UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Late Latin Poetry in Dutch-Speaking Countries after WWII van Waarden, J.A. Publication date 2016 License CC BY-NC Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): van Waarden, J. A. (2016). Late Latin Poetry in Dutch-Speaking Countries after WWII. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:28 Sep 2021 Joop van Waarden (University of Amsterdam) Late Latin Poetry in Dutch-Speaking Countries after WWII SECOND, SLIGHTLY REVISED VERSION AS OF 26 APRIL 2017. This paper was presented at the public study day ‘Voices on Late Latin Poetry: European Scholarship in Context’, organized by Helen Kaufmann, at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, on 16 September 2016.1 It is here reproduced ‘as is’, S.E.&O., with some improvements for which I am grateful to Raphael Brendel, Franz Dolveck, Gavin Kelly and Francesco Lubian. I also thank Tim Denecker, Elena Litovchenko and Jeroen Wijnendaele for their reactions. From the flyer: ‘The study day aims at giving a survey on European scholarship on late Latin poetry. It features six papers, each on the scholarship tradition of one language (French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch) or region (Central European). The speakers will present the most important scholars of their language/region, past and present, and situate them in the context of Classics as a discipline as well as explore the educational, historical and social roots from which the individual research traditions have emerged’. The study of late Latin poetry in the Netherlands and Flanders (“Vlaams”, “Flemish”) after the Second World War has to a great extent been determined by its specific social, especially religious, embedding.2 One would typically encounter, say, Prudentius, not Claudian, as the main focus of interest traditionally was on early Christian poetry against the foil of a number of chairs in Patristics. Recent developments have only gradually altered this original thrust, which is as much an accolade to the creative force of the founding fathers and mothers as it is – regretfully – a proof that late antique poetry is relatively understudied nowadays in the Low Countries. The ‘discovery’ of Late Antiquity, the paradigm shift from Patristics to Early Christian Studies3, and the sweeping methodical turn away from positivist philology towards postmodern relativist and reader-oriented interpretative concerns in the field of Classical Studies at large, all of them well under way since the 1970s, are recognizable in the development which I’m going to sketch, but did not fundamentally alter the bias towards matters Christian in the study of late Latin poetry in Dutch-speaking countries. Perhaps that is what, in the end, made it extra vulnerable to the inexorable post-war process of secularisation and deconfessionalisation, on the one hand, and to the reduction of time and money spent on the classics in academe (and a fortiori on patristics), on the other. Incidentally, in the Netherlands, the study of late Latin prose held itself much better, witness the Groningen Apuleius project and the grand Ammianus Marcellinus commentary published in Leiden. The joint Amsterdam-Edinburgh project, in which I’m involved, could mean a lot for both Sidonius Apollinaris’ prose and his poetry, but is – apart from being a Dutch initiative – very much an international undertaking. 1 After WW II in the Netherlands Let’s begin in medias res, in the Netherlands, with the start of the Dutch Foundation for Early Christian studies in 1961. One of the leading personalities in the field in post-war Holland, Christine Mohrmann (1903-1988), who was professor of Early Christian Latin and Greek Language and Literature at the Catholic University of Nijmegen,4 dominated her department to such a degree that a number of her disciples, though deeply impressed and grateful to her, longed for a venue to discuss the discipline away from the eye of the master. So they created what came to be the Foundation for 1 https://voicesinlatelatinpoetry.wordpress.com/european-scholarship-in-context/. 2 South Africa and its Afrikaans population is a case of its own; see below. 3 Described by Elizabeth Clark 2008, ‘From Patristics to Early Christian Studies’. 4 See Toon Hilhorst, http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_jaa003199101_01/_jaa003199101_01_0013.php. 1 Early Christian Studies. Over time, it developed beyond the University of Nijmegen, beyond the Roman-Catholic Church, and also beyond national limitations. In an informal way, the Foundation became – and still is – a broad forum for Dutch-speaking scholars, from emeritus professors to doctoral students, who are interested in early Christianity. I’ll later discuss some of the edited volumes which the Foundation has published. But first Nijmegen, and the post-war confessional academic landscape. In those days, the University of Nijmegen was a Roman-Catholic institution, founded in 1923 with the aim of emancipating Catholics in the Netherlands by means of their own university. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Dutch society had become progressively organized according to denominational “zuilen” (“columns”), one for Socialists, Protestants, and Catholics each, to mention only the most prominent. Only since 1853 had Catholics been restored to full civic rights. The state being neutral, private initiative created the institutions that built and strenghtened group interests, be it housing, trade unions, or education. Departments of theology at the state universities were liberal protestant. The confessional Reformed-Protestant (“gereformeerd”) community founded its own university as early as 1880, the Free University at Amsterdam.5 Nowadays, Nijmegen is no longer a Catholic stronghold, and the Free University (“VU University”) no longer a protestant one, the “zuilen” having largely disappeared and Dutch society having become very much secularized. But patristics still linger there, as they do at the School of Catholic Theology at the young Tilburg University, reinforced since a couple of years by the scientific partnership between Amsterdam and Tilburg within the Centre for Patristic Research (Dutch: CPO).6 But that’s interesting for your overview of the Dutch academic landscape, not, however, for our current theme as the centre focuses mainly on theology. Early Christian Greek and Latin literature as part of the major bachelor degree in Classics now only exists at VU University and in Nijmegen. Now, to return briefly to Christine Mohrmann, whom you no doubt all know for her 1932 thesis and subsequent work on the “altchristliche Sondersprache”, thus continuing the work of her supervisor, Prof. Schrijnen (1869-1938), the founder of the theory of early Christian group language, and thus the founder of the “École de Nimègue”.7 It’s worth noting that she had a personal preference for the French language (in 1985 she received the Légion d’Honneur), and that’s why so many publications by her and her disciples are in French. I have been asked to speak here today on the Dutch-language take on late antique poetry. For obvious reasons, little of the Dutch scholarly output for any international audience has been in Dutch, from the very start of the period which we are considering. French for Mohrmann cum suis, German for others, and nowadays almost universally English. Some Dutch you may run the risk of hitting upon, and not being able to avoid, is in doctoral theses, especially the earlier ones. Christine Mohrmann, together with another brilliant scholar of the post-war period, Prof. Jan Hendrik Waszink (1908-1990), Professor of Latin at Leiden University, famous for his work on Tertullian and on Calcidius, one of the founders of the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, in 1946 took the initiative to publish a Dutch journal for early Christian literature, whose first volume came out the next year, Vigiliae Christianae. Its very first instalment featured no fewer than three contributions on 5 That’s the reason why there are still two universities in Amsterdam, the one belonging to the city (now financed by the state as all other universities), and the other “free” from the liberal state ideology. 6 http://www.patristiek.eu/index_english.htm. 7 At length on the Nijmegen School: Denecker forthcoming. 2 late antique poetry: Paulinus of Pella (by Pierre Courcelle himself), Paulinus of Nola, and Hilary of Poitiers.8 Nowadays, there are (still!) departments of Classics at both Universities in Amsterdam (progressively cooperating in ‘Acasa’), in Leiden, Nijmegen, Groningen, and Utrecht (the latter embedded in Cultural Studies). Late Antiquity, as we have seen, is marginal in education, while being dependent on the taste of individual scholars for research. After graduation, a substantial portion of students find their way into secondary education and an equally substantial one into a variety of other occupations, where they are selected for their general academic qualifications rather than for knowing Latin and Greek. Very few eventually find a job at university, where opportunities are scarce. 2 After WWII in Flanders In 1947, the Benedictine monk Dom Eligius Dekkers, of the Sint-Pietersabdij in Steenbrugge, drew up a plan for editing afresh early Christian texts.