07 February 2014
Children’s author wins LGBT award
Last Sunday, the Netherlands Association for the Integration of Homosexuality COC. (N.V.I.H. COC) announced the winners of this year’s Bob Angelo medal. The medal is awarded to a person who has in some way advanced the interests of LGBT people. One of this year’s winners is children’s and teens’ author Carry Slee. Slee writes about LGBT issues in a down-to-earth way, rather than emphasising the ‘otherness’ of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people. In doing so, the jury remarked, Slee made a special contribution to the emancipation of young LGBT people especially, by making it easier for them to identify with the characters in her books.
The fight against prejudice for LGBT people in the Netherlands has come a long way, but remains necessary.
The N.V.I.H.-C.O.C. is the world’s oldest still active advocacy group that works to support equal rights for LGBT people and is one of very few gay rights organisations with a special advisory status at the UN. It was founded in 1946 as ‘The Shakespeareclub’, but changed its name to Centre for Leisure and Culture C.O.C.
It had to tread very carefully and meetings were held in secret, because of the semi-illegal nature of homosexuality in those days. Article 248bis of the Dutch Penal Code rendered non-heterosexual activity practically illegal. It wasn’t finally scrapped until 1971.
Advocating equality for LGBT people remains necessary, even in the Netherlands with its reputation of tolerance towards people of different sexual orientation. The British Library’s Dutch language collections include works on the history of homosexuality in the Netherlands. D.J. Noordam, Gert Hekma and Rob Tielman all discuss the infamous prosecutions against homosexual men in 1731, resulting in severe punishments, including death. We can get a glimpse of these practices from a series of sentences, handed to 33 men accused of ‘sodomy’. They all went on trial at the Court of Holland, Zeeland and Vriesland on the 5 October 1731. The verdict is printed as a standard document of barely two pages long, in which only the name of the defendant needed to be inserted. They were all sentenced to banishment for life from the lands under the jurisdiction of the Court and all their goods were confiscated.
Sententien van den Hove van Holland, tegens verscheide Persoonen ter saake van gepleegde sodomie: in dato 5 October 1731. (’s Gravenhage, 1731) BL shelfmark D.NA.4.
The British Library holds two bound volumes of the journal Vriendschap (‘Friendship’), COC 1950-1954. The recommended book lists it contains give a clue as to which authors were gay.
An early issue of Vriendschap. (Reproduced by kind permission of the COC)
This journal was superseded by Dialoog, co-edited by the Dutch novelist and polemicist Gerard van het Reve.
The Netherlands’ best novelist, Louis Couperus, was known to be homosexual, although he could not openly express this. He hints at it in some of his novels, such as De Komedianten (‘The Comedians’). Similar authors are Anna Blaman (1905 -1960), and Gerard Reve (1923-2006). While Blaman and Reve were gay, Harry Mulisch (1927-2010) was straight. Yet he wrote Twee Vrouwen (‘Two Women’), generally regarded as a very sensitive depiction of lesbian relationships. The novel brought him great acclaim from the international lesbian movement. (Dutch lesbians were less impressed: see Marita Mathijsen, Twee vrouwen en meer: over het werk van Harry Mulisch [Amsterdam, 2009; YF.2009.a.26196].) In 1979 the novel was made into a film with Bibi Andersson and Anthony Perkins.
In the 1980s the Gay & Lesbian Switchboard Nederland was founded and a few years later published a small guide to Amsterdam for gays and lesbians. It lists gay cafes and bars, coffee shops, clubs, shops and cinemas.
Front cover of Information Amsterdam (Amsterdam, [1988?] ) YF.2014.a.3001. (Reproduced by kind permission of Switchboard Netherlands)
In the 21st century the topic of sexual diversity has become mainstream in Dutch literature – and not just for adults.
Marja Kingma, Curator Low Countries Studies
References
D.J. Noordam, Riskante relaties: vijf eeuwen homoseksualiteit in Nederland, 1233-1733. (Hilversum, 1996) YA.1996.b.1210.
Gert Hekma, Homoseksualiteit in Nederland van 1730 tot de moderne tijd (Amsterdam, 2005) YF.2005.a.7764
Rob Tielman, Homoseksualiteit in Nederland. [2e druk.] (Meppel, 1982.) YA.1994.a.4386
Vriendschap : Maanblad voor de leden van het Cultuur- en ontspanningscentrum. (Amsterdam, 1950-1954) Cup.820.cc.17.
Dialoog : Tijdschrift voor homofilie en maatschappij. (Amsterdam, 1969- )
Cup.365.p.18
Louis Couperus, De komedianten (Rotterdam, 1917) 012582.bb.15. [English translation: The Comedians. A story of ancient Rome … trans. by Jacobine Menzies Wilson (London, 1926) 12582.t.13]
Anna Blaman, Op leven en dood. (Amsterdam, 1955) 012580.b.11. [English translation: A Matter of Life and Death (New York, 1974) X.989/35532]
Gerard Reve, The Acrobat and other stories (Amsterdam, 1956) X.908/35371.
Harry Mulisch, Twee Vrouwen (Amsterdam, 2008). YF.2012.a.14789
10 January 2014
The ‘Prize Papers’: letters as loot
Five sea-battles were fought between the Dutch and the English in the North Sea and elsewhere in the world’s oceans during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The National Archives in Kew, London, houses the High Court Admiralty archives. These not only contain papers relating to the jurisdiction of the courts but also ships’ books and papers, ships’ logs and documents related to prizes. The term ‘prize’ refers here to a ship’s cargo captured in naval warfare. In 1980 a Dutch researcher stumbled upon archival material at Kew containing papers from Dutch prizes 1652-1832. These ‘Prize Papers’ consist of 1,100 boxes containing about 38,000 letters. Of these 16,000 are private letters. Some of the letters had never even been opened!
An index to the contents of 700 boxes in the Prize Papers has been made available online. This free resource also contains digitised images of the letters.
In 2004 the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, started a project called ‘Sailing Letters.’ This project resulted in the publication of a series entitled Sailing letters journaal. The British Library has purchased all titles in this series. Each volume consists of essays written by scholars and specialists in their field. In their contributions they analyse letters which are grouped around a common theme.
De dominee met het stenen hart en andere overzeese briefgeheimen (Zutphen, 2008; shelfmark YF.2009.a.19867) is the first volume in this series. The letters in this volume were written in the second half of the 17th century. The authors and addressees lived all over the world, from Batavia and Curaçao to Hoorn and Zierikzee. The contents of the letters cover all sorts of occasions from the murder of the De Witt brothers, a New Year’s poem, an issue of a newspaper in Suriname, the Surinaamse Courant of July 3, 1782 to news items from Batavia, Indonesia, and the last page of a ship’s logbook.
The third volume entitled De voortvarende zeemansvrouw : openhartige brieven aan geliefden op zee (Zutphen, 2010; YF.2011.a.11834) presents letters written by two wives to their husbands De Cerff and Buyk who were sailors employed by the Dutch East India Company. The letters are not only of interest to historians but also to linguists. Two further volumes in the BL’s collection are: De gekaapte kaper : brieven en scheepspapieren uit de Europese handelsvaart (Zutphen, 2011; EMF.2012.a.51) and De smeekbede van een oude slavin : en andere verhalen uit de West (Zutphen, 2009; EMF.2010.a.5). The latter gives the reader some startling examples of everyday life in the colonies such as the letter written by Wilhelmina, an elderly lady who once was a slave or the letter written by a medical doctor in charge of the slaves in a plantation.
In 2013 appeared the fifth and last volume in the series: Buitgemaakt en teruggevonden : Nederlandse brieven en scheepspapieren in een Engels archief. Chapter 3 addresses the question of whether any archives in the Netherlands hold letters seized from English ships captured by the Dutch.
Buitgemaakt en teruggevonden: Nederlandse brieven en scheepspapieren in een Engels archief / onder redactie van Erik van der Doe, Perry Moree, Dirk J. Tang ; met medewerking van Peter de Bode. (Zutphen, 2013.) YF.2014.a.1041.
As a cataloguer, I regularly stumble upon my own ‘prizes’ which experience I have tried to share in this blog.
Annelies Dogterom, Dutch/German cataloguer
30 December 2013
Anatomy of two anatomists
You probably know Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp’. Painted in 1632, it show Dr Nicolaes Tulp, praelector of the Amsterdam Surgeons’s Guild, dissecting the corpse of Aris Kindt (Adriaen Adriaenszoon), who was executed for killing a man in the course of stealing a coat. Dr Tulp is addressing seven beruffed gents, one of whom is taking notes. With his right hand he is securing the flexores digitorum with his forceps. His left hand is raised to chest height in a modest pose of explication.
You may not know:
Anatomia completa del hombre con todos los hallazgos, nuevas doctrinas, y observaciones raras hasta el tiempo presente ... segun el methodo con que se explica en nuestro theatro de Madrid. Por el doctor don Martin Martinez (Madrid, 1752) British Library RB.23.a.12905
It has 23 plates showing various grisly parts, but what catches my attention is the engraved frontispiece, signed ‘ F. Mathias Irala inv. et sculp.’. (That is, Mateo Irala both designed and engraved it).
Frontispiece of Anatomia completa del hombre
Not for ‘doctor don Martín Martínez’ grubbling round in the innards of a corpse, possibly that of a lowly criminal. He leaves that to foreigners like Dr Tulp. In the ‘Amphitheatrum Matritense’ [of Madrid] Dr Martínez has a man to do that for him, leaving him free to point in lordly fashion at salient features with an outstretched finger in a pose reminiscent of that of a Roman general. Tulp stands up and Martínez sits down. The Dutch audience strain their necks to see; the Spanish students point their fingers in rhetorical fashion.
Hands-on experience apparently still plays only a small part in the education of doctors in Spain in our own time: I understand they study largely with books. By the way, in the etching of Rembrandt’s picture by Johannes de Frey (Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne) a folio book has appeared in the bottom right-hand corner, so learning and experience both have a role to play.
It’s tempting to think of these two images as typifying practical Protestantism contrasted with theory-driven Catholicism, but we must resist the temptation. There was, for example, no Catholic ban on the dissection of corpses. A fairer contrast would I think be nation-based: Dutch versus Spanish, not Protestant versus Catholic.
Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic studies
References:
Dolores Mitchell, ‘Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp: A Sinner Among the Righteous’, Artibus et Historiae, 15 (1994), 145-56. DSC 1734.085000
20 December 2013
Deventer does Dickens - and much more: literary heritage in a Dutch city
Deventer is a town of about 100,000 souls, situated on the banks of the river IJssel in the East of the Netherlands. It was founded by the English missionary Lebuinus around 768. In the Middle Ages it was part of the Hanseatic League, which brought great wealth to the city. This can still be seen in the many beautifully restored old houses in the city centre.
One of these is the building of the Latin School (1300), where famous mediaeval scholars like Erasmus and Geert Grote, founder of the Devotia Moderna movement, studied and taught. Under the direction of Alexander Hegius, who introduced new study methods, the Latin School reached its peak. His new curriculum included Greek and required new text books, which were printed nearby by Richard Pafraet and Jacob van Breda.
Conjugationes verborum graecae (Deventer, [1488?]). British Library G.7536. One of Pafraet's textbooks; the authorship is sometimes ascribed to Alexander Hegius.
Deventer had been quick to adopt the new technique of printing with movable type and became a centre of the printing and publishing industry that continues to this day with offices of Wolters Kluwer publishing based in the city. Deventer also harbours the oldest scholarly library in the country: the Stadsarchief en Athenaeumbibliotheek (SAB), founded in 1560.
With such a strong tradition in learning, printing and publishing it may not come as a surprise that Deventer has two major book festivals. In August it hosts the biggest second hand book fair in Europe, with 6 km of stalls lined up along the banks of the IJssel.
In December there’s the Dickens Festival. This takes place in the medieval quarter of the city centre, the Bergkwartier, with its many beautifully restored houses. In 1990 the local inhabitants and businesses wanted to attract more visitors and custom to their area and came up with the idea to have a Dickens Festival, featuring concerts, Christmas markets and of course street performances by participants dressed up as Dickens characters, 950 in total this year.
Last weekend (14-15 December) saw the 23rd Festival, which attracted around 140,000 visitors, from all over the country and beyond. With a total city population of just under 100,000 that’s not bad going. Photos of the event are available on Flickr.
Almost exactly coinciding with the Dickens Festival in Rochester, Kent, it is rather like a tale of two cities!
Marja Kingma, Curator, Dutch studies
References:
The British Library holds 115 titles published by Richard Pafreat, between 1477 and 1511, as listed in Johnson, A.F. and Scholderer, V. Short-Title Catalogue of Books printed in the Netherlands and Belgium and of Dutch and Flemish books printed in other countries from 1470 to 1600 now in the British Museum (London, 1965) YD.2011.a.3918; RAR 094.209492 BL
14 November 2013
Gilt and gingerbread - celebrating a rare binding sample
In an earlier blog post I wrote about a remarkable and unique object that Printed Historical Sources and Dutch Language Collections bought with the generous support of the Friends of the British Library.
On 6 November we celebrated this purchase with the Friends, the Dutch Ambassador and some colleagues. Dr. Jan Storm van Leeuwen and Professor Mirjam Foot, renowned experts on Dutch bookbindings, gave us their ideas on what this strange object might be, followed by a viewing in small groups of the item itself in the finishing studio of the BL’s Conservation Centre , where Book Conservator Doug Mitchell showed his mock-up of the object especially made by for the occasion and gave a demonstration of gold tooling (described here by Christine Duffy) .
Doug Mitchell (centre) displays his mock-up; the original sample can be seen to the left. (Photograph by Elizabeth Hunter )
Meanwhile Conservation Team Leader Robert Brodie entertained guests in the Conservation Centre’s Foyle Room by displaying some of the Centre’s own book decoration tools and answering questions from fascinated guests. There was a real sense of excitement in the air, which made it a very lively and interesting afternoon. Guests offered their own theories about what the object might be and are very interested to hear of any further developments in the research on this item.
Robert Brodie (left) shows colleagues and visitors some of the Library’s own binding tools (Photograph by Elizabeth Hunter )
We hope that this event will generate further research interest from the academic, professional and arts world, so that together we may solve the puzzle of the ‘Book Binder’s Specimen. Sample book cover. Utrecht/Amsterdam c. 1730’ (C.188.c.43). It did inspire me to bake and gild some traditional Dutch gingerbread!
Marja Kingma, Curator Low Countries Studies
Further reading:
Jan Storm van Leeuwen, Dutch decorated bookbinding in the eighteenth century ('t Goy-Houten, 2006) YD.2006.b.1244
Mirjam M. Foot, Studies in the history of bookbinding (Aldershot,1993)
93/18864 and 667.u.132
For the Love of the Binding: studies in bookbinding history presented to Mirjam Foot, ed. by David Pearson. (London, 2000) 667.u.169
Eloquent witnesses : bookbindings and their history, ed. by Mirjam M. Foot. (London, 2001) YC.2006.a.2251 and m05/.10663
Marja presents her gilded gingerbread men to the speakers (Photograph by Elizabeth Hunter )
29 July 2013
Registering the registrars
Our summer exhibitions Propaganda: Power and Persuasion and Poetry in Sound: The Music of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) exhibit items from our own rich collections as well as items borrowed from other heritage institutions, in the UK and abroad. At the same time the Library contributes to exhibitions by other libraries and museums, such as The Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham and Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure in the National Gallery.
When I recently travelled to the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles, escorting a collection item for their exhibition ‘Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia’, I got an idea of how much work goes into arranging loans and the vital role the registrars play in this. They deal with the huge amounts of paper work that comes with every single loan request, including all travel arrangements. They pack up the items to go out on loan, so all I had to do was turn up with my paperwork and hand luggage and enjoy the trip.
Collaborating with other libraries and museums on exhibitions gives us a great opportunity to present our collection items to the outside world and to foster relationships with other heritage institutions. I found it very interesting to meet with the Getty’s curators, especially the lead-curator Stephanie Schrader, who specialises in sixteenth- to eighteenth century Dutch and Flemish art. She and her colleagues did a stellar job in putting together the small, but exquisite exhibition around the print by Peter Paul Rubens of a ‘Man in Korean Costume’ (ca. 1617), which is part of the J. Paul Getty’s collections.
The exhibition was a great hit, especially with the Korean community in Los Angeles and it attracted some very high profile visitors. The Library’s contribution consisted of a copy of the first eye-witness account about Korea known in the West. It was written by Hendrick Hamel, survivor of a shipwreck of a Dutch East India Company (VOC) vessel, in September 1653. The ship had been on a journey from Batavia to Taiwan, when it ran into a heavy storm and stranded on the coast of Korea. Hamel and some 30 other surviving crew members spent 13 years in Korea, being prevented from leaving the country by the authorities. In 1666, after several failed attempts to escape, Hamel and seven other men succeeded to get away and sailed in an open boat to Nagasaki in Japan and from there to Amsterdam (exchanging their open boat for a VOC ship!).The Board of the VOC commissioned Hamel to write an account of Korea, its people and society, which was published around 1670. It became very famous throughout Europe, as well in Korea and saw several editions in a short period of time.
The Dutch National Archives hold the original account. The British Library holds three editions of the published version (shelfmarks 10057.dd.32. 10057.dd.28, and 1295.c.28 the copy present in the exhibition).
The shipwreck from Hamel's account of his Voyage
Hamel has become an important ‘ambassador’ in fostering relationships between the Netherlands and Korea. Exchanging collection items between heritage institutions can do the same and without the registrars this would not be possible.
Marja Kingma, Curator Dutch Language Collections
17 June 2013
Marketing tools
One of the British Library’s latest antiquarian acquisitions, purchased jointly by European Studies and our Curator of Bookbindings, is a very rare example of a book cover dating from the 18th century. Actually, it isn’t really a book cover at all, but a single board, about A4 size, covered with a fine piece of calf’s leather. It is sumptuously decorated with 33 different bookbinder’s tools, all in gold, which makes it look rather expensive.
Amongst the decorations are scrolls of a hunting scene – including, unusually, a hunting lodge; another scroll depicts musicians playing various instruments, interspersed with animals both real and mythological. In the centre there is a coat of arms, as yet unidentified, surrounded by intricate corner and spine pieces depicting pomegranates, angels, vases, etc.
The leather is in very good condition: there are no visible tears or cracks, and the gilding is undamaged. It must have been passed on and cherished from one generation to the next, something very unusual for bookbinding samples which were more commonly discarded when no longer needed. But this was no ordinary sample piece, we think, and that may well be the reason why it survived.
So who made it and why? Experts we consulted offered two possibilities.
First, it could be a test-piece by a bookbinder’s apprentice. Could be – but he must have stood in very good stead with his master to be given such a prime piece of leather to work on. In general apprentices had to make do with offcuts.
The second possibility is that a master bookbinder made it in order to show off his skills to rich potential clients. Therefore he used a high-quality piece of leather and as many different tools as he possibly could.
Tools used by bookbinders differ from one region to another. Although the individual tools used on this sample are not as yet identified and cannot therefore be linked to a particular binder, the experts told us that they are very similar to those used in 18th-century Amsterdam and Utrecht, and that it is almost certain the piece was made in one of these two cities.
An image of the cover will appear in our online Bindings Database to join over 200 18th century Dutch bindings already listed there from both the BL and the Royal Library in The Hague.
We hope that this sample book cover will stimulate the interest of researchers and practitioners in the fields of bookbinding and gilding. Personally I hope that it will also inspire young people to develop their creative skills to make similarly beautiful and enduring items.
We would like to extend our thanks to the Friends of the British Library for their support in purchasing an item which is unique in itself and a perfect complement to our existing collections.
Marja Kingma, Curator Dutch Language Collections.
Reference:
Jan Storm van Leeuwen, De achttiende-eeuwse Haagse boekband in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek en het Rijksmuseum Meermanno-Westreenianum=the Hague bookbindings of the eighteenth century in the Royal Library and the Rijksmuseum Meermanno-Westreenianum ('s-Gravenhage, 1976). 667.m.27
23 April 2013
From Queen to King in the Netherlands
On 30 April 2013 Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands (1937 - ) abdicated in favour of her eldest son,
Prince Willem-Alexander (1967 - ) .Above: The new King of the Netherlands. Photo by FaceMePLS
from The Hague, The Netherlands. Source http://bit.ly/11eBBp7
Queen Beatrix was the eighth monarch since the Netherlands became a Kingdom in 1813 and the fourth queen since Princes Emma (1858-1934) acted as regent for her daughter Wilhelmina, following the death of her husband King William III in 1890.
The Royal Library in The Hague runs a special web exhibition on the Dutch monarchy for the occasion. Some of the images in this exhibition are from ‘Vorsten in Nederland’ (Monarchs in the Netherlands) by Arnoud van Cruyningen, which is one of many titles on the Dutch monarchy present in the Dutch Language Collections. (BL shelfmark YF.2009.b.500)
The site Memory of the Netherlands has some great content on the investitures of Dutch kings and queens.
Succession in the Kingdom of the Netherlands follows either death or abdication and is laid down in the Dutch Constitution. When Queen Beatrix signed the instrument of abdication in the Royal Palace on the Dam in Amsterdam, the Prince of Orange Willem-Alexander became King Willem-Alexander. A coronation was therefore not needed. Instead, the King took the oath in a special assembly of Parliament in the New Church , next door to the Royal Palace, in the presence of the Dutch government and a great many guests.
Later that day the royal party made a boat tour on the IJ Pool of Amsterdam passing by the brand new EYE building, the Dutch equivalent of the BFI.
In London the Dutch Centre in the age-old Dutch Church at Austin Friars (1550) opened its doors officially for the first time for a party in the presence of the Dutch Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ms Laetitia van den Assum.
It feels somewhat strange having a king as head of state, after more than a century of queens. But hey, when Willem-Alexander abdicates in a few decades we’ll have a queen again.
Marja Kingma, Curator of Dutch Collections
European studies blog recent posts
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- For the Love of Books: European Collections at the British Library Doctoral Open Days
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- A Balm on so many Wounds: Etty Hillesum’s Diaries 1941-1943
- New Year, Old Years: a Look Back
- Christmas in Scheveningen 1942
- How Bitter the Savour is of Other’s Bread? International Conference on European Political Refugees in the UK from 1800
- EURO 2024: The Dutch Legion takes over Hamburg
- Continental cookbooks
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