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

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Chapter 7. The mistress of life
Furthermore, Boxhorn’s historical works display a great antiquarian interest
in customs, monuments, and settlement patterns. They also show an
awareness of the importance of numismatics, 200 geography, and chronology
for the study of the past. 201 Although Boxhorn cannot be considered a ‘professional’
antiquarian like his tutor Scriverius, his antiquarian attitude is evidently
present, which is not so strange, considering the fact that there is a thin
line between the linguistic endeavours of a humanist scholar to get a grip on
the world of the word and the efforts of an antiquarian to unearth the world
where the people who employed the word lived in.
But Boxhorn not only focused on customs and places. He was predominantly
interested in the religious and the political ‘spheres’ of the past. This had everything
to do with his preoccupation with the present. Boxhorn travelled into the
past in order to explain contemporary events and social relationships. Both the
Theatrum and the Nederlantsche historie make clear that for Boxhorn contemporary
events and social relationships were the outcome of long-term historical
processes. This explains Boxhorn’s obsession with ‘origins’. Indeed, if only two
words had to be given to characterise Boxhorn’s historical works, ‘origins’ and
‘changes’ would take first place. Since changes ‘do not happen suddenly’, the
historian always has to go the sources (ad fontes) because ‘nothing is more useful
for the right and thorough understanding of even the truth, than to dig up
and to have a careful look at these first if small origins, from which, however,
like the outcome has amply shown, great and wonderful changes, above and
against all expectations, have emanated’. 202 In order to understand the present
it has to be put into a framework of time, in which one event leads to another.
It is the primary task of the historian, then, to unravel these strings of events
and thus explain the changes they lead to. This begs the question to what these
changes actually amount, and why it is so important to understand them. In
the humanist sense of the past there was no real difference between the past
and the present. Understanding the past and changes that happened in the
past had value because it meant understanding the present and the changes
that people themselves formed a part of.
form an important and integral part of the narrative as well as serving as Boxhorn’s main primary evidence.
200 For example, in a letter to Adriaen Hoffer, November 18, 1643. Boxhorn, Epistolae et poemata, p. 213.
201 In 1660 a chronology appeared at Frankfurt that is attributed to Boxhorn. This chronology is
ordered in accordance with the theory of the four monarchies and runs to the year 1640. Is this chronology
wrongfully attributed to Boxhorn or is it just a ‘worthless pedagogical’ instrument? Marcus Zuerius
Boxhorn, Chronologia sacra et profana (Thomas Matthias Goetsius; Frankfurt, 1660).
202 Boxhorn, “Dedication to the States General”, v-vi. ‘Tot rechte en grondige kennisse oock van de
waerheidt is niet dienstiger als op te staen ende naerstich in te sien dese eerste wel kleine beginselen,
nemaer uyt de welcke, gelijck de uytcomste genoechsaem geleert heeft, groote ende wonderlijcke veranderingen,
boven ende tegen aller verwachtinge, sijn voortgecomen.’