A Brill Calendar: July 13

Few observers of marital relationships will contest that maintaining a LAT relationship – Living Alone Together – is a ‘delicate’ way of living.

This is also true on less personal echelons of existence. On the level of European peoples and cultures, this type of bond has shaped the continent’s history for more than a thousand years.

European history is also a study in separation; admittedly never a complete one, and Polish history is a striking example. Geographical structure with its realities and distances is decisive for the originating of ever-growing interdependencies; but it is a leisurely, unhurried growth, taking time. The 130 years between two military marches to Moscow – the first one in 1812 – hardly made a difference. For centuries, a European country could seem to live by a code of insularity and be virtually oblivious to the rest of Europe; occasionally under the French adage: ‘pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés’. The vast Danish kingdom of the 13th century was hardly noticed on the Iberian Peninsula – and vice-versa.

Yet, it is seldom that this estrangement is total; and it is moot to suggest that itinerant students, scholars and professors were always been of a continuing ‘communication’. Etymologically dissected the word stands for ‘changing together’. More than most others, children of ‘Almae Matres’ enabled mutual awareness and its growth; being more ‘foot-loose & fancy-free’ than farmers and labourers, the vast mass of Europe’s inhabitants. When a Dutchman, born in the city of Delft entered the service of the Swedish Crown on July 13 1634, this Hugo Grotius (1583 - 1645), Europe’s most versatile scholar and legal mind, contributed to the ideal of ‘unita diversitate’: unity both in and by diversity.