A Brill Calendar: January 11

The Family Silvius

Few intellectual traditions that concern crafts gracing European Universities - especially since Gutenberg’s invention of the ‘black art’ - equal or surpass in the glory of professional craftsmanship the title of ‘Printer to the Academy’.

In the case of Leyden, the sequential list of officially appointed typographers encompasses more than two centuries and the appointment and position carried immense prestige and significant political influence.

It starts with Willem Silvius, born in the city of ‘s –Hertogenbosch, in the Duchy of Brabant around 1520; a man who came to ply his innovative trade later in Antwerp, Flanders, from 1558 even at one point as ‘Printer to the King’. In 1577, he was academically appointed in Leyden, Holland; and eventually died there in 1580. The position of Printer to the Academy petered out – ‘evaporated’ might be the better expression - with Johannes and Samuel III Luchtmans from 1786; during the final Decline & Fall of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces.

But back to Silvius. His initial appointment, combined with the function of Printer to the States of Holland, came to force in early summer 1577 – when the University had yet to celebrate its first lustrum, and it lasted just some thousand days; with Carel, his son, registered as a Leyden citizen on January 11, 1580, immediately inheriting the parental office & business. And spending roughly the same amount of time in his post.

Next, just before the ‘Urheber’ of Leyden University, Willem, Prince of Orange, was assassinated in the ‘Prinsenhof’, the ‘arch-typographer’ of his age, Christopher Plantijn, was the third entrepreneur shouldering the task of providing printed information to the scholarly community of Leyden and Holland, by then intensely dependent on Gutenberg’s miracle, some six human generations after its invention.