A Brill Calendar: September 23

Few definitions of the noun ‘nation’ have been more influential than ‘imagined community’.

In the plural, it is the title of a book by Benedict Richard O’Corman Anderson which has changed thought on the causes and workings of nationalism profoundly since the final decade of the 20th century; world-wide. And it may be said that Anderson founded a school incorporating a range of specialists. The emergence of nationalist sentiments may be dated in historical time. Anderson attributes its awakenings to European countries not long before the Revolution in France; stressing throughout the vital role of printed matter in the process.

Because of the singular importance of print in Holland since the 17th century it should be possible, then, to indicate more or less precisely when these ‘real communities’ became transformed into their ‘imagined’ successors; allowing of course a long drawn-out shift in awareness. A primordial step in this direction may be seen in death and burial of the great Hermannus Boerhaave (Voorhout, Holland, December 31 1686 – Leyden, September 23 1738).

It is seldom that one individual scholar was so strongly seen as a citizen of the world. The story of a handwritten letter, addressed ‘Boerhaave Europe’ and reaching Leyden in due time, is an example the dignified, virtuoso, humane and modest approach to God’s creation as it prevailed during the final stage of the viability of universalism in the life of the scholarly mind.