A Brill Calendar: November 7

The Recognition of Eva Van Alphen

Few concepts are so vital to Western cultural traditions as ‘emancipation’.

In the world of Ancient Rome, ‘emancipatio’ involved a homely and sacred ceremony, celebrated by the ‘Pater Familias’ as ‘sacerdos’ and priest, in which he ‘sent from his hands’ (hence the ‘e’ and ‘man(u)’ ) into freedom a ‘servus’ or ‘serva’.The word ‘slave’ still awaited its birth when Seneca, Cicero & Horace lived.

In the middle of the 17th century, Leyden, Amsterdam, The Hague and the urban environs of those cities exemplified to the Europe the peak of emancipation in almost any connotation of that ancient notion; although the very word, Latin to its bones, is rarely found in contemporary sources and documents.

But undisguised servitude and the legal right to chain individuals to one spot on earth, normally the village where they were born, was in the Holland of the 17th century already a thing of the past. This was a land where many women could read; some even write, ‘mirabile dictu’. Clearly this was a country where the old feudal pecking order, valid at least since Carolingian days, had come to an end.

Yet, it is seldom that ‘emancipation’ with all the many connotations of the word is as strikingly illustrated as on November 7 1661, when in Leyden Eva van Alphen - widow of the distinguished printer and publisher Johannes Elsevier, recently deceased - became officially a member of the typographical establishment of Holland and of the Leyden Guild, regulating in the city production & trade in printed materials.