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  • The Practice of Community:Humanist Friendship during the Dutch Revolt
  • Jason Harris

In 1574 Abraham Ortelius, the renowned Flemish cartographer and antiquarian, began to collect signatures, inscriptions, and pictures from his international network of friends. They entered their contributions in an album, called an "album amicorum" (book of friends). Given the lack of geographical mobility during the Dutch revolt, Ortelius's friends occasionally circulated this album amongst themselves. Others sent their contributions directly to him in Antwerp. As the album grew in scope and prestige over the following twenty-four years, inscriptions were included on behalf of deceased friends. Eventually an index was added by Ortelius's nephew, but as Ortelius reached the end of his life further entries were added. By the time he had died the album contained more than 130 names, making it one of the most distinguished signature collections of the time, including such illustrious figures as Jean Bodin, Justus Lipsius, William Camden, and Gerard Mercator.1 The contributors cross generational, geographical, and religious boundaries. What was the purpose of collecting such an album? What does it tell us about the humanist culture of the time? And why did a diverse group of academics, artisans, and merchant scholars decide to celebrate friendship?

The first friendship albums (alba amicorum) were kept during the mid-1540s by students at Wittenberg.2 These students used books (often the Emblem Book of Alciati, or a Bible, or a work by Melanchthon) as albums in which they collected autographs and insignia from professors in Wittenberg and the neighboring protestant universities that they visited in the course of their study. Entries were sometimes written in the margins of these books, sometimes on interleaved pages, and sometimes on liminary pages at the front or back. Most of the entries are brief salutations with short epigrams or quotations. These have been analyzed into various statistical forms by Wolfgang Klose.3 It is not surprising that most of the quotations come from classical sources. Ovid is the most frequently [End Page 299] cited author, no doubt due to the style of his writing as much as to the wellspring of mythological reference found in his works. Third, fourth, and fifth most quoted authors are no less surprising: Cicero, Augustine, and Seneca. It may, however, be worth noting the strong presence of Stoic sources, more common than Aristotelian or Platonic ones. Again, the style of the writings and the nature of the epigrammatic form may have a lot to do with this. Nonetheless, what is most striking about the breakdown of these statistics is that Philip Melanchthon is the second most quoted author, comfortably ahead of Cicero and not far behind Ovid. The next most quoted contemporary writers are Stigelius and Luther, both with fewer than half as many references as Melanchthon.4 Generally speaking, the Lutheran influence is clear and perhaps not so unusual for a fashion that began in Wittenberg. However, these figures are drawn from Wolfgang Klose's analysis of all alba up to 1573, by which time their geographical range had spread substantially.5

The later history of the fashion for friendship albums is complicated. As the fashion spread, it became less uniform. Alba were kept as travel diaries, as sketchbooks; many were still used as students' signature albums. To some extent, early Dutch alba followed the original Wittenberg model. For example, the album of Janus Dousa was initially kept as a record of those he met in his college years in Louvain, Douai, and Paris. By the 1570s a number of nonacademic alba were being kept, though universities remained an important setting in which contributions could be sought.6 In this article I will explore the Album Amicorum of Abraham Ortelius, collected 1574–1596, for evidence of the multiple sets of social relations in which friendship inhered in the early modern period.

Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) was a Flemish merchant and scholar who began his career selling "curiosities" and maps in Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century. During the 1560s he began to produce his own original maps, and to compile a reference work containing redactions of the most reliable maps of each area of the known world. This was to...

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