Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2022

Catechisms and schoolbooks were essential tools for Catholics living in partibus infidelium, ‘in the lands of the unbelievers’, in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. While constant demand for these texts from parents, priests and schoolteachers sustained the livelihoods of many Catholic printers, their regulation and censorship became a battleground of doctrinal orthodoxy. In the 1690s, corrections to the catechism of the Archbishop of Sens led to printed polemical rebuttals and an audit of books used in Catholic schools. Using the remarkable archival evidence surviving from this controversy, this article demonstrates the importance of schoolbooks to the Catholic book trade in the Dutch Republic and how accusations of unorthodoxy and censorship can help to reconstruct lost titles and editions.

This article presents three early catechisms for the religious education of children under the age of three, printed in Germany and the Netherlands. Two of them were best- and long sellers on the book market, while one of them was a commercial failure. Catechisms were influential reading primers. The children’s catechisms written by Jacobus Borstius, Johann Cyriacus Höfer and Nikolaus von Zinzendorf contained questions for children who were too young to read the texts themselves. Therefore, these catechisms had to be performed in the form of interactive read-alouds. Höfer, Borstius, and Zinzendorf used child-directed speech in their catechisms: short and foreseeable answers and a basic vocabulary to facilitate the understanding and the pronunciation of words in the process of language acquisition and the deliberate introduction of new religious vocabulary. Whereas the catechisms of Borstius and Höfer reckoned with pedagogical laymen and chose standardized questions and answers, Zinzendorf proclaimed an ideal of Socratic intercourse, enthusiasm and aesthetic-poetic affirmation – an ideal that exceeded the capabilities of average teachers and parents.

In 1674, the Amsterdam publisher Jan Claesz ten Hoorn printed a new schoolbook, the Nieuwe Spiegel der Jeugd, of Franse Tiranny (New Mirror of Youth, or French Tyranny). The work, based on a chronicle of the recent ‘Disaster Year’ (1672), during which the Dutch Republic was invaded and nearly overrun by a French-led coalition, provided a concise but highly graphic and violent history of these turbulent events for the Dutch youth. The Nieuwe Spiegel became a run-away success, and was one of the most popular Dutch schoolbooks of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the production, content, circulation, use and legacy of the Nieuwe Spiegel, and situates the book in the broader context of the political, literary and pedagogical culture of the Dutch Republic. Based on a detailed bibliographical reconstruction, this article also includes an appendix listing the fifty-two editions that appeared between 1674 and 1780.

This article provides the first overview of Dutch artists’ manuals, published in the first half of the nineteenth century. These instructional books tell the reader what materials to use and how to apply them in order to successfully make an artwork. Contemporary researchers have used artists’ manuals as a source of historical information for technical research of historical objects. However, the focus on the technical information results in a lack of consideration for other aspects of published manuals. The present article is aimed precisely at that: what can non-technical texts, material form and cultural-social context tell us about artists’ manuals?

In 1906, a new primer was published in the German city of Bremen: The Bremer Fibel. Its illustrations were created by Cornelis Jetses (1873-1955) one of the best-known illustrators of teaching material in the Netherlands, his home country, in the first half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on these illustrations and shows how Jetses used his artistic skills to create images which fulfilled the demands of representatives of Reformed Pedagogy, a movement which emerged in Europe around 1900 and placed the child at the centre of education. By creating an overall design for the book that should help children develop a good aesthetic taste and by showing people, objects and situations that were part of the pupils’ everyday world, Cornelis Jetses played a part in establishing a child-oriented education in Bremen. Furthermore, this article also shows how the illustrator used artistic composition principles to create images that helped pupils to learn how to read words and decipher images.

Hoewel er de laatste jaren steeds meer aandacht wordt besteed aan de clitoris, is vaak maar weinig oog voor de houding tegenover haar bestaan in het verleden. Dit artikel gaat in op de geschiedenis van de kittelaar en richt zich op haar voorkomen in Nederlandse publicaties van (en voor) medici en docenten in de laatste 400 jaar. De conclusie luidt dat de clitoris nooit volledig is vergeten of genegeerd, maar dat de onwetendheid over dit vrouwelijke orgaan te wijten is aan culturele en sociale factoren: een gebrek aan aandacht voor seksualiteit in het algemeen en voor de vrouwelijke geslachtsorganen in het bijzonder. Pas in het laatste decennium is dit langzaam aan het veranderen: aandacht voor de volledige anatomie van de clitoris wordt voor het eerst op grote schaal gecombineerd met aandacht voor de seksuele beleving van de vrouw binnen een kader waarin ze gelijkwaardig is aan de man.

This contribution consists of two interviews with experts from the Dutch educational publishing field. The first interviewee, Rivka Mooren, works as project editor Higher Education at Pearson Benelux. She explains how handbooks and digital learning platforms develop from the conceptual stage to publication. In light of international developments in higher education publishing, Mooren expects that the market will become fully digital, although in Europe more slowly than in the United States. Secondly, Regine Reincke considers the larger trends and developments in Dutch educational publishing. She works as Head of Product for ParnasSys, an administrative system for students that is widely used in Dutch primary schools. She arrived at this position after a career in educational publishing. This allows her to reflect on the role of technology in the classroom, and how it may enhance, but not replace, traditional classes and books.

Previous attempts to describe the life of Peter van Selow, one of the more important type founders and printers in Sweden during the first half of the seventeenth century, have suffered from serious deficiencies: we knew neither the dates of his birth and death, nor was it clear where he was born. Quite consistently he was characterised as a Dutchman. Thanks to a newly discovered funeral sermon that has survived in Stuttgart, many blank spots in Van Selow’s biography can now be filled in: Van Selow was born in Grevesmühlen in Mecklenburg, 1582, and he died in Stockholm, 1650. This study combines information from the recently located new source with long-known Swedish scholarship on the hitherto enigmatic type founder and printer. Sources about the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, in whose service Van Selow was employed for several years, were also used to fill in some gaps.

The present article is the result of the ongoing research of the project ‘The Dynamics of the Classical Reformed Liturgy in the Netherlands: Its Texts and their History’. This Liturgy is recorded in numerous psalm books and Bibles. The question arises how many editions of the Liturgy have not been preserved, or which are not known in publicly accessible collections. To this end, the article analyses a list of forty editions of the Liturgy from the period 1566-1634 that the theologian Gisbertus Voetius included in 1641 in a book entitled Catechisatie Over den Catechismus der Remonstranten. The article examines in particular the extent to which a tried and tested statistical analysis can be helpful in determining the value of this list. The article concludes that the data provided by Voetius not only provides information about a number of specific lost books, but, taking into account a number of uncertain factors, also offers an indication of the probable total number of editions containing the Liturgy that were originally published and are now untraceable.

This article investigates ‘nose books’ (neusboekjes) and their social functions in the Early Modern Low Countries. Nose books are short literary texts written in the form of joyful ordinances that can be found in bound volumes (Sammelbände). These volumes contain a number of separately printed works, such as almanacs, prognostications and popular texts, which were subsequently bound together. Unlike previous studies, which have largely considered nose books as purely entertaining, this article demonstrates that nose books were initially sold as a form of political satire. As such, they encouraged societal engagement. However, over the course of the eighteenth century, the political undertone of nose books was no longer part of people’s reading experiences. These later readers appreciated the parody of the official ordinance instead.