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

Chapter 7. The mistress of life
History, then, is something worth remembering for present and future
generations. The past is valuable because it provides lessons, examples, and
maybe even answers to present questions. It shows God’s involvement with
this world, it incites people to do noble deeds, and it entertains people’s
minds.
It is the job of the historian to preserve this past, which has a global reach,
for his and future generations. Preferably, he will present this past in some
kind of chronological or geographical order. The relics of the past are the historian’s
subject. Written artifacts like books of history, declarations, or town
privileges are his main sources. But other physical remains such as statues,
epigraphs, coins, ancient ruins, and even pots and pans also belong to the
large treasury that the historian can plunder in search for the truth about the
past. 197
Although Boxhorn remains silent about the tools and methods that the historian
can and should apply to recover and preserve the past, it is clear that
his approach was, in the first place, philological. Like all humanists, Boxhorn
had a special interest in words and languages, and the ‘particularly meaning
of words and the way that words acquired meaning’. 198 Finding out the exact
and correct meaning of words was crucial for the historian because words
formed the key to understanding the texts that were the historian’s primary
sources of information and his most valuable pieces of evidence. Boxhorn’s
contribution to the field of philology testifies that Boxhorn was aware that
the meaning of words, and the ‘matter’ they referred to, depended upon the
context, ‘both in the sense of the surrounding words and that of the physical
and historical context in which the text had been produced’. 199
fontes veluti ac causas, ex quibus insignes publicarum rerum imperiorumque exortae sunt mutationes.’
197 In the Theatrum Boxhorn referred to drinking cups that had be found in the northern part of
Brabant to proof that the inhabitants of the northern part of Brabant, that is, the place of his birth and
youth, and the Hollanders had the same common ancestors. Boxhorn, Theatrum, p. 8.
198 Stephen Davies, Empiricism and History (Palgrave Macmillan; Basingstoke, 2003), p. 16.
199 Ibidem. A good example of this can be found in the letter from Boxhorn to Blaespilius. In this letter,
which is by far the longest letter we have from Boxhorn, Boxhorn dwelled on the possible meanings
of the Latin words ‘subjicere’ and ‘circumdire’ in Suetonius’s Life of Augustus, 87-88. Boxhorn defended
Heinsius’s interpretation of these words against a certain Johannes Crojus, who followed a more stricter
interpretation than Heinsius did. To proof his point Boxhorn presented an array of evidence, ranging
from other passages in Suetonius’s Life of Augustus (p. 271) to Roman inscriptions on graves (pp. 261-
64), all in order that his reading of the words corresponded with the way how Romans, and specifically
Augustus himself, actually wrote (Boxhorn also referred to an ancient manuscript of the Res Augustae,
a work allegedly written by Augustus himself). In other words, he tried to explain the meaning of the
words ‘subjicere’ and ‘circumdire’ by putting them in their context. Boxhorn, Epistolae et poemata, pp.
236-76. See also G.P.M. Knuvelder, Handboek tot de geschiedenis der Nederlandse letterkunde van de aanvang
tot heden, Vol. 2 (Malmberg; ’s-Hertogenbosch, 1948), pp. 184-85.
The importance of texts as primary sources of information becomes clear from both the Theatrum and the
Nederlantsche historie, but also from Boxhorn’s other historical-geographical works and his editions of classical
authors. In the Nederlantsche historie, for example, eyewitness accounts, charters, and official documents
239