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

Chapter 2
Intellectual context
Early modern historical thought
This study is concerned with two fields of research: the history of historical
thought and the history of political thought. In early modern Europe the ‘historical’
and the ‘political’ were closely interconnected. Often works of history
were politically motivated or had a political goal. For example, in his history
of the Dutch Revolt, the Annales et historiae (Annals and Histories, 1657), the
Dutch scholar and politician Hugo Grotius tried to show ‘what he thought
was the true character of the Dutch Revolt’ in order ‘to exert a conciliatory
influence on the quarrels’ that were troubling the Dutch Republic at the time
that Grotius was writing the first version of the Annales et historiae. 1 On the
other hand, early modern works that we now classify as ‘political’ often used
material drawn from history. Notorious examples of these kinds of works are
Il principe (The Prince, 1532) and the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio
(Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, 1531) of Niccolò Machiavelli,
the ‘sly dog’ from Florence. 2
An important argument of this thesis is that Boxhorn’s political thought
cannot properly be understood without a good understanding of his historical
thought. To get a good understanding of Boxhorn’s historical thought we
have to look, among others, at how Boxhorn thought about the past, how he
looked at the relationship between the past, the present and the future, and
why he thought that knowlegde of the past was of importance for those living
1 Grotius wrote a first version of the Annales et historiae between 1601 and 1612. During this period
the so-called Truce controversies erupted in the Dutch Republic. Grotius wrote the work by order of
the States of Holland, who did not proceed to publication, when Grotius had finished his first version
of the Annales et historiae in 1612. The Annales et historiae remained unpublished until 1657. For a short
discussion of the Truce controversies, see chapter 3. For a discussion of the Annales et historiae, see Jan
Waszink, “Tacitisme in Holland: de Annales et Historiae de rebus Belgicis van Hugo de Groot”, in De zeventiende
eeuw, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2004), pp. 240-63, and idem, “The Ideal of the Statesman-Historian: The Case
of Hugo Grotius”, in Jan Hartman, Jaap Nieuwstraten and Michel Reinders (eds.), Public Offices, Personal
Demands: Capability in Governance in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing;
Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009), pp. 101-23, with quote on p. 113.
2 In one of his letters the Dutch historian Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581-1647) writes about
Machiavelli’s work as ‘this sly dog’s work’. See E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, “A Controversial Republican:
Dutch Views on Machiavelli in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, in Gisela Block, Quentin
Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge,
1990), p. 248.