In Praise of Ordinary People

Early Modern Britain and the Dutch Republic

M. Jacob, C. Secretan, M. Jacob, C. Secretan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137380524
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The discipline of social history has still not given enough attention to the ways in which the perceptions and roles of "ordinary" people changed over time. In these fascinating British and Dutch cases, we see how the study of this evolution imparts historical texture and enables us to understand early modernity with greater clarity.

Part I

A New Self-Perception

1

The “Simple Burgher” of D. V. Coornhert (1522–1590): A Dutch Freethinker Opens the Door to a New Age

Dorothee Sturkenboom

Introducing the Man—Setting the Scene

Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522–1590) was a Dutch philosopher, poet, playwright, and polemicist who has held the fascination of many historians. Although he lived in the sixteenth century, he expressed extraordinarily modern ideas, while making his living as an etcher and engraver and later in life as a town secretary and notary.¹ With his arguments for religious toleration and individual human rights and his perception of human nature as essentially good and rational, not to forget his early call for a reform of criminal justice, Coornhert seemed decades, if not centuries, ahead of his time.² Outspoken and almost permanently at odds with the authorities of his time,³ one could even be tempted to say Coornhert would have fitted well in the circles of the more radical Enlightenment thinkers who would later begin to shape the modern world.⁴ Such outspoken admiration for a historical person usually spawns a counter reaction, and, indeed, a more recent study suggests that the modernity and originality credited to Coornhert stands “in direct proportion to the ignorance of his [modern] interpreters.”⁵ An informed reader would have to recognize that Coornhert was very much a man of the sixteenth century: a humanist whose ideas were deeply influenced by classical learning, mystical thinkers, and the social issues and religious upheavals of his time. As often happens in this kind of historical debate, both sides have valid arguments but tend to overemphasize their point. In this chapter we will get to know Dirck Coornhert as both a stubbornly unconventional thinker and a man who had learned a lot from others—characteristics, indeed, that do not exclude each other.

Despite his many admirers in the Netherlands, Coornhert is not well known outside his homeland. Undoubtedly, the fact that he preferred to publish in Dutch rather than in Latin, another distinctly modern trait of his, did not help to spread his fame outside the Dutch-speaking world— even though some of his publications were translated into Latin during his life, most notably by his Reformed Protestant adversaries who thought his work so dangerous that their leader Calvin and Calvin’s successor Beza should be informed of its content.⁶

Born in a well-to-do Amsterdam Catholic merchant family, Coornhert had enjoyed a broad private education—including a vocational journey to Spain and Portugal at the age of 16—but he learned Latin only when he was in his thirties.⁷ Still, this was not the reason he did not write in Latin, which he later mastered well enough to publish Dutch translations of Cicero, Seneca, and other classical authors.⁸ Coornhert actually preferred the simplicity of vernacular words, the direct appeal of Dutch songs, and the power of images printed in large numbers because they enabled him to reach a broader public.⁹ Thus he wrote not only learned treatises but also pamphlets, poetry, dialogues, and morality plays in Dutch, engraved numerous moral scenes, and took the initiative for a printer’s shop in Haarlem, his adopted city near Amsterdam where he lived most of his life after his early marriage at the age of 17.¹⁰ Choosing this marriage against his parents’ wish, with a woman from a lesser social background and 12 years his senior—fully aware that he would be disinherited as a consequence—was one of the earliest recorded expressions of Coornhert’s inclination toward nonconformity.¹¹ As one of his fellow humanists Arnoldus Buchelius would later write in his diary, Coornhert was “a brilliant man, but with an unruly and restless mind, born to contradict.”¹²

It is into this background—a turbulent age calling for reform and an acute mind leaning toward independency, and yes, even rebellion—that we must place Coornhert’s ideas about what he called the “unlearned people,” the “humble simple burgher,” and the “lesser common sorts.” Coornhert was one of the few philosophers of the time to address the issue of the common, or ordinary, people, which makes him such a significant figure for this book. This chapter approaches the topic from two different angles: first, the manner in which Coornhert used his work to speak directly to common men and women, and, second, the way he gave voice to those men (if less so to women) in his work. What concerns me in this context is not so much the moot point of the modernity of his ideas, but rather the arguments he advances to force his contemporaries to take the potential of the common people seriously. How (and why) did Coornhert articulate the rights and dignity of common men and women at a time when this was far from usual?

Addressing the Unlearned—Teaching the Value of the Truth and Individual Judgment

There is little doubt that a significant part of Coornhert’s work was aimed at the common people—“not the astute scholars but the unlearned people eager to learn,” as he himself described his intended public in his ethical handbook Zedekunst is wellevenskunste, vermids waarheyds kennisse van den mensche, van de zonden, ende van de dueghden (Ethics Is the Art of Living Well, Given Truth’s Knowledge of the People, of the Vices and of the Virtues) (1586).¹³ Coornhert’s Ethics has been heralded as the first book of ethics written in a modern vernacular language in Europe.¹⁴

Though his more educated peers also might have felt the need for mentoring—sometimes repeatedly asking for his moral advice in letters¹⁵—Coornhert’s foremost goal was to bring classical and biblical learning, and more generally ethical learning, to the less educated men and women (not necessarily illiterates) who normally had no direct access to these kinds of sources.¹⁶ This is how we have to understand the publication of his Ethics, his edifying songs and morality plays in Dutch, his translations from Latin, and his engravings of moral scenes that were often accompanied by captions in Dutch rather than (or in addition to) Latin. In contrast to woodcuts that were aimed at a yet broader public, captions in Dutch were still an unusual feature for engravings at the time.¹⁷ A line in one of Coornhert’s morality plays reveals that he considered engraving as one of the fine arts that owed their existence to commissions by the well-to-do.¹⁸ Be that as it may, engravings could be printed in large numbers and were therefore much cheaper than other, more individual, works of art, allowing for a wider distribution among people such as merchants, schoolteachers, (low-ranking) civil servants, tradesmen, artists, and artisans, who, in the Dutch context of the time, would have been literate but not highly learned. These are the contours of the group we assume that Coornhert addressed, looking for a broad audience to maximize the influence of his work.¹⁹ It is highly likely that women were part of Coornhert’s intended public. Quite a few of them would have been able to read his work by themselves as the literacy rate among women in sixteenth-century Netherlands was relatively high.²⁰ Coming from a successful merchant family himself, Coornhert would have been used to taking women seriously since they often played an important role in business, as did his mother Truy and sister Katryn in the drapery business of the family.²¹

In the early 1570s, when Coornhert lived as a fugitive in the German town Xanten, he engraved a series of eight prints dedicated to “the power of the truth.”²² The engravings followed a draft made by the young Netherlandish artist, Adriaan de Weert (also spelled as Weerdt), but the auctor intellectualis was Coornhert himself, as can be seen from the many thematic similarities between these prints and his texts. In fact, nearly all engravings made by Coornhert in his life, following sketches by artists such as Heemskerck, Goltzius, and de Weert, mirrored his ethical system, as art historian Ilja Veldman has convincingly argued.²³ If others invented the compositions, it was because they were impressed by Coornhert’s personality and enthused by his ideas. More than once the relationship between philosopher and artist developed into a lifelong friendship, as happened with de Weert.²⁴ Later, Hendrick Goltzius, who had learned the art of engraving from Coornhert in Germany, would picture his amiable master and friend in his commemorative portrait as a gifted teacher (see Illustration 1.1), adding the caduceus of the Greek god Hermes to symbolize Coornhert’s role as a wise guide and praising his eloquence in the Latin verses underneath:

The Batavian Coornhert,

who because of his study of the truth, and his love of freedom,

could not bear, Calvin, your priests,

could bring the words so lively,

but in his writings the words sound even more lively.²⁵

In the series on truth, drafted by de Weert and engraved by Coornhert, every print illustrated a psalm or other passage from the Bible that underlined the absolute moral value of the truth. The prints carried captions with Bible verses in Latin and a Dutch interpretation, most likely written by Coornhert himself, clarifying the biblical message and the scene depicted for those who did not have a Bible at home. That would have applied to most Catholics at the time. This specific series of engravings was probably brought into circulation by Coornhert himself and may not have known the wide distribution of his other engravings published by more established printers.²⁶ Nevertheless, they are an important series for us because they illustrate one of Coornhert’s philosophical premises, that is, that the truth was the one force in life that really counted. The subtitle of his Ethics (Given Truth’s Knowledge of the People, of the Vices and of the Virtues) would later emphasize the same point.

Illustration 1.1 Dirck Coornhert, portrayed by Hendrick Goltzius, 1591–1592, Rijksprentenkabinet Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

In his moral philosophy, Coornhert developed a strongly rationalistic approach. Thus he may indeed have paved the way for the more radical thinkers of later centuries, as was recently suggested by Ruben Buys—even though tracing the reception of Coornhert’s ideas has proven difficult so far.²⁷ Indeed, the populist voice of the early Enlightennment that is discussed in the chapter by Margaret Jacob shows many similarities with the rationalist voice of this sixteenth-century philosopher, except that the materialist turn would have been inconceivable for his deeply spiritual mind. Coornhert believed in the transformative powers of instructional images and simp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: A New Self-Perception
• Part II: The Capabilities of Ordinary People and the Birth of the Commercial and Industrial World
• Part III: New Approaches to the Populist Voice
• Part IV: Forging the Individual
• List of Contributors
• Index