Going Dutch

Donna Merwick. Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. 281 pp. Notes, references, and index. $35.00.

Among the prized possessions of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is a stunning, late-sixteenth-century "model book" of writing, aptly titled Mira calligraphiae monumenta. A superb example of the calligraphic craft, the Getty codex features over a hundred and fifty exquisitely embellished, meticulously made up leaves of thick vellum, each displaying a separately designed, inventively presented sample of script. The work was completed in 1596 by the Antwerp artist Joris Hoefnagel and preserved in the renowned Kunstkammer, or treasure room, of the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II. Viewing it today, one is reminded, first, of the remarkable tradition of writing that once flourished in Europe, especially in the north, and endured right through the Renaissance; and second, that this tradition, and the almost mystical admiration for writing and scribing in premodern Europe, belong to the world we have lost. For we live in an age poised on the very margins of writing. It is not that the written word is headed toward extinction; reports of the book's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Yet the very act of writing--of putting pen and flowing ink to genuine tactile paper--is an infrequently practiced, if not altogether forgotten, art. Penmanship, as the New York Times regularly reports, is no longer what it used to be (which never was very much for this reviewer, the recipient of a decidedly non-gentleman "C" in penmanship throughout grade school). Email, voicemail, and other late-modern technologies have made careful and conscientious scribing a thing of the past. This essay is being composed, naturally, per computer; the book under review, upon its delivery, was awkwardly "signed for" with an electronic stylus. ¹

The art of writing stands central in Donna Merwick's fascinating inquest into living and dying in New Netherland, Death of a Notary. In her new study Merwick has produced a finely textured portrait of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam, a Dutch immigrant to the New World who made his living--barely--by writing, serving as a notary in Beverwijk and later Albany. Her subject is imaginatively and well chosen. The Dutch, perhaps more than anyone else in early modern Europe, engaged with the written word. It is not only that the Netherlands, occupying the most urban corner of the Old World, waged an epic struggle over the right to preach the Word: the Eighty Year's War against Catholic Spain (1568-1648), the conclusion of which happens to coincide with Janse's voyage west. The Dutch also possessed the highest concentration of printing presses and highest rates of literacy in Europe--exceeding, by the seventeenth century, even that cradle of Renaissance culture, northern Italy. The Dutch made a "fetish of writing," according to Merwick. Perhaps. Yet the historian exploring the rich record of Dutch words from this period, printed and not, would certainly be forgiven for thinking so, especially a historian of Merwick's ilk, who has herself mastered--obsessively, if also lovingly--the written remnants of New Netherland. And Merwick does more. She employs writing to recuperate the past by her own very scrupulous reading of the scribal record left by Janse, and by her own very energetic, and at times experimental, style of writing narrative history, which makes that past--Janse's humble life--come wonderfully alive.

By most measures, Adriaen Janse led a fairly unremarkably life: he "aroused . . . little attention" (p. 34), Merwick admits. Born in 1618 to Jan Janse van Ilpendam and his wife Judith, he was a native of Delft, a town then famous for its rich role in the Dutch Revolt. Adriaen did not enjoy a very rich childhood, however. His mother died before he reached his third year, and his father, "something of a rolling stone" (p. 46), moved abruptly to Leiden, where he practiced his trade--hatmaking--unsuccessfully. Janse père soon turned to "commerce," laboring...