Table of Contents - VU-DARE Home

Introduction
The ten appendices that follow contain primary source information never before
published. Gleaned from original, handwritten documents found in archives in
New York and New Jersey, the information served as the basis for many of the
statements expressed in my dissertation. This study is not source-oriented: these
appendices have been added so that the texts I referred to can be studied in their
original context. These texts, which have been transcribed, translated, and
compiled in these appendices, will provide a more convenient collection for future
research, as much of the lives of eighteenth-century Americans has yet to be
described. These were especially chosen because they form a very important part
of the spiritual biography of Eilardus Westerlo.
For the transcription of Westerlo’s Memoirs and the various letters, I applied the
rules as laid down by the Nederlands Historisch Genootschap and the
Rijkscommissie voor Vaderlandse Geschiedenis. Of the three methods they allow
for in the sixth edition of their Richtlijnen voor het Uitgeven van Historische
Bescheiden [Guidelines for the Publishing of Historical Records], published in
1988, I applied the so-called critical or critical-normalizing method as much as
possible. In line with the purpose of this study, in which the contents of the text
were most important for my research, I used the critical-normalizing method as a
frame of reference, without, however, disregarding all typographical aspects.
For the rendition of the eighteenth-century English and Dutch texts, I normalized
spelling, grammar and punctuation. An exception was made for the spelling of
the Dutch texts, since they appeared side-by-side with their translation into
modern English. Contractions and abbreviations in the originals have been
written out as much as possible. I indicated where parts of the text were illegible
or obviously missing, placing these parts between square brackets, either to add
what I could infer with reasonable certainty, or to indicate that a part was indeed
missing, by using periods between the square brackets.
Appendix 1 contains Eilardus Westerlo’s Memoirs, which cover his life from birth
in 1738 until December 1774 in sixteen folio pages, written in Dutch, and from
December 1781 until three weeks before his death in December 1790 in diary
form, in more than five hundred quarto pages, which Westerlo wrote in English
after he abandoned Dutch in his writing in May 1782. The Memoirs were all
transcribed, translated and annotated by me. These Memoirs are an important
source of information for our understanding of the spiritual life of Eilardus
Westerlo, and as such, many references to these Memoirs can be found in the nine
chapters of the dissertation.
As much as possible, I have tried to retrieve all of Westerlo’s Biblical references.
The actual Scripture that the references are based on are provided in modern
English, from the 2001 version of The New Oxford Annotated Bible edited by
Michael D. Coogan. Commentary on the meaning of certain Bible texts is also
taken from this book. Because it is impossible to determine which version of the
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