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TEMPTATION

IN THE

ARCHIVES

TEMP

RCHIVES

ESSAYS IN GOLDEN AGE

DUTCH CULTURE

0.375 in

www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press 'In these sparkling essays, Lisa Jardine uses letters, diaries and other archival papers to enrich the story of Dutch-English exchange...and pay tribute to the delights of the scholarly enterprise. A wonderful read.'

NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

In Temptation in the Archives, Lisa Jardine takes readers on a journey through the Dutch Golden Age. This collection of essays and lectures, previously unpublished in English, explores the fascinating cultural exchange that took place between the English and Dutch in the seventeenth century. Through a range of primary sources the reader is given a rare and intimate glimpse of the key players of the new Dutch ruling elite. Most notably, through the study of Sir Constantjin Huygens, a Dutch polymath and diplomat, and his family - including the brilliant scientist Christiaan Huygens - we begin to see the Anglo-Dutch cultural connections that formed against the backdrop of unfolding political events in England. Lisa Jardine compares the public and private lives of these eminent figures, and challenges us to look beyond the surface with a critical eye. The duality of archival research is also revealed; the excitement at the link it provides to the distant past but also the underlying uncertainty at its heart. Temptation in the Archives paints a picture of a unique relationship between the Netherlands and England in the seventeenth century forged through a shared experience - and reveals to us the lessons we can learn from it today. LISA JARDINE CBE is Professor of Renaissance Studies at UCL, and Director of the UCL Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge. She is the author of many works, including Going Dutch, Ingenious Pursuits and

Worldly Goods.

FRONT AND BACK COVER IMAGE:

Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life with Books, oil

on panel, 1625-30. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

COVER DESIGN:

Rawshock design

£10.00

Temptation in the Archives

Temptation in the Archives

Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture

Lisa Jardine

First published in 2015 by

UCL Press

University College London

Gower Street

London WC1E 6BT

Freely available online at: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press

Text © 2015 Lisa Jardine

This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

from The British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-910634-02-8 (Hbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-910634-03-5 (Pbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-910634-09-7 (PDF)

ISBN ebook: 978-1-910634-07-3 (epub)

ISBN ebook: 978-1-910634-08-0 (mobi)

DOI:10.14324/111.9781910634035

For Arnoud Visser

Amicus est tamquam alter idem

PREFACE vii

Preface

In spring 2013, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam - home to unimagin- able treasures from the Dutch Golden Age - reopened after a ten-year closure for refurbishment. Strolling through opulent rooms displaying towering blue-and-white pyramidal delftware tulip vases, gorgeous jewel-like paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, and ornately inlaid baroque furniture a week after the reopening, I came upon an object which for me went to the heart of the seventeenth-century cultural relationship between England and the Netherlands. If only I had known of it a few years earlier, when I was writing my book-length study of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century, Going Dutch. I would certainly have reproduced it there. In a quite large glass display case all of its own sat a small rectangular block of mottled grey stone, in a modest-sized, purpose- made wooden box. Two original hand-written labels, in a rather unconfident cursive hand, in fading brown ink, are affixed - one inside the box's lid, the other pasted on to the stone itself. 'A piece of the Rock on which William Prince of Orange first set foot on landing at Brixham in Torbay Nov[embe]r 4th 1688', the latter reads. The fragment of stone in its contemporary setting reminded me powerfully of a similar fragment of stone on my own bookshelf - a piece of the Berlin Wall, given to me by a friend who had raced from London to Berlin in November 1989, to witness the 'people power'

1 The inscription inside the lid reads: 'The Stone on which King William III first placed his

foot on landing in England was long preserved in Old Market House of Brixham, and when placed in the Obelisk now on the Pier a piece of it was kept by the Harbour Master & afterwards given to me & now placed in this box of heart of English Oak for Her Majesty the Queen of Holland. R. Fenwick Elrington Vicar of Lower Brixham Nov 4. 1868.' viii TEMPTATION IN THE ARCHIVES which brought down the barrier between East and West in that city. Like the resident of Brixham, I cherish that small relic (complete with an obliging East German guard's ink stamp on it) as a reminder of a twentieth-century life-changing moment - an emotional turning-point for many of us caught up in the European politics of the time, as well as a landmark historical event. The little box in the Rijksmuseum is lasting testimony to the fact that for its original owner, the moment when a Dutch Stadholder set foot on English soil was similarly charged with emotion, and similarly recognised from the instant it happened as reshaping the lives of both the English and the Dutch. Standing in front of that glass case - and I returned to it several times that morning during the hours I spent wandering through the bright, airy rooms of the Rijksmuseum - I was struck by how vivid material objects make historical events. In my own work it is generally an archival document, handled and deciphered for the first time, that gives me the particular thrill of connecting with the distant past. Arlette Farge captures the tingling excitement of a fragment of parchment or a bundle of papers in her Allure of the Archives, which is a book I treasure and to which I regularly return. I also realised from my encounter with the Brixham stone fragment how strongly I feel emotionally about events in the Netherlands and in England in the seventeenth century. We are all still complicit, I believe, in a pact sealed partly publicly, partly socially and privately, between the Dutch and ourselves during those eventful decades. I still detect today, in the easy relationship between my graduate students and their counterparts in Leiden and Utrecht when we visit, a sharing of cultural outlook and intellectual convictions which continues to shape their attitudes and beliefs. It is not just an educational context that they share, but also taste in gardening and cooking. It is no accident, I feel, that both countries look back to a golden age, an age of Imperialism, an age when their interventions counted on the world stage, and that the two nations share today a mutual unease about loss of power and influence, and uncertainty about their role in a global political arena. Yet the rich cultural heritages of both continue to hold sway worldwide, and hordes of international visitors flock to their great national museums. Have I confessed to more emotional investment in things Anglo-Dutch than is proper for a professional historian? Perhaps. The essays that follow are scrupulous exercises in historical investigation, which craft the evidence I uncover into narratives designed to shine a

PREFACE ix

vivid light on those similarities between English and Dutch cultures to which I am so committed. Readers may decide for themselves whether they are prepared to follow me on my journey into the nooks and crannies of Anglo-Dutch history. I would also encourage them to keep an eye out for the moments at which I see lessons to be learned for the Europe of today in the international cultural exchanges of the past. Each of the essays here was written for a particular public occasion, either in England or the Netherlands. 'Temptation in the archives' was my inaugural lecture at University College London, wherequotesdbs_dbs2.pdfusesText_4

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