The Dutch Republic was home to various philosophers who broke with traditional worldviews and accepted beliefs. The ideas of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) left a profound mark on the intellectual climate of the Netherlands. Spinoza transformed Cartesianism into a disruptive discourse that became part of the so-called ‘Radical Enlightenment’. According to Jonathan Israel's famous thesis, this discourse paved the way for the ‘mainstream’ Enlightenment decades later through discussions in both academic and popular (Dutch) domains. Cultural historians and philosophers have therefore studied the reception of Descartes and Spinoza extensively. They continue to debate the nature and influence of Cartesianism, Spinozism and related discourses in both the Latin and vernacular sphere.

However, qualitative research allows only a limited corpus, leaving the scale of the dissemination of these ‘radical rumours’ – disruptive and clandestine proto-Enlightenment beliefs – subject to speculation. Moreover, close reading is not sufficient to systematically describe the actual language - often informed by rationalist epistemology and purist language philosophy - of many Cartesio-Spinozists involved in translating Descartes and Spinoza into Dutch. In response to these methodological challenges, this project aims to analyse the dissemination of Cartesian and Spinozist discourses in Dutch texts using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It uses the growing body of digitised material and applies text mining to access a philosophical, clandestine discourse through the surface of textual features from a large and diverse corpus (printed between 1640-1720). Characteristic Cartesian and Spinozist idioms will be formalised through an analysis of the earliest Dutch translators of Descartes and Spinoza: Jan Henderiksz. Glazemaker (1620-1682), Pieter Balling (? - 1664), Jacob Copper and Steven Blankaart (1650 - 1704). By combining computer-assisted discourse analysis with close reading, this study provides a challenging new perspective to the vernacular dissemination of Cartesianism and Spinozism during the Early Enlightenment.

Supervisors:

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

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.

Literary history is no longer written in books alone.12 As literary reception thrives in blogs, Wikipedia entries, Amazon reviews, and Goodreads profiles, the Web has become a key platform for the exchange of information on literature. Although conventional printed media in the field—academic monographs, literary supplements, and magazines—may still claim the highest authority, online media presumably provide the first (and possibly the only) source for many readers casually interested in literary history. Wikipedia offers quick and free answers to readers' questions and the range of topics described in its entries dramatically exceeds the volume any printed encyclopedia could possibly cover.3 While an important share of this expanding knowledge base about literature is produced bottom-up (user based and crowd-sourced), search engines such as Google have become brokers in this online economy of knowledge, organizing information on the Web for its users. Similar to the printed literary histories, search engines prioritize certain information sources over others when ranking and sorting Web pages; as such, their search algorithms create hierarchies of books, authors, and periods.

This article explores these algorithmically constructed hierarchies as cultural representations of what is (and what is not) presented as important to the Google user, taking information about authors from a particular body of national literature as a case study...

The analysis of representations in literature is not only concerned with characters but also with relations and hierarchies between characters. In literary narratives, such relations are inherently ambiguous: they activate different readings and different views on the power dynamics between characters. There have been various attempts to formalise and quantify the analysis of character relations, for instance through social network analysis. However, because of this ambiguity, the meaning of a computational approximation of characters, relations and the strength of such relations is far from evident. Inspired by Stephen Ramsay’s notion of ‘algorithmic criticism’, this article demonstrates how both close and distant reading approaches of character hierarchies rely on an arrangement of text-internal or text-external evidence rather than the text itself. It thus responds to the issue of character hierarchy raised by a specific case, Peter Buwalda’s bestselling novel Bonita Avenue (2010). As a narrative composed of three apparently equal main characters, the novel illustrates the complexity of the interpretation of character relations when analysed either qualitatively or quantitatively. This analysis thus also demonstrates how close and distant reading strategies could go hand in hand in order to approach character representation from different angles.