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

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Chapter 3. Biography
III. Remnants of the past: Petrus Scriverius
Petrus Scriverius was born in Amsterdam in 1576 as the son of a wealthy
Dutch merchant. In 1593 he matriculated at Leiden University. He studied
law and followed classes in the artes-faculty, but never graduated. At Leiden
Scriverius came into contact with Heinsius and Hugo Grotius, who both, just
like him, belonged to Scaliger’s circle of students. He became friends with
both men. After his study Scriverius spent most of his adult life in Leiden as
a private scholar with a specific interest in the ancient and medieval Dutch
past. 127
Scriverius was a versatile scholar, who occupied himself with poetry, philology,
and antiquarian studies. He edited poetry of Heinsius (Nederduytsche
poemata, 1616) and published an edition of Martial (1618/19). His antiquarian
works include a ‘learned sourcebook’, containing different sources (medieval
annals, chronicles and charters, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
works), which told the history of the counts of Holland from the first count to
Philip II (Principes Hollandiae, et Westfrisiae, 1650). In addition, Scriverius was
also responsible for a collective volume that dealt primarily with the history
and government of Holland (Respublica Hollandiae, et urbes, 1630). 128
As a humanist, Scriverius’s diverse scholarly activities were directed to the
uplifting of the culture of the community to which he belonged. 129 His ‘programme
of study’, at least as far as his study of the Dutch past was concerned,
was finding out the truth, independently, both financially and socially, ‘at the
service of the citizen’. 130 Yet despite Scriverius’s devotion to the truth and his
independence as a private scholar, his antiquarian studies were not ‘politically’
neutral. ‘With his antiquarian work Scriverius wanted to show that the
powerful position of Holland in the seventeenth century goes back to Hol-
127 For Scriverius’s background, life and student days, see Langereis, Geschiedenis als ambacht, pp.
105-12. For Scriverius being one of Scaligers’s students, see also Sellin, Daniel Heinsius and Stuart England,
p. 14. For Scriverius’s friendship with Heinsius, see Ter Horst, Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655), p. 47.
For Scriverius’s friendship with Grotius, see the introduction to Hugo Grotius, The Antiquity of the Batavian
Republic. Edited and translated by Jan Waszink et al. (Van Gorcum; Assen, 2000), p. 30, and Henk
Nellen, Hugo de Groot: een leven in strijd om de vrede, 1583-1645 (Uitgeverij Balans; Amsterdam, 2007), p.
46.
128 Langereis, Geschiedenis als ambacht, pp. 113, 147, 227, 335-36, 359, with quote on p. 147. For the
content of the Respublica Hollandiae and Scriverius’s involvement, see the introduction to Grotius, The
Antiquity of the Batavian Republic, pp. 27-28. See further for Scriverius’s works Pierre Tuynman, “Petrus
Scriverius: 12 January 1576 – 30 April 1660”, in Quaerendo, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1977), pp. 20-25, with references
there. Scriverius’s versatility has been emphasised by Pierre Tuynman in: Pierre Tuynman and Michiel
Roscam Abbing, “Scriverius, Stoke and Bockenberg: Scriveriana II”, in Quaerendo, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2001),
p. 266. This article also contains some critical remarks on Langereis’s study Geschiedenis als ambacht.
129 Tuynman, “Petrus Scriverius”, p. 11, and Tuynman and Roscam Abbing, “Scriverius, Stoke and
Bockenberg: Scriveriana II”, p. 266.
130 Ibidem, pp. 6, 9, 30 (there footnote 20), with quotes on p. 9.