A Brill Calendar: September 21

Few life-stories maintain their interest if those tales have been reduced to facts in a totally unimaginative way.

Sadly proving this  proposition, here is the life of Gerhard Johann Voss, born near Heidelberg, 1577. Matriculates at Leyden University, September 21 1595. Famous letter to Grotius written at Dordrecht, August 11 1614. Co-founder of the Amsterdam ‘Athenaeum Illustre’ Amsterdam opening January 8 1632. Connoisseur of the history of language and literature. Dies at Amsterdam March 17 1649. Works: ‘Institutiones oratoniae’ (1605) ‘Ars historica’ (1623). ‘Grammatica latina’ (1626), ‘Aristarchus, sive de arte grammatical libri VII’ (1635), ‘De theologia gentili ‘, Poeticarum institionum libri III (1647). Collected works, ‘Opera omnia’ 1701.

Vossius (1577-1649) is thus summed up; more or less along the lines of factual reporting. Yet it may in order to recollect an insight of a Roman Catholic priest cum sleuth, Chesterton’s Father Brown: “the best place to hide a book is a library” and the best place to hide a man like Vossius is an arm-length of sturdily bound tomes, written, printed and published during the adolescence of scholarship in Holland. In inventories as the above, it is seldom that something shines through of the joy of literature and poetry as it existed in the circle of friends of P.C. Hooft, the ‘Muider Kring’.

When one of them, Joost van den Vondel, wrote to Vossius a poem of consolation after the death of Vossius’ infant son, the cultural landscape of Holland’s ‘Golden Age’ vibrates all of a sudden in a new and unexpected light.