Newsletter
Volume 7, Number 1, September 2007

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Reports from the Field

Anglo-Dutch relations in the later seventeenth century: report on a recent inter-national symposium

The second half of the seventeenth century was one of the most intricate and complex periods in the history of relations between the British Isles and the Low Countries, a time which saw three hard-fought naval wars between England and the Dutch Repub-lic but also the foundation of an enduring Anglo-Dutch alliance, and which witnessed economic collaboration between merchants of the two countries as well as intense commercial rivalry. These were among the themes explored in a lively and productive symposium held in the Senate House of London University on Saturday 23 June 2007.

The opening session looked at aspects of Anglo-Dutch politics and diplomacy in the last quarter of the century. Wouter Troost examined the part played by Sir William Temple as Prince William III’s point of contact and influence in England’s factional politics before and during the Exclusion Crisis (1674-81). Both men tried in vain to promote unity between crown and parliament as the best counter to the growing threat to European liberties posed by French power. Another facet of William III’s anti-French policy was discussed in Colin Heywood’s paper on the hitherto unexplored role of William Lord Paget as the stadholder-king’s envoy to Vienna and Istanbul, seeking to broker a peace treaty between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, so that Austria could be drawn back into the Western coalition against Louis XIV. Following on chronologically Thomas Byrne traced the career of the Irishman, Nathaniel Hooke, radical Protestant chaplain to the rebel Duke of Monmouth, a convert from Roman Catholiism and servant of King James II, and from 1701 secret agent of the French crown, reporting to the foreign minister, Torcy, first on England’s capacity for war and then on the political and diplomatic intentions of the Dutch Republic before and after the death of William III. Like other diplomats before him he failed in his efforts to prevent or even postpone a European conflict, the War of the Spanish Succession.

The second session continued the theme of war and the origins of war by turning to the Anglo-Dutch struggle at sea between 1652 and 1674 and the prelude to the in-vasion of England in 1688. The author of a recently-published book on the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Gijs Rommelse, compared English and Dutch mercantilist policy as a spur to war and indicated how England was following the Netherlands’ lead in allowing merchant groups a bigger say in the making of policy. On 1688 and William’s strategy against France Joop van Wijngaarden showed how the support of the seven provinces for the stadholder’s plans stemmed largely from fear of French political and military aggression, a fear fed by memories of the attack of 1672. Only the province of Holland (and, belatedly, the city of Amsterdam) supported William for economic reasons, reflecting their concern over France’s guerre de commerce against the Dutch cloth and fishing industries.

After lunch the focus of the symposium shifted to the literary, artistic and religious dimensions of the Anglo-Netherlands relationship. Sarah Plimmer evoked the port-rayal of foreigners, and of Dutchmen in particular, on the London Restoration stage, a consistently hostile, if comic, caricature of the Hollander as drunkard, rapist and thief. Dutchmen were represented metaphorically, too, as donkeys, frogs, snakes or toads, with only the occasional hint (after 1674) of a more favourable view of industrious Dutch womanhood. In return Dutch treatment of the English, or at least of their restored Stuart rulers, was more polite. Inge Broekman and Helmer Helmers analysed the States General’s gift to King Charles II on his accession in 1660, a gift comprising not only paintings (Italian as well as Dutch masters) but also furniture (an ap-propriately chosen bedstead), antique sculpture, a yacht and, most valuable of all, jewellery. In part an expression of Dutch national pride, the gift was also an act of policy intended to erase royalist memories of the United Provinces’ failure to support the embattled Charles I during the civil wars of the 1640s. Of course it could not prevent the outbreak of further Anglo-Dutch conflict, and Gary Evans examined how the history of the three Anglo-Dutch naval wars was written on both sides of the North Sea in the century down to 1750, a literature coloured by rival party loyalties (Whig or Tory, States or Orangist) as well as by the shifts in focus created by different literary genres. If individual admirals were the heroes or villains of some of these accounts, so also were the Dutch and English nations. Finally Hugh Dunthorne considered the impact of three-way migration between Flanders, southern England and the Dutch Republic on the religious life of early modern Britain. The existence of émigré churches in all three regions helped to draw Britain into the mainstream of continental reform, Roman Catholic no less than Protestant, while the peaceful co-existence of supposedly irreconcilable faiths in the Dutch Republic demonstrated to British observers that religious pluralism was not, after all, incompatible with political stability and economic growth. The Toleration Acts of 1650 and 1689, Britain’s first steps towards the development of a more liberal religious regime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were the product of lessons in practical statecraft learned from our Dutch neighbours.

With five of the speakers at the symposium coming from the Netherlands, four from England and Wales and one from Ireland, this was a genuinely international gather-ing. It also brought together younger and more established scholars. The papers were of a high standard, the discussions which followed them lively and informative, and the atmosphere throughout friendly and convivial. It was encouraging, too, to see that those attending the conference were drawn from outside as well as within the acad-emic community. Everyone involved owes a considerable debt of gratitude to the organizers, Elizabeth Edwards and Catherine Wright, to the Williamite Universe research network and to the financial sponsors of the symposium, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Association for Low Countries Studies in Great Britain and Ireland and the Universities of Kent and of Swansea, without whose support this event could not have taken place.

H. Dunthorne

In Memoriam
Anna E. C. Harvey- Simoni
30 August 1916– 8 January 2007

“One of the beacons illuminating the landscape of the Dutch book.”

Anna Elisabeth Charlotte Harvey- Simoni died suddenly at her home in Gillingham, Dorset, on 8 January 2007, a few short months after her ninetieth birthday. Almost her entire life she dedicated to the Dutch book and its history: she became, indeed, a part of it. For over half a century she worked on it in various ways: expanding the Dutch section in the British Library, writing scholarly publications, or translating from Dutch into English. In the course of all this she travelled far and wide, gradually weaving a whole web of contacts - very many of whom became real friends.

Born Anneliese Simoni into a German Jewish family in Leipzig, she completed Oberschule in 1935, after which she travelled to Italy to study Latin and Italian at the universities of Turin and Genoa. Declared persona non grata in Genoa in 1938, she fled to Britain where she was able to join her family, and complete, in 1941, at the University of Glasgow, the studies she had begun in Italy. She later joined the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) and from the end of 1944 was at last able to put her knowledge of languages to good use in Educational and Vocational Training for RAF and WAAF personnel. Demobilized in 1946, by the end of 1950 she had left teaching for her future career with the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum, undertaking the curation and further expansion of the ‘Dutch Section’. This meant Dutch books in the widest possible sense: new and old, wherever printed or published — and the relevant reference library.

Gifted with wisdom and common sense, a great sense of responsibility and not least, boundless enthusiasm, the new Assistant Keeper at once put her shoulder to the wheel. Many book reviews followed, and thanks to ‘Uncle Victor’ (Victor Scholderer), Editor of the STC-BM Dutch XV-XVI, Anna came into close contact with early Netherlandish printing, a lifelong specialisation. By chance – or perhaps not – her interest was also awakened in the clandestine press in the Netherlands during the Second World War. In 1970 she gave an illustrated talk on the subject to the Bibliographical Society, ( The Library 1972) and three years later the catalogue of these British Library rarities appeared: Publish and be Free (1975).*

The results of Anna’s unwavering efforts for the Dutch book were not confined to her publications. Over the years the Dutch section of the British Library became a benchmark, a meeting-place for all librarians, historians and book historians who were ‘doing’ anything with the Low Countries. This continued long after her professional retirement in 1981 from the Dutch Section, (albeit not from her desk in the North Library Reading Room), her marriage to William Harvey on 24 October 1985, and subsequent move to Dorset.

Anyone who knew Anna Simoni will have a wealth of memories to recall, thanks in part to her remarkable correspondence, both personal and professional. Alongside her many book reviews, the large volume of translation work that she undertook, including for the journal Quærendo, also deserves recognition, and what Ton Croiset van Uchelen has written about this in De Boekenwereld sheds light on her loyalty, her love of the job and for Netherlandish culture. She maintained close ties with the Association for Low Countries Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (ALCS), continuing to write regularly in Dutch Crossing, the Association’s journal, and was recently conferred with their Honorary Membership. Many were the invitations, from the Netherlands and elsewhere, to attend academic and ceremonial events. In 1998 at the age of eighty-two, for her achievements on behalf of Dutch language and literature abroad, she was made a Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion by Queen Beatrix. In 1999 the City of Genoa, in recognition of the black stain of 1938, offered its medal of Honour, the Premio della Città di Genova, and then in April 2000, finally, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Genoa. In 2001 she attended a commemoration at her alma mater, the University of Glasgow. Even if over the last year she felt her physical strength fading, her mental powers, her sparkling mind, stayed with her to the end – one of the beacons illuminating permanently the landscape of the Dutch book. We all can only be immensely grateful.

Bibliography of Anna E. C. Simoni

Her former colleague at the British Library, Dennis E. Rhodes, produced a bibliography that runs to the end of 1990 and appeared in Across the Narrow Seas. Studies in the history and bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries. Presented to Anna E. C. Simoni. Edited by Susan Roach ( The British Library 1991) pp. 211-215. Additions for 1993-2003 appeared in De Boekenwereld, and for 1992-2006 in Anna ’s Book. An informal collection. Edited by Susan Roach (Published by the Friends of Anna 2006).

The following are her chief publications in book form:

Publish and be Free: a Catalogue of Clandestine Books printed in the Netherlands 1940-1945 in the British Library (The Hague / London 1975).

[* Cf. the British Museum’s Exhibition of 1970, and the article ‘Dutch Clandestine printing, 1940-1945’ in The Library, 27 (1972) 1-22 ].
Catalogue of Books from the Low Countries 1601-1621 in the British Library (London 1990).

The Ostend Story. Early tales of the great siege and the mediating role of Henrick van Haestens (‘t Goy-Houten 2003).

©Quærendo, 37 (2007) 1-9 Author: Elly Cockx-Indestege, Dilbeek, Belgium DOI: 10.1 163/157006907X185731 [Translation: Harry Lake, Bussum]

The Editor and members of the Committee are grateful to Koninklijke Brill NVLeiden for permission to publish this abridgement.
[B. Traxler Brown, School of Information & Library Studies, UCD Dublin]

Dutch at University of Nottingham

With the generous support of the Taalunie, who are part-funding a lectureship in Dutch for two years, the department of German at the University of Nottingham is delighted to announce that we now have a full-time permanent Dutch lecturer, Dr Bram Mertens, as well as an additional part-time teacher, Eddy Verbaan. This means that from autumn 2007, we are able to extend our provision of Dutch teaching beyond an option available to second and final years only. For the first time this year, our first-year students will be able to take up Dutch and to follow it through the whole of their degree. As of 2009-10, we plan to offer the Dutch pathway as part of a German with Dutch degree, as well as on a number of other such combined honours degrees. We now also have an Erasmus link with the KU Leuven, whose students will come to us as teaching assistants, and we look forward to establishing further links in the near future.

We congratulate Dr Bram Mertens warmly both on his appointment in the Department, and on his initiative in securing Taalunie funding to make this expansion of Dutch possible.

Dr Nicola McLelland
Department of German
University of Nottingham

ALCS Events and Activities

7th ALCS Biennial Conference: Beyond Borders: The Dutch-Speaking World in Times of Globalization and (Trans)Nationalism and Teacher Training event: using Dutch literature to promote language learning
University of Nottingham, January 3-5, 2008

We are delighted to announce that the next ALCS biennial conference will be held at the University of Nottingham, from January 4-5, 2008. Papers will be presented by speakers mainly from the UK, but also from Poland, Rumania, Belgium and the United States, exploring the theme of Beyond Borders in popular culture, history, art history, literature (from medieval to 21st century migrant literature!) and linguistics. Three plenary speakers have also agreed to present papers in the areas of philosophy, art history and linguistics:
Prof. Rudi Visker (KU Leuven): ‘The Philosophy of Multiculturalism’
Dr Jeremy Wood (University of Nottingham): ‘Rubens in Spain: The diplomatic gift to the duke of Lerma’ Lila Gobardhan-Rambocus (Instituut voor de Opleiding van Leraren Universiteitscomplex): ‘The status of Dutch in Surinam’.

There will also be a linked one-day staff development event for teachers of Dutch in the UK and Ireland, on January 3, prior to the conference. Limited to 10 participants, the training day will look at effective ways of using literature to promote language learning at different levels. As well as providing opportunities for developing teaching materials, the workshop will also reflect on the role of literature in the curriculum and on ways of incorporating literature into a range of teaching programmes. The day will be run by Eddy Verbaan (University of Sheffield) and Jane Fenoulhet (University College, London).

We are delighted to be hosting the event, a chance to celebrate the appointment of our first permanent Dutch lecturer (Bram Mertens) in the Department of German Studies at Nottingham.

The Association's biennial general meeting will also take place during the conference. A registration form will be circulated to ALCS members shortly. Please check the ALCS website for the provisional programme.

Dr Nicola McLelland
Dr Bram Mertens

ALCS Students Days 2008 in Nottingham

The ALCS Is proud to announce that the 5th edition of the ALCS Student Days will take place at the University of Nottingham on 28-29 February 2008. All university students of Dutch in Great Britain and Ireland are warmly invited to come to Nottingham for two days of culture and fun. With the Students Days we aim to bring students of Dutch together to enjoy a programme of activites involving Dutch language and culture in the broadest sense. For 2008 the theme will be Passie and we are hoping to inspire passion for many different aspects of Dutch Studies. A provisional programme will be on the ALCS website soon. In 2005, the ALCS Student Days attracted over a hundred students from universities in Cambridge, Hull, London, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Dublin. For more information check the ALCS website or contact Bram Mertens (Bram.Mertens@nottingham.ac.uk) or Henriette Louwerse (h.louwerse@shef.ac.uk)

The ALCS Prize for Low Countries Studies

The Association for Low Countries Studies in Great Britain and Ireland, in-vites entries for the ALCS Prize for Low Countries Studies for 2007, to be awarded to the best essay written in any area of Low Countries Studies.

The Association for Low Countries Studies in Great Britain and Ireland invites entries for the ALCS Prize for Low Countries Studies for 2007, to be awarded to the best essay written in any area of Low Countries Studies (linguistics, literature, cultural studies, history, art history, politics, etc.).

The prize will be awarded in two categories:

1. Undergraduate: open to all undergraduate students currently registered in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Entries may be written in English or Dutch, and should not exceed eight thousand words, including references, footnotes, tables, appendices, etc. Shorter undergraduate essays of one thousand, five hundred to three thousand words are also expressly welcomed.

2. Postgraduate: open to all postgraduates currently registered in the UK and the Re-public of Ireland, and to scholars resident in the UK or Ireland who have received their PhD or equivalent qualification within the last five years. Entries may be written in English or Dutch, and should not exceed eight thousand words, including references, footnotes, tables, appendices, etc.

Members of the Executive Committee of the Association may not apply. Applications from non-members are welcome.
The prize consists of £100. Prizewinners may also have the opportunity to publish their winning essay in the Association’s journal, Dutch Crossing. Others of the essays submitted may also be published where appropriate. The prize will not be awarded if none of the submitted essays is deemed to be suitable for publication. The prize-winner is also entitled to one year’s free membership of the Association and a year’s free subscription to Dutch Crossing.
The prize will be awarded by the Executive Committee on the recommendation of a Prize Committee drawn from its members.
The closing date for submissions is 30 September 2007. Four hard copies of the essay, and one in electronic form, should be sent to the Secretary of the ALCS Committee (Dr Hugh Dunthorne, Department of History, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP; h.l.a.dunthorne@swansea.ac.uk), by the closing date. The Com-mittee’s decision will be final. All entrants will receive notification of the outcome by the end of December.

Publication News

Public Opinion and Changing Identities in the Early Modern Netherlands: Essays in Honour of Alastair Duke

Edited by Judith Pollmann and Andrew Spicer
(Studies in Medieval and Reformation traditions, 121)
Leiden: Brill, 2006 xiv, 310 pp.
ISBN-13 978 90 04 15527 5
ISBN-10 90 04 15527 9
€ 99.00 / US$ 129.00 (hardback)

Was there such a thing as 'public opinion' before the age of newspapers and party politics? The essays in this collection show that in the Low Countries, at least, there certainly was. In this highly urbanised society, with high literacy rates and good connections, news and public debate could spread fast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enabling the growth of powerful opposition movements against the Crown, the creation of the Dutch Republic, and of the distinctive Netherlandish culture of the Golden Age.

Contributors include: Hugh Dunthorne, Raingard Esser, Jonathan Israel, Gustaaf Janssens, Henk van Nierop, Guido Marnef, M.E.H. Nicolette Mout, Andrew Pettegree, Judith Pollmann, Paul Regan, Andrew Sawyer, Jo Spaans, Andrew Spicer, and Juliaan Woltjer.

The Low Countries: arts and society in Flanders and the Netherlands

Volume 15 of this annual publication is now available. The theme of the main section, covering pages 11-92, is Money matters. The remaining part of the volume contains contributions on a diversity of subjects which reflect the rich culture of the area.

Van Hugo Claus tot hoelahoep. Vlaanderen in beweging, 1950-1960

Kevin Absillis & Katrien Jacobs (red.), Antwerpen: Garant, 2007. 282 pagina’s; ISBN 978-90-441-2018-9; EUR 22,90

In de jaren vijftig was geluk in Vlaanderen nog heel gewoon: de straten waren veilig, de kerk bood rust en zekerheid, moeder deed de vaat en vader heerste met gezag over het gezin. Tenminste, dat is de herinnering die de babyboomgeneratie aan haar kindertijd lijkt te hebben bewaard. De meeste geschiedenisboeken vertellen over de periode tussen de Tweede Wereldoorlog en de woelige sixties een verhaal van re-stauratie en verzuiling, tucht en ascese, saaiheid en bekrompenheid. Zowel de his-torische als de populaire beeldvorming lijkt echter nogal eenzijdig.

Zeker op cultureel gebied was Vlaanderen van 1950 tot 1960 immers volop in beweging. Terwijl een aantal jonge, naar eigen zeggen door de oorlog gevormde schrijvers en kunstenaars (o.a. Hugo Claus) een alternatief probeerden te formuleren voor de opvattingen van de vorige generaties, bespoedigden nieuwe media als de tele-visie en de transistorradio de doorbraak van de Amerikaanse muziek, film en moderages (o.a. hoelahoep). Oude vanzelfsprekendheden werden daarbij steeds openlijker ter discussie gesteld, tot ongenoegen van de ‘gevestigde’ orde die zich kantte tegen de ‘veramerikanisering’ van de cultuur en de ‘verloedering’ van de goede zeden.

In Van Hugo Claus tot hoelahoep trachten onderzoekers in bijdragen over (o.a.) film, televisie, architectuur, beeldende kunst, theater, muziek en literatuur het beeld van de Vlaamse jaren vijftig scherper te stellen. De essays tonen aan dat de fifties, die in de krant en op tv nog in zwart-wit werden gevat, kleurrijker waren dan tot dusver werd aangenomen.

Van Hugo Claus tot hoelahoep. Vlaanderen in beweging,1950-1960 bevat bijdragen van Kevin Absillis, Jaap van der Bent, Daniël Biltereyst, Jo Braeken, Geert Buelens, Luk Van den Dries, Carien Gibcus, Kris Humbeeck, Katrien Jacobs, Jos Joosten, Yves Knockaert, Pascal Lefèvre, Dennis Van Mol, Ed Taverne, Georges Wilde-meersch en Els Witte.

Survey of pre-1801 Low Countries imprints in Scottish research libraries

Although I had been aware of the diverse riches of Glasgow’s and Edinburgh’s libraries since the mid 1960s, and gradually thereafter of those in other parts of the country, it was not until the 1990s that I had the opportunity of formalising that knowledge, when I was invited by Prof. Bernhard Fabian, then of the University of Münster, Germany, to edit the Scottish entries for the volume covering Great Britain and Ireland in his magisterial series, Handbuch deutscher historischer Buchbestände in Europa, which was designed to continue the work done in his earlier survey of holdings in German libraries. It was not difficult to find volunteers to help me to pre-pare the entries for libraries outside Edinburgh; what was difficult in some instances was to have these offers of help turned into action. Thus I found myself having to travel to various libraries with financial assistance from the Volkswagen Stiftung, arranged by Prof. Fabian, to cover travel and accommodation costs, in order to ensure that the work was carried out. That in itself was very useful for the German part of my official duties at that time and later in the National Library of Scotland but the bonus was that, while preparing these entries, I became sufficiently aware of the wealth of the holdings of early Low Countries imprints in these libraries to convince me that a similar survey of these was also needed. There has been yet another bonus in that these closer investigations, which I have undertaken now on my own, have shown to my satisfaction, bolstered at times by a pleasant surprise, that the holdings of early Low Countries imprints are in every way as important as the early German ones. It should, however, be stated at this point that the present survey is similar to Fabian’s in that its coverage is limited to those libraries to which bona fide scholars have fairly easy access. It does not attempt to cover those libraries which are known to form part of properties in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. Adrian Hall, a former Deputy Librarian of the University of Aberdeen, has spent almost twenty years of his ‘retirement’ cataloguing the libraries of several N.T.S. properties in Aberdeenshire. That these properties contain good holdings of early Low Countries imprints can be inferred from the libraries of Boyndlie House and of Meldrum House, which are now in the care of the University of Aberdeen. In a working list of pre-1701 Low Countries imprints in Drum Castle, Haddo House, Leith Hall, Brodie Castle and Fyvie Castle, which Mr. Hall has kindly let me see, one finds standard works on law, his-tory, politics, classical languages and travel. From the works listed it is clear that the holdings of the first-named property are the most impressive. However Mr. Hall has confirmed the practicality of my decision to restrict my survey to repositories to which scholars have relatively free access by appending a cautionary note to his lists that access to these books is not easy. That holdings of early Low Countries imprints exist in similar properties in other parts of Scotland can be guessed from their published descriptions. Another omission from this Survey, which is not deliberate but due to a regrettable oversight on my part, is Dundee University Library, which, John Bagnall, the University Librarian, has reminded me, contains some early Low Countries imprints in several of its named Special Collections, including the library, deposited there since 1961, of the Diocese of Brechin in the Scottish Episcopal Church. This omission is doubly regrettable in that, at the time of writing, access to this material is highly improbable until at least the early part of 2008. When the material is accessible, I hope to visit Dundee, in order to assess the extent not only of the early Low Countries material but also the early German, as I had also overlooked Dundee when surveying that material for the Scottish section, for which I was very largely responsible, of A guide to collections of books printed in German-speaking countries before 1901 (or in German elsewhere) held by libraries in Great Britain and Ireland, which was published in 2000 as volume ten of Bernhard Fabian’s magisterial series, Handbuch deutscher historischer Buchbestände in Europa.

Similarly to the model of Fabian’s Handbuch my entries will give the name of the individual institution, with details such as postal, email and website addresses, and lists of services available to readers. There follows a brief history of the institution and its library and then details of relevant special collections, illustrated by some ex-amples of the editions found there. In describing these ex-amples I have given the place of publication in the English form for simplicity’s sake and not in the form in which it appears in the volume. Fabian’s Handbuch serves as a useful model in another respect, in that my survey also has a practical purpose. I have also followed the example of Fabian’s Handbuch in appending to the survey a name and broad subject guide to the collections mentioned. With the exception of libraries in the London area we have at the moment only a rather vague, impressionistic knowledge of the holdings of early Low Countries imprints in most of Britain’s research libraries. From a researcher’s point of view a very great amount of time and effort can be saved by knowing in advance where the necessary primary sources are located, while a much more detailed knowledge is desirable for librarians in both micro- and macro-planning. In the former such information can enable those in immediate charge of departments of early printed collections to offer more accurate advice to the members of their own institution on their Low Countries holdings and will also help them to give more informed advice to their senior management on questions of collection development. In the latter, which has longer term implications for British tertiary education, it can be argued that there is little or nothing to distinguish the information centres of the newer universities which rely on the Internet, e-books and e-journals for the needs of their staff and students, but what does distinguish the older ones not only from the former but also the one from the other are the special collections held by each one. Already there are examples of how individual universities are involved in the scramble for higher scores in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) by setting up large-scale editorial projects, often linked to postgraduate research courses, which rely in differing degrees on the early holdings of their library. While the RAE had the original, laudable purpose of encouraging British academics to adopt a more wide-spread research-oriented ethos in contrast to the earlier, all too common one where they not only saw no need to publish anything but openly scorned their North Amer-ican counterparts, whose prospects of promotion depended on their publications, it has descended into a situation where each institution spends much energy in the dog-eat-dog poaching of expertise. If the government decides to rescue the RAE from this unhealthy development in the years beyond 2008, it may be that, as well as according more weight to the quality of teaching provided in individual universities, it will give more consideration to greater co-operation among older universities on the basis of a regional or subject grouping. In such a possibility a much more detailed knowledge of special collections of the kind offered here will be essential.

Within the context of Great Britain Scotland is a very good place to look for hold-ings of early Low Countries imprints, as it and The Netherlands share a common in-heritance in Roman law, Calvinist theology and also strong links in their commercial activity and in the teaching of medicine, while those parts of it where Roman Cathol-icism has been strong in recent times have a common link with Flanders. In the course of surveying these holdings I have not encountered any which contain items of great monetary value, but that has not been the purpose of the exercise. Even despite the existence of the Dutch-language material on comets in the Crawford Collection, and the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century proclamations in the National Library of Scotland, which are of considerable bibliographical importance, the overriding pur-pose of the survey is to provide general descriptions of the holdings, illustrated by appropriate examples, which will point researchers to those libraries, particularly ones to which members of the public do not have regular access, where they are most likely to find material to assist their studies. The libraries covered in my survey have been the same as those covered in the earlier: in Glasgow the University of Glasgow, which has added to its theological holdings by incorporating those of the former Trinity Col-lege, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons and the University of Strathclyde; in Edinburgh the Advocates Library, which was established in the late seventeenth century to meet the needs of the members of the Scottish bar, the National Library of Scotland, a twentieth century development of the previously mentioned library, the University of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal Botanic Garden and the Crawford Collection in the Royal Ob-servatory; in St Andrews the university library; in Dunblane the Leighton Library, which is in large part the personal working collection of a scholarly seventeenth cent-ury bishop and in Aberdeen the university library.

Beginning alphabetically at Aberdeen with the most northerly of these libraries, King’s College is the older of the two colleges, originally separate, which make up the university. Both have been fortunate in the wealth of books bequeathed to them by former graduates, of whom two can be mentioned here, one from the seventeenth and one from the eighteenth century. The earlier, Thomas Reid, who had taught in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Rostock for a number of years before returning to Britain, where he became Latin Secretary to his fellow countryman, King James VI and I, bequeath-ed a vast library, rich in the works of Aristotle and other early Greek philosophers, to Marischal College. The later, James Fraser, a graduate of King’s College, one of numerous Scots who spent their adult life in England, in his case in London as secretary of Chelsea Hospital, where they attempted to civilise the natives. A considerable bibliophile, he had been responsible during the ten years up to his death in 1731 in enriching the College’s library with nearly a thousand early imprints, including very many from the Low Countries. Even after his death his be-quests helped to build a new library for the College. The present day Special Col-lections Department, which unites early printed books from the library of each col-lege, has many named collections, all of which contain in varying degrees material printed in the Low Countries.

Moving south, we come to St Andrews. The early printed books held by the three original colleges are now to be found in the university library. The subjects covered are theology, those various disciplines traditionally encompassed by the teaching of the Arts Faculty and the natural sciences and medicine. The last named categories in-clude the personal library of a nineteenth century Principal and physicist, J.D. Forbes, who is now remembered for his work on glaciers, and of an eighteenth century Pro-fessor of Medicine, James Simson. The teaching of medicine, which along with law was transferred to the university’s daughter college in Dundee in the nineteenth cent-ury, had a rather unfortunate history at St Andrews throughout the eighteenth century in that the holders of the Chair had very little to do.

Edinburgh has a wealth of repositories of early printed books from the Low Countries and elsewhere on the Continent. A large percentage of the legal works in the Advocates Library comes from presses in the Low Countries, reflecting the in-fluence of Dutch-speaking writers on legal studies at that time and later. Some seven-teen percent of the holdings are of a historical nature. An explanation for such a high figure is the close link between law and politics in the seventeenth century, by which a lawyer would be expected to have an interest in the regulation of politics both at home and abroad. In its earliest days the library benefited from donations by members of the Faculty and by others. The earliest, most important donation both by size and by range of material was the library, numbering around eight hundred volumes, col-lected by Lord George Douglas (d. 1693?), the third son of the 1st Duke of Queens-berry, who had studied law in The Netherlands for a time during a six-year absence on the Continent, which was presented in 1695 by his father in memory of him. The paucity of Dutch-language materials among the library’s early acquisitions can be explained by the general unfamiliarity with the language in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although a knowledge of Dutch was more common among members of the Faculty of Advocates from the time many of them had spent studying law at a university in The Netherlands. It is impossible to give anything like an ade-quate overview of the range of Low Countries imprints held by the National Library, some of which, being of a non-legal nature, have been transferred from the Advocates Library in 1925 or, irrespective of their content, have been acquired since then. Suf-fice it to say that with the exception of those in the Newhailes Collection, which is substantially the private library of an eighteenth century Scottish judge, the Low Countries imprints include very few Dutch-language texts, being mainly in Latin or in French. In addition to the texts acquired by whatever means to meet the teaching needs of the curriculum, particularly in the Arts Faculty, Edinburgh University Lib-rary has acquired over the years a wide range of Low Countries imprints on theology, philosophy, law, natural sciences and medicine, which are to be found either in the general collections or in specifically named ones which are under the care of the Special Collections Department. Again there are very few Dutch-language texts among these, Latin and to a lesser extent French being the medium. There is a se-parate Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, which has its own library, but the vast majority of its early book stock, including Low Countries imprints, were entrust-ed to the safekeeping of the university library in the eighteenth century during a lean period in the College’s fortunes in exchange for rights of access to the College’s members. Various attempts to have them returned have been made over the years by the College, but the most recent attempt ended in a compromise decision to let the books remain where they are. Whatever the legal position of the original owners in a dispute at law such as this, there is always a suspicion that the owners want books back so that they can sell them. There are also very many early Latin imprints from Low Countries presses to be found in New College Library, where the teaching of theology and its various related subjects and of religious studies is carried on. Edin-burgh’s Royal College of Physicians has one of the finest collections of early medical books in the United Kingdom, and these naturally include many printed in The Netherlands, where many of the more gifted Scots medical students of the early mod-ern period received their academic training. The similar holdings of the University of Edinburgh and of the Royal College of Physicians make Edinburgh an excellent place to study the importance of The Netherlands both as a centre of medical publishing and of medical education. Although not nearly so numerous as the medical works to be found in the above mentioned libraries in Edinburgh, the collection of early astro-nomical works in the Crawford Collection at Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory cannot be ignored. A gift made to the nation in the late nineteenth century by a member of a Scottish aristocratic family with a very long and honourable tradition of book col-lecting, the collection was regarded for very many years as second only to that in the Pulkovo Observatory near St Petersburg until the fire, which rumour asserts was start-ed deliberately by members of the Russian underworld with links to unscrupulous property developers. The highlight of the collection is the very large number, possibly the largest held in any library, of pamphlets on comets. Although those from Low Countries presses are outnumbered by those from ones in Germany, they are nonethe-less important, not least because they form the largest body of material in Dutch which I have come across in my survey.

By far the largest repository of early Low Countries imprints in Glasgow is the lib-rary of the University of Glasgow. In addition to a wide variety of material which has been in the library’s general collections for several centuries to support the univers-ity’s teaching there are special named collections which contain large numbers of theological works and early editions of the Bible as well as others devoted to astro-nomy, botany, mathematics, medicine and medieval scholastic philosophy. Added to these are the early Low Countries imprints in the library of the University of Strath-clyde and in that of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. Although not as numerous as the holdings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the early Low Countries imprints, like the early German ones, are well worth an effort to pub-licise them more widely.
It is not easy in some cases to say what was the method, purchase or donation, by which the material covered by my survey was acquired, not only because of a lack of archival sources but also because many of the volumes have been rebound, which means as so often that the original pastedowns and blank leaves, which are likely to contain details of previous owners and other interesting information, have been thrown away in the process. It is a sad fact that in past centuries, the nineteenth prob-ably being the worst, librarians often have been very negligent of the material under their care, a record which is never mentioned by their present day successors when they preach to readers the need for conservation. The exception to the lack of archival sources on how the material in my survey was acquired is the astronomical books in the Crawford Collection at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. In the Crawford fam-ily’s papers, which are currently on deposit in the National Library of Scotland, there is a wealth of documentary evidence in the form of booksellers’ invoices, etc., but it would require a separate, lengthy study to reconstruct the origins of the library by sifting through these.

It is easier to characterise the holdings, as revealed by the survey. In the main they are precisely those solidly scholarly, accurately and attractively printed products of the major printing presses of this part of Europe which one would expect to find in the larger libraries attached to older universities where a wide range of subjects in the more general Arts Faculties and in the other, more vocationally oriented ones at under- and postgraduate level, but in these cases it is both the breadth and depth of the holdings which are impressive. This last point also holds good for the necessarily more narrowly based holdings of the professional medical bodies, privately financed for most of their existence, which have been included in the survey and it is to the credit of their governing councils that in an age when both the knowledge and the use of Latin among their members have long gone that they are not tempted to follow the shameful example of the universities of Manchester and Keele to raise money for oth-er purposes by selling the family silver, as a former Prime Minister put it. It can be argued that in a real sense these holdings are no longer the sole possession of the individual body to be disposed of at its own will, for they are part of this country’s intellectual heritage. What is particularly interesting in the survey is the specialised nature of some of the holdings of the Leighton Library in Dunblane and of the Crawford Collection in Edinburgh, but the common bibliographical interest in these two cases is the more obvious because it has not been subsumed in a larger, less homogeneous collection.
What of the future for this survey? The priority is to find a suitable medium for the dissemination of its results. However I have a wider hope for the survey, not simply that it will supplement the in-formation gathered by Dr. Reinier Salverda, formerly of the Department of Dutch, University College London and now the Director of the Frisian Academy, for libraries within the M25, that is London’s ring road, but that these two will form a substantial basis for a survey which will cover the whole of Great Britain. In order to achieve this, I would like to seek the help of the Ministry of Education in The Netherlands and in Flanders on how to approach the relevant de-partment of the European Community for financial assistance. I have been assured that that body looks with greater favour on a proposal for such cooperation, if it in-volves more than one member state, and it would be appropriate here to follow again the model of Fabian’s Handbuch by including Ireland in this.

In the first paragraph of this Introduction I mentioned several professional benefits which have accrued to me myself both from my involvement with Bernhard Fabian’s Handbuch and from my work on this survey and in the second I outlined several which I hope will accrue to the wider profession from the particular material which I have drawn together. I hope also that the profession will benefit from the encour-agement which this survey will give other researchers to improve our knowledge of the holdings in Scottish, and, if my wider plans for the survey come to fruition, also in British research libraries of pre-1801 imprints from other areas of Europe such as Scandinavia, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.

Call for Papers

Institute of English Studies

‘Evidence of reading, reading the evidence’

A major international conference to be held at the Institute of English Studies, Uni-versity of London, 21-23 July 2008, organised by the Open University and the In-stitute of English Studies. The keynote speakers are Kate Flint, Jonathan Rose and David Vincent.

Studies centred on the history of reading have proliferated in the last twenty years. They have sprung from several different disciplines, encompassed different periods and geographical locations and chosen divergent methodologies, but their common quest has been to recover and understand the traces of a practice which is central to our understanding of human history, yet notoriously elusive.

One such approach is ‘The Reading Experience Database 1450-1945’ (RED), a pro-ject run by the Open University and the University of London. While RED is already proving its worth as a digital resource, its methodological parameters are necessarily limited and its vision therefore partial. What is needed in order for the study of the history of reading to progress beyond the boundaries of specific institutions, dis-ciplines, methodologies, geographical locations and time periods is a forum in which as many diverse approaches as possible are brought into energetic debate.

This major three day conference, the first of its type, seeks to provide such a forum. We invite twenty minute papers from international students and scholars of any dis-cipline, both within and outwith the humanities, who are interested in the history and practice of reading in any period or geographical location. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

Theories of reading; Issues of literac; National and transnational histories; Reading and readers in fiction; Reading communities; Quantitative versus qualitative methodologies; Genre reading; Digital resources and their development; Visual representations of reading; Reading across disciplines/languages; Using historical data in contemporary research fields; The sociology, psychology and neurology of reading experiences; Evidence of reading from private audio recordings and blogs; Finding, compiling, interpreting and preserving the evidence of reading

Paper titles, abstracts of no more than three hundred words and short biographies should be sent electronically by 31 January 2008 to all three organisers: Dr Shaf Towheed (S.S.Towheed@open.ac.uk); Dr Rosalind Crone (r.h.crone@open.ac.uk); Dr Katie Halsey (Katie.Halsey@sas.ac.uk).

Conference website
RED website: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/

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