historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 6. New tidings
With the Antwoord Boxhorn gave the first full expression of his scholarly
efforts on ‘Scythia’. More publications were about to follow. At least, that
is what he promised his readers. 42 But no further publications on ‘Scythia’
would appear during Boxhorn’s lifetime. Numerous letters contest that for
the reminder of his life Boxhorn kept working on his ‘Scythian observations’.
43 But for reasons unknown he kept postponing their publication. In
the end death catched up with him, and it was left to his successor Hornius
to publish Boxhorn’s Originum Gallicarum liber. In this book Boxhorn further
expended his Scythian thesis, adding Celtic to the list of languages that had
derived from ‘one common source’, Scythian.
If modern scholars have judged positively about Boxhorn’s contribution
to the field of language comparison, the reaction of his contemporaries
was rather more mixed. 44 In England Bishop Brian Walton (1600-1661),
responsible for the London Polyglot Bible, preferred Boxhorn’s opinion on
the relationship between the Germanic languages and Persian to Scaliger’s. 45
In Germany, however, Boxhorn’s ideas met with a hostile reception. Reinesius,
whom we have already met in chapter 3, and Christoph Adam Ruprecht
(1612-1647), professor of history and eloquence in Altdorf, mocked Boxhorn
for his many putida or ‘rotten parts’. 46 For them, the comparison between the
Germanic languages and Persian had lost its relevance, although the way
Boxhorn expressed his ideas, for example in Dutch instead of Latin, probably
also did not help him to overcome the ‘envy’ or ‘ignorance’ of even the most
learned men. 47
42 See, for example, ibidem, p. 39. ‘Van de reden, waerom de g verhuyst, ende de c in haer plaetse
gecomen is, sal ick wijdtlustiger, met Godt, spreecken in mijn A b c boeck van de Scythen’, i.e. a Scythian
dictionary (or abc book).
43 See his letters to Pibo a Doma (1614-1675), the councillor of the court of Friesland, to Blanckaert,
to Hornius, and to Constantijn Huygens. Boxhorn, Epistolae et poemata, pp. 289-307, 314-15.
44 Unlike Fellman and those who followed him, Dekker is more critical about the ‘innovative’ contribution
of Boxhorn, whom he calls a ‘philologist-turned-historian’, to the field of linguistics. He holds
that in Boxhorn’s work ‘the historical hypothesis received more attention than the etymological evidence.
His approach is therefore historical rather than philological, and is reminiscent of previous scholars like
Becanus. In his work on Nehalennia, Boxhorn did not establish a new method, but reached back to the past’.
That is, Boxhorn’s ‘structural division of the ways in which words could change originated directly from
Varro’s concept of language change in De Lingua Latina, and Boxhorn was no different from his predecessors
in his rather unrestricted application of these principles’. Dekker, “The Light under the Bushel”, p. 212.
45 Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible
(1653-57)”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 62, No. 3 (2001), p. 481.
46 In letters of 1640 Reinesius attacks Boxhorn’s interpretation of aures in the Dutchman’s Quaestiones
Romanae, while Ruprecht ‘had composed “for private use” a collection of Boxhorn’s mistakes’.
Droixhe, “Boxhorn’s Bad Reputation”, pp. 366-67, with quote on p. 367.
47 Ibidem, p. 362. ‘It is obvious, even highly deplorable, that their reception was greatly conditioned
by the way they were sometimes expressed. It happened that he gave them a very clumsy or, like
Becanus, a really too provocative presentation, and that he chose difficult communication media.’
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