A Brill Calendar: May 17

"Petite Histoire"

Few expressions display such disdain as ‘Petite Histoire’.

Some academic historians use this phrase in their assessment of a certain class of texts produced by authors writing about the past. Their premise being that institutionally accredited champions of Clio, Muse of History, have sworn an oath of loyalty and devotion to ‘grande histoire’, featuring abstractions, concepts, theories and statistics.

What happened in Leyden May 17 1683 may be brushed off into ‘petite histoire’. In the register of the municipal Guild of Booksellers a new name was entered that day: of one Jordaan Luchtmans, born some thirty years earlier in Woudrichem, a picturesque small city in the delta near Leyden. In his adolescence, Jordaan, not known for excelling in class, had learned the ropes of his profession from a bookseller in The Hague, the political hub of Holland Province and the Republic as a whole; his training in the craft completed at Leyden, with the Gaesbeek brothers for his Masters finishing the education of their employee.

All Leyden was well aware that love & marriage explained this emancipating registration; within a week an erstwhile country-boy took the sophisticated Sara van Musschenbroek for his lawfully wedded wife: marrying not only into a wealthy, distinguished family, but also merging, in ‘upward social mobility’, with descendants of the Great Christoffel Plantijn, and with his revolutionary technological mercantilism dear to the ‘grande histoire’ of humanism, expansionism, liberalism and internationalism, (and all other ‘isms’ born in the cultural philosophies of the 19th century).

It is seldom that the Great and the Good can appreciate the role & significance of contingency in human activity, including long-lasting traditions in scholarly publishing. History according to Brill starts with a love-affair: ‘petite histoire’.