Symposium on the English and Dutch in the Early Modern World (review)

Nowhere is the imperative to develop a multilingual, transnational, even “global” approach to American literature maturing as rapidly as in the field of early American literature. The early-modernist scholar interested in the impact of European contact with the Americas will find two central frameworks—the hemispheric and the Atlantic world—that offer distinct yet overlapping archives, methods, and texts. There are obvious and extensive connections between English-language literatures of the metropole and the colonial periphery that have been well explored. A consideration of the broader Atlantic world is in a nascent stage, with important work beginning to appear. Hemispheric scholarship is somewhat more advanced, due in large part to a set of scholarly initiatives that began ten years ago with the Early Ibero/Anglo Americanist Summit held in Tucson. The summit brought together specialists from these discrete fields for three days of plenary panels. In lieu of the standard conference paper reporting work in progress, presenters were asked to choose a major text and introduce it to nonspecialists. (The website for the Tucson summit is available at http://www.mith.umd.edu/summit/Program.html.)

The recent Symposium on the English and Dutch in the Early Modern World, organized by Kristina Bross and Marjorie Rubright and held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, followed a format similar to the Tucson summit, though on a smaller scale. (The website can be found here: http://www.newberry.org/10192012-symposium-english-and-dutch-early-modern-world.) The one-day event included two plenary sessions and a keynote address by Alison Games, who spoke about “Anglo-Dutch Relations in the East Indies and the ‘Massacre’ at Amboyna, 1623.” Games’s engaging and well-illustrated lecture analyzed the events leading up to the execution of several English traders and Japanese mercenaries by the Dutch on the Indonesian island of Ambon in 1623. Games described the ensuing pamphlet war about the “Massacre” that fueled conflict between the two nations, which fought three wars over the course of the seventeenth century. She also noted (without much discussion) that the “massacre” had its biggest literary impact on John Dryden’s play Amboyna (1673).

The two panels that preceded the keynote lecture each featured three scholars presenting a work that was chosen to reveal how, as the program states, “Anglo-Dutch relations informed the shape, scale, and imaginative limits of colonial enterprise.” The individual presentations were only loosely related to one another, and there was no clear distinction in chronology, theme, or approach between the two panels. They functioned as microtutorials in a chosen text or texts, achieving an impact that was cumulative rather than teleological. Joanne van der Woude discussed the poetic exchange that Johan Farret and Petrus Stuyvesant conducted from 1639 to 1645, providing a textual history, contextual analysis, and close reading that sought to discern the impact—or lack of impact—of the American setting on the poems. Andrew Fleck analyzed a narrative by John Darell accusing the Dutch of sinking two English ships that had mysteriously disappeared, an episode and text that Fleck tied to the start of the Second Anglo-Dutch War. He then situated the narrative in the historiographical tradition descended from Thucydides and discussed how such narratives, which claimed but could not prove their truth value, opened space for fictional representations such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Jeffrey Glover discussed Cornelis Melyn’s Broad Advice to the United Netherland Provinces, highlighting its depiction of the ship as an international, polyglot public sphere where grievances could be aired without fear of arrest. Glover addressed how ideas of just war and the law of nations were debated in what he termed “the literature of the English channel.” This phrase should not be taken to exclude indigenous voices, however. One of Glover’s main contentions is that Native Americans contributed to international jurisprudence and the definition of human rights both actively and passively. Melyn’s pamphlet exemplifies how Europeans in conflict triangulated debates over international...