J. Exalto

Away with all my pleasant things in the world: model death-bed accounts of two young victims of the plague of 1664 in the Dutch town of Leyden

One of the most successful religious children’s books ever written is James Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671/1672). This book offers 13 examples of “well‐dying” children, including the death‐beds of two Dutch children. Details concerning the background of those children are lacking in the English‐language historiography of children’s literature. Janeway borrowed their stories from a broadsheet, published in English in 1666, describing the “last hours” of Susanna Bickes and her little brother Jacob. They died at the age of 14 and seven, respectively, as victims of the plague that raged in 1664 in the Dutch town of Leyden (Leiden). The account of their pious departures had been published in Holland in 1664 as instructive illustrations (exempla) of the Christian ars moriendi. This paper sheds more light on the historical and biographical backgrounds of the dramatis personae of this little book and on its religious and ecclesiastical context. It then evaluates the pious stories from a pedagogical point of view and finally their international and inter‐confessional reception is traced.

Orating from the Pulpit: The Dutch Augustine and the Reformed Godly until 1700

Much recent scholarship identifies books as the primary means by which Augustines thought was transmitted; by contrast, this chapter focuses on five other modes of communication: teaching, preaching, reading, writing, and meditating. An intermedial approach, relatively new in the field of research for early modern Protestantism, provides a valuable, new perspective. The parameters of this chapter are limited geographically to the Dutch Republic, chronologically to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and confessionally to the Reformed Church. The subtitle of the chapter suggests two more qualifications: Dutch Augustine refers to Augustine in the Dutch vernacular context, to which most attention is given, while Reformed godly refers to Puritan believers, both lay and ordained. The title of this chapter reads Orating from the Pulpit as the pulpit is the only communication medium besides the book where one knows that Augustine featured regularly. Keywords:Augustine; Dutch Republic; early modern Protestantism; orating from the pulpit; Puritan believer; Reformed Church