CHAPTER ONE
THE VERDUSSENS AND THE INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN CATHOLIC BOOKS (ANTWERP, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY)*
Stijn Van Rossem
The year 1585 was an important turning point in the history of the Low Countries. The Fall of Antwerp marked the end of Protestant influence in the Southern provinces and led to the de facto separation between the protestant North and the Catholic South. Many investors moved North at the dawn of what would become the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. Yet, the Fall on Antwerp was not the end of Antwerp as a mercantile cen- ter. It was Roland Baetens who launched the concept of ‘the indian sum- mer of Antwerp’s prosperity’ in a 1976 study of the De Groote trading house.1 Baetens used the concept to refer to the relative prosperity of trade in Antwerp during the first half of the seventeenth century. After 1585 the city of Antwerp enjoyed a relative economic and cultural boom by special- ising in luxury items and by immersing itself entirely in its new Catholic identity. The real downfall of the international position of Antwerp, started in the second half of the seventeenth century. Recently, even this theory has been put to the test. Ilja Van Damme has ‘rehabilitated’ the economic status in the second half of the seventeenth century, concluding that no true economic crisis occurred in the cities of the Southern Netherlands until the first decade of the eighteenth century.2
List of Abbreviations: CAA: City Archive Antwerp; MPM: Museum Plantin-Moretus; AHPS, Archivo Histórico Provincial de Sevilla; STCV: Short Title Catalogue Vlaanderen/ Flanders. * The title refers to the article of Jan Materné, ‘La librairie de la Contre-Réforme: le réseau de l’Officine plantinienne au XVIIè siècle,’ in Europe et le livre: réseaux et pratiques du négoce de librairie xvi–xixe siècles, ed. Frédéric Barbier, e.a. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996) 43–60. This contribution is a follow-up article of Stijn van Rossem, ‘The Bookshop of the Counter-Reformation Revisited. The Verdussen Company and the Trade in Catholic Publications, Antwerp, 1585–1648,’ Quaerendo 38 (2008): 306–321. 1 Roland Baetens, De nazomer van Antwerpens welvaart: de diaspora en het handelshuis De Groote tijdens de eerste helft der 17de eeuw, 2 vols. (Brussel: Gemeentekrediet van België 1976). 2 Ilja van Damme, Verleiden en verkopen: Antwerpse kleinhandelaars en hun klanten in tijden van crisis (ca. 1648-ca. 1748) (Amsterdam: Aksant 2007).
When it comes to book historical historiography, the dates 1585 and 1648 still serve as important demarcation points to describe the decline of Antwerp as a typographic center. In this view, Antwerp lost it leading role as a center of Humanist printing to Amsterdam after 1585, but the Antwerp printers and booksellers managed to prolong their international status until 1648 by embracing the new spirit of the triumphant restoration of the Catholic Church and by recognising the economic potential that it represented. The period after 1648 is characterised as a time of crisis, impoverishment and increasing provincialism. It builds upon stereotypi- cal statements, e.g. made by Le Clercq, who described the period following 1648 as follows: la pleine décadence de l’imprimerie en Belgique, commencée par le traité de Munster en 1648 et achevée en 1715 par le traité de la Barrière, qui fermait toutes nos frontieres a l’exportation.3 In a 1969 article, Leon Voet advanced the slightly milder proposition that Antwerp had slipped back into the status of a regional typographic center during the second half of the seventeenth century.4 Francine de Nave repeated these words in the 1990s, proposing that, after 1640, the late sum- mer of Antwerp typography had passed, under the influence of the eco- nomic and political troubles that took place at that time.5 In the opinion of Voet and De Nave, the Officina Plantiniana was the only company to be able to hold its own within this downward spiral. To date, investigations of this topic have been dominated largely by the Officina Plantiniana, which has served as a pars pro toto for the typograph- ical activities that took place in the Southern Netherlands. In essence, the history of the early modern book trade in the Netherlands has been over- simplified as a parabola that reached its peak in the activities of Chistophe Plantin. The period before Plantin is strewn with important predecessors, including Gherard Leeu, Petrus Phalesius and Joannes Steelsius, who were internationally oriented publishers of learned books, albeit not on the
3 Leopold le Clercq, ‘Les catalogues des Verdussen, imprimeurs-libraires et bibliophiles,’ De Gulden Passer 10/4 (1932): 141: ‘the complete downfall of the printing press in Belgium, started with the Treaty of Munster in 1648 and finalised with the Barrier Treaty in 1715, clos- ing our borders for export.’ 4 Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses. A history and evaluation of the printing and publish- ing activities of the Officina Plantiniana at Antwerp, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Van Gendt & Co, 1969–1972), vol. 1, 215. 5 Francine de Nave, ‘Een typografische hoofdstad in opkomst, bloei en verval’ in Antwerpen, verhaal van een metropool, eds. Jan van der Stock, e.a. (Gent: Snoeck-Ducaju, 1993), 94.