HADRIANUS JUNIUS’ BATAVIA AND THE FORMATION OF A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CANON IN HOLLAND* Coen Maas In the year 1516, roughly a decade after the historian Reynier Snoy had returned to his native town Gouda from an academic tour that brought him to the universities of Louvain and Bologna, he finished a voluminous history of Holland that ‘is characterised by various pecu- liarities that demonstrate clearly that – at least in appearance – the new school [viz. humanism] had begun to exercise its influence in our country’, as Herman Kampinga put it.1 Snoy himself was quite aware of his originality and even described his project as unprecedented. With some bravura, he wrote to his acquaintance Erasmus that ‘among a number of enthusiastics, by some fate or other, I am the only one who has undertaken to write the history of Holland’, and at the end of the first book of theHistoria Hollandie, as he called the work, he said that ‘I was the very first – let there be no envy at the word – to venture upon this task on my own initiative’.2 As could be expected after such statements, Snoy’s work is almost completely devoid of references to previous historians from his province. * I wish to thank Dirk van Miert, Robert Green, and Nico de Glas for their careful review of this article and their helpful suggestions. 1 H. Kampinga, Opvattingen over onze Vaderlandse Geschiedenis bij de Hollandse Historici der 16e & 17e eeuw, Utrecht, 1980, p. 2: ‘Snoy’s “Rerum Batavarum” . ken- merkt zich door verschillende eigenaardigheden, die duidelijk aanwijzen, dat de nieuwe richting tenminste in het uiterlijk haar invloed te onzent is begonnen uit te oefenen’. For sound information concerning Snoy’s life, see L.G. Visscher, ‘Reinier Snoy’, Kronijk van het Historisch Gezelschap te Utrecht, vol. 2, 1846, pp. 173–176; C.G. van Leijenhorst, ‘Reyner Snoy’, in P.G Bietenholz and T.B. Deutscher, eds, Con- temporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, 3 vols, Toronto etc., 1985–1987, vol. 3, pp. 261–262; P.H.A.M. Abels et al., Duizend jaar Gouda. Een stadsgeschiedenis, Hilversum, 2002, pp. 158, 228–233. 2 Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, P.S. Allen et al., eds, 12 vols, Oxford, 1906–1958 (henceforth abbreviated Epistolae), vol. 2, no. 458, p. 332: ‘Ego inter ardeliones vnus nescio quo fato historiam Hollandiae scribere aggressus’. Leiden Uni- versity Library, ms. BPL 838, fol. 40v: ‘Omnium primus – absit verbo inuidia – hanc prouinciam vltro suscepi obeundam’. About Snoy’s unjustified claims that he was the first historian of Holland, see K. Tilmans, Historiography and Humanism in Holland in the Age of Erasmus: Aurelius and the Divisiekroniek of 1517, Nieuwkoop, 1992, pp. 256–258. batavia and the historiographical canon in holland 39 Approximately seventy years later, Janus Dousa the Elder was the foremost expert about Holland’s past. He related to his predecessors in a completely different way than Snoy had done, however. Even though the aesthetic conventions of classical historiography precluded meticulous documentation, Dousa supported his arguments by means of extensive quotations and numerous source references. He cited the integral text of important charters – despite their un-classical Latin – and discussed the views of both medieval and humanist historiogra- phers on the basis of excerpts from their works.3 The margins of his work are strewn with exact source references, ‘wholly against the custom – or rather: fallacy – of many people’, precisely as Dousa had promised in his introduction to the vernacular verse chronicle by Melis Stoke, printed in 1591: ‘When you will read [my works of history], this poem will often come to mind, or even tickle your ears, particularly when I have led my argument to a testimony, by which we prove the truth on the basis of authentic records’.4 Assuming that Snoy and Dousa were representative of their respec- tive generations of historians in Holland, one has reason to wonder what developments might have occurred in the intervening period that caused the complete reversal of attitudes towards the local historio- graphical tradition and the appearance of a new canon of historiog- raphy. In this article, the hypothesis will be brought forward that the transition from one attitude to the other was accompanied by underly- ing changes in the historians’ institutional and political context, and it will be argued that Hadrianus Junius, and especially his Batavia, played a key role in the shift to a new historiographical canon in a new environment. In addition, it will be shown how the work of Junius himself was given canonical status by the edition and evaluation of the 3 I can only give a few examples here. Quotation of charters: Janus Dousa the Elder and Janus Dousa the Younger, Bataviae Hollandiaeque annales, Leiden, 1601, pp. 178–180, 226–227, 370–372. Quotations from works of history: ibid., pp. 198–199 (Paulus Aemilius), 208 (Johannes de Beke), 218 (Aimoin of Fleury, Otto of Freis- ing), 264 (Jacobus Meyerus), 380–381 (Petrus Nannius, Annals of Egmond), 385–386 (Hadrianus Junius). Also see Kampinga, Opvattingen, pp. 26–27 about Dousa’s use of documents. 4 H.L. Spiegel, ed., Hollandtsche riim-kroniik inhoudende de gheschiedenissen der graven van Hollandt tot het iaer MCCCV, door enen wiens naeme noch onbekent is, voor 286 iaren beschreven, Amsterdam, 1591, sig. (:)iijv: ‘Welck als ghy lesen sult, zult dicwijl u te voren / Doen comen dit gedicht: jae kittelen in d’ooren. / Byson- der, als ick deez tot oircond’ heb beleydt / Int gunt wy maiken wair deur autentijk bescheydt. Recht jegens het gebruyc, of misverstandt van veelen’..
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