Library of the Written Word – The Handpress World, 74. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xii + 272. Hb, €130.00 /$157.00.
The book thematizes one of the central issues of transatlantic history—how news and knowledge were circulated and disseminated in a wide variety of print editions and, accordingly, how they formed the European imagination of the Americas. Michiel van Groesen is professor of maritime history at Leiden University and author of The Representations of the Overseas Worlds in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (Leiden: Brill, 2008) and Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
By analysing the European imagination of the New World through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century print sources, the author illustrates its gradual transition from curiosity and stereotypes to the Transatlantic World in which imagining served a clear political purpose. The book consists of nine chapters of which, with the exception of Chapters 8 and 10, seven have been previously published (in English or Dutch) and, with some small modifications, gathered here under the common title, making a good intersection of Atlantic history.
Van Groesen opens the book with two chapters on the De Bry family to whom we owe a number of innovations in book production. The De Bry collection of voyages, the twenty-five volumes comprising the America-series (1590–1634), is here presented beyond the usual (mis)interpretations as a plain Protestant vision of the early Americas and their Catholic colonizers. By elaborating De Bry’s modification to both the texts and the iconography of various editions (depending on the market), the author reveals an editorial strategy that tried to meet the demands of a highly differentiated European readership, turning his publication into a global success and exercising considerable influence beyond the Protestant world.
To demonstrate how Dutch publishers acquired and selected information for dissemination, Groesen examines the appearance of manuscript maps of the Zeeland mariner Dierick Ruiters (Chapter 3). His maps played a crucial role in building the short-lived Dutch Atlantic empire which thrived between 1620 and 1645. Apart from transferring first-hand knowledge, these maps illustrate the Dutch West India Company’s (gwc) policy being torn between the need of corporate secrecy and their need of appropriation of the provinces they aspired to control.
The position of the Society of Jesus in the United Provinces is best reflected in the episode of Dutch conquest of Salvador de Bahia in 1624, when nine Jesuits, including the Superior Provincial Domingo Coelho, were brought to Amsterdam as captives (Chapter 4). In the climate of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish rhetoric, which was additionally intensified after the expiration of the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–21) and after the canonizations of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier (1622) were exuberantly celebrated in nearby Antwerp, the captured Jesuits had to face the accusation of conspiracy followed by interrogation and a two-year imprisonment. The public image of the captives was largely influenced by two publishers. At the instigation of the gwc’s directors, Claes Jansz Visscher, a resolute Calvinist, issued two so-called news maps that supported the image of Catholic guilt, one which celebrated the Dutch military triumph in Salvador, and the other which represented fourteen captives accompanied by a textual pamphlet accusing the Jesuits of greed and the Spanish of tyranny over the local nations. Nicolaes van Wassenaer, another informant of the Dutch audience, chose a different strategy. As he implied that he had spoken with Coelho himself, the readers could not have any doubts about the credibility of his information. At first, he praised Coelho as a humble man of meticulous character, and then twisted everything Coelho actually said. In that way, he went one step further than Visscher—he used Coelho’s own words to criticize the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus, and the Spanish monarchy. In both cases, the printed propaganda proved to be very effective—they successfully cherished anti-Jesuit and anti-Catholic sentiments until, in November 1626, it was the turn of Jacob Schaep, the most influential Catholic burgher of Amsterdam, to make a public statement that led to the release of the Jesuits.
Chapters 5 and 6 compare the use of two distinctive genres of printed news to support a new “culture of anticipation.” The first such genre, the newspaper, was presented through a comparative study of newspapers published in Amsterdam and Antwerp in the crucial year of 1630, when both the United Provinces and the Spanish Netherlands experienced a mix of success and disappointments. Their contrasting strategies showed different rhetorics, spanning from close reports about good news to blatant suppression of bad news. On the other hand, to beat a certain scepticism about the reliability of written history, the gwc’s directors decided to control how Dutch success should be stored in the collective consciousness through their maps. For that purpose, acting on behalf of the company, Hessel Gerritsz and Claes Jansz Visscher invented a new cartographic genre—a news map—a skilful combination of verbal and visual presentation of news that served as a whole new set of tools for transmitting messages of political appropriation.
The moral issues associated with Dutch involvement in the transatlantic slave trade are discussed in Chapter 7, while Chapter 8 reveals that the Dutch never succeeded in exporting their book culture to the Transatlantic World. The re-examination of imagining Dutch Brazil in Arnoldus Montanus’s monumental edition “The New and Unknown World” (Amsterdam, 1671) emphasizes the creation of the exotic narrative about Brazil that appeared after the decline of Dutch rule in Brazil (Chapter 9). While the geographic features of the former colony were accompanied by maps and bird’s eye views by Visscher, the chapter on Brazil’s native nations was richly illustrated with scenes of cannibalism. This re-emergence of the narrative about cannibalism was used as an argument that the return of Catholic (Portuguese) rule would represent a step back in civilizing the local people and, without Protestant leadership, a re-introduction of their old habits.
After Dutch imperial ambitions started to wane in the late seventeenth century, the focus of the book market turned to the lower segment of the readership by shifting toward narratives about piracy, thus further supporting Dutch interest in the Americas (Chapter 10). In that regard, the Amsterdam publisher Jan ten Hoorn played a crucial role in the production of low-cost, small-sized books with simple copper engravings, creating a new market formula where fact and fiction intertwined. The final chapter closes the circle by thematizing the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century process of selective amnesia that grew in the period of cultural nationalism in Europe, as well as independence movements in the Americas. Comparing the stories of three naval heroes from the golden era of the Dutch Atlantic project, the author demonstrates the evocation of past glory that is still alive in the collective memory of the modern Netherlands. To conclude, the book represents a valuable contribution to transatlantic history, the history of the book, as well as the history of visual culture. The author’s approach, which relies on a combination of textual and visual historical sources, proves that the imagination of the Other can only be understood through different types of genres.
doi:10.1163/22141332-00704008-08
