The Dutch theatre society Nil Volentibus Arduum was founded in 1669 amid the rise of various rationalist debates in the Dutch Republic. Both the theoretical works and the plays produced by the society have often been read as expressions of a rationalist worldview and a Spinozist approach to the human passions. In this article I complicate that reading by arguing that the plays produced by Nil Volentibus Arduum were also shaped by anti-rationalist ideas. By comparing the society’s genre theory to the composition of 22 plays published by its members, I demonstrate the differences between ‘order’ versus ‘disorder’ as story models underpinning the historical and everyday realities depicted by tragedies and comedies respectively. These genre differences are analysed using quantitative narratology and network analysis, focusing on ‘storyworld speed’ and character interactions. This article thus also showcases the potential of computational methods for comparative and cross-lingual approaches to early modern drama.

In 1685, Govert Bidloo and Gerard de Lairesse published their Anatomia Humani Corporis, an impressive anatomical atlas with 105 engravings of dissected bodies and body parts. It was published in a culture in which medical professors performed dissections in anatomical theatres, while regular theatres became spaces for knowledge transfer about human passions. Engaged in both sorts of theatres, Bidloo and Lairesse exemplify the interconnectedness of art, theatre, medicine and publishing in early modern Amsterdam. In this essay, we use the materiality of Anatomia as a key to unravel the entanglement of the city’s cultural industries, tracing the social, intellectual, aesthetic and commercial connections linking Bidloo, Lairesse, the theatre, and the publishers involved in the production of the atlas.

This article compares the first two Dutch translations of the Qur’an printed in the Dutch Republic: De Arabische Alkoran (1641) published by Barent Adriaensz Berentsma and Mahomets Alkoran (1657) published by Jan Rieuwertsz. It builds upon previous bibliographic research by quantifying the abbreviation of the Surahs in the two editions, identifying the sources of the paratexts, and describing the different strategies for translation. This analysis reveals how different editing choices reflect contradictory ideological attitudes among the publishers and translators involved. These producers of the first Qur’an translations echoed the widespread hostility towards Islam in Western discourses while also highlighting the peaceful nature of Muhammad and the similarities between the Bible and the Qur’an. This ‘Orientalist ambivalence’ not only resonated in local debates about freedom of conscience among Amsterdam Mennonites, but also signalled a more fundamental epistemological uncertainty following the rise of Cartesianism in the Dutch Early Enlightenment.

Benedictus de Spinoza became one of the few censored authors in the liberal publishing climate of the Dutch Republic. Twenty-three years passed before the first Dutch translation of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) appeared in print, despite two interrupted attempts to bring out a vernacular version before 1693. This article compares the three oldest Dutch translations of Spinoza’s notorious treatise by combining digital sentence alignment with philological analysis. It describes the relationship between the variants, two printed versions and a manuscript, revealing a pattern of fragmentary similarity. This partial textual reuse can be explained using Harold Love’s notion of ‘scribal publication’: readers circulated handwritten copies as a strategy to avoid the censorship of Spinozism. As a result, medium and language not only conditioned the dissemination of Spinoza’s treatise in Dutch, but also affected its text in the versions published—either in manuscript or print—between 1670 and 1694.

This dissertation presents a comparative, computer-assisted history of the Dutch transmission of the New Philosophy in the Dutch Early Enlightenment (1640-1720). It examines Dutch translations of philosophical treatises written by French natural philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650), English political theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), and Jewish-Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677). Part I – ‘Translating the New Philosophy’ – consists of four case studies about the first and most important Dutch translators of Descartes, Spinoza and Hobbes: Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker (1619/1620-1682), Pieter Balling (?-?), Abraham van Berkel (1639-1686), Stephan Blankaart (1650-1704). Part II – ‘Contextualising the New Philosophy’ – expands the findings from the case studies, using digital text analysis to contextualise the first Dutch translations of the New Philosophy in wider contemporary discourses. The aim of this study is to better understand the social and intellectual background of translators of the New Philosophy, to assess the relationship between translation practices and rationalist language theories, and to reconstruct the various ways translators negotiated with socio-linguistic norms in early modern Dutch discourse.

The main thesis is that Dutch translations of the New Philosophy were shaped by (1) their intellectual conditions, (2) social circumstances, and (3) the linguistic practices of early modern textual culture. Understanding the role of translators in the Dutch Early Enlightenment requires careful reconstructions of their involvement in current local debates, their position in specific publishing and reading circles, and their navigation through the socially and linguistically diverse Dutch Republic. Such reconstructions reveal that translators were not just passive puppets employed to disseminate the great minds of the Early Enlightenment. Neither were they pragmatic clerks who used language merely as a medium for communication. Instead, they functioned as curious brokers of ideas, eager to find intellectual support for their position in local discussions about pressing philosophical, religious or scientific issues. Moreover, they intervened in the intellectual, social and linguistic conditions of their practice, by selectively omitting loanwords, annotating less familiar philosophical terminology, or by extending the source for clarification.

These style features, lexical preferences and translation choices are viewed in this study as symptoms of a coherent attempt to reduce confusing and misleading elements in the Dutch language. This search for a new language for the natural light postulated the rationalist conviction that language was fundamentally unreliable as a medium for communicating rational knowledge. Several key texts from the Early Enlightenment addressed the semantic instability and inaccuracy of (Biblical) language, or stated the importance of using clear and understandable words. Although most participants in this debate agreed about the fallibility of language, they defended different positions regarding the relationship between language and reason. While Descartes and Spinoza simply accepted the inherently unreliable nature of language, proposing reason as the infallible remedy to human error, Dutch thinkers such as Adriaan Koerbagh (1632-1669) and Lodewijk Meijer (1629-1681) tried to find a linguistic solution to this linguistic problem. They compiled and published dictionaries to correct misconceptions and to open up learned discourse to unlearned readers. Koerbagh and Meijer not just subscribed to the idea that language was a broken system, with a vocabulary corrupted by Ancient and learned knowledge traditions, but they also believed that language could be manipulated to one’s own advantage by propagating new norms and vocabularies. Their pragmatic position resembles the radical intellectual turn, described by historian Quentin Skinner, that Thomas Hobbes underwent when writing his rhetorical masterpiece Leviathan (1651). Confronted with religious discord and political disunity, Dutch freethinkers and translators seem to have acknowledged the necessity to use both the rationalist promise for intellectual consensus and the emancipating power of the vernacular. This dissertation examines whether and how the ‘Hobbesian turn’ – the revision of the relationship between language and reason – in vernacular debates is reflected in the Dutch translations of Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes.

The four case studies from part I reveal two main similarities between Glazemaker, Balling, Van Berkel and Blankaart as translators of the New Philosohy. The first similarity relates to the interaction between intellectual conditions and social circumstances. First, they all engaged in local debates that were informed by the New Philosophy, but not primarily about the New Philosophy. Glazemaker, Balling, Van Berkel, and Blankaart were all to some extent inspired by (respectively) Descartes, Spinoza, and/ or Hobbes. Their commitment to these great minds of the Early Enlightenment is indicated by their connection, directly or indirectly, to the group of freethinkers involved in ‘Spinoza’s circle’ and the publishing networks of Jan Rieuwertsz sr. (ca. 1617-1687) and Jan Claesz ten Hoorn (1639-1715). The case studies contribute to current knowledge about the relationships between Glazemaker and Spinoza, between Balling and Spinoza, between Blankaart and Spinoza’s circle and between Van Berkel and Koerbagh. But despite those social and intellectual attachments, the translators of the New Philosophy were not just vernacular spokespersons of the philosophers they admired. They are best viewed as enablers of new opportunities to appropriate the New Philosophy in local contexts. Each translator was involved in local vernacular discussions – about freedom of conscience, religious discord, political theory, and medical discoveries – where Cartesian, Spinozist, and Hobbesian ideas proved to be useful. For the two Mennonite translators Balling and Glazemaker of Spinoza and Descartes, Cartesianism and Spinozism became especially relevant when Mennonite communities in Amsterdam and Rotterdam were being torn over confessional quarrels – the so-called Lammerenkrijgh from the 1650s and the Bredenburg disputes during the 1670s. Van Berkel’s 1667 translation of Hobbes’s Leviathan was, in turn, mostly a contribution to an ongoing Dutch discussion about political sovereignty and republicanism based on the influential work of Pieter de la Court. De la Court was indebted to Hobbes, but as an advocate of republicanism he turned Hobbesian royalism on its head, and Van Berkel’s translation of Leviathan contributed to De la Court’s intellectual appropriation. In the vernacular public sphere, the New Philosophy fuelled existing discussions rather than spark fundamentally new intellectual programs.

Secondly, part I highlights the relationship between social circumstances and linguistic practices. For every translator of the New Philosophy, the form of their translations was affected by contemporary debates about language theory and rhetoric – although in different ways and in some cases indirectly. With his consistently purist vocabulary, Glazemaker practiced the rationalist ideals and linguistic norms propagated by Meijer and Koerbagh. Both Balling and Blankaart adhered to the same purist norms, although less consistently. Automatic loanword extraction is used to reveal their tendency to avoid loanwords selectively: the proportion of loanwords in their translations of philosophical texts were significantly lower compared to Balling’s pamphlets or Blankaart’s medical books. Such intra-author or intra-translator lexical variation is explained as a form of cultural code-switching between socio-linguistic and philosophical discourses. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is used to explain a translator’s capability to negotiate with existing intellectual conditions, social circumstances and linguistic conventions.

The observed similarities between the studied individuals raise questions about the possibilities for translators to reform language through translation while being bound to intellectual and socio-linguistic traditions. However, the relationship between individual texts and textual conventions cannot sufficiently be captured with a case study approach. The specificity of a translator’s style, the unicity of his terminology, or his possibilities for innovation – these characteristics can only be described comparatively, that is, in comparison to contemporary discursive conventions. The findings from Part I are therefore further contextualised in Part II through ‘computer-assisted discourse analysis’. This methodology depends on several forms of digital text analysis applied to reconstruct the intertextual relationships that comprise the ‘context’ of the translated treatises by Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes. Two different computational experiments enable a systematic comparison between a sample of 18 Dutch translations of the main philosophical texts written by Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza (the ‘Translation Corpus’), 12 Dutch texts of various genres explicitly adapting the New Philosophy (the ‘Adaptation Corpus’), and a diverse corpus of 365 texts printed between 1640 and 1720 (the ‘Test Corpus’). The Test Corpus serves as a sample of Dutch textual culture from this period, including Dutch plays, songbooks, prose novels, poetry collections, history books, theological treatises, medical books, emblem books et cetera. The Adaptation Corpus consists of Dutch texts that either critically discuss or approvingly adapt the ideas introduced by Descartes, Spinoza or Hobbes. It functions as a ‘control group’, enabling assessment of the specificity of the vocabularies typical to the Translation Corpus when compared to the Test Corpus.

The two chapters from Part II are dedicated to the two simultaneous affordances of the translation as an intervention in textual discourses: its tendency to reproduce and its ability to change. Chapter 7 tests the hypothesis that Dutch translations of the New Philosophy were embedded in various contemporary debates, echoing the vocabularies of those debates. The notion of ‘textual representativeness’ is introduced to interpret statistical representations of textual similarity – cosine similarity and Kullback-Leiber divergence. Document-matrices of intertextual relations between the Translation Corpus, Adaptation Corpus and Test Corpus can point the researcher to the discursive centre and margin in a given collection of documents. This approach enables the identification of texts that ‘represent’ the diversity of vocabularies in a given corpus relatively well. High similarity measures indicate high resonances of other texts and vocabularies, while low similarities signal texts with a relatively specific style or word use. The results shift the usual perspective on relationships of resonance and influence: instead of reconstructing how texts broke with intellectual or linguistic traditions, a focus on textual representativeness foregrounds the width and eclecticism of the vernacular reading culture in the context of which Descartes, Hobbes, or Spinoza happened to be translated, distributed, and read.

Chapter 8 tests the hypothesis that Dutch translations of the New Philosophy created new ways to linguistically represent that philosophy. It questions whether and how translations and adaptation of the New Philosophy deviate from the conventions of contemporary language use. Unlike chapter 7, the computational experiments in chapter 8 focus on dissimilarity rather than similarity. Text classification is applied as a hermeneutic tool for an analysis of two specific features of the Translation Corpus: frequencies of loanwords and of philosophical terminology. The unit of analysis consists of the consistency of the predictions produced by a binary classifier trained on two different models (Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB) and several samples taken from the Test Corpus. A few texts from the Adaptation Corpus are thus consistently classified as closest to the Translation Corpus in terms of loanword use and frequencies of philosophical terminology, while most texts from the Adaptation Corpus are not consistently associated with the vocabularies typical to the Translation Corpus. As consistent predictions only occur in a minority of the studied cases, the Translation Corpus’s specific use and reform of philosophical terminology probably resonated with only a limited group of authors and readers. These results suggest that the quest for a new language for the natural light was a highly local and highly limited endeavour. It was carried out by a small group confined by socio-linguistic and ideological boundaries.

The Epilogue offers a reformulation of the latter conclusion about the socio-linguistic and ideological limits of the new language for a natural light. This final essay proposes a new reading of the philosophical prose novel Het leven van Philopater, opgewiegt in Voetiaensche talmeryen (1691) and its sequel Vervolg van ’t Leven van Philopater geredded uit de verborgentheeden der Coccejanen (1697), usually attributed to Johannes Duijkerius. The intellectual Bildung of their main character Philopater can be read as an allegory of the philosophical and linguistic problems involved in the search for a new language for the natural light. The Philopater novels imagine a conversion to Spinozism as a moment of aphasia caused by a revelation about the true nature of language. Philopater’s enlightenment is preceded by a flash of speechlessness: an absence of language following a rejection of language and rhetoric on linguistic and philosophical grounds. Challenging the relationship between language and reason represented in Philopater’s aphasia, this dissertation aims to demonstrate that in fact, several translators and freethinkers involved in Spinoza’s circle embraced language and linguistic reform as instruments for the dissemination of rationalist ideas – through writing, translating, and compiling dictionaries. Like Hobbes had done in writing his Leviathan, they employed the rhetorical power of the language of the people to enable and encourage their readers to participate in vernacular debates about philosophy.

• prof. dr. Lia van Gemert (UvA)
• prof. dr. Antal van den Bosch (RU Nijmegen/ Meertens Institute)