorists of sentimentality attributed special meanings to weeping. Tears were considered a proof of virtue and of spiritual nobility. Sentimental tears, moreover, gained meaning when shed publicly, so that the world could see and value the weeper's virtue. In mid-eighteenth century Dutch literature, sentimental tears also had an explicit religious function. Crying had been an important aspect of devotional life since the Reformation, culminating in the religious sentimentality of pietism. The devotional literature of Dutch bevindelijkheid shows many examples of such tears demonstrating virtuous sensitivity.
In this article I propose a re-evaluation of sentimental and pietist tears from a performance-theoretical perspective, and investigate the role of tears as a cultural performance. Whereas sensitivity and repentance were described as private emotions, their tearful expression took place in the new public sphere of the bourgeois that Jürgen Habermas has described. In its functionality as a public arena for collective sentimentality, the mid-eighteenth-century epistolary novel can be interpreted as the stage on which crying - as a cultural performance - evoked the crossing of borders between both secular and religious sensitivity, private and public emotions, and worldly sorrows and eschatological redemption. A critical rereading of Elisabeth Maria Post's novel Het land from this theoretical background will serve to evaluate the variegated meanings and functions of sentimental tears in this phase of Dutch literary history.
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Lia van Gemert
Real heroes are rare
Idols in Dutch epic tales
This paper studies four heroic leaders in Dutch early modern epic poems: John the Baptist in Vondel's Joannes de boetgezant (1662) vs. the biblical David in Van Merken's David (1767) and Stadholder Prince Maurits in Van Bos's Mauritias (1646) vs. Hugo de Groot, Pensionary of Rotterdam, in Moens's Hugo de G root (1790).
The four want to be traditional heroes, aspiring to purify their society. Joannes and De Groot even become similar to Christ in performing this task. But only two of them succeed: Maurits and David. Joannes and De Groot are isolated men: Joannes dies (Christ will fulfil his mission); De Groot fails totally because he puts his personal interest first.
All four epics show the traditional pattern of virtues and vices: courage, moral integrity and (in various degrees) devotion to God, in opposition to cowardice, unreliability and self-conceit. The differences between the 17th- and 18th-century societies are strikingly clear: the 17th-century poems focus on the governing elite, while in the 18th century the ideal of a shared community is being put forward. In terms of gender, the difference is also obvious. Vondel and Van Bos hardly portray any women, and when they do the women show their
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traditional reprehensible qualities; Van Merken and Moens pay equal attention to men and women, without distributing qualities among the sexes but stating that they are together responsible for public and private life.
The poetic conventions in these poems also mark the differences between 17th- and 18th-century writing. Vondel and Van Bos concentrate on rhetorical arguments with static scenes and characters. Van Merken and Moens operate in a more narrative way, following strategies derived from the novel and presenting socially sensible characters. Their reason for not choosing the novel may have been the status of the epic poem. David and De Groot are perfect citizens but at the same time could not have been portrayed in a novel without harming their status of heroic leader.
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W.R.D. van Oostrum
Convicted to serve as an example?
Female idols in the eighteenth-century literary circuit
In the eighteenth century the world of public writing and publishing was mostly a male territory. So, on the one hand, for women to praise a woman writer as an inspiring predecessor was risky. Her destiny was to be a caring spouse, housewife and mother, and her female nature didn't permit her writing for her own sake. However, of course there were women writers. They had to fight their way into a man's world and to be successful they had to conform to the existing male standards.
On the other hand the mere act of praising women's writing didn't necessarily imply a serious attempt to assess its literary worth, nor did recognition by the critical (male) establishment mean inclusion in the literary canon. To become famous, a female writer had to be the best of her sex and better than most male writers. If a woman surpassed male colleagues, she became unique and an exception, the recipient of paradoxical praise: she wrote ‘like a man’.
The official literary canon of the eighteenth century contains only a few women writers. Accordingly, only a few women (and men) idolize female laureates. Praising a female writer was always a bit ambivalent: men admire her work and esteem her femininity; women look up to her literary achievement. As the number of women writers increases, the adage is: ‘new balls’. New forms of literary criticism develop, literary criteria change (circa 1760 & 1790).
A different status and a warm reception produce literary characters, such as the English Pamela and Clarissa, the French Julie, the Dutch Julia (& Eduard), Koosje, Chrisje (&Willem) (from Willem Leevend). They are ‘compatible’ with our twenty-first-century icons.
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André Hanou
Wanted: heroes (M/F)
When asked to write about heroes of the Enlightenment, one's first difficulty is to get a clear focus on this problem. Is there a definition for a Hero, Heroine? Does one wish to write about people who have had a real existence, or does one write about characters in fiction? Should there be a difference between hero-worship in the past, and acknowledgement of past heroes nowadays?
The present author has more or less withdrawn from this methodological battlefield. He has decided to use different frameworks and points of view. Therefore he discusses:
1. Fictional heroes (who are famous mostly because of their origins in fiction, or literature). The focus is here on their archetypical value, and usability in the mind of modern man. It would
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seem that the Enlightenment has produced more types (like Robinson, Casanova) than Antiquity, the Bible and so on; at least when one considers those who are still well-known today. 2. Thematic heroes: characters who in fiction, essays and other sources were popular during the Enlightenment period because they fulfilled contemporary needs and desires. Examples: the adventurer, the distressed young woman who is put to the test, the gentleman-rogue, the citizen, the innocent. Of course in this field there are counter-heroes, like the dandy, the pharisean religionist, the conspirator.
3. Real heroes, from a dozen dimensions of life. A very debatable selection. Is it, for instance, really verifiable if, in the Netherlands, in the field of philosophy, the most known or adored thinkers have been, in succession: Rousseau, Martinet, Kant, Spinoza and Swedenborg? - This part of the article might mean the end of friendships, or become a cause of quarrels among the learned.
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Luc Duerloo
Cassant and Cassandra
Idolizing the Habsburgs
The recently reconstructed memoirs of Jean Philippe Eugène de Merode, marquess of Westerlo, offer a frank and revealing insight into how a high ranking nobleman of the early eighteenth century understood his allegiance to his Habsburg sovereigns King Charles II of Spain and Emperor Charles VI. Critical if not vitriolic of almost everyone who crossed his path, Merode considers the two monarchs absolutely beyond reproach. Heavenly signs mark out their distinct nature. Their virtues are innate; their propensity to rule indisputable. Even the lack of a proper education in the case of Charles II cannot compromise this. When erroneous policies are pursued, these are wholly the responsibility of evil counsellors that surround and maliciously manipulate the sovereign. The stereotype of the good prince and the bad counsellor is a very old one, dating from at least the Late Middle Ages. Yet at the same time Merode's adoration of his sovereigns also contains a much more modern aspect, for his memoirs devote considerable attention to their private lives, in particular to their sexuality. The lurid details he provides are very much like those that were to compromise the French monarchy later in the eighteenth century. In very much the same vein, his interests prefigure those of the royalty press of the twenty-first century.
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Cecil P. Courtney
Isabelle de Charrière and Voltaire.
Trois femmes and Candide
Isabelle de Charrière's ‘Kantian’ novel, Trois femmes (1795), is an example of the use of prose fiction to test philosophical theories. Just as Voltaire, in Candide (1759), tests the optimistic rationalism of Leibniz against what happens in the real world, so Charrière tests Kant's theory of moral obligation against the experiences of her three women. The present article examines not only the affinities between Candide and Trois femmes, but also the differences, including differences of tone and style. One important difference is that, whereas at the end of Candide we are left with the exhortation ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’, without any precise explanation of its meaning, Charrière makes a point of illustrating, incident by incident, what exactly such a practical philosophy might involve and shows how, in making moral decisions in response to difficult situations, the three women are guided, not by any ab- | |
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stract theory, but by what, in their judgement, is the most useful course of action for the happiness of those concerned. Another important difference is that, in the second part of the novel, we move beyond the pragmatic morality of the first part to a recognition of the need for a certain ideal of moral perfection, at least as an aspiration, which adds dignity and meaning to life. Strong reservations are now expressed about the philosophy of utility of part I, but this development is not entirely surprising when we remember that Voltaire, likewise, to judge from his later works, became dissatisfied with the empiricism of Candide and finally returned to metaphysical considerations and a search for higher ideals. However, whereas Voltaire conducts his enquiry in terms of a search for cosmic order, Charrière, who in this respect remains very much a novelist and shows close
affinities with Rousseau, conducts it in terms of psychology and the individual conscience.
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Rienk Vermij
What was Enlightenment?
This article, which joins a discussion on the meaning of ‘Enlightenment’ started earlier in this journal, questions whether the idea of Enlightenment makes sense as a historical concept. The idea was introduced in nineteenth-century history of philosophy to denote a set of philosophical ideas. Only much later was it adopted by cultural historians as well, but Enlightenment should still be regarded as a philosophical, not as a historical concept. The problems this causes are twofold. In the first place, the idea of Enlightenment is closely linked to nineteenth-century positivist ideas about social progress, which by now have become obsolete. Secondly, as a philosophical concept Enlightenment presupposes an idealistic view of history. Such presupposions will unwittingly enter the narrative of a historian using the term. In principle, it would be possible to define ‘Enlightenment’ in a more strict and neutral way. However, the philosophical content has always been the raison d'être of the idea of Enlightenment and it seems improbable that historians would reach agreement on a completely new definition.
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