Logo DBNL
Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 9 (2002)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 9

(2002)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Maureen Bell
Books and beliefs across the North Sea

[On:] Protestantism crossing the seas. A short-title catalogue of English books printed before 1801 illustrating the spread of Protestant thought and the exchange of ideas between the English-speaking countries and the Netherlands, held by the University Library of the Vrije Universiteit at Amsterdam. Compiled by Michel L.H.M. Le Cat. Edited by Willem Heijting with the assistance of Sandra van Daalen. 't Goy-Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2000. (Bibliotheca humanistica & reformatorica, 59). xxxvi + 291 pp. ills, isbn 90-6194-408-2. Price: € 96,20.

Over the last decade, as an increasing number of national projects on the history of the book have been under way in English-speaking countries, the importance of the essentially international nature of the book trade has come ever more sharply into focus. Indeed, the very concept of ‘national histories’ has itself come under increasing pressure, as international scholarly collaboration and new lines of research bring into view the cultural and intellectual interdependencies and influences of which the book trade and its surviving artefacts are eloquent material evidence. This catalogue deserves a particular welcome from bibliographers and historians of the British book for its contribution in making visible to English-speaking researchers the rich collections of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam.

The special collection catalogued here is part of the wider holdings of a Department of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books which specialises in early Reformation writing, the texts of international Calvinism and the works of Dutch Reformed Protestantism, now configured as part of the Study Centre for Protestant Book Culture. This volume's English books, totalling around 5,600 items, represent a collection particularly strong in bibles and theological works, but also with a scatter of English holdings in a wide variety of subjects including philosophy, science and medicine, law and politics, history, geography, travel, literature, art and music. The earliest items date from circa 1530 and, while the bulk of the catalogue (some 3,000 titles, including 100 American imprints) is of eighteenth-century books, the earlier holdings are a significant proportion of the whole, with around 750 STC items and some 1,850 from the Wing period. Dutch translations of English nonconformist writers have been excluded, being already covered by the bibliographies of J. van der Haar and C.W. Schoneveld.1 As the largest collection of English imprints in Holland, the

collection of the Vrije Universiteit bears comparison with that of Göttingen; in terms of its focus on nonconformist material, it may well be the most significant continental collection of English books.

The importance of the trade between the British Isles and Holland in the early period has many facets, some of them still awaiting detailed scholarly exploration. The printers and booksellers of the Netherlands served the English market in many ways, not least by reprinting English authors and English texts for sale on the English market. As Paul Hoftijzer remarks,2 although the importation into England of Dutch-printed books was viewed as piracy by the London authorities, the work of Dutch printers ensured a wider distribution for the English authors whose texts they reprinted in cheap formats for English buyers. A particular bugbear of the London Stationers' Company throughout the seventeenth century was the illegal importation of ‘Dutch bibles’ into England, and the records of the Stationers' Company and the State Papers abound in references to the scale of the trade. In 1641, for example, Thomas Cowper petitioned both Houses of Parliament for the return of 850 bibles, 2,000 prayer books and 750 books of psalms which he had imported some years earlier but which had been seized at the Customs House and were still impounded; in the same year William Jackson was complaining of similar treatment in relation to 88 quarto bibles and 50 duodecimo bibles brought from Amsterdam.3 All attempts at stamping out the trade in ‘Dutch bibles’ - via customs controls, ambassadorial pressure on the States General, and the imposition of fines - were doomed to failure not least because English stationers themselves frequendy connived at these illegal imports, which had a ready market and provided a profitable trade for the booksellers. Countless seizures of Dutch bibles printed by Stam with false English imprints, and later by Veselaer and others, were made by the English authorities, only to be followed by their clandestine resale by the very stationers who had seized them and the stationers' collusion. In a letter of 7 April 1684 to the Secretary of State, the Bishop of Oxford blamed the greed of the King's printers for the success of the trade in ‘Holland Bibles’:

Being resolved to gain beyond measure by all books they printed, they were not solicitous to print great numbers, so that, the nation being unsupplied, Holland Bibles were encouraged to be brought in, which, when they had seized, they afterwards sold and, when they were retailed, they seized them again and extorted the penalty from the poor country chapmen.4

Among the 138 editions of the Bible, New Testament and Psalms catalogued here are examples of these illegally-imported Dutch bibles which resisted all efforts at control and found a ready market in England.

The Dutch trade had a strong presence north of the border, too. Scotland, like its neighbour, was served by the Dutch bible trade, and item B292 in the catalogue, The Bible. According to the copy printed at Edinburgh (...), is a 1640 printing by Christiaens at Leiden of Hart's 1610 Geneva text. The printer Richard Schilders, represented here by about a dozen imprints, worked in both London and Middleburgh and from his base in the latter city served both Scottish and English markets in the last decades of the sixteenth century. The researches of Paul Hoftijzer on the Amsterdam trade and of Alastair Mann on the Scottish trade demonstrate, too, the importance of Steven Swart (see B297-298) as a middle-man for the export of bibles both to England and Scotland, and document the business deals struck in the 1670s and 1680s between the bible printers and booksellers of Amsterdam and the merchants of Glasgow and Edinburgh.5

The export of massive numbers of English bibles, however, was by no means the only significant contribution of Dutch printers to the British book market and to English and Scottish cultures. Works by English Catholics (printed at Louvain, Antwerp, St. Omer and Rheims), works by Calvin and other continental reformers, and many texts by English and Scottish reformers in exile were supplied to readers at home as well as abroad by Dutch printers and by those expatriate printers, such as Giles Thorp and John Canne, who set up businesses in Holland. Each of these areas is illustrated by the Vrije Universiteit's collection which, despite its main focus on Protestantism, includes some Catholic texts, notably Sanders' The supper of our lord set foorth, 1566 (S30) and editions in English, Latin and German of works by Thomas à Kempis (T74-85). Continental reformers are, of course, much more extensively represented: Luther (L215-222); Calvin (C23-65), notably his The mynde of the godly and excellent lerned man (...), Ippyswiche: J. Oswen, [1548]; and sixteenth-century editions of Théodore de Bèze (B242-248).

It is in the field of Protestant and nonconformist writing that the collection is particularly rich, demonstrating the strong links between English puritans and Dutch reformers. The collection contains works by sixteenth-century reformers such as John Knox, Richard Hooker and James Ussher, as well as editions of Alexander Nowell's catechisms. Reformers exiled to Holland are well represented here (as, for example, Thomas Cartwright and Hugh Broughton) as are the authors favoured by puritans, including William Perkins, Henry Ainsworth (himself active in Amsterdam as bookseller and leader of a Brownist congregation) and William Ames. Among the

many works by later seventeenth-century champions of nonconformity are fifteen editions of Richard Baxter's The saints everlasting rest, as well as many other Baxter

illustratie
Amsterdam, ubvu: XL.00129.


titles; and several Quaker authors also appear, though surprisingly only four works by George Fox. A particularly interesting revelation is the strength of the library's interest in Bunyan, obvious here from the circa 200 pre-1800 Bunyan imprints, which include works translated into Welsh and German. As the introduction usefully explains, these constitute only a fraction of the Universiteit's Bunyan collection as a whole, which contains ‘nearly a thousand editions and translations and an unknown number of adaptations, imitations, pastiches and secondary works’ (p. xxiv). Undoubtedly it is the seventeenth century which is the high point of this collection of English nonconformist texts; the large numbers of editions from the following century are mostly reprints of seventeenth-century works, though works by the Congregationalist Isaac Watts and the Methodist John Wesley are well represented.

Before going on to comment on the specific bibliographical features of Protestantism crossing the seas, it is worth pausing to consider the general nature and purposes of catalogues of this kind. Their aims are, it seems to me, twofold: one is, broadly speaking, educational and promotional; the other is a question of practical utility. The first of these has quite simply to do with publicity: to make known to the scholarly community both domestic and international the range of holdings of a particular library in relation to a specific kind of book (as defined by subject category, author, language or time-period). It is the frustrating experience of many special collections librarians that even those readers who are apparently familiar with their library are often woefully unaware of its richness in particular areas. Catalogues of this kind are a good way in which to focus for library users (both regular and occasional) a particular dimension of the collection's research potential which may be obscured from view when subsumed into the library catalogue as a whole. By extension, the catalogue of this kind will also attract users from further afield, whose (perhaps more pardonable) ignorance about a library's strengths for their research will be usefully and productively corrected. In this respect, such catalogues are a notable part of what librarians call ‘user education’, putting (or repositioning) a collection on the mental map as far as both existing and potential visitors are concerned. The second and more immediately practical purpose is to facilitate the exploitation of the collection both at a distance and within the library. Printed catalogues are themselves, if the bibliographical details offered are sufficiently detailed, a rich source for many kinds of analysis conducted by scholars remote from the physical collection embodied therein. In such a case, both the fullness of the individual entries and the provision of multiple points of entry and analysis (as, for example, indexes by printer,

publisher, place, STC number) enable ‘remote’ analysis of the collection. And for library users on the spot, a catalogue of this kind should not only focus their attention on an aspect of the larger collection, but might reasonably be expected to provide a direct way into the collection as a finding aid (as, for example, by the provision of shelfmarks). In assessing the particular bibliographical features of Protestantism crossing the seas, these two aspects of its purpose - ‘What can be learnt from this catalogue?’ and ‘How can this catalogue be used?’ - must both be borne in mind.

First, the absence of a name index of publishers and printers is to be regretted, since in particular this would enable easier identification of the works issued from the presses of notable Dutch printers such as Schilders and Swart as well as those set up by radical English Protestant printers. William Brewster's Leiden press (1617-1619) is represented by one work, Thomas Cartwright's A confutation of the Rhemists translation (...) on the New Testament, 1618 (C103); Giles Thorp, whose press in Amsterdam was active from 1604 to 1622, appears in the imprints of several works by Henry Ainsworth (A45-46, 49, B321); and Ainsworth's The communion of saincts, 1640 (A52) is among a handful of books listed which were printed at John Canne 's ‘Richt Right Press’, established in Amsterdam in 1637.

Comparison of this catalogue with Graham Jefcoate and Karen Kloth's catalogue of the more extensive Göttingen collection6 suggests that the title's claim that the Amsterdam collection illustrates ‘the spread of Protestant thought and the exchange of ideas between the English-speaking countries and the Netherlands’ should be treated with caution. The larger Göttingen collection of English books was accumulated in the eighteenth century, was mostly purchased from England, and is peculiarly rich in its documentation of the international trading which secured it for the University; consequently the collection itself stands as contemporary evidence of eighteenth-century German academic interest in English culture. The Amsterdam collection, however, cannot profess such direct evidence for cultural interchange, in that at its core are several separate collections, none of them pre-1801. A brief account (pp. xi-xvii) of the development of the Vrije Universiteit (founded 1880) and of the collection policy of its library describes the acquisition, in 1971, of part of the private library of H. Bos Kzn. The hundreds of pre-1801 imprints it contained provided the initial impetus for the collection of English books. In the later 1970s two nineteenth-century collections were acquired: the library of the Congregationalist New College, London, and that of Columbia Theological Seminar at Decatur, Georgia. A third collection, of English bibles, was acquired from Bristol Baptist College. As a whole, therefore, these books have no particular status in themselves as evidence of early cross-cultural exchange between the English-speaking countries and the Netherlands. The word ‘illustrating’ therefore proves a judicious choice on the part of the compilers, but one which might possibly mislead on first sight. Crucially, for a fuller picture of the cultural interchange signalled by the volume's title, the catalogue

must properly be viewed in the context of the broader collections of the Universiteit and the Study Centre for Protestant Book Culture, covering non-English continental editions of English authors and in particular Dutch translations of English nonconformist texts.

With that caveat in mind, the catalogue has much to offer in its illustration of many aspects of cultural and religious interchange. In addition to the areas discussed above, the books listed here illustrate the interest of readers of both nations in the other's politics and language (notably through Dutch-English grammars and dictionaries). Like the English in Holland, Dutch exiles found a common interest with their co-religionists during exiles in London and Norwich at different points in the sixteenth century, and shared their enthusiasm for anti-Catholic polemic. More broadly, translations of Dutch writers into English indicate the intellectual traffic across the North Sea: here are translations into English of Hugo de Groot, Christiaan Huygens, Justus Lipsius and Franciscus Junius. To draw deserved attention to the collection's more remarkable books risks contradicting a collection policy which, quite properly, is concerned with ‘the transmission of culture as a whole, not merely (...) cultural highlights’ (p. xv) and which consequently argues for the value of acquiring reprints and reissues rather than rare and expensive first editions. That said, it is important to note that the collection has some treasures. One such is a unique copy of Natura brevium wyth new addicions, [1528?] (N8); another, a rare copy of Hart's Heidelberg catechism, A catechisme of Christian religion, Edinburgh 1615 (H114), a work also represented by copies of eighteenth-century editions from Amsterdam and Utrecht (H115-119).

The catalogue entries themselves are rather costive, supplying, as the editors remark, ‘rigorously abbreviated’ titles arranged by author and numbered in the manner of Wing. Cross-referencing, on the other hand, is generous. STC Wing references, and indexes, are supplied, as are occasional notes. The brevity of the entries, however, makes cross-checking with other catalogues difficult. Among the 27 items listed as ‘Not in Wing’, for example, Michel le Vassor's The sighs of France in slavery, 1690 (V5) looks like estc R234998 (where one copy is listed) but more information is needed to clarify the comparison. Of course, it is in the interests of the researcher that individual copies are physically examined, and the compilers are justifiably keen that their collections be visited; nonetheless, they could perhaps have been more generous in their provision of information to the reader geographically distant from Amsterdam. Inevitably, assessment of the adequacy of the amount of information offered in entries suffers from the comparison with the Göttingen catalogue, since the latter was produced from the very full cataloguing of the estc enterprise. estc's computer files no doubt enabled the manipulation of data to provide multiple indexes with maximum information. But although the Vrije Universiteit compilers argue (p. xxxiii) that the concordances to STC and Wing obviate the need for indexes of publishers and printers, this reader would nonetheless have appreciated such indexes, as well as a place index; and the inclusion of shelfmarks would surely have encouraged the reader attracted by this volume to visit the library.

The compilers note that ‘it is hard to say how these holdings relate to those of other Dutch libraries’ (p. xvi) and it would indeed be a great benefit to be able to see these entries in the wider context of a Dutch union catalogue of early imprints or, more ambitiously, within the wider European context. It is much to be hoped that more Dutch libraries (in addition to the Royal Library in the Hague, the only current Dutch member) will become contributors to the Hand Press Book database now being constructed under the auspices of the Consortium of European Research Libraries. Cross-cultural exchange in the present is at the heart of the cerl project and in publishing this catalogue, whose contents are a testament to the vigorous intellectual links of the past, the Vrije Universiteit declares itself a vital part of the European bibliographical enterprise called ‘the history of the book’.


Vorige Volgende

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs