A Brill Calendar: January 22

The Birth of Caspar Jacob Reuvens

Few careers in Academia and its environs mirror their historical time as faithfully as the one of Caspar Jacob Reuvens.

He was born in The Hague on January 22 1793, during the short-lived ‘Batavian Republic’; an ersatz Dutch Revolutionary government - based on the French revolutionary political system - that became, by default, the inheritor of the defunct Republic of the United Seven Provinces. Reuvens died in Rotterdam August 26 1835, at 42 years of age; a Professor in a young Kingdom.

When Caspar joined his forefathers, the Chair of Archeology at Leyden University became vacant. Reuvens had been the first to occupy it, probably the benefiting from earliest assignment of that type in Western scholarly traditions. As of the same moment the Leyden ‘Rijksmuseum van Oudheden’ (State Museum of Antiquities) had to look for a suitable successor for its first Director, who founded that institute as early as 1818, when only 25 years old.

Reuvens’ preceding studies in Amsterdam and Leyden had been concluded in Paris, during Napoleon’s ‘Empire’. When he returned to Holland in 1814 - following Bonaparte’s decisive, although not final defeat at Leipzig, he became a barrister in his native town; and two years later, Professor of classical languages at the High School of Harderwijk during the decline & fall of that institute of learning.

Two years later again – in 1818 – the Leyden Chair was created especially for him. That singular promotion can’t be seen as independent from an exceptional obligation he undertook: to advise his Sovereign and Autocratic King, Willem I of The Netherlands and the VIth Prince of Orange, on one of His Majesty’s many passions and undertakings, the personal archaeological collection of his Princely House.

It is seldom that vital innovations and expansions of the structure of a national academic system were enabled by so young a scholar; one who even didn’t live to see his Sponsor, the first King of a new Kingdom abdicate in 1840.