A Brill Calendar: May 15

Which is The Information Age?

Few common, modern conceits are so universally endorsed as the notion that Mankind is living in an ‘information & communication age’.

If preached by men deemed to be visionaries like Senator Al Gore or Entrepreneur Bill Gates, the truism is transformed into a secular religion. The Voltairean ‘bon mot’ to the effect that the more things change, the more they stay the same, isn’t just a witticism; and it may be believed that information & communication ages have been intimated to civilizations before.

Emerging modern cartography in the European delta – first in southern Low Countries, one generation later more northerly, with Amsterdam stealing the show quickly from Antwerp – fits this context: an era replete with expectation, confusion, hope, missionary zeal and eschatological tenets. The observation ‘time is out of joint’ is coeval with it.

All these aspects are present in the extraordinary person of Petrus Plancius, born in the village of Dranouter, Western Flanders, in 1552. Plancius was both a sermonising Servant of a Calvinist Lord and an innovative and shrewd producer of printed maps, globes and maritime instruments. As if this was not enough, his activities as teacher and consultant to mariners planning profitable expeditions to new, Promised Lands made him an ambitious ‘Man for All Seasons’, living in two worlds, each complementing the another.

This can also be observed metaphorically in secondary literature on Plancius. In 1622 he dies (at Amsterdam) twice: first May 15, then May 25. The rather pedestrian explanation is the shift during his life-time from the Julian calendar, Old Style, to Gregorian reckoning, New Style. The ‘information & communication age’ he embodied was uncertain about its symbolical and technical bearings; for reasons as fundamental as ever.