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

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Chapter 7. The mistress of life
curators decided that it was time for the once very gifted child to follow in his
master’s footsteps and granted Boxhorn permission to give public lectures on
history. 9 Although Boxhorn’s new task was meant to be temporarly, it did bring
him a step closer to officially succeed Heinsius as professor of history. His inaugural
oration gave Boxhorn an opportunity to show his skills and to proof to
the curators that when Heinsius departed from this world, he was the man to
officially and permanently take over Heinsius’s office.
However, when reading Boxhorn’s oration one cannot help to feel some
disappointment. The oration lacks the sound theoretical underpinning that
is so clearly present in the inaugural speech that Vossius presented on the
‘usefulness of history’ at the opening of that new academy of learning, the
Athenaeum Illustre, in Amsterdam in 1632. 10 For example, nowhere in his oration
does Boxhorn define history. Nor is it as eloquent as the speech Heinsius
delivered on the same topic, in which history is praised for the knowledge it
entails for that ‘fretful animal we call man’. 11 Boxhorn seems to skip the laus
historiae altogether when he kicks off by saying that he does not want to say
anything ‘about the whole past, and the great and by wise men much praised
advantage of events that have occurred in the past, a subject that others have
covered so many times, and have by now exhausted’. 12 Boxhorn only wants
to warn his audience that ‘although all the arts and disciplines that are ruined
and, so to speak, utterly destroyed, can always be restored and represented to
you and [your] offspring by the diligence and wisdom of the next generation
of talented men, nobody’s talent or skill or any other human power is able to
recover the once lost memory of events that have already occurred’. 13 But this
is just a cover-up, because at the moment that Boxhorn starts explaining why
this memory should not be lost, the value of history immediately pops up.
First and foremost, history is important for those people to whose care the
people’s souls are entrusted, because ‘there are, according to the actual verdict
of the immortal God, also writings handed down to us among the first
and very old beginnings of events, [and] among the very recent beginnings
9 Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Leidsche Universiteit, Vol. 3, p. 20. See also chapter 3.
10 Vossius, De historiae vtilitate oratio. For his oration Vossius heavily depended on his Ars historica
of 1623. See Vossius, Geschiedenis als wetenschap. According to Cor Rademaker, Vossius’s basic principles
concerning history and his way of reasoning did not change over the years. Ibidem, pp. 36-39.
11 For Heinsius’s oration, see chapter 3.
12 Boxhorn, Oratio inauguralis … cum … historiarum professionem aggrederetur, p. 2. ‘De Historia
vero omni, multoque ac sapientibus laudatissimo rerum ante gestarum usu, toties occupato ab aliis, &
exhausto jam argumento nihil hic dicam.’
13 Ibidem. ‘Id modo vobis nunc ego praedixerim; quod, cum sepultae & quasi deperditae aliae
omnes artes ac disciplinae, sequentium ingeniorum industria ac sapientia semper reddi vobis posterisque
possint ac repraesentari, amissa semel rerum jam gestarum memoria nullius ingenio, solertia, aut
alia humana ope, queat redonari.’