De Achttiende Eeuw - Volume 54, Issue 1, 2022

Abstract This article deals with professionalization processes in the Dutch medical market. In this increasingly competitive and commercial market, tooth masters acquired a prominent position from the 1730s onwards. Originally, many of these medical specialists did not have any protective institution such as a guild behind them, and were therefore often considered as ‘quacks’. Eventually their position became stronger, bec Read More

Abstract In 1782, poetess Anna van der Aar de Sterke founded Die Erg Denkt Vaart Erg In ’T Hart, a literary group that is now known as the first all-female literary society of the Dutch Republic. Once a week the women gathered in and around Van der Aar’s library to discuss their own and others’ poetry. In their pursuit of scholarship, the members of Die Erg Denkt aspired to educate themselves on a literary and religious le Read More

Abstract Compiled by a ‘society of learned men’ mainly affiliated to the University of Göttingen, the Geschichte der Künste und Wissenschaften (1796-1820) presented a tableau of the history and progress of the arts and sciences at an unprecedented scale, divided up into eleven sections and 71 volumes. Ambivalent between a bibliographic format and a running narrative, it is both a high point and an end point of the early Read More

Abstract Between 1723 and 1743, the French bookseller Jean Frederic Bernard, who had emigrated to Amsterdam, published the seven-volume Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, richly illustrated by Bernard Picart. Earlier research argued that Picart and Bernard are important predecessors of the emerging scientific fields of anthropology and ethnology in the early modern period because Read More

Abstract This article zooms in on a memorandum of transfer written by Hendrick Merkus de Kock, a Dutch Governor of Ambon in 1819, and studies how it reveals the importance of the governmental legacies of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the nineteenth century. This type of document was a typical VOC genre and, while its author was rhetorically very critical of the practices of the VOC, the memorandum sho Read More

Abstract The professional use of numbers, tables, and statistics has been well studied for the (early) modern period. However, research on the application of Hindu-Arabic numerals and statistical practices by the middling ranks of society in the period between 1500 and 1850 is hitherto understudied. This article aims to provide a remedy for this historiographical gap by demonstrating when and how early modern chronic Read More

Abstract When Chinese tea was first introduced in Europe in the seventeenth century, it quickly became popular both as a hot drink and as medicine. In the Netherlands, the interest in Chinese goods and tea in particular reached its apogee in the last decades of the century. Such products were avidly consumed, but they were also discussed in numerous book publications. These publications largely focused on how Read More

Abstract From 1799 until 1810, the naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) published eleven Annuaires containing weather predictions and meteorological treatises. More than offering a weather forecast, Lamarck’s aim with these publications was to foster the creation of a meteorological discipline. To encourage his readers to join his meteorological project, he constantly emphasized the many useful benefit Read More

Abstract This article discusses the uses and abuses of scientific knowledge by contemporary critics of the Enlightenment, a topic overlooked by historians of both science and the Enlightenment. It will focus on the reviews of scholarly works in the Journal Historique et Littéraire, edited by the catholic publicist François-Xavier de Feller between 1773 and 1794. Feller was a former Jesuit from the Southern Netherlands. In his vari Read More

Abstract This essay discusses the costume department’s choices for the popular Netflix series Bridgerton (2020-), set in the London high society of 1813. While the costumes follow the Regency silhouette, they use fabrics and colours that did not yet exist in 1813. Moreover, Queen Charlotte’s dress is forty years out of date. As a fashion historian it is easy to argue against these stylistic choices, but when looking at Bridgerton as Read More

Abstract In Sophie Straat’s song ‘Vrijheid, Gelijkheid & Zusterschap’ (2022) and her corresponding music video, a colorful character falls asleep and, like a ‘Marie-Antoinette of the twenty-first century,’ dreams that she can do anything she wants. We witness a utopian dream world where all twenty-first-century problems have been solved: from climate change and factory farming to corruption and religious oppression. Her a Read More