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

Chapter 7. The mistress of life
and read. First, we have the inaugural oration that Boxhorn delivered after
he was given the task to hold public lectures on history. This oration contains
valuable information and will be the centrepiece of the following discussion.
Second, his private letters to colleagues and friends contain several remarks
and comments that are related to the writing and reading of history. Third,
the prefaces that are attached to many of Boxhorn’s historical works also hold
information about how Boxhorn thought about history and the way historical
research should be conducted. Last, there are other speeches written by Boxhorn
that merit attention for their remarks on history, most notably his speech
on Tacitus, the most prominent classical historian in the seventeenth century. 6
Before we proceed, however, a warning is in order. All four of the above
named sources were written for a specific purpose and for a specific audience,
namely to awe and please an audience that was at least fairly literate if
not highly educated in the humanistic tradition of the age. This means that
rhetoric plays an important part, a part which every reader of early modern
European works must take into account. Yet this does not mean that we are
left with mere petty words, or that the people of the early modern period did
not mean what they said when they couched their thoughts in commonplaces.
Rhetoric indeed played an important role, but by looking at what people said
and by comparing this to what they actually did I believe we can come as
close as is humanly possible to people’s thoughts and ideas. Therefore, the
first part of this chapter will be devoted to how Boxhorn formulated his ideas
about history and to the language he chose to communicate his ideas to the
world he lived in. In the second part of this chapter I will discuss three of
Boxhorn’s historical works at length. I will look at the topics they address,
the ideas that Boxhorn expressed in them, and the way Boxhorn actually conducted
‘history’. Together these two parts, theory and practice, will give us a
deeper and clearer insight into Boxhorn’s historical thought.
On November 19, 1648, Boxhorn held his inaugural oration on ‘history and the
way of reading and teaching it’. 7 That same year Heinsius, who was by now
in his late sixties, had ‘received a temporary dispensation from teaching’. 8 The
6 For Tacitus as the most prominent classical historian in the seventeenth century, see chapter 2.
7 Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Leidsche Universiteit, Vol. 3, p. 13. ‘Eadem sessione visum
est D. Boxhornio concedendum esse diem eiusdem mensis 19 ad habendam auspicalem professionis Historiarum
orationem.’ Boxhorn’s oration carries two titles. The title on the frontispiece reads: Oratio inauguralis,
dicta in Illustri Batavorum Academia, cum, Ex auctoritate publica, historiarum professionem aggrederetur.
The title on the first page reads: Oratio inauguralis de historia, ejusque legendae ac tradendae ratione. The oration
was later published under a different title with various other public speeches of Boxhorn. Marcus
Zuerius Boxhorn, “De Historiarum lectione ac usu”, in idem, Orationes, Varii Argumenti, IX, pp. 305-37.
8 Sellin, Daniel Heinsius and Stuart England, pp. 64-65.
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