From Revolt to Riches: Culture and History of the Low Countries, 1500–1700

15

Virtually every Dutch biographical dictionary since Jacobus Kok¹ has treated Rutger Wessel van den Boetzelaer, Baron van Asperen (1566–1632), as the author of what ought to be an important seventeenth-century meditative treatise in French verse. In addition to citing Van Asperen’s readily verifiable translation of Du Bartas’ La Semaine into Dutch,² for example, the venerable A. J. van der Aa’s Biografisch woordenboek der Nederlanden not only lists ‘Meditations Christiennes sur trois Pseaumes du Prophète David, composées en rime François’ among the works of Van Asperen but offers publication data that are highly specific, giving place and date as ‘à la Haye, 1622’ and laying down the format as octavo.³ Similarly, Molhuysen’s Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek repeats this formula practically verbatim, including the same place and date of publication as well as the format. Not surprisingly, editors of such major poets as Joost van den Vondel,⁴ P. C. Hooft,⁵ Anna Roemers Visscher⁶ and Constantijn Huygens⁷ repeat the essentials of this information faithfully,⁸ and J. W. des Tombe’s 1969 study of the Boetzelaer family reiterates the title among Van Asperen’s works as ‘Méditations chrestiennes sur trois psaumes du Prophète David’.⁹

Since Van Asperen was a man of letters much acclaimed as friend and translator by several of the major Dutch poets of the seventeenth century, it would add nicely to our picture of Netherlands letters in their Golden Age if one could have a look first hand at a work of which distinguished contemporaries went out of their way to take poetic note.¹⁰,¹¹ Let us not forget either that a seventeenth-century volume of Dutch ‘meditations’ is of great potential interest to English literature of the early seventeenth century, especially if, as in the case of Van Asperen’s work, it promises to touch on Anglo-Dutch relations in the early seventeenth century and on a figure no less significant than John Donne. Rutger Wessel’s sister, Margaretha Elburg van den Boetzelaer, was married to Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, personal physician to King James, and she lived in England as the spouse of one of the leading ornaments of the London College of Physicians during the first half of the seventeenth century. When one also recalls that the ministrations of Sir Theodore (most likely the personal physician whom the English monarch generously sent to attend the poet during his severe illness at the end of 1623) not only form the core narrative plot of Donne’s famous Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (a remarkable collection of meditations published not long after in 1624¹²) but also received specific mention therein, then a continental work cast in a Romance vernacular that is said not only to stem from an in-law of Mayerne’s but to bear a title as provocative as ‘Christian Meditations’ and a date as close to Donne’s Devotions as 1622, should be a matter of urgent interest for students of meditative literature. This is all the more so as it is quite clear that Huygens, who greatly admired Donne’s poetry, preaching and character, read or at least reacted to Van Asperen’s work on the psalms not at home on Dutch soil, but while he was sojourning in London during the course of his second embassy to England in 1621–2.¹³ During his various stays in England as a student and as a member of Dutch embassies during the early 1620s, not only was Constantijn on an intimate footing with the Mayernes, a relationship that had its roots in Dutch society back in The Hague,¹⁴ but this period of the second embassy of 1621/22 is the very one in which he is often thought, if not to have made his initial acquaintance with the Dean of St Paul’s,¹⁵ then at least to have experienced personal contact for the first time in any depth.

Despite the many references in secondary literature to Van Asperen’s ‘Méditations’ since the eighteenth century, however, apparently no one has succeeded in tracking the work down. So far as I know, there is no evidence of literary scholars, whether compilers of biographical notices or literary editors specialising in the Dutch Golden Age, ever in the last two hundred years claiming to have held the volume in hand, much less actually managing to peruse it. To judge from his note of Huygens’ commendatory poem on Van Asperen’s work on the Psalms, J. A. Worp searched for the book but was unable to locate it.¹⁶ Evidently Des Tombe also tried to trace it but fared no better. His listing of the ‘Méditations Chrestiennes’ does not derive from the bibliographies offered in the standard biographical dictionaries cited above. Instead, he made a laudable effort to go back to the Asperen notice gracing the second edition of Kok’s Vaderlandsch woordenboek. ¹⁷ Finding no specific reference to the ‘Méditations’ as such in either the first or second edition of Kok, however, he settled for inferring its existence from his secondary sources rather than relinquish the attribution.¹⁸

Personal efforts to locate a copy of the work have also been in vain. Perusal of standard bibliographical sources such as the Library of Congress National Union Catalogue (pre-1956 imprints), the catalogue of the British Library,¹⁹ or the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale yields no such title. As for more specialised resources, the old union card catalogue maintained at the Royal Library in The Hague lists no copy anywhere in the Netherlands; the title does not appear in Cioranescu’s bibliography of seventeenth-century French verse,²⁰ and up to now queries placed with the Nouvelles du livre ancien (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) has yielded nothing. Checks with the Royal Library and the Meermanno-Westrenianum in The Hague or the Thysius Library at Leiden and Utrecht have also proved fruitless.²¹

There is good reason for such failure. As far as I can see, all modern references to the work simply stem from the Beschrijving van de stad en baronnie Asperen by Martinus Beekman in 1745. In his account of ‘Heer Rutger Wessel Baron van den Boetzelaer’, Beekman described Van Asperen as follows:

Given Van der Aa’s specification of place of publication and format, not to speak of his wording of the title of the supposed ‘Méditations’, or his silence regarding the printer, it looks as though Beekman served as the source for Van der Aa and his imitators, and in this the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seem more credulous than the late eighteenth. Indeed, despite Beekman’s explicit statement that the ‘Méditations’ was still extant in his time, we should observe that Kok himself seems to have been sceptical. That is, neither the first nor the second edition of the Vaderlandsch woordenboek repeated Beekman’s ascription or incorporated the bibliographical entry, though it is hard to imagine that Kok had overlooked Beekman. In the very second edition that Des Tombe cites, for example, Kok makes no specific mention of the ‘Meditations’ but merely asserts that Van Asperen excelled in composing French verse, adducing as proof the passage from Hooft quoted below. It seems clear from the context that, deducing from Hooft that Van Asperen authored ‘outstanding’ French poetry, he would do no more than term Van Asperen ‘a great admirer of French and Dutch poetry’. Never once suggesting that he had actually seen or read any of Van Asperen’s work in that tongue, he was evidently cautious in making statements about a book he had not personally examined, decided to ignore Beekman on the point of the ‘Meditations’ entirely, and seems scrupulously to have refrained from listing any such title.²³ Prompted by such restraint, I began to suspect that the title was but an eighteenth-century ‘ghost’ generated by Beekman and that the Van Asperen meditations never existed at all. Did his specification of the work not ring more like a layman’s description of a book than a true bibliographer’s rendition of exact information on a genuine title-page? End of story. Period.

Or was it? Luckily, the argument took on a storied ending. Having decided to risk developing sturdy, albeit risky dialectic based not on verifiable book facts hard to come by, I learned once again that dialectic, not facts, showed fancy readings often to be completely wrong. That is, while idly glancing somewhat later through Petrus Leffen’s 1655 sale catalogue of the library of the late Daniel Heinsius, my eyes became very large when the page fell open at the fifth from the end. Six lines from the bottom, as no. 54 among ‘Gallici in octavo’, the title of Beekman’s supposed ‘ghost’ suddenly popped up as ‘Meditations [sic] sur trois Psaeaumes [sic] par W. de Boetzeler [sic] 1622’! Beekman could of course have obtained the correct format from the Leffen catalogue, not the book proper. However, the addenda he recorded in the title (‘Chrestiennes’, ‘du Prophete David, composées en rime Françoise’), his correcting the obviously erroneous spelling of ‘Psaeumes’ as ‘Pseaumes’ and giving The Hague as place of publication all clearly implied that he had physically taken the book in hand. Indeed, the fact that he neither changed the Leffen spelling of ‘Meditations’ into ‘Méditations’ nor followed others in altering the adjectives ‘Chrestiennes’ or ‘Françoise’ into ‘Française’ showed that these were the actual spellings on a title-page he had faithfully copied. Clearly, Van Asperen’s Meditations of 1622 still existed in 1655 and survived up to 1745 at the least. No, it was I, not Beekman, who had generated a false ‘ghost’.

In order to lay to rest the malign spirit I had called forth, it was necessary not merely to correct the mischief but also to call on zestiende- en zeventiende-eeuwers everywhere to be once again on high alert for Van Asperen’s Meditations. After all, there was no reason to assume that the baron’s volume was any more irrecoverable than the ‘lost’ Dutch translations of Donne’s Devotions or John Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, both of which were known to have once existed but only recently turned up. Sure enough, in 1992 the Bibliografie van de Nederlandse taal- en literatuur wetenschap finally repaired a gap in Dutch literary scholarship that the German occupation had torn open between 1940 and 1945, and the missing information was now available online. In a compact, gracious and pivotal essay, accordingly, Professor Dr Eddy Grootes disclosed that but four months and some eleven days after Germany attacked the Netherlands, Baroness van Boetzelaer van Asperen en Dubbeldam provided the prolific church historian Dr J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink with a look at a small volume titled ‘Meditations Chretiennes sur trois Pseaumes du Prophete David. Composées en rime Françoise par W. de Boetzeler [sic]...A la Haye, Chez Arnoult Meuris [sic] Libraire, à l’enseigne de la Bible, en l’Année, M. DC. XXII. Avec permission.’ Thanks to Grootes, we now know that Van Asperen’s book was still extant ‘presumably in private hands’ as recently as 21 September 1940.

Who would not rejoice at Grootes’ find? Where and when do we get a look at the sweet prize? Alas, towards the end of March 2010, Floris, Baron van Boezelaer, reported to Dr Ad Leerintveld that after searching through his paternal legacy he was unable to locate it. In my limited, yet happy experience, unknown or lost works like this tend to turn up in more than one copy once someone finds it. As the Leffen catalogue shows, there were any number of poetic reworkings of psalms and meditations being collected at the time, and there is every reason to expect that chances of finding another copy of the Van Asperen Meditations are quite good, not just in private and public repositories in the Netherlands but also in France, Belgium, Germany, the United States, Great Britain, her former colonies, Scandinavia, eastern Europe and so forth. Let us just stay alert, be a little clever about sources, books and bindings; and above all keep eyes and mind open for it. Then wait for good luck.

Postlegomenon by Dr A. M. Th. Leerintveld

Meditations Chrestiennes Found!

While this volume was still in press, a copy of Van den Boetzelaer’s Meditations Chrestiennes unexpectedly came to light, confirming Paul Sellin’s prediction in this chapter.²⁴ On 25 August 2011, I consulted the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/kvk.html). Because I happened to make a ‘mistake’, I discovered that an unknown copy of the Meditations still exists in the Finspong Collection (books from the De Geer family) at the Stadsbibliotek, Norrköping, Sweden.

I am planning to write a complete scholarly article about this remarkable find. For now, however, the bibliographical description (based on scans provided by the Stadsbibliotek) will have to suffice. With slight modification, it follows the criteria of the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands.

With thanks to Ola Fergusson and Jörgen Dahlberg (Stadsbibliotek Norrköping), Erik Geleijns (STCN), Margriet Lacy (editor), and Paul Sellin.