T. Weststeijn

A New Field: History of Humanities

hese are exciting times for the humanities. The impressive corpus of knowledge that the humanities have discovered, created, and cultivated over many centuries is available for the benefit of more people than ever and evolving rapidly. Fresh perspectives open up as digital tools enable researchers to explore questions that not long ago were beyond their reach and even their imagination. Novel fields of research deal with phenomena emerging in a globalizing culture, enabling us to make sense of the way in which new media affect our lives. Cross-fertilization between disciplines leads to newly developed methods and results, such as the complex chemical analysis of the materials of ancient artworks, yielding data that were unavailable to both artists and their publics at the time of production, or neuroscientific experiments shedding new light on our capacity for producing and appreciating music. At the same time, there is a sense of gloom, perhaps even crisis, among those who are convinced that the humanities are valuable, precious, indispensable. The number of students taking humanities courses declines, and humanities departments at universities worldwide are subject to severe budget cuts or abolition altogether. In a period in which the academic world is plagued by governments insisting on measurable results for the sake of short-term financial profit, the humanities seem most vulnerable. We present the first issue of History of Humanities with feelings of anticipation. Our journal is meant to stand for the fact that scholarly practices of a type today labeled “humanities” have been an essential part of the process of knowledge making ever since human inquisitiveness sought to enhance our understanding of the world and ourselves. This long history has been studied in fruitful and illuminating ways, but the focus has been on either the natural sciences or on single disciplines within the humanities, such as history writing and linguistics. The fundamental contribution of the humanities to the intricate web of knowledge that scholars, thinkers, and researchers have spun in the course of several millennia has thus been poorly recog-

The Making of the Humanities : Volume I - Early Modern Europe

Zoals blijkt uit een beruchte opmerking van Ronald Plasterk dat ‘alfa’s de geschiedenis schrijven, en beta’s de geschiedenis maken’, is de invloed van de alfawetenschappen lange tijd onderschat. Dit boek is een eerste stap tot een overzichtsgeschiedenis van de humaniora. Specialisten uit verschillende vakgebieden bieden een vergelijkende geschiedenis van de taalkunde, filologie, muziekwetenschap, historische wetenschappen, logica en literatuurwetenschap. Dit eerste deel uit de serie The Making of the Humanities richt zich op de vroegmoderne tijd. Verschillende perspectieven maken duidelijk hoe de geesteswetenschappen zich ontwikkelden van ‘vrije kunsten’ tot moderne disciplines. Nieuw licht valt op de rol van de humaniora in de Wetenschappelijke Revolutie. Gerenommeerde auteurs uit Europa en Amerika, onder wie Floris Cohen, David Cram en Ingrid Rowland, bieden nieuwe inzichten voor zowel specialisten als geinteresseerde leken, studenten en alfawetenschappers in de breedste zin van het woord.

The Making of the Humanities : Volume II - From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines

Dit boek onderzoekt de ontwikkelingen in de geesteswetenschappen voor en na 1800. Er wordt vaak gesteld dat rond 1800 de alfawetenschappen een ‘humanisering’ van hun onderwerpen en methodes ondergingen. The Making of the Humanities Vol. 2 toont echter aan dat het strikte onderscheid tussen mens- en natuurwetenschappen de uitkomst was van een proces dat al in de zeventiende eeuw begon. Als er al sprake was van een revolutie, dan vond deze eerder op een institutioneel dan op een conceptueel niveau plaats. Dit is het tweede deel van de serie gewijd aan de geschiedenis van de geesteswetenschappen.

Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain

How did the classical tradition survive on the North Sea shores? This book explores the writings of Franciscus Junius that paired scholarship to painter’s practice in the seventeenth century. They illuminate the reception of antiquity and the creation of an Anglo-Dutch artistic Arcadia.

The Making of the Humanities, Volume III. The Modern Humanities

This comprehensive history of the humanities focuses on the modern period (1850-2000). The contributors, including Floris Cohen, Lorraine Daston and Ingrid Rowland, survey the rise of the humanities in interaction with the natural and social sciences, offering new perspectives on the interaction between disciplines in Europe and Asia and new insights generated by digital humanities.

The Gender of Colors in Dutch Art Theory

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Between Rome and Amsterdam: Barthold Nihusius (1589-1657) and the Origins of Egyptology

The German scholar Barthold Nihusius, a famous convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism, wrote forty letters from Amsterdam, where he worked in Blaeu’s printing office, to Athanasius Kircher in Rome. These reveal how Dutch collections of antiquities and related publications contributed substantially to Kircher’s interest in Egypt. The view that the hieroglyphs expressed the original language in which God had spoken to Adam attracted him in particular. In addition, the exchange resulted in detailed images of Egyptian antiquities. The transfer of knowledge from the Middle East through the Low Countries to the Eternal City appears as an essential route in the rise of Egyptian studies as a new discipline.

The Germanic origins of art: Dutch and English antiquity according to Verstegan, Junius and Van Hoogstraten

Abstract Seventeenth-century writers about Dutch art and language, wishing to promote a vernacular culture as a counterweight to the dominant ideals of Southern Europe, developed a view of Germanic antiquity. Exporting their visual art, the Dutch brought linguistic attitudes suggestive of a common Germanic history to Britain, as three authors exemplify: Richard Verstegan, Franciscus Junius and Samuel van Hoogstraten. Their writings presented simplicity as a distinctly Germanic quality. Imaginative etymologies, providing equivalents for the artistic vocabulary of humanism, proved that Germanic civilization was the purest continuation of classical antiquity since ‘bastard Latin languages’ had been corrupted by the Dark Ages. The pre-eminence of Netherlandish painting thus reflected the courage and integrity of the tribes praised by Tacitus. The aims formulated in Dutch art theory to ‘follow the simplicity of nature’ became interrelated to cultural ideals of masculinity and imperturbability.

Margaret Cavendish in de Nederlanden : Filosofie en schilderkunst in de Gouden Eeuw

The intellectual position of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, has been controversial since the seventeenth century. According to her Dutch contemporaries, she still remains princeps ingenii: prominent among the elite. In his essay Thijs Weststeijn outlines a beautiful picture of this philosopher and her fifteen-year stay in Rotterdam and Antwerp. Thijs Weststeijn won the ABG VN Essayprijs for this essay.