Book review

F.F. BLOK,Isaac Vossiusand his Circle. His Life until his farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden 1618-1655. Groningen, Egbert Forsten, 2001, cloth, 24.5 x 16 cm, 520 pp., illus., ISBN 9069801175, f 125.

There is a remarkable passage in Sevensuspects, a novel from the famous series which Michael Innes wrote around inspector Sir John Appleby in the 1930s. A murder - but of course - has been committed in a very British University College. One of the seven professorial suspects is brought to life in an equally British way: "... the man who received the blessing of Niebuhr preserves the liveliest family anecdotes of Bentley and Heinsius and Voss - the sense of personal contact scarcely growing dim until it disap- pears with Politian and Erasmus into the twilight of the fifteenth century". The remark- able thing about this sentence is not so much its splendid expression of what is now called the transmission of culture, as it is the writer's apparent reliance on the fact that the average English reader of detective novels in the 1930s would know who Niebuhr, Heinsius and Voss are. That the readers might be familiar with one of their 'own', the famous classical philologist Richard Bentley (1662-1742). perhaps even with the equally well-known German professor in classical philology B.G. Niebuhr is not so surprising; but the Dutchmen Heinsius and Voss? Would a Dutch audience have been that knowledgeable? In those days? Not to mention our present times, when the Arts Faculty of the largest university of the has to make do without and Greek on the curriculum. Perhaps here and there bells would start ringing and bring to mind the learned Gerardus Vossius of the Muidcrkring and the Atheneum Illustre in , or even his no less erudite Leiden colleague Daniel Heinsius, on the assump- tion that the writer must refer to those two. But in that case those bells had better stop ringing. In the context of textual critics and philologists, Michael Innes' illustrious roll- call does not refer to the well-known pair of fathers Gerardus and Daniel, but to their sons, and Nicolas Heinsius, world-famous in their own days, though now almost forgotten. Almost forgotten, were it not for the fact that Frans F. Blok, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Nicolas Heinsius in 1949 and who went on to write a number of highly absorb- ing studies on the scholarly circles in the 17th-centur-y Dutch Republic and the excel- lence of the philology practised there, has now published an in more than one sense monumental and fascinating book on the life (albeit not the entire life) of this Isaac Vossius (1618-89). The Dutch version appeared in 2000, now followed by a no less mon- umental and highly readable English translation by Cis van Heertum. We read about young Vossius' early years in the studious family circle in Leiden and, from 1631 onwards, in Amsterdam, where his father Gerard and are appointed as the first professors of the Athenaeum Illustre. We also learn about his menthor, the 'difficult' Leiden scholar Claude Saumaise, and how the good relations existing between them slowly deteriorate into hate. We read about his friends Johannes Fredericus Gronovius, Nicolaas Heinsius, Jan Six and about his friendly relations with the Amsterdam rabbi . Then there is his 'grand tour', taking him 310 via and Paris - where he lives in the house of , then Swedish ambassador in , and is introduced in the highest scholarly and diplomatic cir- cles - to Italy. First he travels to Florence, where he studies and copies numerous manuscripts in the Biblioteca Laurentiana. From there he goes to Rome and Naples and back again via Venice and Milan. Setting off from the latter city, he travels on horseback to Paris via Geneva and Dijon in less than four weeks. We read about his second stay in Paris, again spent with Grotius, for whom he acted as secretary. Then there is the main chunk of the book, relating the story of his 'Swedish connection'. In 1648 Queen Christina invites him to the royal palace in Stockholm, where he arrives after a journey of three months, to be welcomed by her in his own native language. He enters her service against the royal salary of 2,000 rijksdaalder.s,a salary five times higheir, as he proudly informs his father, than that cashed by a professor in the Netherlands. At the age of thirty he meets the 22 year-old Christina on a daily and informal basis and becomes her teacher. Initially the tutorials focus on the Greek lan- guagc, in which she was already so proficient that she was able to read Plato cursorily almost without assistance and render him in Latin! Can there now be found even one Professor in Classical Languages able to equal the young Queen of Sweden in this respect? A monarch who thought nothing of this, who ordered a tutor to help her brush up her Greek and who had other things on her mind, too. Intriguing. Was this only due to her great intelligence, or were other factors involved, such as a highly disciplined work schedule without the distractions of modern life, and quite simply a longer work- day : royal audiences often already began at five o'clock in the dark and icy Swedish morning. Isaac is in any case thrilled with her and she is thrilled with him. The palace could of course only speculate to what extent they were enthralled by each other, and speculate they did. Slanders, backbiting and intrigues, Isaac had to suffer them all. He, too, repeatedly fell into disfavour, was rehabilitated again, only to be accused of the murder, for reasons of professional envy, of no less a man than the renowned Descartes, who had also been called to Stockholm and who died there on m February 1650. The entire European Who's Who of scholarship seems to have been invited to Sweden at the time, including Saumaise, whom we encountered above. His wife incidentally thought it funny punning on the death of Descartes, to spread the message 'qu'elle et son man allaient jouer des cartes', a bon mot which could not amuse Christina. In the meantime Isaac, who by then had also been appointed royal librarian, was hard at work increasing the library's number of printed books and manuscripts by means of massive acquisitions. His ambition was to turn the royal library into one of the great- est and finest of Europe. Until June 1654 he remained in Stockholm, punctuated by periods abroad, but was forced to witness how Christina gradually lost her interest in the library, at one time ordering the books to be catalogued and arranged, only to have the rooms of the library cleared to house a few guests. As the financial situation of the Swedish court declined rapidly before the Queen's abdication - also in 1654 - payment of Isaac's salary had fallen dramatically in arrears. In the end Christina allowed him to compensate himself by selecting books from the royal library, which, for that matter, contained large parts of his own private collection of books. Although the accusations that Isaac had plundered the royal library when he left, are largely untrue, he proba- bly did not sell himself short either - and why should he. A large part of the books which were then moved from Stockholm to the Netherlands eventually came to the