Viewing Dutch books at home

This week the Dutch Royal Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) in The Hague launched a new digital library, Boeken 1700-1870. In this digitization project some 160,,000 titles will eventually appear. On this blog digital libraries have often been the subject of posts. In this post I offer an extended version of my review in Dutch for the portal of the Foundation for Old Dutch Law.

A large Dutch digital library

In discussions of Dutch digitization projects the absence of any large project for old books has often been noted. On my blog, too, I discusses this in a number of posts, for example this post in 2011, and in another post that year about projects focusing on pamphlets. The Royal Library did develop substantial projects for old newspapers, journals and its illuminated manuscripts. For the project Early Dutch Books Online on eighteenth-century books it cooperated with the university libraries at Leiden and Amsterdam. However, with 10,000 books this digital collection is relatively small compared to projects elsewhere. Dutch viewers have free access to the digitized books from the Royal Library in the project Early European Books of Chadwick. Pamphlets from the rich collections of the Dutch Royal Library are present in Brill’s The Early Modern Pamphlets Online. Digital libraries at other Dutch institutions and many Dutch digital repositories can be searched using the BASE portal of the Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld. It is common knowledge to use the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog to trace books in any language in major libraries all over the world, including digitized works.

For this new project the Dutch Royal Library has started a cooperation with Google. It follows the example of several major public and national libraries worldwide. Of the scheduled 160,000 titles some 80,000 are already available. A first notable feature is the rather restricted search functionality, just for author, title and a free search possibility. The website opens with this general search feature; with Uitgebreid zoeken (Advanced search) you get three search fields. Searches for a particular period, place of publication or a publisher are not (yet) possible. One can enter in the author field the full name in its normal word order to retrieve titles by a particular author, and this feature is certainly distinctive. The free text search enables you to search in all digitized texts. One can combine the search fields, and even add an extra search field, in order to narrow search results. The language of the search interface is Dutch. One can save pages either as an image or as a PDF. Buttons with links to social media can help you to alert others on the books digitized in this Dutch project.

Looking for legal history

It helps very much to make a review both readable and useful when you can include clear examples. Dutch legal history furnishes enough to have a good look at the workings of this digital library. For an author search I took the name of Cornelis Willem Opzoomer (1821-1892). At first I used only Opzoomer, but of course other people do have the same name. I was happy to find that you can enter his name in its entirety to get only the books he wrote. One of the things to notice is the great variety of subjects this prolific lawyer wrote about. With the word wetboek, “code of law”, I checked for both codes of law and commentaries on them. Boeken 1700-1870 contains a great range of both commentaries on particular codes, and it brings you also to subjects as military law, and codes for the former Dutch Indies and Suriname. In particular the digitization of books on Suriname is a major asset. Until now you would have to turn for Suriname to the digitized texts in the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (Digital Library of Dutch Literature). The digital collections contains printed collection of arresten, verdicts of the Dutch Supreme Court, the Hoge Raad. I did not find many books on particular trials (proces). For subjects such as legal consultations (consultatie, advies) I did not find many titles. However, the typical Dutch kind of official consultation by lawyers on new or proposed legislation, often in their quality as member of the Nederlandse Juristenvereniging, the Dutch association of lawyers, now known as pre-advies (preliminary consultation), was also called advies during the nineteenth century.

Beyond Dutch borders

Using the general Dutch term for law as a subject, recht, I was surprised to find some fifty books in German. If you search for penal law, strafrecht, you will even find just one Dutch books and ten German titles, because both languages share the same word. One should consider this as a useful reminder of the great influence of German law and lawyers all over Europe during the nineteenth century. The Dutch code of private law that came into force in 1838 was adapted from the French Code civil, but this did not diminish the attention of Dutch lawyers for German law. When checking for titles in other languages – using the term civil – I encountered nearly 200 titles, and surely more is to be found, for example six titles of works by Alexis de Tocqueville.

It is still early to pronounce either completely positive or negative judgments on this new digital library. At this moment Boeken 1700-1870 forms already a substantial addition to the number of Dutch digitized books. The search possibilities are restricted, but search results yielded for authors and titles are promising. The full searchability of texts is a major quality. The contents for the field of legal history do seem alluring, especially when they clearly transcend the frontiers of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the borders of the Dutch language. Hopefully the comments and wishes of users in my country and abroad help to strengthen the qualities of this project.

Universal and utopian

This year I have spent quite some time searching the internet both for information for my postings and for the pages of my website www.rechtshistorie.nl. At some turns I felt the clear temptation to use the main gateways to online information. In particular when dealing with digital libraries the presence of WorldCat, the Open Library and the World Digital Library seemed an invitation to refer people for once and forever to these endeavours which aim so much wider and higher than my efforts. However, when I tried to use these websites most times I returned empty-handed. With only 1350 items the World Digital Library still has many empty shelves, even if one has to applaud the fact that all continents and major regions of the world are represented. Many months ago a notice by archivist Eric Hennekam on his Dutch archive forum made me smile about such heroic efforts. It makes one aware of the many obstacles faced by the pioneers behind these projects with a claim to completeness or worldwide coverage, and of the fact that the 21st century is not the first century to witness similar proposals. Through the centuries lawyers, too, have left their footprints on this trail.

The Mundaneum

Hennekam pointed to the history of the Mundaneum at Mons, about which institution The New Yorker had published in June 2008 an article by Alex Wright, “The Web Time Forgot“. The Internet Archive has stored the documentary All Knowledge of the World (Alle kennis van de wereld) by the Dutch VPRO television from 1998 about the creator of the Mundaneum, Paul Otlet (1868-1944). Wright tells the story with more skill than I have at my disposal, so I will only give a summary. Otlet was a Belgian bibliographer who created the Universal Decimal Classification. He worked together with the Belgian politician and pacifist Henri la Fontaine (1854-1943) who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1913 for his Bureau International de la Paix. La Fontaine teached international law at the Université Libre at Bruxelles. In 1895 Otlet and La Fontaine founded the “Institut International de Bibliographie”. Otlet did not only devise a new classification system, but used it at his institute and envisaged powering it with a mechanical system to link information. Many million library records survive and eventually the project became too vast. In 1934 Otlet published his major bibliographical work, the Traité de documentation in which he presented his vision of reading library books at home using a kind of telescope. The card collection was housed at several addresses before the remains arrived at Mons after the Second World War. Today the Mundaneum offers shelter to archives on feminism, pacifism and anarchism.

Were Otlet and Fontaine the first people to create such projects? The nickname of an early multivolume collection of juridical treatises, the series called Primum [-Decimum] volumen tractatuum doctorum iuris published in Lyon in 1535 was “Oceanus iuris”, “The Ocean of Law”. At Jena the Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbiblothek has created a digital edition of this edition in ten volumes from its “Historische Bestände“. The Bibliotheca Universalis (1545) of Konrad Gessner – online at the Universitat de Valencia – can claim to be the first early modern attempt at universal bibliography. More early editions books of works by this Swiss scholar have been digitized for E-Rara. The Lyon 1549 edition of the Tractatus Universi Iuris counts seventeen volumes, and the better known version printed between 1584 and 1586 at Venice has 27 volumes with four volumes for the indices. Gaetano Colli has used his book about this edition of the Tractatus Universi Iuris to create an online database to assist the search for treatises by particular authors or on special subjects in this collection.

Other early lawyers tried to create comprehensive surveys of all fields of law. Giovanni Nevizzano published a Index librorum omnium qui in vtroque iure hinc inde eduntur (Venice 1525; online in Vienna at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), a generation later superseded by Giovanni Baptista Ziletti and his Index librorum omnium nomina complectens, in utroque iure tam pontificio quam caesareo (Venice 1559), better known as the Index librorum omnium iuris tam pontificii quam caesarei (Venice 1566), an edition digitized at the Göttingen Digitalisierungszentrum. Among their successors are for instance Agostino Fontana with his Amphitheatrum legale (4 volumes, Parma 1688-1694; reprint Turin 1961; online at the University of Michigan, Hathi Trust Digital Library) and Martinus Lipenius with the Bibliotheca realis iuridica first published in 1679. The Leipzig 1757 edition – online at Polib, the digital library of the universities of Lille - has been reprinted in 1970. The 1775 and 1789 supplements are online at the Hathi Trust Digital Library, and now also the edition 1679. It should not surprise you that I have not yet found a digital version of all works mentioned here. Please do not hesitate to share your knowledge if you know more!

A most remarkable digitization project is to be found at the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence for the multi volume manuscript called Mare Magnum, a universal bibliography created at the beginning of the eighteenth century by Francesco Marucelli. This manuscript was never printed, but can now be consulted online. In the last century John Gilissen and a team of legal historians working with him edited a bibliographical project with a less ambitious title, Introduction bibliographique à l’histoire du droit et à l’ethnologie juridique (6 vol. in 8 parts, Bruxelles 1963-1988).

I would like to finish this posting by bringing you to a digital library at the Université de Poitiers called Les premiers socialismes, a new project with both modern studies on the first French socialists such as Fourier and Saint-Simon and works by them. Socialist utopism was an important current in the nineteenth century. The links selection on this site could bring you to the Familistère de Guise, a housing and factory project near St. Quentin, on its website characterized as a realized utopia.

Clearly some people will keep trying to realize utopian projects. Modern technology certainly offers some of the means to create also virtual utopias. The internet realizes to a large extent even more than visionaries like Jules Verne could dream of or describe. These days it is clear that bringing digital information on an unprecedented worldwide scale is not just the dream of scholars or journalists, but a major fact in private lives and public life. Politics and law are touched by it and try to influence it. A legal history of Internet is not a fancy book title anymore.

A postscript

On March 17, 2011, Mike Widener, curator of the Rare Book Room of the Lilian Goldman Law Library of Yale University, wrote a blog post showing the frontispiece of the Jena 1743 edition of Burkhard Gotthelf von Struve’s Bibliotheca iuris selecta, another legal bibliography. Of Struve’s work several reprints and enlarged editions exist. Many works by Struve have been digitized in Halle, Dresden and Munich. Using the OPAC Plus catalogue at Munich you can now find seven (!) digitized editions of Struve’s Bibliotheca iuris selecta, Jena 1703, 1710, 1714, 1720, 1725, 1743 and finally the 1756 edition. The Jena 1725 edition has also been digitized now at Dresden.

Human nature, human rights: a long history

Looking at my recent postings I became aware of a common theme connecting them: both in my posting on South Africa and apartheid and in the posting about the mirror of society offered by the beast epic Van den vos Reynaerde views of human nature are at stake. From the viewpoint of legal history it might seem a small step to human rights. Just how great the step is for humanity was at the centre of a lecture at Utrecht University on the history of human rights by Lynn Hunt, a historian from UCLA well-known for her books on the French Revolution.

Thursday Lynn Hunt’s starting point was her book Inventing Human Rights (New York 2007). She did not repeat the lecture shown on YouTube and on University of California Television! Instead Hunt presented her conclusions as a set of propositions which she then more or less illustrated. In her perspective the concept of human rights came to the fore very suddenly on a wave of interest which started around 1760. The change in views about human nature, if not partially created, were at least stimulated by the new genre of the epistolary novel which invited readers to sympathize with the characters of the novel. It is not just in the sphere of the law, and more precisely of criminal law and punishments, that we should look for motives for and supporters of legal change, crowned by such documents as the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789. What happened between 1760 and 1789? Hunt looks for the interplay between cultural, social and political developments, and rightly so. The suddenness of the coming of human rights makes the title Inventing Human Rights an echo of The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1983), the volume of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger.

Utrecht University and UCLA have an exchange program since 2001, founded by Margaret Jacob (UCLA) and Wijnand Mijnhardt (UU). This year the two of them together with Lynn Hunt have edited a volume of essays, Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Getty Research Institute, 2010), and The Book that changed Europe. Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Belknap Press, 2010). A website with a full facsimile of the four earliest versions of Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, originally published at Amsterdam between 1723 and 1743, accompanies both books. Jean Frederic Bernard wanted to present the rituals of all known religions and he got the engraver Bernard Picart to illustrate the nine volumes of the first edition.

These books and the splendid website evoke for me at least four remarks. First of all venturing into social history, law, art history and much more shows Lynn Hunt’s scholarly capacity to cross frontiers and to connect different fields of research in a fertile way. Secondly, the growth of religious tolerance is coupled with the establishment of a vision of worldwide mankind, which contributes indeed to a cultural change, and this view of man and mankind influenced the concept of human rights. Thirdly, Bernard’s and Picart’s ventures slightly predates the French eighteenth century vogue for encyclopedic works in the wake of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Voltaire published between 1751 and 1772, but it surely made some minds already more open. The fourth point is the evident role of illustrations in the success of these works, and this brings me to the subject of legal iconography.

Lately I have been busy searching for digital libraries concerning legal history, which I present on my legal history website. Having collected a fair number of digital libraries it becomes clear that more is needed and possible. Archives presenting digitized documents and institutions with different kinds of material contribute as much to legal history as classic libraries presenting mainly digitized texts. At some universities Law and Humanities has become a regular subject. It would be to the benefit of both legal historians and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to revive legal iconography. Since this is only a posting I will not try to present here a full list of interesting websites, but only mention some of the more classic collections for legal iconography. The University of Graz (Austria) has a database for legal iconography. The University of Munich and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek have digitized the collection on legal iconography of Karl von Amira. The Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte at Frankfurt am Main has put the collection of Karl Frölich on its intranet; you will have to visit Germany to use it. Of the former Dutch Centre for Legal History and Legal Iconography at the Royal Library (KB) in The Hague the iconographic database is accessible for KB card holders. Its bibliographical documentation and its thesaurus, too, survive on the web, the former has been integrated into the Digital Bibliography for Dutch History. In due time I hope to present more on my website.

Let’s return to Lynn Hunt and the history of human rights: of course she had to mention such landmarks as Cesare Beccaria and Voltaire’s comments on the Calas affair. Jean Calas was tried at Toulouse. Tolosana, the digital library of old books at the Université de Toulouse, contains a substantial number of legal works from eighteenth century France, including at least 23 books and documents concerning the cause célèbre of Calas.

No doubt it remains difficult to pinpoint exactly the start of the concept of human rights, but at least it is clear this concept was not invented as recent as 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Awareness of the history of human rights can help to understand the slow progress of human rights. This last miserable fact can be researched using the database at the documentation centre of the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights at Utrecht. And a reminder about iconography: at Utrecht University you can use a copy of the Index of Christian Art, both the card files and the database.

A postscript: a fine history of views on mankind and humanity has been written by Siep Stuurman, De uitvinding van de mensheid. Korte wereldgeschiedenis van het denken over gelijkheid en cultururverschil [The invention of mankind. A short world history of thinking about equality and cultural difference] (Amsterdam 2009).

Young and old

How can one bring life to legal history? How to find young people able to develop an interest in a subject is a perennial question for any discipline. Some people happen to know at a very early stage in their life what profession they will choose, others find their specialism with more difficulty. At school and university it is not just the subjects taught that will ignite a sparkle, but more often just one teacher or professor whose approach and personality makes you happy to go for one particular subject.  Thinking about your initial choice, even after many years, you will remember her or him, and smile because of memories rekindled. The sheer enthusiasm, the inimitable gestures, the way of putting questions to you, and so much more influence you for the rest of your life.

I have a soft spot for the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog. Mike Widener, its librarian and chief contributor to the blog, published on May 4 a post about letters with questions and remarks from children who had recently visited the library with their school class. Earlier this year Widener received a number of medievalists who visited the exhibition on reused fragments of medieval manuscripts used as bindings in old legal books. The Yale blog presents the items put on exhibition. Some of the fragments need further identification: sometimes the exact nature of the text is not yet fully clear, and for other items the provenance poses riddles. If you like you can help solving questions of this kind.

Of course showing young children historical materials is not the only way to kindle historical interest. The story of this visit is very much also a story of curiosity, of questions asked without any educational or professional blockades, of remarks which make you think again. In my opinion confronting people with a rather different world than their own, a world that partly belongs to the past, and yet a world with real people, is one of the major tasks of history. It can set us free to look again at what seems unchangeable, at what seems modern, at what seems dead or forgotten. It can indeed show us our prejudices and other weaknesses. Any sensible contribution to fulfill this task is very much welcome.

A new portal

The legal historians from Ghent publish every month Rechtshistorisch Nieuws, a digital newsletter (in Dutch) on legal history. You can subscribe to their e-mail service to receive this bulletin, which is published also at www.rechtsgeschiedenis.be, the site of the department for legal history at Ghent University. Every month you can find in this bulletin announcements of new books, events and lectures. The final item is often a short notice on a new website. In the latest issue of Rechtshistorisch Nieuws Fontes Historiae Iuris, a new portal site from Lille is presented briefly.  The aim of this new portal is to give you direct access to digitized old legal books and several kind of sources within a predefined framework: legislation, doctrine, custom law, jurisprudence (in particular collections of sentences), legal encyclopedias and dictionaries, and to provide guides to them. At this moment you will find for example guides to the collections of arrêts of the parlements, the high courts during the French Ancien Régime. Renaud Limelette offers a guide (in French) to the archives of the Parlement de Flandre in the period 1667-1790. These archives are mainly kept at the Archives Départementales du Nord at Lille. The ADN is famous for the diversity of the sources preserved, which are important not only for French history, but also for the legal history of Belgium and the Netherlands. However, presenting digitized books with relevance for legal historians, in an easy accessible way, is the main aim of Fontes Historiae Iuris. At this moment you will find mainly French works and translations into French from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The équipe at Lille tries to create a bilingual portal: let’s hope they succeed on that road, too!