A Brill Calendar: February 3

Splendid Isolation and the Royal Society

Few people hesitate to link the idiom ‘splendid isolation’ to England; or the British Isles as a whole.

Hackneyed expressions contain some truth; as Philip II of Spain, Napoleon and Hitler experienced. Yet even in this narrow context it is a half-truth, given the campaigns of William the Conqueror and William of Orange. In a much wider sense, when we take the grand total of European culture & history into account, this seclusion evaporates.

It is refuted most interestingly by the history of learning & scholarship; since Anglo-Saxon monks introduced not only Christianity to the Low Countries, but literacy and crafts as well - in the 8th century. Land-lubbers might readily forget that travelling by water was much the easiest way during the middle ages – and long thereafter – to transport products, passengers and ideas for all kinds of purpose. The North Sea is the material and physical nursery of civilization in North-Western Europe; and century after century more intensively used.

In the early 16th century, a humanist like Desiderius Erasmus could travel much more comfortably to London than to the North of the Low Countries; his bosom-friend in England, Sir Thomas More could visit Flanders without great trouble. During the following century - when scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens were instrumental in the flowering of new fields of scholarly inquiry - this splendid lack of isolation became self-evident. The history of the ‘Royal Society’, encouraging unprecedented co-operation between scientists and scholars, demonstrates as from its beginnings vital contributions to it from the Continent, with many Dutchmen among them; like Van Leeuwenhoek and Swammerdam.

When the English satirist Samuel Butler (Strensham, Worcestershire, February 3, 1612 – London September 25 1680) made fun of the solemnities of the Society in his hilarious ‘The Elephant in the Moon’, he didn’t only mock an English scientific institution, but trans-national mumbo-jumbo by officialdom and learned men as well.