This lecture was given at the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews. It is not for citation without permission of the author. For further information, please visit intellectualhistory.net where you will find news about upcoming events. and all the relevant information about studying with the Institute in St Andrews. Okay, we'd better start, and this is the first event of...
It doesn't actually feel like yet another academic year. A new special... Speak to yourself, yeah. A new special academic year. And obviously this is the first session of the events in the Institute of Inflectual History calendar. And there's nobody better to kick us off than Martina van Ittersom from...
Dundee, who's one of the most prominent early modern scholars, fantastic work, early modern political thought generally, but Grotius in particular, and today she's going to talk about the working papers of Hugo Grotius, but before... I turn over to her. I just want to say one thing, which is this is probably the last event where we'll see the wonderful Lena Weber in person. And Lena's been with us for over four years. She's just been the greatest support. She's a brilliant scholar.
She's going to be so badly missed. And I know that some of you are new M. Lit, so you might not get to know her. Perhaps you will if you go out with her tonight. But... Nevertheless, even those who don't know her, I hope you don't mind everybody giving her a clap because she's been fantastic and she deserves a lot more. After that. The floor is yours, Martina.
Thank you very much, Richard. Thank you all for coming today and for inviting me. It's great to see so many women and also people from lots of diverse backgrounds. Let me put it this way in the room. Let's say in the past, intellectual history has been... a rather meal-dominated discipline. Mostly we were talking about white males studying literally other white males, right? That's literally one of the problems with the traditional way of doing intellectual history.
Now, I should say, of course, that I study white males as well, namely Hugo Grotius. So, yeah. How do I get out of this scrape? It's a good question. Let's put it this way. I talked about this with a colleague of mine in politics in the University of Dundee a while ago. And why are we studying these guys? Is it because they are great men? No. They're not. It's because what they wrote or what they did had big consequences later on for other people.
And if you've read any of my stuff, let's say that I'm not exactly an admirer of Hugo Grotius, I've written some pretty critical stuff, I think. And so the reason why I study him is not because I think he's a great man, but because what he said and what he did had important consequences later on for other people, usually. And that's why we need to keep doing intellectual history.
Okay, here is my big friend. Keep moving on. I like this picture of him. This is not the writer, of course, of the Jura Balik Pakas. This is him literally as a 16-year-old kid. right um already of course at light university at that point and very proud as you can see you know showing off um he basically got this chain and this medal from Henry IV of France. He went on this tour together with other political leaders in France, of course, also got his...
PhD, well, basically his doctorate in both civil and criminal law from the University of Orléans during the tour. Basically, you show up at the university, you pay your fee, you do a little defense, and then you get your PhD. Let's see how he did it. But he was very proud, obviously, of having met Henry the Prophet France. And you can see, you know, he's a pretty ambitious young man and very, you know.
eager and also pretty full of himself, I would say, judging by this picture. Okay, research context. Let's start with that. For my first book, I wrote about Hugo Grosjes and the Duchess India Company, and about basically his justification of Dutch imperialism and colonialism in Asia. And I looked at a lot of...
papers, archival materials at that point already. So I was invited to join the Grosje's theme group at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in spring of 2005. And what was the purpose of the theme group? The purpose was to... produced a new edition of The Sure of Prey Day, the Commentary on the Law of Price and Booty, written between 1604 and 1608 by Grotius.
Now, let's say we didn't accomplish that in the time that we were there. It was basically later on Jan Wassink who took this on and basically 10 years later produced a digital edition. and it's on the website of Leyen University Library. I can highly recommend it to you because Jan Wassink actually figured out what are the different versions.
The problem with the published versions, including my own, I did a published version for the Liberty Fund. It's literally based on the last version of Grotius. And in fact there are lots of different versions that are still visible in fact in the manuscript. But another question arose is why did Croesus' manuscripts end up in various places? And what could have been the original arrangement? What might have been lost?
And I can point out to you some materials that we work with and that I still work with today. For example, this is basically the catalogue of the 1864... auction of Grosjes' papers. And there's an original version of that and this is in fact the second edition. I'll pass this round. The second edition was produced in the 1950s. and also some indexes of Grosses' papers, and it was one index also produced in the 1950s.
That's this one here, which has a little introduction talking about, you know, the papers of grocers and the fact that various family members had those. And then it talks about the 1864 auction, but literally in less than six pages. And it wasn't very clear, let me put it this way. So why did various papers that were related, for example, to Desjure Prédé end up in all these different places? And why was there an auction in the first place?
These are all kinds of questions that came up as part of our theme group. Now this was a matter of serendipity and well I'm just pointing this out because I just want to make a point to you guys. You may think, OK, when you do intellectual history, you should only be talking to other intellectual historians. And my suggestion is don't.
So Margaret and Peter Spofford happened to be at NIAS in spring 2005. They are both deceased right now. They were wonderful people. I talked with them over lunch quite a bit. They are, or were in fact, social historians. Basically, 17th century England, social history. And so I started talking to them about these problems. Why...
Was there an auction? What happened there? And at a certain point I discovered that there was in fact a last Finland testament of the last descendant of Grotius who died in the village of Kuik. in 1864. And Margaret, I still remember that, she literally insisted, she said, Martina, you need to get that last covenant testament. You need to look at it. Find out what was going on.
So I did. I got that last minute testament. But Lizzie, it was quite a shock to me to be told to do that because I was an intellectual historian. Why would I bother with the last will and testament of some unknown person living, dying in the village of Kuik?
Not exactly, right? Intellectual history in the sense of, you know, parsing all these important texts written by these clever people, right? That was not what this last minute testament was about. So, I mean, they set me literally in a direction. for which, you know, I'm still very grateful, of course. And here are pictures of, this is Margaret, and here's Peter's Popper, wonderful people. And I just want to make clear, you know, they did influence.
what I was doing with brochures and put me in a very different direction from what I have been doing so far. And another person who was very important for this project was, of course, Hank Nellen. Gross is this modern biographer, and here's a picture of him. Nellon was also the one who basically completed the brief whistling, so the correspondence of Hugo Grotius, the modern edition of it, 17 volumes. He basically, I think, edited the last seven at least.
The project only finished in 2001, started in 1928, so they had been going for quite a while. And obviously as part of that project, Hank was well aware of the various archival sources. and obviously of, again, connections between archival materials. And also how these archival materials had been handled, not just by Grossius himself, but by various other people. who lived either during his own time or later on. So this is the monograph that I eventually wrote.
This is the title. It was just submitted to the publishers. It hasn't been accepted for publication, so that's great. It took quite a while, 2005 to 2022. Although obviously I did things in between, let me put it this way. But it was also a matter of literally figuring out, okay, what am I doing here? Because I have a tendency to literally dive into the archive materials, and then at a certain point I resurface, and then I'm like, what the hell was I doing? Or am I doing?
That's always a good question. So conceptualising by Mr. Rachel, I think it draws on the history of science and what the historians of science call the archaeology of archives. And here I am indebted to Anne Blair. Here's a picture of Anne Blair at Harvard University. So she pointed me to Archives of the Scientific Revolution, a wonderful collection of essays edited by Michael Hunter, who's a specialist on boil.
And I mean, again, this was a game changer in the sense of, OK, yes, this is important to look at this, how materials have come down to us, who handled these materials, why certain materials have survived and others haven't. And it's not a matter of happenstance. There are some, I'm not saying laws, but there is consistency in terms of what survives and what doesn't.
And it usually is about, okay, what's the importance of materials for people living in later periods who happen to be able to get a handle on this stuff? What's the importance of this material for them? What can they do with it? And if it's not important, let's see how it goes. And of course, on the other hand, there are the forces of nature. We know that fire and water are usually not good in terms of survival of paper. So these kinds of acts of God, they do happen.
There are examples of that, not just in the case of groceries as papers, but other papers as well, obviously. But on the other hand, in terms of survival, there is some consistency in terms of... Who handles this material? Why do they decide to keep it and make an effort to keep it? And it's usually about the importance of this material for them.
Sarah Dry, her book on the Newton papers, again, wonderful stuff. I can highly recommend it to you to read this. So the historians of science have, you know... Look at the date of Michael Hunter's essay collection, 1998. They, as far as I can tell, are far ahead of intellectual history in terms of, you know, literally dealing with these questions and examining, okay, you know...
Where do we need to look? What can we do with this? So the materiality of text, archaeology of archives, that's really prominent in history of science today. And I think intellectual historians and also certainly historians of political thought still need to catch up in this regard. And obviously, history of the book comes into this as well, right? We use responses to texts, the fact that we are now enlisting the digital transition.
if you can even call it that, or we are now in a digital world, has certainly increased interest in the medium. of texts in earlier periods. We don't take it for granted anymore. Obviously, I'm still from the generation of the typewriter. I'm still from the generation of the fax machine, which is now, of course, completely outdated.
So we are now far more aware of, okay, what difference does it make in which medium a message or a text is being conveyed to people? And, you know, as intellectual historians, we, you know... Certainly the way that I was educated. We always had the idea that, okay, you know, these great guys, they're writing their text, and they have all these other texts literally on the shelf behind them. They just take the book, right?
So the Cambridge series in Intellectual History, the one from Quentin Skinner, those paperbacks, well basically our authors had something similar. on the shelf, in their own study. That's what we imagine. And that's, of course, not the case. Not at all. And we should literally step away from that. If you just see pictures of medieval monks copying out their books, what is very significant is the fact there's hardly any other book in the picture. Medieval...
depictions of people writing, it's usually about one book. And that's significant. There are very few texts around. So if you talk about the print revolution, that's an explosion of texts, and you literally see that in artwork as well, 17th century Dutch artwork, when they depict scholars, they literally, the printed texts.
are literally thrown all over the floor, pell-mell, right? I mean, and that depicts literally the explosion of texts that you see in the 16th and 17th century. And then we still should be thinking about, okay, Which editions are they reading? Because that's very significant. So, for example, Grosje's sites, for example, Thomas Aquinas, well, nothing new about that, obviously.
great scholar, but which edition does he use and how does he read Thomas Aquinas? Well, it's not in our paperback edition, obviously, right? There is, we still have that copy. It's in Lund Library in Sweden. I've seen it. It's a 16th century edition, and it's an edition produced by Cajetanus, the cardinal.
who was appointed by the Pope in Rome to basically bring Martin Luther to heel and to have a little discussion of Martin Luther and talk him out of all these crazy ideas, right, about the Protestant Revolution and all that. Okay, I'm simplifying. Simplifying here, but that's the guy, right? So Catia Tainas produces this edition of Thomas Aquinas. The text of Thomas Aquinas is in the middle. Catia Tainas' commentary is all around it.
And when you look at that edition that Grosses used, the underlinings are all in the commentary of Cajetanus. So when Grosses cites Aquinas, right? He is literally reading him through the lens of Cajetanus. It's not a direct engagement with Thomas Aquinas. It is an engagement with a 16th century text.
So that kind of, you know, those kinds of issues, right, the materiality of texts, right, and readers' responses to texts, you know, again, approaches underlining stuff or writing something in the margin. Those are, you know... Total importance for this. And one example I can give you is Peter Hachenmacher and his Grosjes et la guerre juste. So this was a famous... a book on grosses and the just war, produced in the 1990s. I had to read it as a PhD student in French, of course. I got through it.
The suggestion of Hagemacker is that Grotius engage with all these medieval texts. So, you know, all kinds of authors are being mentioned. Oh, Grotius, you know, engagement with this guy, with this guy. And it's all based on the basically offers mentioned by Grotius in the margins of the Jura Bilek Pakas. So you will say it in the text as well, but also in the margins, you literally get direct references to Thomas Aquinas, to Victoria, to all kinds of medieval authors.
And what Hagemachmer never considered, nowhere, in this entire book, 500 pages of it or something, is how did Grotius read these texts. Did he even read them? Because I produced an article in which I showed that, in fact, he's lifting whole sets of references from, for example, Victoria. Vittoria's Rilexio of the Indies, another stuff by Vittoria. So we add an addition of that, we know that through the briefcase length, it's mentioned in his letters, and it must have been very well thought.
Because he's lifting whole sets of references from Vittoria and puts them in his own text. Which means that he never read these supposed medieval authors that he... drew on, according to Hachemacher. I mean, okay, I can see that there's a difference between, you know, this year of Prey Day, when he's still a young man in his 20s, and then later on, this year of Redek Pakas, which is 20 years later.
Okay, then he may have had a chance to do some actual reading in medieval authors. And he's by the time, of course, in Paris, where there's a lot more available in terms of texts. But we really have to be very careful, all right? in terms of talking about Grouch's engagement with medieval authors or any kind of other author. What are we talking about? What do we know about his own reading habits, his own note-taking habits? Do we have...
Let's see, surviving notes by grocers. And we do. The only problem is nobody looks at them. Right? Just pointing it out. Anyway, so... a great book to Lizzie also again about you know the importance of the material materiality of texts and you know our work as individual historians is The one by Harrison and Laslett, the library of John Locke. And it was David Armitage who pointed this out to me. So just a little picture of David here. And Peter Miller's stuff on Piresques Europe.
And again, I can recommend it to you because that really shows the whole intellectual world, these networks of scholars corresponding with each other. What is important for them? What are they circulating? are they obtaining their materials which could be manuscripts living from the Middle East, objects, you name it, all kinds of stuff literally is being circulated in these intellectual networks.
Okay, and here, of course, the Republic of Letters, and somebody who will be familiar to you, I hope, Andrew Pedigree, of course, the man of the USDC project here in St. Andrews. We now have these big databases, and the correspondence of growth is also part of these databases. It's available for MLO, for example. So we can now literally reconstruct Republic of Letters through... these thousands of letters exchanged by scholars in early modern Europe, and they are in these big databases.
and they allow us to really think about what are these connections, who are the people fighting with each other, who are the people who are supporting each other, what are the important debates in these intellectual circles. Because these debates can be very different and of course the priorities of these people can be very different from the priorities that we have today and the questions that we have today.
point this out. So in the end I arrived at the idea of the micro-sociologies of archives. So what is that? It's obviously in the title of my talk today. And I'm taking this definition from Lee Panman. So it's the relationships, however fleeting, formed between individual uses of an archive and the documents or other materials within the archive itself.
So archaeology of archives, I used that term before as well, but that is too much Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones digging around. Whereas I think... the idea of the relationship between human beings and these documents and the fact that they are constantly being handled for particular reasons. I think that it is important to emphasize that.
Obviously when, you know, at least when I do this kind of research, you then, you basically, you re-service and you think, okay, what have I been doing? What is this, right? And you try to engage with the secondary literature and find, okay, what are the concepts that we can best use in order to describe what we've been doing here and basically simplify also for obviously an outside audience.
the importance of what we've been doing. That basically is to me what concepts are for in terms of doing historical research or intellectual history. I'm not interested in concepts as such, to be honest. because that can become intellectual navel-gazing very quickly, where the fight is simply about concepts and not about, okay, what can...
What you can lose sight of very quickly is the fact that concepts are supposed to explain something outside, in the real world. Concepts are not an intellectual game, as far as I'm concerned. We use them for very good reasons, but they are there to explain something in the outside world. And that's what we need to keep in mind. I also discovered later on that Lee Penman had been a postdoc working on the Cultures of Knowledge project.
in Oxford, so I'm not surprised that he came up with this definition of micro-socialities of archives. Okay, so I've been talking enough about concepts, let's move on to Grosjes. One archive or many. So Grotius was, during his lifetime, already in the habit of circulating parts of his manuscripts. He kept it in various locations, and I'm just listing a few of them here. Paris, of course, is another one.
So you can see how, you know, how materials can be lost, dispersed, already during Roses' own lifetime. And that actually happened. As part, Lizzie, of... the working habits of scholars in that era. Now something else happened. His possessions were confiscated after his conviction of high treason by the Dutch states general in May 1619. It's a very cloak-and-decker story, you could say. There's one of my chapters in the book, obviously. So his relatives hid or burned sensitive materials.
Then the Court of Holland had no confiscation decree in May 1630. So on the one hand, materials got lost because of the confiscation itself. and the fact that materials that his relatives were able to hide away, yes, some of that must be covered, but we also note Lizzie Maria van Rijksberg, Grosjes' wife, before she set up to Paris. So Groces escaped in March 1621 from Louverstein Castle, went to Paris. Then his wife joined him there in September.
But we know from correspondence that she literally burned materials that had been hidden by her father-in-law. He returned it to her and then she burned it. And what it was, we don't know. There's no list literally provided in the letter. So the confiscation degree is annulled in May 1630. But does that mean that Grotius gets material back?
He asks his relatives in Holland to, yes, go to various people and try to retrieve materials, but of course it doesn't really work that way. Some of these people are still very powerful. They are post-degrotious. And Lizzie, his brother, says, well, no, thank you. I'm not going to knock on the door of that guy, because you're not going to do that, Lizzie.
It basically means that if we still want to find materials that may have belonged to Grosius or produced by him, we are well advised to look within the archives of his enemies. because they had a real motive to get a hold of this material and either of course burn it or hide it away in their own archives. Yes, so that's one tip. Look in the archives of the enemies of your author.
So after the escape from Louis Vuitton Castle, Groces goes to Paris. I'm not going to go into the details of what he does there, but basically he keeps producing materials. and written texts literally go back and forth between Grosjes and his younger brother in Holland, who is responsible for getting stuff published in Holland. So you can already see that materials can get lost on the way.
And, of course, materials can also stay in Holland in the sense of Willem de Groot trying to get stuff published but not succeeding in that. And of course, at the time that Grouches dies in 1645, literally Willem de Groot has a whole stack of materials at home, and he becomes the de facto owner. So there already you have a split literally in the archive.
Grosses himself became more systematic in ordering his papers once he received his appointment as Swedish ambassador. And I'll show you an example of this. So this is manuscript 38 in a remonstrant church collection in the Rotterdam Municipal Library. And what you can see here is, let's see, one of the end leaves with, you know, eligible...
handwriting, this is Mr. Grosius for you, but also here with folio numbers. So he obviously had materials bound, then he foliated it, put folio numbers on it. And at the end leaves, he wrote his own little table of contents. So this is very much, this is Grosje's own ordering. Okay, what happened after Grosjes' death? This is a picture of Grosjes' second son, Peter de Groot, who became pensionary of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, also Dutch ambassador.
And he inherited the bulk of the papers. But, as I already pointed out, Wilhelm de Groot, the younger brother of Grosjes, also had a whole set of papers in his possession. at the time that his elder brother died, in 1645, and basically kept that material. these papers preserved later on. Why would the descendants of Grotius do that? For what reason? Because it's a lot of material. Why do you keep preserving this? Let's see.
Put it in a big chest and keep it safe from water, from fire. Keep it at a nice temperature. I think one of the main reasons was the support of Grotius and his descendants for the remonstrant denomination in the Netherlands. So during the 12 years truce Grotius had been arguing that Basically the Remonstrants who had a different idea about predestination than obviously the Orthodox Calvinists. This was an issue about free will or not.
Grosjes was basically on the side of the Remonstrance during the 12 years truce, that's between 1609 and 1621 in the Dutch Republic. And so the Remonstrants very much see him as their hero. And they are the ones who are interested in his papers and also want to preserve the papers and, of course, his own reputation. And they very much see this as part, of course, of writing their own history.
and also proving themselves right. So the idea that religious conflict is over by the second half of the 17th century, or let's say the age of enlightenment in the 18th century, nope, not at all. It's very clear from the way that Grotius' papers are used by the Remonstrants is there are still memory wars going on. The idea is still to prove, you know, we were right and the Orthodox Calvinists, who of course won.
one, in the sense that they controlled the Dutch and Chrom Church, that they were wrong. Listen. Here at Penantro, the history of the Reformation, multi-volume work. And of course, history of the Reformation is about showing again the remonstrance right. And later on... Caspar Brandt, who is in fact the son of Gerard Brandt, wrote a very important biography of Grosje's in Dutch, published later on in two volumes. I have a copy lately at home.
because it provides very important information about approaches which otherwise we wouldn't know. So the biography was left unfinished at Brandstaff in 1696, but then completed by yet another Remonstrant, Ariane van Kattenburg, professor of theology at the Remonstrant Seminary in Amsterdam. And he is the one who 10 years later deposits documents, literally entire volumes, like this.
in the library of the Wimelsmann Seminary in Amsterdam, and it's now part of the collection of the University of Amsterdam. So here we can see how... Of course Ganesh, the Hode family, they gave permission for this. Again, it's all for the remonstrant cause. Grotius is the remonstrant hero. It also means that he is depicted, of course, in a certain way in the biography. So the biography that Brandt and Kattenberg produce is very much about religious conflict, and Grosje's role in that.
attempts to resolve the situation and later on to produce a kind of, you know, reconciliation of the Christian churches, right? That is all very prominent in the biography. There's nothing there, for example, about Grosjes and the Dutch Sydney Company. It's not because these papers didn't exist. They did. But Brandt and Kattenberg never asked for them. Perhaps they didn't know about them. or weren't interested in them. And so you literally get in the biography two lines about...
Oh, yes, yes. In 1613, Grotius went to London to negotiate on behalf of the Dutch East Indian Company. But what was much more important was that he also tried to convince, of course, James the First of England.
to side with the remonstrance, which was true. But yeah, let's see, two lines about grocers and the Dutch East Indian Company, and that's it. And let's see, pages, pages, pages about... the remonstrant cause and gross importance for that, for religious reconciliation and of course trying to make it possible for the remonstrants to exercise their religion. Okay, and then moving on to the Knessethofer family in 18th century Rotterdam. Here's one of them. The big guy, you could say.
Burgermaster of Rotterdam, VUC Director, Commission of the Postal Services, etc, etc, etc, literally. And here we have to emphasize the importance of material wealth. So I looked at the papers of these guys, and particularly Last Wills and Testaments. I mean, you're talking about inventories like, packs like this, right? This guy, that he had a million, at least. in terms of material wealth. You're talking about houses, investments, also here in Britain. They owned part of the British...
the sovereign debt, so they had shares in the funds, as it's called. They had lots of things, but it amounted to at least a million by the time this guy died. So, you know, they belong to the elite of Rotterdam. They have houses on the Hanning Fleet, where all the elite of Rotterdam have their houses. It means that you have a gallery with ancestral portraits, right?
And you start, you know, this side with, let's say, the parents of Grosjes, then Grosjes Maria van Eichsberg, then the children of Grosjes, and then all the way on, right? The portraits were hanging in the Maas camera, which is basically the room that was facing the Maas River, the most important room of the house.
And on top of that, you have Grosje's memorabilia. I'll show you one of them later on. And of course, you have the papers. And if you look at the inventories in the Last Wills and Testaments, these things are mentioned together. So for these guys, the papers are not stuff that you read. They're relics. They're memorabilia. They are part of the social status competition.
amongst Rotterdam families. You can show that you are an important person because you have this whole lineage and there are the ancestral portraits. But you can also literally pull out a set of papers if you wish. or a gown, supposedly worn by coaches. Something for a dinner party, right? I mean, listen, this is how you have to think about it.
After his death, the first five inventory of the working papers was drawn up. A very important document, of course, for tracing what happened to the papers. And here's the second son of this guy, Jan de Cheroj. who also was in possession of the papers. And interestingly, this guy was an orangist and his father had been as well, to be honest. So you literally see him. Here in this picture, this is his Haringly house, adorned with, in fact, a Prussian eagle.
This was literally after the king of Prussia intervened in a basic kind of patriot revolution in the Netherlands in the 1780s. The Prussian king intervened in order to put down the revolution. and to make sure that the Statholders, the Princes of Orange, would continue to be literally in charge. So that's what's being celebrated here.
the illumination of the house of Jan Cornessegoed. Let's see, on the birthday of the stadtholder, William V. And it shows the Persian eagle literally on top. And of course, here are... also the orange trees on the top of his house. So the guy was very much an orangist and he was in possession of groceries papers.
And the Rotterdam Patriots, they had a field day with this. They were like, because for the Patriots, Grosius was, of course, a Republican martyr. So here you see a change in terms of the public perception of Grosius. For the Remonstrants, he was basically this guy who was on the side of the Remonstrants, who was arguing for religious toleration. At the end of the 18th century, Groses becomes this Republican martyr, the hero of the patriots in the Netherlands.
And so the Patriots literally in all kinds of pamphlets pointed out the incongruity of Jan Kornets de Groot, literally being a descendant of Grotius. but also an orangist. They're like, you know, you are literally betraying the legacy of your great ancestor. Thankfully for us. Jan Cornets de Groot never touched the papers. So on the one hand, he was, you know, the Patriots, you know, hated him. You know, the stuff they said about him was not very nice. But on the other hand...
You know, he was like, you know, the ancestral papers, you don't touch them, you don't touch the portraits, right? You just leave them. So that's what he did, which is a great thing for us historians. Here on the right-hand side you see one of the, remember Biblia? Supposedly the drinking glass that Roses used in Luvestein Castle when he was drinking wine and writing perhaps on this, your buddy Apaches, who knows, right?
Obviously that glass was produced in the second half of the 17th century for family members of Grotius. Probably at the time when in fact the older generation died away, the generation that had known him personally. And you basically get the transition to the grandchildren, the grandchildren who never had any direct contact with him. And I think that this is a way, you know, a drinking glass and other things like the pensionary's gown and all that.
is to make it more, you know, to be able to touch him, right? Because here, this is the glass that he's supposed to touch, so you can now touch the glass, right? I think you're dealing with those kinds of sentiments. I mean, you can very much compare it with what's happening now with the funeral of Elizabeth II. Being there, seeing the cortege, going past the casket, you know, you're part of history, you can touch history, right? Something like that.
And this is all part of this. So Hülkenets de Groot, in the village of Kuyk, he's legally the grandson of the Rotterdam Burgermaster. Biologically, he was not. Yeah, there's a very complicated situation in terms of the elder son of the Rotterdam Burgermaster. I'm not going to go into the details, but basically the descendants of the daughters of the Rotterdam Burgermaster.
did not regard this guy as basically, you know, the son of their brother. And they literally cast him out. And that has consequences. Again, you know, the guy himself basically... you know, a petty tax collector in Coke. He never had a house of his own. He lived in a B&B all his life. Lizzie probably surrounded by the portraits, the 30 volumes of working papers and the glass and the gown and everything. A pretty sad story, to be honest. But I mean, that distinction, right?
between the daughters of the Rotterdam Bergamas, who married, of course, into the Rotterdam elite, and whose own descendants were part of the elite of the Netherlands in the 19th century, and the fact that this guy, who hooked on his throat, he's just cast out. They don't recognize him as one of them. And that has consequences. So already during his own lifetime, he displayed the grocery memorabilia and the sold-off stuff.
So we have this Noltenes, the Mann guy, who made a drawing fact of the Louverstein glass. He also bought other stuff from Hugo Canessa Road. Horkin has to go to science, you know, certificates of authenticity. Lizzie took pieces from the black lace coat and sold them to various people. At the end of his life he lodged with Jean-Baptiste Reguère, a tobacconist in Kuik, and obviously at the end of his life he became elderly and also sickly.
He became totally dependent, you could say, on Regrand, on this tobacconist, his landlord. And so Regrand's story, because that's the only story we have. that he was gifted 30-odd volumes of grosses, his working papers, literally as a kind of thank you. Supposedly, Hugo Conestero didn't have anything else that he could give away. And so, out of gratitude for all the care that had been taken of him by Reguin and Reguin's family, we hope that's about gifted.
Regrand would be 30 odd volumes of Grosje's working papers, and Regrand then used these to settle his debts with Christian Snelleman, a wholesale merchant of tobacco in Rotterdam. Yes. It's a pretty amazing story. So here is literally a part of the lace coat, supposedly worn by Grosjes, together with the certificate of authenticity. It's all still there in the Marks Museum in Amsterdam.
But moving on. So Snelleman obtains these materials and again what's very interesting for us is Snelleman was himself a remonstrant. And again, the remonstrant network literally swings into action here. Because Snellemann, when he negotiated with Reguin about this, you know,
rather unorthodox way of settling debts, let me put it this way, had been in contact already with the remonstrant minister, C.P. Thiele, the local minister in Rotterdam. Later on, C.P. Thiele became a very important theologian, by the way, at the University of Leiden. So Thiele basically advised Snellemann and said, you know, you can't go wrong with this, right? And so Snellemann accepted the volumes in lieu of the actual payment, right, by Regret.
And then Tiele put Snellemann in touch with Martínez Nayev in The Hague. And again, Martínez Nayev, you know, he was part of, you could say, remonstrant circles. who happened to be the minister's brother, was the one who drew up the auction catalogue at the request of Martínez Nayev, and we're very lucky that he did that because, you know...
He was one of the founders of model bibliography in the Netherlands, and the amount of detail that he literally provided in the auction catalogue was very significant. Martimus Nayov was very pleased with the work done by P.I. Chile and already said it at that time, this will be important for scholars, the fact that you put together this. auction catalogue with so much detailed information. So the VOC papers were considered the most important part of the collection.
and divided it up into 48 lots. The tour of Prairie, which was marked as Lot 72, was described as an early work of Grotius, which was correct. yeah it's always uh you know we are literally of course judging with the benefit of hindsight the fact that these papers were split up in so many lots, about a hundred in total. We have the correspondence of Martínez Nayef and he literally instructed
who Lizzie had the whole collection at his house, Lizzie, to go through it and describe it, right? And Lizzie instructed Pei Attila, said, you know, divide it up in as many lots as possible, because I want to make, you know, a killing, basically. The more lots you have, the more you can sell, and the higher the profits. It's that simple. The same thing happened, by the way, at the auction of the papers of Newton. in 1936 so this is not an exception it is the rule
And it also meant, of course, that papers were physically removed from their bindings. And I can show you an example from Rotterdam Municipal Library. This is Lot 70 from the auction of 1864, and as you can see, only half the papers are left in the binding. have been taken out and described as individual lots. Now thankfully the remonstrant congregation in Rotterdam also bought all of those. So we do have it. is simply not sitting anymore in that volume.
So this is one example, but obviously it also happened with the other materials. And for example, in the case of the VOC materials, that's now a set of loose papers in the Dutch archives in The Hague. there will have been a binding around it and there will have been a set of end leaves with probably Grosius' own table of contents. And that is lost. And I was probably lost when Piatila went through stuff, cut stuff out. We literally have to be aware of that, that this is the situation.
Okay, so what do you get at the auction and also after the auction for trading in manuscripts? Neyhoff himself approached important buyers and made deals with them. So Fredrik Müller, the guy who had trained him, the other auctioneer in the Netherlands, there were two important antiquarians and auctioneers in the Netherlands in the second office of the 90th century, it was Fredrik Müller and Nayev.
Nayef was a trainee of Muller. On this occasion Pradeck-Muller went to the auction and was literally negotiating on behalf of the Nederlandse Handelsmaatsuppei. Quite appropriate. The bid was for the VOC papers. And guess what? The Nelofs-Handes-Malcipé was pretty much the successor of the Dutch East India Company in the 19th century Dutch East Indies. They controlled the trade with the Dutch East Indies.
in terms of the production of cash crops, but also, you know, shipping them to Amsterdam and then selling them off at big auctions in Amsterdam. That's the Netherlands of Handel's Mass Pay. And they literally put up the money. 500 guilders for the VOC papers alone. Quite a bit of money. Rotterdam Municipal Archives wanted to have their share of Grotius. Grotius had of course been a pensioner of Rotterdam, i.e. a legal advisor of the town of Rotterdam during its own lifetime.
The Remonstrant Church of Rotterdam, these guys were very rich, the Remonstrants claimed Grotius as one of their own. Leiden University Library, Leiden had been of course Grotius his university, this is where he received his training. And they still regard Leiden, still regards, of course, Groses as one of their own. The Swedish ambassador in the Hague, Groses had been, guess what? Swedish ambassador in Paris.
And so the Swedish ambassador got basically papers related to Grosses' embassy in Paris. And they also basically contacted people in Sweden. and said, do you realize this is coming up? And so literally the foreign minister of Sweden got involved. It's wonderful to read the correspondence between the foreign minister and the Swedish ambassador in The Hague. And then also another descendant, the head of the cadet branch of the Kornetscher family, the Ape Kornetscher from Carienberg.
And by the way, I've mentioned a lot of names. They're obviously on your genealogical table in front of you. And I basically put names that I mentioned here in my talk in bold so that you have an idea of who these people are and where they are. Let's see. in relation to other family members. It is possible that Nayev also kept some materials for himself so that not everything was sold because there were likely later on in 1899
acquired Lot 71. That's the manuscript of the Imperio and it was acquired at an auction of the collection of J.L. Bayers. And Bayers had been a trainee of Nayef at the time of the 1864 auction. So Nayef probably made an arrangement whereby Bayers could keep this stuff and Bayers basically...
very shortly after that auction set up a basic shop for himself in Utrecht. So it was basically a way in which Nayef tried to help his trainee and say, okay, I'll get you some stuff that you can use to set up your own shop. in Utrecht. But it didn't stop the horse trading, basically. continued Lizzie after the auction. So there's wonderful correspondence between Frederick Müller and Lein University Library about the exchange of autographed manuscripts.
And it basically means that if you think about BPL 917, the Jure Prey Day, you can say that it is a construction of the 19th century Leiden librarians. because various parts of that manuscript were basically in different parts of Groces's archive, you know, by the time that the auction of 1864 came around.
Of course, they very quickly realized the connection between these materials. But it was basically the exchange of manuscripts between Muller and the University Library that made it possible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, so to say. Then materials were sold on to, for example, a Jewish customer, Henrique de Castro. These are all materials relating to basically the Viceroy's in East Asia writing to Philip III of Spain and Particle.
And why was Henriques de Castro so interested in that? Well, he imagined that he himself was a descendant of the viceroy. The viceroy was also called the Castro. Whether that means that you are in the Senate is not a question, but hey, you know, let's see, putting together your own family collection, your imagined genealogy, hey, that was all part of the game in the 19th century. The De Castro collection was auctioned in 1899. Ed Saïm and Bibliothek of Rosentilliana acquired lots 73 through 75.
That's what we call the Jodalé Clement. It's quite an important text, in fact. In 1615, Grossius and probably other pensionaries, so legal advisors of Holland towns, got together to think about, okay, There are Jews from Portugal, the Sephardic Jews, who want to come and settle here in Holland. On which terms should we allow them to settle here in Holland? And they came up with a kind of proposal.
for the states of Holland to think about. It was never accepted, but that text exists. It's now in Ed Sahim. It's very important in terms of thinking about toleration of Jews in the Netherlands. Obviously it has been published in the 20th century. There are multiple editions. There's a very recent one as well. But there was more material, and that only came to light in 1954. Let's see the importance of, did I pass this round, the second edition of the of the auction catalogue? Is that somewhere?
Again, this is an amazing story. So, Clevens himself was, as it says here, former Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was hanging out in the Hotel des Andes in The Hague. It's very close to, in fact, the... The centre of government, where the parliament buildings are, and also the office of the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. It used to be the place to hang out for politicians. I'm not sure whether it's the case today, but it certainly was.
Clevens was himself a student of Van Eysenka. Van Eysenka is one of the editors of his book. Van Eysenka was a prominent judge, was on the Permanent Court of International Justice, for example, in the 1930s. was also the advisor to the Dutch government in terms of basically appointing people as diplomats for the Netherlands, of course, in various places.
admitting people to basically a kind of training to be a diplomat. You had to do an examination. And guess what? One of the examiners was Van Eitenkamp. So he literally was a gatekeeper for, you know, if you wanted to go into the diplomatic service, you literally had to deal with this guy, right, to get in. So Clevens was a student of an Isinga, obviously.
got a presentation copy of this, of the second edition of the auction catalogue. So he was sitting literally in the voyeur of the hotel designer, flipping through this stuff, and then he sees a pal. Victor Eduard Teixeira de Montes, who happened to be on leave from Guatemala. He was the Dutch representative of Guatemala at that point. So these guys start chatting. And then Clevens points out, he talks about this, he says, oh, such a shame that all these...
Various lots, you know, have disappeared because literally that's what it says here in the text. We don't know where this is. We don't know where this is, right? And then Teixeira de Mato is saying, yeah, but hey, hold on. I have these lots. I have these lots. Two, five, six, eight, and ten. They're sitting literally in a safe back in Guatemala.
Right? And of course, Clevens was like, what? Right? So he literally, this is the description of Clevens, he grabbed Victoria de Matos. They, literally, they ran to the next telephone, which is probably on the desk of... So in the foyer there in Desende. And they tried to phone to make a call to Van Uysenka, who was hanging out on his estate in Friesland. Thankfully for us historians...
Van Eysenkaan never answered the call. He was not at home at that point. So Van Clevens then basically wrote him a letter. And that's why I have this whole wonderful story, of course. happenstance, yes, serendipity, whatever you call it. So Teixeira de Matos was basically his father was the one who acquired these lots from Henrique de Castro, whether at the auction or earlier, I can't remember from the top of my head.
Anyway, von Klefferns was able to publish this material. They also tried to persuade Taxiero de Matos to donate the materials to Leyen University Library. That didn't happen, but... and I only discovered this a couple of years ago, Leighton University Library went to an auction at Sotheby's in the 1970s, where this material was put on sale again, and they got it. So the materials are now in Leighton University Library.
Conclusions. So, working papers reserved by the Kornets-Zachroth family. It's all about social status competition of elite families in Holland and, of course, the importance of the family wealth. the difference between, you know, the 18th century Corness de Groot family, you know, these very, very wealthy guys who are literally at the top of the game in Rotterdam, and then, you know, the grandson.
who is not recognized as being a grandson of the Rotterdam burgomaster, who spends his days as a petty tax collector in Kuik in a PMB. He's the one who literally was selling up stuff already during his lifetime and that the stuff is then auctioned later on in 1864 is not a surprise.
Grossers are the remonstrant heroes, so the remonstrant community, they have the incentive to preserve the working papers and to explore the importance, in fact, of these working papers in order to win the memory wars. They were right. and the Orthodox Calvinists were wrong. What happened during the Twelve Years' Truth was wrong. The Synod of Dort, which is still regarded by the Dutch Reformed Church today, as one of the most important synods in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church of Lutti.
you know, one of the building blocks, you could say, of the Dutch Reformed Church, right, the Synod of 1619, which of course cast out the remonstrance, the remonstrance that kicked out of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1619, right. is what this was all about. That's why they set store by Grosjes' papers. It also made Grosjes a harbinger of the Enlightenment. So yes, Grosjes was for religious reconciliation.
But this is not some kind of, you know, principle in the sense of, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom, that kind of stuff. Or, you know, it's a good thing. in principle for everybody to say whatever they want or to believe whatever they want. It was very much about reconciliation of the Christian churches. freedom of expression or freedom of religion for Jews or any other kind of religion, that was pretty much out of bounds. If you look at the Joden Reglement, so this set of...
ideas about, okay, what can we allow Jews to do here in Holland? It's very clear that Grosje said, okay, yes, yes, we can have these, you know, they can have their own religious preachers. But, you know, at the start of a religious service, the Jews first have to listen to, let's see, a Christian minister telling them that they're wrong. And, you know, this is one of the proposals in the Yoder Reglement, you know, by Grosjes.
Okay, we can allow them Jewish religious services, but at the start they first have to listen to a Dutch Christian minister, Calvinist minister telling them they're wrong. Well, that's not our idea of religious toleration, is it, right? But literally, I would say that the way the process is presented in the biography of... of Brandt and Kattenberg, that makes him much more an enlightenment figure as supposedly this great fighter for religious toleration, which he wasn't.
I don't think he wants. Not in our sense of the word. And of course, our sense is pretty much indebted to the way that the Enlightenment guys understood this issue. So the 8064 auction obviously is a transition in terms of papers from private to public ownership. It's a very dramatic one in a sense. It's never complete. As we've just seen, a couple of lots were only acquired by Main University Library in the 1970s. So there is still stuff that remains private.
But the irony of this story is, okay, the bulk of the materials end up in public collections, but is it being studied? Not really. The first 50 years, basically nothing happens. Yes, This Year of Pray Day gets published, so four years after the auction you get the Latin edition of This Year of Pray Day by Hammacher.
And in the Slyen University Library is Fraun, the great Dutch historian of the 19th century, who basically finds somebody to do the edition and Fraun studies the material and he writes a very important article on it in fact. But that's it. Basically, it's only in the 1920s. For example, in 1925, the big pterocentenary of Grosius.
the Jourobelic Parkes, 300 years of the publication of the Jourobelic Parkes, it's only then that they start paying attention. And for example, it's only then that they start, that they commission people. to produce indexes. There was, until that time, no index on, for example, the papers that were in the Dutch National Archives. So they have to commission somebody to, let's see, go through the papers and describe, okay, what is this? Is this a letter? Is this a memorandum, right?
And it only gets done in 1920s. And only after that can you actually look at these materials and use it for your own research before that. People didn't know it was there. There was no access, right? And so today I think most people who claim to be doing brochures use published materials. not the actual archival stuff. It is getting easier to get to it in the sense of Leiden University Library has digitized a lot of materials.
But I recognize that for most things you still need to go over there to the Netherlands. That's an expense, it's time, it's true. But there's a lot of stuff there that is absolutely crucial in terms of, you know... if you want to understand, for example, what's the intellectual universe in terms of what did he actually read, what are his notes on certain texts, what are his priorities in terms of the...
The big problems that he deals with in his own time, well, you actually have to look at these archived materials. You can't get away with just, you know, reading another published edition of the Zurabetic Parchets. Okay, well, I think I'll leave you with this. And here's a selected bibliography that lists a couple of the publications that deal with these issues that I've published over the years. But the monograph, hopefully, will be published in. Hopefully a year's time. Thank you very much.