De Achttiende Eeuw - Volume 54, Issue 1, 2022

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, because they treated patients and ailments that physicians and surgeons often ignored or whose treatment was considered too risky. Furthermore, dentistry received a scientific boost, partly due to the pioneering work of the French surgeon-dentist Pierre Fauchard. Another stimulating factor was that healthy and white teeth became a status symbol in social intercourse. The professionalization of dentistry manifested itself in increasing specialization, strong family networks, an accumulation of knowledge and skills, administrative protection and assertive media campaigns.

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 level. In this article we set forth the ideals and goals of the society, as well as the role of Anna van der Aar in guiding and educating these ambitious women.

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 modern genre historia literaria. This article explores how the Göttingen megaproject contributed to discipline formation especially in the domains of history, art history, and the history of literature, giving these fields a history of their development and formulating a programme for furthering them. Thus, the attempt to create an overview also resulted in unintended pioneer work, even if the contents of the Geschichte were rather dull. I call this the ‘handbook paradox’.

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 of their use of the comparative method. The frontispiece Picart developed for the work in 1727 confirms this. Although previous research has already pointed at this frontispiece’s iconographic and metaphorical value in relation to the entire work, a thorough close reading of the title print seems to be lacking. In this contribution, I not only show to what extent the frontispiece serves as a visual synthesis for the book’s content, I also argue that it reveals Picart and Bernard’s artistic strategy of condemning the ceremoniality and theatricality in these religious rituals.

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 shows that he used VOC legacies to shape his own rule. He repeated stereotypes about the local population, first written down by former VOC governors, to justify Dutch control in Ambon. Moreover, De Kock used rituals that were negotiated during the period of the VOC to shape his interactions with local Ambonese regents. Finally, his memorandum of transfer shows how his rule was inspired by British practices of knowledge production and governance.

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 chroniclers started to use Arabic numerals and tables in their writings and which developments we can discern in the period between 1500 and 1850. To do so, it turns to a corpus of 310 handwritten chronicles, produced by a heterogenous group of authors from the Low Countries. From the analyses, it appears that in the second half of the eighteenth-century local authorities stimulated statistical practices in their record-keeping and that these were consequently picked up by society at large. Studying these chronicles not only provides us with new perspectives on the broader reception of (new) knowledge and novel practices in this period, but also illustrates what early modern people regarded as useful knowledge.

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 tea could have a beneficial effect on health and wellbeing. However, tea consumption was also mocked in satirical culture. Even before tea truly became a mass-consumer good, the anonymous publishers of the Oost-Indische thee post (1687) and the Darmstadse thee courant (1687) took up the growing tea mania for their satirical genre parody. They confirmed tea’s continued association with health and medicine, but also testified to the first stirrings of debates on the participation of women and the ‘lower classes’ in the tea ritual. This article looks at the complex ways in which tea was represented in Dutch culture at the turn of the eighteenth century.

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 benefits that would come from knowing what the weather will be. This article therefore discusses the mobilizing potential of this ideal of utilité but also reflects on its limits. While usefulness was a shared epistemic value, his readers applied his meteorological theory and methodology in a flexible way. This led Lamarck to not consider most of their contributions as part of useful meteorology and, therefore, from the eighth volume onwards a change takes place in his rhetoric of persuasion. Lamarck instead argues for the importance of having a devotion and love of nature, especially for its atmospheric phenomena, as the main driving force that will propel meteorology forward.

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 various reviews in the field of natural history, biology, medical science, vulcanology and mineralogy, Feller fiercely criticized the new enlightened science he associated above all with Buffon, the ‘French Pliny’. Feller in particular decried the alleged arrogance of the Enlightenment and argued for the acceptance of wonder and the boundaries of scientific endeavors. Only scientific discoveries that were in line with catholic tradition would be of use to society. Although Feller ferociously attacked philosophy, his use of enlightened reasoning is evidence that he too was a product of the Enlightenment he so despised and feared.

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 a part of popular culture, it makes sense that it tries to cater to modern and diverse audiences. Other recent productions have shown similar deliberate choices, departing from historical accuracy, though Bridgerton is by far the most extreme. The mise-en-scène in Bridgerton can be seen as a fictionalisation of the Regency period into a brightly coloured fantasy world.

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 awakening in the true twenty-first century, however, is rough: ‘it looks more like the eighteenth century!’ The song contrasts present and past, dream and reality in an intriguing way and depicts the beheaded French queen Marie-Antoinette as an embodiment as much as a victim of eighteenth-century progressivism. Departing from the French Revolution, it seems, Straat aims at criticizing today’s progressivism. For this, she uses one of the historically most powerful tools to voice social critique and mobilize the masses: song. But will the people ever be able to achieve the utopia that this singer is dreaming of?