A Brill Calendar: October 29

Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert: 'Uomo Universale'

Few Dutch citizens witnessed during their lifetime so many fundamental changes and dramatic developments than Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (Amsterdam, 1522 – Gouda, Holland, October 29, 1590).

The man was not only an engraver on copper, civil servant and entrepreneur, but also a translator, theologian, playwright and philosopher; the first Dutch ‘uomo universale’. This was a man, moreover, who advocated the Humanist ideas and ideals earlier formulated by Erasmus, but in his mother-tongue, a vernacular that began to be written and printed during the 16th century.

When Coornhert was born, the very idea that the northern Low Countries would rebel against Habsburg domination must have seemed out of the question, unthinkable even. When he died, after an ‘eventful life’ to put it mildly - tortured and tormented by military battle and political strife, not to mention imprisonment and exile - the armed, often gruesome struggle for Dutch sovereignty and independence was still raging.

It is seldom that a cultural predecessor continues, through the ages, to maintain and retain their moral spell on succeeding generations. Coornhert, a highly cultured man and a close associate of the leader of the rebellion, Willem, Prince of Orange, was self-taught; able to translate literary masterworks from both Latin and French for the first time into Dutch, and someone who insisted on the value of tolerance in religious affairs - banning such strictures as capital punishment for heretics.

An optimist & moralist by temper, he has inspired his liberal and open-minded compatriots ever since. Among the recent examples of this phenomenon is a national organization, founded in 1971, and carrying his name: de ‘Coornhert Liga’, which fights wrong practice and abuse in the governmental exercising of legal power.