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

Chapter 10. Conclusion
people to read in a work that was published under his name with his approval,
thereby signalling that he as the author of the work publicly agreed with its con-
tent. In short, the content of the Institutiones politicae and the Disquisitiones politicae
is possibly not affected by self-censorship. 29 The case of Scaliger, who did not dare
to publish the results of his biblical exegeses, nicely illustrates that self-censorhip
influenced what early modern scholars officially published. 30 With regard to
scholars who taught at the universities and academies of the Dutch Republic, this
implies that what these scholars published does not necessarily reflect the extent
and depth of what they thought and taught. They may have taught ‘radical’ or
‘revolutionary’ ideas to their students, but published ideas that conformed to the
received academic tradition. This means that possibly there may have been more
‘traditional’ academic scholars in the Dutch Republic who, in and through their
teachings, were in fact, just like Boxhorn, important transitional figures between
the age of late humanism and the age of the Early Enlightenment. On its turn, this
possibility is an argument that in the Dutch Republic the origins of the transition
from the old world of learning to the new ‘modern’ world of learning did possibly
not, at least not completely or solely, lay outside the universities and academies.
In this case it is worth remembering that ‘modern’ critics of the academic
tradition like Descartes and Johan de la Court had studied at a Dutch university.
Some of the connections that can be made between Boxhorn’s ideas and those of
the brothers De la Court, who had both studied at Leiden University at the time
that Boxhorn taught politics at Leiden, are possible arguments to substantiate the
view that the ‘modern’ critics of tradition might have learned a thing or two from
their ‘traditional’ teachers. 31 Therefore, scholars like Boxhorn deserve attention
not only because of what they can tell us about the nature of ‘traditional’ streams
of historical and political thought and about developments within them, but also
because of what they can possibly reveal to us about the origins of the historical
and political ideas of the Early Enlightenment and, from there, about those of our
modern age.
29 The same holds good for the Commentariolus. As we have seen in chapter 5, the Commentariolus
also originated from Boxhorn’s private lectures on politics. Like the two editions of the Disquisitiones
politicae published by Johannes Verhoeve in 1650 and 1651, both the first Latin edition, i.e. the 1649
Verhoeve edition, and the first Dutch edition of the Commentariolus lack the name of the author, i.e.
Boxhorn, and a preface written by the author. Although no conclusive evidence is available, it is very
well possible that both the first Latin edition and the first Dutch edition of the Commentariolus were
published without Boxhorn’s knowledge or approval. See also chapter 5.
30 See chapter 2, footnote 125. For a broader view on self-censorship by scholars in early modern
Europe and their concealment of their true beliefs and the problem of dissimulation that can be connected
to it, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern
Europe (Harvard University Press; Cambridge/London, 1990), pp. 289-330.
31 Here, however, it needs reminding that there is no conclusive evidence that Johan or Pieter de la
Court ever studied with Boxhorn.
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