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

Chapter 3. Biography
town, province, or even perhaps the history of the young Dutch Republic. If
Boxhorn wanted instruction in this field of history he could have turned to his
patron Scriverius who was one of the leading antiquarians on the Dutch past.
Burgersdijk’s teaching would have taught Boxhorn that it was natural
for man to live with his fellow-men in a political society. It would also have
taught Boxhorn that monarchy is the best form of government, but that given
the circumstances this is not always the case. In Heinsius’s edition of Aristotle’s
Politics Boxhorn would have found material that concurred with Burgersdijk’s
teaching, but also material that offered alternatives to the tradition
in the politica at Leiden University in the first half of the seventeenth century,
which favoured monarchy.
Scriverius’s work and perhaps also his personal teaching would have introduced
Boxhorn to the historical work of the antiquarian. This work focused
on the collecting and studying of sources. These sources and the information
they contained could be applied for ‘political’ ends, which Scriverius did. ‘In
this way’ Scriverius’s ‘antiquarianism compared strongly with the didactical
political histories of the humanist historians’. 139
Finally, Scriverius would probably have pointed out to Boxhorn the importance
of going ad fontes; to find out the original historical documents instead of
relying on the versions of these documents that had been handed down by later
scholars. From Heinsius Boxhorn could have learned another employment of the
ad fontes principle, namely to find out the causes of certain past events, a method
of inquiry that Heinsius believed the ‘political man’ should follow ‘in the study
of past events’. All in all, the work of Heinsius, Burgersdijk, and Scriverius would
have given a young man like Boxhorn insight into several different aspects of
history and politics and into the interrelationship between these two branches of
knowledge as this interrelationship was seen in early modern Europe.
1. Career
Professor (1632-1653)
Boxhorn finished the artes-programme by at least 1629. 140 This was not the
end of his student days, because after completing the artes-programme Boxhorn
went on to study theology. He was a good theology student, ‘but since
139 Langereis, Geschiedenis als ambacht, p. 362. According to Sandra Langereis this not only applies to
the antiquarianism of Scriverius, but also to that of Buchelius.
140 See footnote 64 above.
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