W.T.M. Frijhoff

Historian's discovery of childhood

The “discovery of childhood” is a tricky notion because childhood is as much a fact of a biological and psychological nature as a cultural notion that through the centuries has been the object of changing perceptions, definitions, and images. Children barely speak in history; virtually everything we know about them is mediated by adults. Then how to interpret the theme? This introductory paper proposes a triple approach. It examines firstly, and forcibly very roughly, the discovery of the child in social discourse and social practice throughout history. Secondly, it analyses the invention of childhood in scholarly practice, focussing in particular on the influential study by Philippe Ariès. Thirdly, it briefly recalls the interplay between scholarly work and personal commitment with regard to the discovery of the child as an “historical sensation”.

Education's memory

As a means of cultural transmission, education is more than schooling alone: family, kinship, friends, working conditions, self-teaching, the street and the church, culture and leisure all contribute to the formation of the individual or the group. Conversely, not all forms of education result into a successful transmission of the intended educational pattern, whether it has been achieved or not.Although often unconsciously introduced into the historical narrative, achievements and failures are key notions in the history of education. But is a “failed” education always equivalent to a failure in the transmission of culture? Or is a successful transmission of values and attitudes always a token of a positive cultural achievement?In this essay, a reflection is proposed on the difficult relationship between education and cultural transmission: in former educational practice, in the personal or collective memory of the past, and in the historians perception and narrative of the past.It is argued that the rel...

Inspiration, instruction, compétence? Questions autour de la sélection des pasteurs réformés aux Pays-Bas, XVIe-XVIIe siècles

Ignorance was one of the major blames put upon the medieval clergy by the Protestant Reformation. The new Protestant ministers were supposed to be experts of the Divine Word and had to be able to explain it eloquently. Normally this requisite would have put the theological faculties at the forefront of ecclesiastical policy. But in the Northern Netherlands, the Reformed Church remained cautious, even suspicious, towards a too powerful impact of university training. It refused the monopoly of university examinations for the recruitment to the ministry. The author explains the reasons for this aloofness and shows how it brought about a clear distinction between formal training and individual qualities, the latter being the decisive factor in the admission procedure. This distinction may have contributed to the ideology of merit.

The Empire that never was: The nearly-Dutch Atlantic empire in the seventeenth century

This book forum focuses on Wim Klooster’s The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2016). In his book, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World. According to Klooster, the Dutch would not have been able to achieve military victories without the native alliances they carefully cultivated. Indeed, Klooster concludes, the Dutch Atlantic was quintessentially interimperial, multinational, and multiracial. At the same time, it was an empire entirely designed to benefit the United Provinces.The four reviewers – Trevor Burnard, Joyce Goodfriend, Cynthia Van Zandt, and Willem Frijhoff – all offer praise, some more profusely than others. Their reviews critically question some aspects of Klooster’s narrative, particularly in relation to slavery, the inevitability of the Dutch Atlantic empire’s decline, his assessment of the rule of Johan-Maurits van Nassau-Siegen in Dutch Brazil, the role of violence and of women in Dutch colonization, as well as the relationship between microcosmic and macrocosmic perspectives on the history of Dutch America.

Johannes Lomejer (1636-1699) : From a Historian of Books to a Cultural Historian

Abstract This article examines the making of young Johannes Lomejer’s treatise on library history De bibliothecis (1669) including the famous Chapter X in its second edition (1680) that is considered to be the first comprehensive inventory on European libraries. Since this chapter has been thoroughly analysed by J.W. Montgomery already in 1962, the scope of this article is not its contents but the way it is related to Lomejer’s personality and career, to his publications and the circulation of knowledge, and to his family habitus and the local network in which his work was embedded. The author shows that Lomejer, who most probably was educated by his uncle Christoffer, bookseller at Zutphen, could benefit from a tradition of learning in his family and from a compact network of local scholars in the city in which he was successively teacher at the Latin school, Reformed minister and professor at the Illustrious School. Lomejer was a typical polyhistor, yet his work shows an interest in cultural practices that points to an early form of cultural history.

A Misunderstood Calvinist. The Religious Choices of Bastiaen Jansz Krol, New Netherland's First Church Servant

In the history of New Netherland the comforter of the sick Bastiaen Jansz Krol (1595-1674) is known as the first servant of the Reformed Church, before the establishment of a formal congregation with an ordained minister. Until recently, his reputation as such was quite mediocre, and the quality of his faith was questioned by the historians of the Reformed Church. In this article, the author revises this negative image thoroughly. Completing the biographical data he interprets them in the context of the early ambitions of the WIC. Arguing, moreover, that Krol was born in a Mennonite family and converted to Calvinism after his first marriage, he presents (with a full translation) the pamphlet which shows his new commitment to orthodox Calvinism. Krols pamphlet was published previously to his appointment as comforter of the sick and may have motivated his choice by the Amsterdam consistory.

Calvinistic education between transmission iof faith and confessional identity: a research model.

Starting from the contention that education is a specific form of culture, this article develops an explanatory, cultural modelfor long-term evolutions in history of education. From the intellectual or religious point of view, such evolutions may appear incongruous insofar as they seem to involve transformations, and indeed interruptions, in the historical continuity of the basic religious inspiration of a given religion. Illustrated at three moments of the history of Calvinistic education, my processual model emphasises the historical interplay between group image, memory, collective acting, and appropriation. The interpretation of educational experience is always embedded in, and internalized by, a group narrative, which is rooted in a durable vision and updated by the communitys memory. What at first sight might seem an educationalfailure, may well reveal itself as an educational success under the viewpoint of such a cultural analysis.