Family, Culture and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr, Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange by Rudolph Dekker (review)

Rudolph Dekker’s book on the diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr offers its reader an accessible and enjoyable introduction to Dutch and English court life in the late seventeenth century. It will appeal to interested laypersons, and will serve well as a prescribed text for undergraduate students or as a point of reference for further reading for postgraduates and researchers.

Dekker’s thematic approach means the book is ideally suited to the former purpose, allowing lecturers and tutors to introduce their students to particular aspects of seventeenth-century society without overwhelming them. Individual chapters exploring Huygens’s observations on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (Chapter 3), gossip and sex (Chapter 10), and raising children (Chapter 12), for example, are ideally suited as introductions to their respective topics, and are generally adequately supported by references to secondary literature. In the few instances where these references appear to be lacking, numerous citations of primary sources in Huygens’s own library provide compensatory material for more advanced readers. It is these citations that position the book as an effective launching pad for further research. Nevertheless, Dekker’s contextual glosses on topics such as the increasing importance of engravings versus state portraits, pamphlet and newspaper culture, and changes in marriage customs (pp. 84, 104–05, and 122–23, respectively) could have been better supported by references to secondary material.

It is obvious that Dekker has acquired an intimate familiarity with Huygens’s diary over the years, and while individual chapters tackle discrete themes, Dekker does a splendid job of weaving a continuous thread throughout the book. Late seventeenth-century courtly interests in art, astronomy, time, and the less salubrious topics of gossip and the occult, for example, are superbly illustrated through the vignettes that he compiles from myriad entries in Huygens’s diary. As Dekker notes, the manner in which Huygens wrote the diary itself is also indicative of self-management and mnemonic practices of the time, and offers its own insights into what it was like to manage one’s affairs as a high-ranking court official under William of Orange.

This book is to be recommended to university libraries, lecturers, and tutors of early modern studies, and certainly to anyone with a professional or personal interest in this period of European history.