A Brill Calendar: July 25

Few necessary conditions for the growth of knowledge are as hard to portray as continuity.

Admiration for scholarship’s past-masters may detract from appreciating the importance of connections comprising generations. The waning of the existing academic order and the rise of a new one in the Low Countries during the second half of the 16th century is a point in case; and it is seldom that it can be better illustrated than the rise to scholarly fame of one prominent family in the city of Delft: well-to-do, if not affluent citizens. We can begin with the name of Hugo Corneliszoon de Groot (1511 – 1567).

His world-famous grandson, Hugo Janszoon de Groot (1583 – 1645) never knew Hugo Senior, who saw to it that his sons Cornelis and Jan both got an academic education, unlike their father. The older one, Cornelis (Delft, July 25 1544 (or 1546)) at the universities of Louvain, Paris and Orléans; brother Jan (Delft, March 8 1554) at a new university in Northern France at Douai, founded 1562.

Cornelis became a Leyden professor in the first year of the university’s existence and a key-figure and power-broker in its institutional organization until he died – on his birth-day – in 1610. In 1594, he also provided young Hugo with a home-from-home on Leyden’s Rapenburg, during his initiation in the ‘vita academica’.

In Henk Nellen’s definitive biography (Amsterdam 2007) of the greatest Dutch scholar of the 17th century, the examination of the connections of the Delft family of regents, magistrates, entrepreneurs and scholars is a veritable ‘who’s who’ of anybody who was anybody during the emergence of the ‘Golden Age’ of the Dutch Republic; including celebrities like Scaliger and Simon Stevin. Success is often a self-enhancing process, sometimes covering several generations.