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

Chapter 8. The science of politics. The Institutiones politicae
ily took shape. It was a period of mixed blessings for Boxhorn. On the one
hand, Boxhorn was flying high. In 1639 he married the daughter of a patrician
from Middelburg. A year later he was promoted to ordinary professor of
eloquence. On the other hand, Boxhorn also suffered misfortune during this
period. In 1640 his twin brother Hendrik died. 17 For the Dutch in general the
period between 1639 and 1641 was marked by the expansion of their overseas
empire and their ongoing war with the king of Spain. 18 In addition to this,
as noted before in our discussion of the Commentariolus, in the early 1640s
there was also fear in the Dutch Republic that the Republic’s whole fabric was
about to fall apart as the Union, so it was suspected, was deliberately being
undermined by the individual provinces. On the international level the period
between 1639 and 1641 was dominated by war and conflict. The Thirty Years’
War was still raging, there were rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal, and the
British Isles suffered from conflicts, both on the battlefield and in Parliament.
Its against this background of personal improvement and misfortune, fear in
the Dutch Republic, and the wars that plagued Europe that the Institutiones
politicae came into being.
Finally, one last point should be made here. Between 1639 and 1641 Boxhorn
did not officially have the duty to teach politics. The origin of the explanations
of Boxhorn’s theses hint towards the possibility that Boxhorn taught
the Institutiones politicae to his students during private lectures, which fell
outside the official curriculum. 19 Private lectures fulfilled an important educational
function. It was at them that professors and scholars attached to the
University could, with more freedom than was possible in public lectures,
instruct their students ‘in an ideal of freedom of thought and argument’ that
would later earn Leiden University the reputation of being the predecessor of
the modern European ‘research university’. The relative private environment
(most scholars taught at home) and personal sphere (classes were often very
small, consisting of only a few students) made scholars feel safe to say more
than was officially allowed or publicly acceptable. 20 Therefore, it is possible
17 See chapter 3.
18 Between 1638 and 1641 the VOC managed to ‘secure a large part of coastal Ceylon from the
Portuguese … and Malacca’. In 1641 a Dutch expedition to Africa led to the conquest of Angola. Israel,
The Dutch Republic, pp. 536-37, with quote on the former.
19 As mentioned in footnote 12 above, Franckenstein had received Boxhorn’s explanations from
‘a very noble young man who had then just returned from the Netherlands’. This young man could
have been Johannes Fridericus Hanwaker, who had given Franckenstein a handwritten copy of the
Institutiones politicae. This Hanwaker probably came from the German town Meiningen in Thüringen.
Most foreign students stayed one or two year years at Leiden. ‘Such a short stay necessarily led … to
following private lectures …’ Otterspeer, Het bolwerk van de vrijheid, p. 264.
20 Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, Vol. 2, pp. 389-92, 739-43, and idem, Athenae Batavae, passim, with quote
on p. 27. Harm Wansink notes: ‘At their private lectures professors were not only free in the choice of
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