An atlas of Dutch crime and punishment

When creating texts nowadays it is challenging not to test here (yet!) the notorious ChatGPT tool, but we often try to get a good view of ideas and themes by creating a mind map. In this post I will look at a book promising to offer a historical atlas of Dutch crime and punishment. Paul Brood and Martin Berendse have recently published a series of fine historical atlases, and now Paul Nieuwbeerta joined them for the Historische atlas van misdaad en straf. Nederlanders over de schreef (Zwolle, 2022). Last year I did not want to review thrice a book on Dutch history hence ny choice to bring it only now to your attention. In September 2022 our indefatigable colleagues at Ghent University already provided a brief description of this book in the monthly Rechtshistorische Courant, pointing also to a book announcement by Leiden University.

Overstepping the marks

Let’s introduce first of all the three authors. Paul Nieuwbeerta teaches criminology at Leiden University. Martin Berendse is director of the public library in Amsterdam and a former General Archivist, the head officer of the Dutch Nationaal Archief, The Hague. Paul Brood worked as an archivist at the Nationaal Archief, too, and at the Drents Archief in Assen. He is also the editor of the series of guides to procedure at regional courts published by the Foundation for Old Dutch Law, and indeed a most prolific author on Dutch (legal) history. Brood and Berendse present their series of atlases for Dutch history on their website Kaartmannetjes, the name itself a pun on the Dutch name of a bird (Panurus biarmicus) and the pair of a bearded ornithologist and poet promoting on television bird watching in my country. The web page on this book is nicely illustrated, a strong feature of the book, too.

The subtitle of their book, Nederlanders over de schreef, Dutchmen overstepping the mark, hints already at the clear objective of this well-organized book. The introduction brings four major questions: what is crime, how much and what kind of crimes are there, what is their origin, and lastly how are crimes punished? Five chapters deal in chronological order with these core questions, starting in the Middle Ages upto around 1570. The period of the Dutch Republic is covered in the next chapter that ends in 1795. A short chapter (pp. 74-93) deals with the period from 1795 to the mid-nineteenth century, followed by thirty pages leading you to 1940. The fifth chapter brings you right to the present. The book closes with ten pages on statistical data and trends, and a chapter with references for further reading, research, websites and also visiting interesting historical locations.

One of the threads in this book is the changing nature of both crimes and punishments. In particular the early nineteenth century is highlighted as a pivotal period in the wake of the French Revolution. You might object to the frequent statements about the development of a more human way of punishment. This by now somewhat old-fashioned vision of progress leads to some awkward pages. The abolition of the death penalty in the Netherlands in 1870 was indeed early in an European perspective (pp. 106-107), but the authors ignore here the fact that it continued to be used in Suriname, the Dutch Antilles islands in the Caribbean and the Dutch Indies [see Sanne Ravensbergen’s essay in Wereldgeschiedenis van Nederland, L. Heerma van Voss et alii (eds.) (Amsterdam 2018) pp. 439-444]. Luckily at some other points they do look beyond Dutch frontiers.

Some remarks

It is perhaps better to state here immediately some major characteristics of this atlas. With only some twenty-five historical maps this book is not exactly an exhaustive atlas as the four other volumes of the series of atlases co-authored by Berendse and Brood. The presence of numerous telling and lavish illustrations and its large format (25 by 31 cm) make clear this book with just 176 pages aims definitely at the general public. Each chronological chapter contains a two-page timeline of a particular period, and every page shows at least one illustration.

Interior of the Weteringschans prison, Amsterdam, ca. 1850 – drawing by Willem Hekking jr., Stadsarchief Amsterdam – image source: https://www.kaartmannetjes.nl/

The distinctive approach of this book is in my view probably due to criminologist Paul Nieuwbeerta. If he had in mind creating an attractive introduction to historical criminology for the Netherlands I can only applaud the result. In fact I think it would have been great to have been able to find such a work when I set my first steps on the road to legal history decades ago. From a scholarly point of view, too, it is refreshing to see this book with clear constraints on its subject and generous space for telling illustrations and maps. As for the selection of references, websites and locations some of the more general museums are indeed relevant, but I do not mention them on my own web page about museums and legal history. However, the authors did not add the URL’s of the websites for these museums. The credits and references for illustrations are too concise, and the numbering of the photos refers only to the paragraph numbers. The references to relevant literature and websites are beyond such reproach.

How should one do justice to this book? Did the authors themselves overstep the mark?! In the end I think it is genuinely important to have this most inviting introduction to the history of Dutch criminal law. It judiciously brings the qualities of modern historic criminology on a much broader canvas of Dutch legal history, however, without clearly affirming the existence of Dutch legal history as a larger subject for study or a discipline with the fields of legal study. For this omission Dutch legal historians can alas point to the rapid disappearance of their subject as an obligatory element in the educational program of some Dutch law schools. In my view legal historians should by all legal means try to reaffirm the necessity and vitality of legal history as an essential subject in studying law and jurisprudence. It will not do to have some scattered chairs for the history of criminal law, public, private or international law to deal with the historical dimensions of law. it is a bit ironic to write these words a few days before the start of the very interesting and lively Belgian-Dutch Days for Legal History at Leuven (March 30-31, 2023). The book by Nieuwbeerta, Berendse and Brood contributes certainly to the visibility of a part of Dutch legal history. Others should do their best to make more of it visible, attractive and meaningful for our time. The abundance of continituity and discontinuity within Dutch legal history and the interaction with a wide context should prove most helpful to achieve this aim. Hopefully Dutch law students, too, will pick up this book, and question its merits and omissions.

Paul Nieuwbeerta, Paul Brood and Martin Berendse, Historische atlas van misdaad en straf, Nederlanders over de schreef (Zwolle: WBOOKS, 2022; 176 pp., ISBN 978 94 525 8494 5)

The birth of a benevolent state? Fighting poverty, cultural heritage and legal history

In July 2021 no less than three historic sites in the Netherlands, actually three groups of sites and buildings, have been officially recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Dutch part of the Lower German limes, the northern frontier of the Roman empire, the defense line of the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie with water, sluices and fortifications around Holland from Amsterdam to Dordrecht, and the Koloniën van Weldadigheid, the “Colonies of Benevolence”, a number of settlements for poor people who could escape from slums and start to build a new life working hard in the northern province Drenthe. Both the limes and the Waterlinie have figured here already long ago. Last year I mentioned the Koloniën van Weldadigheid briefly in a post on Dutch digital archives. This nineteenth-century project deserves more attention here.

Not just fighting poverty

The Koloniën van Weldadigheid, the Colonies of Benevolence, should attract attention with their very name. The use of the word benevolence surely rings a bell and points to some larger governmental objective or aim. The word colony should serve as a remainder these settlements were developed during a colonial period in Dutch history. After the French Revolution it was a near miracle space should have been given to a new Dutch state. The old Dutch Republic had given away for a revolutionary republic, but soon afterwards its territory became just a number of departments in the Napoleonic empire. Mainly thanks to a few politicians, among them Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, a new Dutch kingdom including both present-day Belgium and the Netherlands could come into existence in 1814 and gain European recognition at the Congress of Vienna.

Portrait of Johannes van den Bosch, around 1829 – painting by Cornelis Kruseman – Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

The Colonies of Benevolence were created under the strict supervision of general Johannes van den Bosch (1780-1844). Van den Bosch served between 1798 and 1808 with the Dutch army in the Dutch East Indies. On his way back to Europe he was taken prisoner by the British. Only in 1813 he returned to the new Dutch kingdom. In 1818 he started with his plan to start opening the wildernesses of the province Drenthe for agriculture. Adding settlements for poor people was a secondary development. In 1823 he became a government official. After a year in the Dutch West Indies he became the governor-general of the East Indies (1828-1834), and from 1834 to 1839 he served as a minister of the colonies. In the East Indies he introduced the cultuurstelsel, a system of forced labor on plantations bringing much profit to Dutch firms, investors and state finances. His life was indeed a matter of colonies and forms a part of Dutch colonial history. The recent biography by Angelie Sens, De kolonieman. Johannes van den Bosch (1780-1844), volksverheffer in naam van de Koning (Amsterdam 2019) aptly called him in its title a colony man.

A strange mixture

A farm in Veenhuizen – photo Miranda Drenth

The Colonies of Benevolence included four locations in Drenthe (Veenhuizen, Wilhelminaoord, Frederiksoord, and Boschoord), two in Overijssel (Willemsoord and Ommerschans), and two in Belgium, Wortel and Merksplas. In 1818 Van den Bosch founded a private organisation, the Maatschappij van Weldadigheid, for his agricultural plan. Already in 1819 a first pilot colony was formed at the Westerbeek estate in Frederiksoord. There is a separate website for the museum of this colony, the Proefkolonie. Veenhuizen (1823) and Merksplas (1822) were founded as penal colonies. Since 2018 Veenhuizen is home to the Nationaal Gevangenismuseum, and Merksplas, too, has become a prison museum. Van den Bosch’s society founded also two agricultural schools.

The history of these places is certainly colorful, and thus it is interesting to look at the motivation for entering them into the World Heritage Register. On July 27, 2021 the Dutch UNESCO branch published a web page about the registration of the colonies. Kathleen Ferrier, member of the Dutch committee and a politician, stressed the uniqueness of the initiative to help people breaking with poverty and building a new existence for themselves, even if the colonies did not succeed immediately in abandoning poverty. She views it as an experiment in social history. The registration of the World Heritage Centre rightly uses more sober and meaningful wordings. Urban poor were relocated to a far away region. The original colonies failed to get sufficient income, and thus the scheme was developed to bring in beggars and to found two special penal colonies. There were guards to supervise the doings of people. At its highest point some 11,000 people lived in the Dutch colonies, and some 6,000 people in the two Belgian settlements. Very revealing is the original geometrical pattern of the colonies. The word panoptical serves as a reminder of Jeremy Bentham’s proposals for prison reform.

The international UNESCO website does not mention the existence of archival records digitized by the Drents Archief. Last year I wrote briefly about Alle Kolonisten (All Colonists, the nifty subset of the project Alle Drenten. These digitized records can even be searched with an English search interface. Archives are mentioned in the English nomination dossier (2020; PDF, 21 MB) where you can find also a rich bibliography, but without any reference to the exact archival inventories at the Drents Archief. Luckily the website Alle Kolonisten figures at page 164, and at the website the inventories are duly listed, as are records elsewhere not included among the digitized records. The dossier makes space for Bentham (pp. 78-81), and also for foreign initiatives inspired by the Dutch colonies, and not just for the French project at Mettray with among its directors Alexis de Tocqueville, but also for instance the Innere Mission in Hamburg (pp. 165-170).

Walking though the Colonies of Benevolence

This post is my first contribution after a silence of three months. I will not bother you with a full explanation, I have been simply busy doing other things, in particular describing archival records. One of the much missed recurring features at my blog is the walking historian. As a small solace I will look here with you at two students who made a walking tour of the Netherlands in 1823. Dirk van Hogendorp (1797-1845), a law student who was the son of the renown politician Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, and Jacob van Lennep (1802-1868), the brilliant son of a professor of classics and history at the Amsterdam Athenaeum, wrote respectively a concise diary and letters, and an extensive diary. In 2000 appeared an edition in modernized Dutch of these travel accounts, De zomer van 1823. Lopen met Van Lennep. Dagboek van zijn voetreis door Nederland, edited by Geert Mak and Marita Mathijsen (Zwolle 2000; revised edition, 2017). In 2000 Geert Mak also presented a television series of his attempt at walking in the traces of Van Lennep and Van Hogendorp. You can still watch online the two episodes on the colonies (no. 5, “Charity and discomfort”, and no 6, “Who does not work will not eat”).

People were generally quite aware of the high rank of both young men making in 1823 a kind of inspection tour of their country, no doubt reporting about their meetings and views to authorities and influential people. Actually the two men walked only in the northern half of the Netherlands. On July 5 they visited Frederiksoord, and on July 15 they saw Ommerschans. As graphic as their reports of the meetings at both colonies is their description of the backward province Drenthe with in many parts scarcely any normal road. Before getting the status of a province Drenthe had been often called just a landschap (landscape) … The digitized versions of Van Hogendorp’s and Van Lennep’s diaries can now be found at the resources subdomain of the Huygens Institute, Amsterdam.

In this post I tried to kindle your interest in a transnational project for social reform with a clear legal component, the foundation of penal colonies at a safe distance of urban society.The remaining buildings in the Netherlands and Belgium form indeed cultural heritage with many dimensions. The archival heritage needed to be highlighted here. The two Leiden students looking at the colonies in 1823 were definitely among the Dutch urban upper class, and it is their very bias, too, which makes their views interesting for historians. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic period the new Dutch kingdom had a hard time awakening from it and assessing its position. What could serve the new state best? King Willem I acted as an autocrat with patriarchal characteristics, and Van den Bosch’s plans suited him. The general’s plan showed a military grip on people and things. The royal benevolence served first of all the king, and much less the nation, apart from his canal building scheme.

What became of the two walking students? Van Hogendorp became a lawyer serving as a substitute attorney-general and as a judge at two courts. Van Lennep became a prolific writer and a society figure, taking up causes and getting involved in a cause célèbre, the publication of the pamphlet-like novel by Eduard Douwes Dekker about the exploitation of the Javanese by the Dutch government, and at the same time depriving its author of his copyright. The history of the Colonies of Benevolence shows a state doing an attempt at social engineering, and at the same time colonizing its own rural interior. This history helps you to look sharper for the impact of having a colonial empire, and it is great to detect numerous wider connections and intersections in it.

Approaching digitized pamphlets, broadsides and chapbooks

Among digital collections with old printed works pamphlets, broadsides, broadside ballads and chapbooks have theit own place. You can find a fair number of them in the largest digital libraries. Commercial firms, too, have created some vast pamphlet collections. However, the number of digital collections in open access for this genre is surprisingly large, and not restricted to the Anglophone world. In some ways these cheap printed works have become priceless, because they record ephemeral and fleating information with a resemblance to social media in our own time. Finding such digital collections is one thing, making them better accessible proved to be another challenge. Recently I completed at Zotero a new searchable form of my list of digital collections devoted to these genres which in my view makes them much more accessible.

Adding value to a list

When I started to create a list of digital pamphlet collections my purpose was already not to list them only in whatever sensible order, but to present them with comments on their contents and scope. For years a division in a section with some general themes and periods, and a section in alphabetical order by country seemed sufficient. Occasionally people thanked me for my efforts in compiling this information, no complaints about shortcomings have ever been filed. Of course I could benefit from remarks about lacunae and oversights.

However, a tiny third section with “Other themes” certainly was visible and stood as a kind of question mark about this order of things. Some themes touched only a few countries, others illustrated the growing impact of Europe in other parts of the world, some of them would merit inclusion under another heading, too. At some point I started a section on chapbooks, and later on also for broadside ballads. A post here about complaintes criminelles, French broadside ballads about crimes and trials, prompted me into making space for this genre as well. Politics, government, law and crimes are among the themes of ephemeral printed works. However cheap the paper or crude the illustrations, they, too, form a source for legal history, in particular for the image of law and justice, and even for legal iconography. Festival books, too, deserved inclusion on my list. In 2018 I discussed here a number of digital collections with festival books.

In order not to make anyone unhappy when seeing an interesting collection only accessible at subscribing institutions and for their cardholders, I focused almost exclusively on collections in open access. I listed only those licensed collections when you can at least browse and search them, leaving you with at least some substantial information, even without final complete access. Some licensed collections contain many thousand items, but some digital collections in open access are equally rich in numbers. The first image in this post shows a pamphlet printed in Lyon in 1561 from the holdings of The Newberry Library in Chicago, a collection with 38,000 items in the Internet Archive, also searchable with Philologic4 (ARTFL, University of Chicago). On a separate section of its website The Newberry informs you about many aspects of this project, including data versions of the entire set.

Some projects give you not only digitized items, but also access to an online catalogue or a virtual exhibit. For some subjects bibliographies exist. Sometimes even more can be found: The catalogue of the priceless collection of early editions of works by Martin Luther at the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, many of them pamphlets, amounts to a bibliography worth mentioning. When you start counting the number of similar cases it becomes clear that even a commented list can offer you only a restricted number of services, let alone a bare list.

Qualities and quantity

How can you make the various kinds of information in a list better accessible? Having information at your hand is one thing, using it to gain knowledge leading eventually to insight is another thing. When you reach a certain number of items in a list, catalogue or bibliography it may become advisable to store them electronically, not only in a text program, but in some kind of information storage and retrieval system. I contemplated creating an online database, either in a specially created format or at an existing platform. A few months ago I looked rather closely at an online database for the humanities in order to deal with a much longer list. The benefit of accompanying visualization seemed most interesting. For this shorter list a chance encounter with a sophisticated bibliography at Zotero quickly led me to this platform.

At Zotero you can create online bibliographies with facilities for rapid reshuffling and exporting in any layout according to the styles preferred by research institutions and journals. You can restrict access to yourself or a group, or invite people to work together on a project. It is possible to create sections in a bibliography, and, for me very interesting, you can create and use tags, labels and classifications at will. Combining tags is very easy and effective for finding information and relating it to a wider context. Thus Zotero can function to a certain extent as a relational database. Using tags is also most sensible when you deal with collections in a variety of languages. Zotero uses icons for particular kinds of information,, be they books, videos, web pages, statutes or cases. It is also possible to import data using scripts.

In my searchable overview I use icons sparingly. Putting the items into Zotero manually gave me a chance to look again at digital collections. Some of them had grown substantially, some of them are at a slightly or completely different web address, some of them lacked sufficient descriptions. It was pleasant to discover for some collections a web directory, a bibliography or other useful information well worth mentioning. I decided to mark the tags for genres within a collection with colours, and also catalogues and bibliographies. Thus for example collections with both pamphlets and broadsides stand out, as do those with a catalogue or a bibliography. I was able to add also the major separate collections with digitized pamphlets from the First World War which you can find at my blog Digital 1418.

Looking at the new overview I am surprised by the ways you can now relate collections to each other in new ways. In fact these combinations sometimes helped me to add or refine tagging, or I could quickly add a collection that should figure here, too. Some gaps have become more visible, too. To mention just a few examples, until now I have included only few collections with pamphlets concerning the Second World War, and the number of collections concerning women is low, too. There is a substantial number of collections from Spain, but Portugal is currently absent. How about links to digitized catalogues for famous pamphlet collections?! Such examples stress the fact overviews will always remain work in progress.

Digital durabiblity and visibility

There is always some reason to adduce here my Dutch view, but this time I am not happy with a change in the digital presence of some Dutch pamphlet collections. The relevant collections that could conveniently be found under the aegis of The Memory of the Netherlands portal have been moved to a new subdomain of the Delpher portal for digitized Dutch books, journals and newspapers. At the old web address a project using the same name, Geheugen van Nederland [The Memory of the Netherlands] announces for a general public new efforts for enhanced visibility of digitized cultural heritage collections. You would have expected the creation of redirects for the old links to the relevant collections, both in Dutch and English, but this has not or not yet happened. The old links were definitely not permalinks, and it seems not all old links have already been turned into permanent links.

In view of the ongoing campaign for digital visibility, sustainability and usability led by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network this is simply inexplicable. Creating a new platform with currently just three themes and giving the old portal a new logo seems to have been more important than realizing the impact of the change of addresses. The absence of effective and wide communication this summer about this change adds to the paradox of removing a working portal with substantial contents for an almost empty shop window. Just one example of the impact: The Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, an important contributing institution, still gives links for its web projects at The Memory at the old Dutch version. In the English version of these links for only one collection the link to the new platform has been set, for other collections the old links lead to error messages. The Memory of the Netherlands is a cultural heritage portal with rich collections in open access in need of good maintenance and a new lifespan. In fact, this portal, too, helped me to think about adding yet another genre of popular prints to my overview. Hopefully the current awkward situation can soon end by putting things into order.

Whatever you may think of this unlucky affair, it underlines the fact some efforts are needed for creating and maintaining a digital portal. In my case I commit myself to continuity and renewal for my list and the searchable overview with working URL’s for more than two hundred digitized collections for pamphlets and related genres, and a score of supporting websites. If you spot any broken link in the list or the new overview, please do not hesitate to contact me by mail. Hopefully this service for scholars and anyone interested can achieve its aim of assisting to find your way to these sources in the virtual world.

Maurits and Oldenbarnevelt, a prince and a statesman

Paintings of Oldenbarnevelt (left) and Maurits (right)

Any country has some dates in its history on which politics and violence come together. Political murders are a rare phenomenon in Dutch history. Willem van Oranje, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the sixteenth century, was assasinated in Delft on July 10, 1584. The brothers Johan and Cornelis de Witt were lynched by a mob in The Hague on August 20, 1672. The mob held them responsible for the French occupation of the Dutch Republic. In recent years my country has witnessed the assasinations of politician Pim Fortuyn (May 6, 2002) and movie director Theo van Gogh (November 2, 2004). Last week solicitor Derk Wierum was shot brutally in front of his home in Amsterdam. Alas it was not the first time in this century a Dutch lawyer was shot, but the death of a solicitor defending a crown witness is an assault on the rule of law and justice.

In the list of Dutch historical figures who became a victim of violence you will find also a lawyer and statesman sentenced to death after a political trial. Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619) clashed with prince Maurits, the son of William of Orange. I hesitated to deal here with yet another commemoration based on rounded years, but at last I visited an exhibition in his home town Amersfoort. I looked at some historical spots and archival records, and I will briefly mention some recent publications about Oldenbarnevelt.

A matter of choices

In the lovely old inner city of  Amersfoort – near Utrecht- Museum Flehite has organized the exhibition Johan en Maurits. Van vriend tot vijand [John and Maurits, from friends to enemies]. The exhibition opened on May 13, 2019, exactly four hundred years after the execution of Oldenbarnevelt on the inner court of the Binnenhof in The Hague, the premises of the Staten-Generaal, the governing body of the Dutch Republic. A life of service to the state, helping to create and unify it, ended on the scaffold. In a country sharply divided between his followers and those agreeing with prince Maurits Oldenbarnevelt had become a public enemy.

Van Oldenbarnevelt stemmed from a fairly average family in Amersfoort. His father was a merchant who acted also as a sequester, an official who took goods into his charge pending judicial proceedings. It is not known where Johan was born, but the house Bollenburg (Muurhuizen 19) where he lived for some time in later years still exists. The Muurhuizen, literally “wall houses” is nowadays a very picturesque street around the inner city with many beautifully restored medieval and Early Modern houses.

The information about his youth comes mainly form a single source, his own statement from 1619 about his life. The full biography on Oldenbarnevelt by  J. den Tex [Oldenbarnevelt (5 vol., Haarlem-Groningen 1960-1972) warns for wanting to flesh out such information. After going in 1564 to The Hague to work for a barrister he studied between 1566 and 1569 in Louvain, Bourges, Cologne, Heidelberg and Padua. At Louvain his name was entered wrongly in the student register…  In 1570 he became a barrister at the Hof van Holland. Two years later he went to Delft to work for the hoogheemraadschap (water control board) of Delfland. In 1576 he became the city pensionary of Rotterdam. Soon he was chosen also on committees of the States of Holland. After the death of William of Orange in 1584 he supported a transfer of power to his son Maurits. His activity, qualities and insights were duly noticed, for in 1586 he reached the two posts he would hold until his death, landsadvocaat (state solicitor) and raadpensionaris (grand pensionary) of Holland.

Much has been made of the personal differences between Maurits and Oldenbarnevelt. Up to the year 1600 they seemed to make a perfect match, Maurits as a prudent and most gifted tactical military leader, Oldenbarnevelt as the man of grand strategies. Thanks to their combined leadership the Dutch Republic grew from a very low point in the mid-eighties to an emerging European power. A campaign to deal with the pirates of Dunkirk led to a hard fought victory in 1600 on the beach of Nieuwpoort in Flanders where Maurits won the day with some luck. The incident annoyed him a lot, because he had urged Oldenbarnevelt not to start this adventure.

In 1609 a truce for twelve years with Spain was reached. Oldenbarnevelt had personally supported François van Aerssen (1572-1641), the Dutch ambassador in France, until 1613 when he did not continue him in his function. Van Aerssen felt disappointed and soon became the personal advisor of Maurits. A prolonged debate about theological matters in the Dutch Republic, in particular about predestination, developed into a full-scale political conflict about the relation between church and state. Maurits decided in 1617 to join sides in public by going to the church of Oldenbarnevelt’s opponents in the Kloosterkerk, next to Oldenbarnevelt’s home in The Hague. The way a national synod should convene at Dordrecht and settle these matters was another matter of disagreement. In several cities riots broke out. In August 1617 Oldenbarnevelt forced the States of Holland in issuing an ordinance permitting individual cities to raise mercenaries to protect citizens. Citizens were not allowed to appeal to the Court of Holland, and soldiers had to obey only the orders of the States of Holland, not those of their commander Maurits. The very balance of power in the Dutch Republic between the individual provinces, the States General and the stadhouder was at stake, and also the adherence to the principles of government laid down in the Union of Utrecht (1579). Oldenbarnevelt favored a situation where towns and provinces could decide themselves on the admission of religious movements, and more specifically he wanted space and tolerance for those who did not join the Reformed protestant majority.

Maurits’ role in the events from 1617 until 1620 is nowadays much clearer than for Den Tex. J.G. Smit could edit 120 letters by Maurits held since 1862 at the Koninklijk Huisarchief [Royal Archive] in The Hague [‘Prins Maurits en de goede zaak : Brieven van Maurits uit de jaren 1617-1619’, in: Nederlandse historische bronnen I, A.C.F. Koch, J.G. Smit and A. Kersten (eds.) (The Hague 1979) 43-173; online, Digitale Bibliotheek der Nederlandse Letteren]. These letters show clearly how Maurits worked slowly but steadily against Oldenbarnevelt after the resolution of August 1617. A year later, after more riots, forced changes in city government, and above all the dismissal of the waardgelders in several towns Maurits had Oldenbarnevelt and his chief supporters, one of them Hugo Grotius, arrested on August 29, 1618. Maurits was in contact with some of the men who were later on chosen to judge Oldenbarnevelt.

It is wise to refer here also to the analysis by Jonathan Israel in his major study The Dutch Republic. Its rise, greatness, and fall 1477-1806 (Oxford 1995) of what happened in this year. Finding a legal reason for arresting Oldenbarnevelt might not have been particularly difficult, but on whose authority the arrest had to be done was certainly unclear, as was the choice of a tribunal and the judges. In the end the judges were chosen from both Holland and the other Dutch provinces. The trial dragged on for months. In the end the verdicts surprised many people. Grotius and Hogerbeets were sentenced to life imprisonment, but Oldenbarnevelt was sentenced to death, with the execution already following the next day, May 13, 1619. Maurits had ignored pleas for leniency towards Oldenbarnevelt. He did not attend the execution and an eyewitness report troubled his mind severely.

Some telling objects

The diary of Jan Francken

The sword of Hans Pruym

Oldenbarnevelt’s walking stick

Pamphlets and broadsides on display

An early contemporary edition of the verdict on Oldenbarnevelt, 1619

The exhibition in Amersfoort is rather small, but the role of pamphlets and broadsides is made quite clear. The verdict on Oldenbarnevelt was quickly printed and published in several languages. Some of the items on display are most telling. The walking stick of Oldenbarnevelt is perhaps the most famous item associated with any Dutch historical figure. A poem by Joost van den Vondel immortalized both its owner and the stick. Another item is rather grim. The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden recently acquired a sword which belonged to the German executioner Hans Pruym who worked for the city of Utrecht, the very man who decapitated Oldenbarnevelt. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has another sword said to have been used for the execution of Oldenbarnevelt (object no. NG-NM-4245), inscribed with a poem, but there is no provenance record of it before 1745. The story of Oldenbarnevelt’s captivity has long been known partially from a deposition by his servant Jan Francken, edited by Robert Fruin, ‘Verhaal der gevangenschap van Oldenbarnevelt, beschreven door zijn knecht Jan Francken’, Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap, 6th series, part 5 (1874) 734-785 (online, Hathi Trust Digital Library). This year the original diary long held in private possession finally became visible to the public. It has been shown at the Museum De Gevangenpoort, a prison museum just outside the Binnenhof in The Hague, and is now on display at Museum Flehite.

‘Justice done to Jan van Oldenbarnevelt’, engraving of the execution of Oldenbarnevelt by Claes Jansz. Visscher, 1619 – source: Het Geheugen van Nederland, https://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/

This engraving has become famous for many reasons. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen discussed it in their study The bookshop of the world, reviewed here earlier this year, as the very work which laid the foundation for the success of Broer Jansz., a publisher in Amsterdam who succeeded in very quickly publishing this powerful picture. At Museum Flehite it is literally used as a background picture on a wall. These years saw a flood of pamphlets about and more often against Oldenbarnevelt. Fake news was created, too, to undermine his position. A number of these pamphlets has been put on display at Museum Flehite. The death of Oldenbarnevelt was not the end of the political strife. A few years later two of his sons prepared a coup, but they were quickly unmasked and severely punished. This did not help to put Oldenbarnevelt and his party in favorable light. The conflict helped to create a fundamental division in the Dutch Republic between those supporting the Oranje family and those supporting the cities and their governing class.

A quick look at recent publications about Oldenbarnevelt leaves me with sometimes mixed feelings. Jan Niessen, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt 1547-1619, vormgever van de Republiek (Utrecht 2019) is rather short. The translation of Jan Francken’s diary by Thomas Rosenboom does some service in retelling his story in modern Dutch [Het einde van Johan Oldenbarnevelt, beschreven dor zijn knecht Jan Francken (3rd ed., Amsterdam 2019)], but a new edition of the text from the original diary which surfaced this year is necessary. The book of Ben Knapen, De man en zijn staat. Johan van Oldenbarnevelt 1547-1619 (7th ed., Amsterdam 2019) offers a political study of Oldenbarnevelt by a historian and politician. Broeders in oorlog, vijanden in vrede. Johan van Oldenbarnevelt en Maurits van Nassau, redders van de Nederlandse Republiek by Mike Hermsen (Zutphen 2019) focuses on the two statesmen and their contribution to the Dutch state, with a fine choice of illustrations. Wilfried Uitterhove’s De zaak Oldenbarnevelt : val, proces en executie (Nijmegen 2019) focuses not only on the final years, but also in particular on the documents concerning the trial. Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, Onthoofdingen in de Hofstad. De val van de Oldenbarnevelts (Amsterdam 2019) looks also at the plot of the two sons. Bollenburg, het huis van Oldenbarnevelt by Jojanneke Clarijs (Bussum 2017) appeared a few years earlier to commemorate the recent restoration of this house.

Account for the costs of the trials in 1618-1619 – Utrecht, Het Utrechts Archief, Huis Hardenbroek, inv.no. 4507

The main historiographical gap is still the lack of a full biography of prince Maurits on the scale of Den Tex’ work for Oldenbarnevelt. The study by J.G. Kikkert, Maurits van Nassau (Bussum 1985; 3rd ed., Soesterberg 2016) is very much in favor of Maurits. Arie van Deursen, Maurits van Nassau, 1567-1625. De winnaar die faalde (Amsterdam 2000) did not quite live up to high expectations. Some of the documents about Oldenbarnevelt’s life and the trial were edited already long ago, for example the questionings at the trial, Verhooren van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (Utrecht 1850; online, Hathi Trust) and the Gedenkstukken van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt en zijn tijd, M.L.van Deventer (ed.) (3 vol., The Hague 1860-1865; online, Hathi Trust). The document on the left, an account of the costs for the trials against Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius, Rombout Hogerbeets and Gilles van Ledenberg, was edited by J.J. de Geer van Oudegein, ‘Onkosten der judicature van Van Oldenbarnevelt’, Kronijk van het Historisch Genootschap 17 (1861) 336-340 [online, Hathi Trust]. This account is now – together with yet another copy of it – one of the special items in the archival collection of castle Hardenbroek for which I am busy finishing a new and very extensive finding aid at Het Utrechts Archief.

Another element that for many years hampered scholars to do research on Oldenbarnevelt was exactly the fact his archive held at the Dutch National Archives was only fully described as late as in 1984 by H.J.Ph.G. Kaajan, Inventaris van het archief van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, 1586-1619 (finding aid no. 3.01.14 (PDF), followed in 1987 by a finding aid for the Oldenbarnevelt family archive [H.J.Ph.G. Kaajan, Inventaris van het archief van de familie Van Oldenbarnevelt, (1449) 1510-1705) (finding aid no. 3.20.41 (PDF)]. Kaajan drily notes in his introduction Oldenbarnevelt’s handwriting was terrible. The modern edition of his state papers and family papers by S.P. Haak and A.J. Veenendaal, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. Bescheiden betreffende zijn staatkundig beleid en zijn familie 1570-1620 (3 vol., The Hague 1934-1967) can be consulted online, too.

Doing full justice to two historical figures can be seen as a metaphor, but in this case there are certainly spurs – both new objects and archival records – to delve again into the early history of the Dutch Republic which was shaped decisively by Maurits and Oldenbarnevelt. It is always a good sign when an exhibition makes you think again about its subjects and the objects put on display.

Amersfoort, Museum Flehite: Johan & Maurits: Van vriend tot vijand – May 13, 2019 until January 5, 2020

A postscript

On February 5, 2020, AvroTros television broadcasted the first installment of the series Historisch bewijs [Historical proof] created in cooperation with the Rijksmuseum featuring both the sword from Dresden and a sword in the holdings of the Rijksmuseum [Rijksmuseum, inv. no. ng-nm-4245] said to be the executioner’s sword. As an extra you can look at a fifteen minutes video of background research in the municipal archive of The Hague. The sword from Dresden was put on display at the Rijksmuseum in 2018. Research concerning both swords led to the article by Lieke van Deinsen en Jan de Hond, ‘The Sword and the Album: Material Memories and an Eighteenth-Century Poetic Account of the Execution of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1619)’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 66/3 (2018) 204-233. The sword in Dresden [Rüstkammer, Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, inv. no. iv 0198] came into view thanks to research by Gisela Wilbertz who published the article ‘Das Schwert des Scharfrichters Hans Prum in der Dresdner Rüstkammer’, Signa Iuris 16 (2018) 91-108. Hans Prum (ca. 1560/65-1621) stemmed from Meisenheim. He came to the Netherlands and worked in Zutphen and Utrecht; see for his life the articles by Cornelis R.H. Snijder, ‘Het scherprechtersgeslacht Pruijm/Pfraum, ook Prom/Praum/Sprong genoemd’, Gens Nostra 69 (2014), 488-500, 70 (2015), 14-23 (also online, PDF), and ‘Hans Pruijm, scherprechter te Zutphen 1595-1604. Executeur van Johan van Oldenbarnevelt’, Zutphen 35/4 (2016) 105-111 (online, PDF).

Clairvaux, a monastery and a prison

Every now and then you across projects which attract immediately your curiosity. In Autumn 2018 the blog L’agenda du médiéviste alerted to an online documentary with the title Le cloître et le prison. Les espaces de l’enfermement, “The monastery and the prison. Places of confinement”. The website of this project was launched on September 26, 2018. The documentary is the fruit of the Enfermements project in which several French institutions work together. Not only the abbey of Clairvaux did function as a prison, other locations have a similar history. In this post I will look both at the documentary and the project website.

Between walls

The medieval abbey of Clairvaux occupies a special place in the Enfermements project. The abbey was founded in 1115. In 1808 it became a prison which functioned until 1971. The official closure is announced for 2022. 900 years of Clairvaux’s history were celebrated in 2015. The medieval manuscripts of Clairvaux are held at the Bibliothèque municipale de Troyes and can be viewed online. Alas the special portal Bibliothèque virtuelle de l ‘abbaye de Clairvaux for these manuscripts does not function currently. You can find the medieval cartularies of Clairvaux using CartulR, a resource of the IRHT/CNRS. Archival records of this abbey are also held in Troyes by the Archives départementales de l’Aube. Among its digitized collections the AD de l’Aube presents fifteen late medieval registres de l’officialité de Troyes, registers of the official, the ecclesiastical judge of the bishop.

The website of Le cloître et le prison has six main sections. The Avant-propos explains the goals and background. The glossaire is a glossary with not just terms from the monastic and incarcerated life in France. Even the Rasphuis and Spinhuis in Amsterdam are mentioned. You had best navigate this glossary using the icon on the rather small top bar of your screen. A chronology of Clairvaux helps you to see developments in their succession. In the bibliography you will find information about archival documents and images, printed sources and scholarly publications.

The section with videos, Visite vidéo, takes most space in the exhibition, and equally in the helpful sitemap. Jean-François Leroux, already forty years president of the association to save the cultural heritage of Clairvaux, acts as a guide in the videos. There is no question about the quality of his calm explanations, but sometimes he seems somewhat tired, but in comparison with other more enthusiastic reporters this might well be a pleasant change. At a number of turns the team of this portal does not hesitate to use materials from other prisons, even from outside France.

The tour of the premises starts with the location nowadays called Le Petit Clairvaux, the site of the first monastery, sometimes nicknamed by medievalists Clairvaux I. The nine following sections deal with the main site, starting with the cloister walls. For each items a short motto has been chosen, often with verbs opposing each other. For the eight section, Quartier punitive, the verbs Surveiller – punir, survey and punish, are a choice clearly referring to the study by Michel Foucault. Apart from the videos each section has an accompanying text, photos and at least one archival document. There are also some interviews with experts of the team. The navigation of the website is stylish, with a key and lock for the main menu, and in the video section a quill pen to go to the menu with the ten sections of Clairvaux. It was possible to follow the preparations for project at Twitter (@enfermements), but it has been very quiet after August 2018.

If you look at the screen print of the chronology you can gather already two elements from the long history of Clairvaux, the ongoing construction, demolition and reconstruction of the buildings and its place in French history. The chronology mentions under the year 1834 the incarceration of political prisoners, but with examples from the late nineteenth century, Auguste Blanqui between 1872 and 1879, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin in the years 1883-1886, and even Philip of Orléans in 1890, albeit in his case lodged away from other prisoners.

In this virtual exhibit the most interesting element, the comparison of monasteries and prisons, is the central element. I feel hard pressed to focus here on one particular aspect. It is exactly the variety of aspects which is brought here into view. When you remember the title of the study by Uwe Kai Jacobs, Die Regula Benedicti als Rechtsbuch: Eine rechtshistorische und rechtstheologische Untersuchung [The Rule of St. Benedict as a book of law. A study in legal history and legal theology] (Cologne, etc., 1987) it is less surprising to look at monks and nuns as persons living under a strict regime with punishments for transgressions on premises clearly designed to make such things possible. You might want to read also the study by Elisabeth Lusset, Crime, châtiment et grâce dans les monastères au Moyen Âge (Turnhout 2017). The strength of the virtual exhibit is the combination of videos showing the present locations at Clairvaux with explanations about both periods as an abbey and as a prison and proper use of historical document and images. The intuition that places with a common dining room or canteen are an institution or a company is not new!

Looking behind and beyond walls

The abbey of Clairvaux is not the only famous building in France which at a certain point was turned into a prison. In Paris the Conciergerie first was a palace, the Palais de la Cité which for centuries housed the Parlement de Paris, with only a number of prison cells. During the French Revolution it became a full-scale prison. The abbey of Port-Royal in Paris served as a prison between 1790 and 1795. Between 1793 and 1863 the abbey at the Mont-Saint Michel was home to a prison. The abbey of Notre-Dame de Fontevraud, once the royal abbey of the Plantagenets, was used as a prison between 1812 and 1963. You might try to find more examples at the website of the Centre des Monuments nationaux, but somehow the search function did not work correctly.

At this point one should by all means invoke the various services of the bilingual Criminocorpus platform (CNRS), strangely absent in the production of this audiovisual project. At this portal you can read both as a PDF and in a browsable version the Guide des archives judiciaires et pénitentaires en France (1800-1958) by Jean-Luc Farcy. He puts these monasteries converted into prisons in a group of prisons for those having to serve long terms, typically in old castles, fortresses and some abbeys. Clairvaux served in this quality for several French départements. Criminocorpus has virtual exhibits on Fontevraud and on Paris prisons after the fall of the Bastille.

It is really interesting to explore this virtual exhibit around the abbey of Clairvaux. The partnership of organizations for cultural heritage, archival institutions, research groups and communication design offices succeeds in telling an intricate history in a way earlier generations would not have thought feasible or sensible. Let Le cloître et le prison be one of your guides to the wealth of stories about this famous monument!

Swiss sermons around executions

The execution of convicted crime suspects attracted the attention of the general public in Early Modern Europe. Authorities saw the public administering of punishments as a key element of criminal law. For a lot of cases we know about the last words people said before their execution, and authors reckoned even on the particular interest of their public to record such words. Less attention has been given to another genre, sermons spoken just before or after public execution. The Universität Zürich has now digitized such sermons, Standreden, based on the materials of the late Urs Herzog, a Swiss philologist.  What was said in these sermons from the eighteenth and nineteenth century? What was the purpose of the preachers and the effect of the sermons on their public? In this contribution I will look at the digital collection, its background and at some questions surrounding these sermons.

It is not the first time that a post appears here after an alert or message at Archivalia, the blog of Klaus Graf (@Archivalia_kg). It is up to any visitor of his blog to pursue the paths he indicates or to heed his warnings. Anyway, Switzerland has seldom been the subject in my posts.

A wide range of materials

The website of this joint project of the department for German language and literature and the center for legal history of the Universität Zürich starts with pointing out how these sermons serve as a focus of attention and as a genre in which the law and Christian teaching came together. Urs Herzog (1942-2015) taught German literature at Zürich. He became a specialist in the field of Early Modern sermons (Barockpredigte), but his interests were much wider. The Standreden are a form of the much more common Leichpredigte, death sermons. As a professor emeritus he did research on the history of criminal justice, moral theology and the spiritual and psychic care for prisoners. In the project only a selection of his materials has been digitized. One of the purpose of the project is to present the sheer scope and range of Herzog’s materials and to invite other scholars to use them for their research.

The image on the start screen shows the execution of a woman in 1851. Below the text the explication mentions an often quoted verse from the letter to the Romans (13,4): “For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (King James Version). In the verse immediately preceding this quote it is clear he refers to rulers. This quote was used as an argument to confirm the right and duty of authorities to execute justice in a most literal way, by applying even the death sentence.

The digital project has a page on further sources (Quellen) with a scholarly bibliography. Apart from the nearly 140 digitized sermons Herzog traced nearly 400 other sermons in Swiss libraries. A glossary helps you to understand numerous terms with a very specific meaning. The questionnaire contains at present only three fairly obvious questions you can ask about these sermons. The page for research (Forschung) gives you access to articles written by Urs Herzog and a few other scholarly publications about the Standreden.

Preaching a good end

The nearly 140 sermons in the digital collection date from 1601 to 1867. In an Excel sheet you can find bibliographic details. However, there is just one sermon from the seventeenth century. 21 sermons stem from the eighteenth century, and some 120 sermons were held during the nineteenth century. The bibliographical information is concise but most useful. Herzog noted the religion of the preacher, the gender of the executed persons, and he even gives his verdict on the nature of the texts. In thirty cases women were executed. Some texts were not really a Standrede. Most sermons were printed, but he traced some sermons in manuscript. Herzog found the majority of the printed sermons, in a way pamphlets, in the holdings of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. It is a bit mystifying he does not mention where he found the other publications. The digital collection has been created using digitized black-and-white photocopies made by Herzog himself.

In the digital collection each sermon has been given a code for the year, and often the name of the preacher, the executed person and the location of the execution are also included. A small number of sermons was not held in Swiss towns , but in Dresden (1601), Stuttgart (1738),  Wernigerode (1747), Ludwigsburg and Heidelberg, the latter both in 1812. In the Excel sheet you can query for dates and places, names of the convicted and the preacher, the kind of crime and the way of execution, the location where the sermon was held, its public (the delinquent, the beholders or a parish), the location of publication and the publisher, and for the facts I mentioned already in the paragraph here above. Some sermons were addressed directly to the criminal, others only to the public that had watched the execution. Of course I feel tempted to use here one or more sermons, preferably very different ones. A sermon in 1843 was held in a case in which the felon was pardoned. The Jesuit priest Matthias Heimbach held three sermons in 1716, a prime case for comparison. Nine sermons date from 1827.

All the strengths of this project do not hide one particular point. It is understandable to use first of all Herzog’s research material, but in the case of the sermons themselves it is rather remarkable his own photocopies have been digitized, and not the original editions. In view of the more than 35,000 thousand titles from the Zentralbibliothek Zürich digitized for the Swiss portal e-rara, conveniently grouped in one set, it is feasible to search for digitized execution sermons. I suppose one had rather seen a simple list of those items or a notice on the presence or absence of items within e-rara. As a matter of fact I searched for Standreden in e-rara, with two results, only one of them an execution sermon by Alois Diogg, a Capucin friar, Standrede, gesprochen auf der Blutstätte in Schwyz bei der Hinrichtung des Raubmörders Hieronymus Kessler von Galgenen (Schwyz, s.a. (1839); online, e-rara). Using the joint catalogue of the university library and the Zentralbibliothek Zürich you will realize quickly the word Standrede was used for any kind of Leichenpredigt.

You might pause for a thought how it took Herzog years to bring his resources together even with the assistance of online catalogues, but luckily he could at least partially build on research concerning death sermons. Since many years the Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur in Mainz is home to the Forschungsstelle für Personalschriften. An important section of its website is devoted to Leichenpredigten. You will find a database and links to projects with digitized German death sermons. Legal historians might want to look in particular at the legal dimensions of these execution sermons, but they can equally be treated as a subspecies of death sermons.

The presentation of these research materials, the digitization of (photocopies) of resources and not in the least the cooperation between two scholarly disciplines is to be welcomed. This Swiss project does homage to the legacy of a scholar with wide interests who found an intersection of theology, literature and legal history. My frowns about some elements should not stop you from investigating the project website and these digitized Swiss execution sermons.

A new resource on the legal history of violence in the United States

At least on a few occasions even historians who try to remain detached from contemporary matters cannot escape from them. A blog dealing with law and history inevitably will touch major themes such as injustice, inequality, violence and slavery, things that are still present in our world, and are definitively not only history. The four themes mentioned here set a challenge to anyone thinking and writing. The subject of violence I have chosen for this post does not come completely unexpected. This month I read a notice about a new scholarly resource on the history of legislation about arms in the United States. Joseph Blocher and Darrell Miller (Duke University School of Law) have created a repository of historical gun laws. I will discuss here its contents and functions. By looking briefly at some contemporary resources on violence I will not shut out the present here entirely.

Finding laws

Blocher and Miller explain the way they compiled the information for their repository quite clearly. The first thing to notice is that the database does not contain the latest laws, statutes and other regulations. You will find English laws starting in the Middle Ages up to 1776, American legislation for the colonial period from 1607 to 1791, the year the American constitution was ratified, laws around the Fourteenth Amendment, and legislation up to the National Firearms Act of 1934. Colonial legislation has been limited to legislation in later American states. The legislation entered into the repository has been taken from regular resources such as well-known licensed databases on legislation by the Congress and state statutes, the Making of Modern Law, Yale Law School’s Avalon project and more general sources. A search for items mentioning the word gun was performed for the Session Laws. In the Making of Modern Law Blocher and Miller searched for the words gun(s), rifle(s) and pistol(s). The editors decided not to include every local regulation for every period. Sometimes a statute merely repeats earlier legal enactments. The spelling of older texts has been adjusted. On the blog of Duke Law School Blocher and Miller told on April 4, 2018 more about their project which contains currently some 1,500 items. They propose to add continuously newly discovered statutes, to expand the information for the colonial period, and of course they will correct factual errors.

Instead of creating at the outset a database with complete coverage of all possible legislation the two scholars at Duke did very sensible aim to deliver a set of materials which cover a most substantial period with due attention to colonial history. In the repository you can search at will using the free text field, and set filters for seventeen particular themes, for example militia regulations, hunting, manufacturing, sensitive places and times, race and slavery, and involvement of minors. It is possible to limit your search to specific years, and you can search for English law and for legislation from one or more states. The repository gives the texts of provisions, labelled with the usual current legal reference. A link to the sources used is also given. Thus you will find an act about the storage of weapons enacted on March 24, 1629 by the state Virginia with the reference 1629 Va. Acts 151, Acts of March 24, 1629, Act 5, and in this case a link to a digitized version in the Internet Archive of The statutes at large, being a collection of all the law of Virginia (…) (New York,1823). This statute at page 151 of the edition dealt with potash and nitre (saltpeter), vital ingredients for gunpowder.

The repository has six statutes on storage between 1607 and 1776, and eight from 1776 to 1791, and you will find 54 statutes on this subject from 1791 to 1861. Storage is the subject of 191 statutes in this database. I would not have labelled a statute of king Alfred from 890, the oldest law in the repository, about the way one has to carry a spear under storage, but under carrying weapons. The source used for this law is not given. In the edition of F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (3 vol., Halle, 1903-1916) it is probably the statute no. 33 (I, 68-71). Of course this is only a detail, and one that can be quickly adjusted. The possibility of classifying statutes under two labels is certainly a matter needing attention. However, the important thing is that this repository enables you to pose questions about a particular genre of gun laws with a more than reasonable chance to find sufficient coverage. Thanks to the project Early English Laws I could quickly search for this medieval law.

At this point it becomes interesting, too, how we encounter laws with a relation to racial matters in the Duke repository. I will not spoil here your own curiosity by giving here a number of results for all subjects. For race and slavery you will find an overall total of 38 results. Here I cannot help thinking about Hein’s massive digital collection Slavery in America and the World where you can certainly find more or at least make valuable comparisons of the coverage. In 2016 I have discussed here at length some of its flaws and omissions, but it is a very valuable collection. Some quick searches among slavery statutes brought me already dozens of statutes which seem relevant for comparisons. Minors and other persons deemed irresponsible occur in 67 results in the Duke repository. Apart from statutes and regulations you will see also references to state constitutions and codes of law.

From the past to the present

It is not a regular thing to encounter a database with matters from the ninth to the early twentieth century. One of the compliments you must make to Blocher and Miller is that the quality of the repository makes one thirst for a sequel into the present. I suppose the editors reckon with the ability to find relevant legislation quickly, using either the licensed databases accessible at American law schools and elsewhere in research libraries, or the marvellous sets of digitized legal materials put online by the Law Library of the Library of Congress, together with links to other resources in open access. If you want to find online more about American legal history you can benefit from Legal History on the Web, the portal site of the Triangle Legal History Seminar at Duke University, for Blocher and Miller perhaps too obvious to mention!

It is impossible to ignore the current turmoil and debate about violence and gun laws in the United States. It would mean ignoring an elephant in the room. I was surprised the ever vigilant team of the Legal History Blog had not yet written something about the Duke repository. Maybe other recent news from Duke University was considered more pressing. The urgency of the situation around the use, abuse and possession of arms is clear to me, but here I can and will not offer my thoughts about possible remedies. For further information you can consult online websites such as the Gun Violence Archive, the Mass Shooting Tracker based on crowdsourcing, and Mass Shootings in America of the Stanford Geospatial Center. Projects such as Every Town for Gun Safety and The Trace bring news and background information concerning shootings, gun related violence, gun possession and gun laws in a larger context. At Mother Jones you can find a dataset concerning mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and 2018. SafeHome has an online dossier Gun Laws vs. Gun Deaths with maps showing the differences between American states.

Judicial statistics can generally be found at the website of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Its page on weapon use will be at the focus of your attention. Those with access at a subscribing institutions can use the online edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States, where you can buy also two-day access to individual parts of it, or you can use the open access version of Historical Statistics of United States, Colonial Times to 1970 provided by the United States Census Bureau which brings you also to statistics for individual states. For statistical comparisons between countries one might start at the Swedish portal for historical statistics with as its core data for 21 countries.

If I had decided to follow here the path of historical statistics I would have added a second post. I am well aware more can be said, and that there are probably other online entrances to this kind of data, but I had rather not hide the main line of this contribution. The shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018 led to massive protests. In my view the database created by Blocher and Miller is one of the things helping to reflect on the development of law and justice concerning weapons in the history of the United States. They perform a service to the public. Hopefully others, and in particular law schools, lawyers and other legal scholars are willing, too, to consider what difference they themselves can make by studying the impact of visible and hidden violence, and how laws, statutes and other regulations work and worked to achieve justice for the victims and anyone hurt by violence. Its role in American history and in legal history needs study in all its aspects.

The many sides of Belgium’s legal history

In the ocean of legal websites you encounter very different sites. There are relatively few attempts at creating portals. When I saw the Digithemis portal for Belgian legal history and discovered its qualities it was only a matter of time before I would write about it here. Digithemis has been created by the Centre d’Histoire du Droit et de la Justice, Université Catholique Louvain-la-Neuve. Currently there is no portal site for Dutch legal history, and thus there is every reason, not only for Dutchmen, to look at this website. It might well inspire scholars in other countries, too.

Simple layout and rich contents

One of the powerful aspects of this website is its simple layout, with an implicit promise you will not get lost here. The subtitle Système numérique d’information historique sur la Justice is best translated as “digital system for historical information about justice”. Under the first heading Applications three databases are presented. The first, Belgian Magistrates, is concerned with officials in the Belgian judicial system. The database contains personal information, details about nominations, jurisdictions and institutions. Cubes, the second database, gives you judicial statistics, information about the number of cases and given verdicts in Belgian courts of justice. As a matter of fact I was hunting for websites with historical statistics when I ran into Digithemis. The third section brings us a bibliographical database for Belgium’s legal history. The database is the fruit of cooperation between the CHDJ at Louvain-la-Neuve and the project BeJust 2.0 – Justice et Populations.

In the second section, Ressources documentaires, you will find four subjects: legislation, doctrine, jurisprudence, and surprisingly again judicial statistics. Under Legislation you can find the French versions of the various codes of Belgian law, bulletins of the Ministry of Justice (circulaires), legislation concerning the judicial structure of Belgium, and a similar section for Congo during the colonial period. For doctrine you can look at a number of legal journals, at mercuriales, discourses pronounced at the start of the judicial season by the attorneys general, and there is a bibliographical database for criminology with some 8,500 entries. The corner with jurisprudence seemed at first straightforward: for arrêts of the Cour de cassation between 1832 and 1936 you can consult the Pasicrisie, alas currently not available, and for the period 1937-2011 there is a similar site, but here I can see only verdicts between 2002 and 2015. A very much contested period in Belgium’s history comes up with the online version of La jurisprudence belge depuis le 10 mai 1940. The section for judicial statistics is enhanced by a historical overview and a concise bibliography.

The section Expositions virtuelles contains two virtual exhibits. The first, Classified, looks at Belgian military intelligence forces. The second one, Mots de la Justice [Words of Justice] is concerned with images and imagery of law and justice. The accompanying congress in Bruges earlier this year has figured on this blog at the time the bilingual catalogue was published.

The next stop of this tour are the contributions, As for now there are only two scholarly articles. The Lignes de temps interactives show interactive timelines for three subjects, women and legal professions, the Belgian judicial organisation, and the jury d’assises. In particular the timeline for women in the legal profession is telling. Ten short videos with presentations in French and Dutch about recent research are the last element of this section.

Finally the links section of this website confirms its claim to be a portal for legal history. The concise choise of links concerns Belgium, France, digital resources, and some Transatlantic websites and projects. In the right sidebar you can browse for interesting items in a RSS feed. This portal does build on other major projects in Belgium, starting with BeJust 2.0. Other portals often have an events calendar, but it seems Françoise Muller and Xavier Rousseaux wisely have built a compact portal with space for future extensions. The footer of the portal mentions the 2016 prize of the Fonds Wernaers awarded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) for the best scientific website.

More statistics

I found the attention to statistics a strong feature of this portal. I could not help noticing that it might be useful to add a more general website for Belgian statistics to this portal. The University Ghent has created the Lokstat project, an abbreviation of Lokale statistieken, local statistics. This project currently offers local statistics taken from the 1900 census in Belgium, with additionally an agricultural census from 1895 and an industry census from 1896, this one accompanied with maps. It would be interesting to combine these data with judicial statistics.

As a Dutchman admiring these efforts of a neighbour country I have not yet found similar Dutch judicial statistics at a special platform. The Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) has made a fine website for Dutch Censuses 1795-1971, accessible in Dutch and English. At CBS Historische Collectie you can consult digitized reports from almost two centuries. For the field of law and justice there are mainly reports from the second half of the twentieth century, for example prison statistics (1950-2000), crimes between 1950 and 1981, juvenile criminality (1974-1981) and crime victims (1980-1984). A quick look at general publications since 1813 in this digital collection shows judicial statistics were part and parcel of the yearly overviews. For four Dutch provinces there are yearbooks since the 1840’s (Provinciale verslagen).

It is not because you find everything at particular websites, but because they help you to look further, to value information, to think about problems you want to study or to contact scholars or read their work, that portals such as Digithemis deserve a warm welcome and attentive followers. Digithemis should serve as an invitation for the creation of similar portals for other countries and regions, too.

Listening to tuneful news: Streetsongs and crime

Just like law music is almost everywhere. It should be no surprise to find law and justice in songs, and a few years ago I first explored this theme in my post The Legal Song: Legal history in lyrics. This time I want to look a bit closer to a specific genre, broadside ballads, a subgenre of pamphlets, yet another subject not unfamiliar to regular visitors of my blog. Recently the team behind the French legal history project Criminocorpus launched the website Complaintes criminelles en France (1870-1940). Broadside ballads as a musical genre have come into view in particular for the United Kingdom, but this genre existed elsewhere also, and not only during the Early Modern period (1500-1800). The genre definitely widens my perception of pamphlets as a communication medium.

News in songs

Last week I first saw the new French collection. In fact it pushed me to look again at digital collections with only broadside ballads. Even if their number is still restricted, they now exist for more countries than I was aware of, reason enough to have a better look at them.

Jean-François Heintzen has created for Criminocorpus a database in which you can search with a simple search with the possibility to use a proximity search. As for now the search interface is only in French, but no doubt an English interface will be added soon, because all elements of Criminocorpus can be accessed in both French and English. You can also search using an interactive map of France which shows you also where most of these complaintes were originally heard. The digital collection with these songs has been created by the Bibliothèque nationale de France for its digital library Gallica. It becomes quickly clear Paris has the largest share, and also the largest audiences, and it seems people in Brittany, around Lyon, in the Languedoc and near the Belgian border could have heard them a bit more often than in other parts of France. The database is strong in indicating the tunes (timbre) to which a complainte was sung. It even alerts to cases in which another song presented the same criminal event. You will find whenever possible also information about the crime and the fate or trial of the accused. I could not find the exact number of complaintes in the database, but a quick look at the interactive map suggest the number must be around three hundred.

The comment in French under the image of the man with a broadside ballad in his hand connects the songs explicitly with news: Marchand de crimes ou crieurs de journaux, “crime merchant or newspaper crier”. The broadsides featured often a telling image, one of their attractions. Dutch street singers used in the nineteenth century a so-called smartlap, literally a “sorrow cloth”, a large illustrated roll which they could unfold and hang on a pole. The word smartlap is still used as the synonym for tear-jerking melodramatic popular songs.

I searched for other collections in France with exclusively complaintes criminelles, but this selection from the holdings of the BnF is the largest one. When you search for complaintes in the website Moteur Collections of the Ministère de la Culture it brings you a substantial number of results in a wide variety of collections. The French portal for digital cultural heritage Patrimoine numérique leads you to just one collection with recordings made between 1979 and 1988 concerning oral memory, chansons and popular dances from Mont-Lozère for which the link was broken. You can get access after authorisation to recordings in the Ganoub database of the Maison Méditerranéene des Sciences de l’Homme (MMSH) in Aix-en-Provence.

Straatliederen, “street songs”, form a substantial part of the Dutch Liederenbank created at the Meertens Institute for Dutch Ethnology in Amsterdam. This database contains now a staggering number of 170,000 Dutch and Flemish songs. At the Memory of the Netherlands portal you can access and search for some 7,000 broadside ballads with nearly 15,000 songs, both from the holding of the Meertens Institute and the Dutch Royal Library. You can listen to recordings of some of the most popular songs, too. The founder of the Liederenbank, the late Louis-Peter Grijp (1954-2016), was not only a musicologist, but also a performer of early music and popular songs, playing the lute as a soloist or with his ensemble Camerata Traiectina. His research into the use of contrafacta, songs made to re-used melodies, helped to recognize texts as song texts, and to find the right melody or melodies for performance.

For Germany and Austria researchers can go to the project VD Lied: Das Verzeichnis der deutschsprachigen Liedflugschriften. This project builds on the bibliographical project VD16, VD17 and VD18 for Early Modern books from Germany, Switzerland and Austria. VD17 and VD18 link to digitized copies of the works they contain. The partners of VD-Lied are the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Zentrum für populäre Kultur und Musik in Freiburg am Breisgau, and the Archiv des Österreichisches Liedwerkes in Vienna. This database contains 30,000 songs from 14,000 digitized Flugschriften and Flugblätter.

Ballads in the British isles

Digital collections in the Anglophone world get perhaps more attention than collections elsewhere in the world, but it makes sense to bring them here together. The English Broadside Ballads Archive (EBBA, University of California at Santa Barbara) has become the portal to access a number of digital collections in the United Kingdom and the United States, with a focus on seventeenth-century ballads. The Pepys Collection of Magdalene College, Cambridge (1,800 items), the Roxburghe Collection of the British Library (1,500 items), Scottish collections at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and three collections of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, all in all almost eight thousand ballads, can be searched here together. The bibliography and additional information strengthen its online presence. In the Huntington Digital Library you can search among some 500 digitized ballads.

It is well worth including here also the Kenneth S. Goldstein Broadsides (University of Mississippi Libraries) with some 1,500 ballad broadsides from the United Kingdom and Ireland from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. At the web site Glasgow Broadsides Ballads Glasgow University Library has digitized some nineteenth-century ballads from its Murray Collections for which earlier ballads are accessible through EBBA. The National Library of Scotland created the collection The Word on the Street with among the 1,800 broadsides from the period 1650-1910 also some ballads. I am sure I might have missed some websites with transcriptions of ballads. Let’s not forget to point you at least to the Broadside Ballad Index created by William Bruce Olson, and the Folksong Index and Broadside Index created by Steve Roud, accessible online at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London.

However, in a competition among digital broadside ballads collections Broadside Ballads Online of the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, still clearly would wins for sheer numbers (30,000 items)! In its new design, light-years away from the austere user interface of Ballads Online which had survived all changes behind the surface, you can even choose the colours of the main type font. A second outstanding thing is the coverage in time, not only the period before 1800, but right into the twentieth century. The Iconclass search function for illustrations or if you prefer a simple keyword search, and even for some images a similarity search, place this collection ahead of all others. The illustration search and the overviews of subjects helps you to rethink your own approach and questions. By the way, the Bodleian Libraries recently developed a digital manuscripts toolkit for working with digital images along the lines of the International Image Interoperability Initiative Framework (IIIF).

A look at American ballads

American culture and history come into view at the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). Isaiah Thomas collected broadsides in Boston during the early nineteenth century. Here you can find some 300 broadsides, and also thirty recordings of ballads. You can search directly or browse subjects in alphabetical order, which usefully includes also the woodcuts. It is a treat to look at the overview of digital projects supported by the AAS. Here it must suffice to mention the American Vernacular Music Manuscripts, ca. 1730-1910 hosted at Middle Tennessee State University. The notable collection collected by Helen Hartness Flanders is now at Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT; you can consult some 450 digitized broadsides ballads of this collection in the Internet Archive. Pop music and poetry are the heart of the digital collection Beat Movement: Poetry and Broadsides (Utah State University). I did not conduct an exhaustive search for American examples. You will find them also using the Digital Public Library of America. A quick search in the rich digital collections of the New York Public Library brought me just one result, which cannot be the complete truth. Patient research will surely yield much more. For this the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the Smithsonian Folkway Recordings are an appropriate starting point.

If you have doubts about the value and use of these digital collections you can find much in the current issue of the journal Recherche en sciences sociales sur Internet (RESET) on Patrimoine et patrimonialisation numérique / Heritage and Heritagization (6/2017). The acronym RESET is in this case strong! The digital turn is much more than only quick access to resources faraway, a theme articulated for global history in the 2016 article by Lara Putnam discussed here last year. At the Revues portal you will find also the Swiss journal Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie.

With the MMSH at Aix-en-Provence and the Smithsonian and other institutions I came from ballads in print to modern recordings of old ballads, and it is tempting to follow that road already here in more detail. I will return to the use of recordings in another post in the future. In this post you will find hopefully enough for your own interests. On the other hand you might want to look at more treasures at the Musée d’histoire des crimes, de la justice et des peines created by the Criminocorpus team or start following the Criminocorpus blog.

Bruegel’s bewitching legacy

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Saint James visiting the magician Hermogenes (detail) – Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Exhibitions sometimes make you hesitate to visit them at all. Will they only confirm what you already knew or suspected, or will they offer you food for thought and send you in new directions? Since September 19, 2015 you can see at the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, a museum for the history of Christian art in the Low Countries, an exhibition about images and the imagination of witches. Bruegel’s Witches focuses on drawings, prints and paintings by the great Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (around 1525-1569). The exhibition credits Bruegel with creating in a few works the very stereotype of witches, looking as a woman with wild hairs and flying though the air on a broom. In is very best tradition the museum looks also at Bruegel’s contemporaries, shows earlier images of magicians and sorceresses, and it follows the impact of Bruegel’s imagination through the centuries. In 2016 the exhibition will be put on display at the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges.

This month Museum Catharijneconvent also shows the Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, University Library, ms. 32), the most famous medieval manuscript in the holdings of Dutch libraries. This manuscript with vibrantly illuminated pages from the early ninth century is only rarely shown in public, and even scholars seldom are allowed to look at it. If you have your doubts about the Bruegel exhibit, you should come at least for the Utrecht Psalter.

Witches in context

At the Catharijneconvent, a former hospital and convent of the Knights Hospitaller, Christian art is always presented within the context of other expressions of Christian life and practice. In this exhibition, too, you will find objects from daily life and criminal justice, and also books. A particular resource used here are the so-called Wickiana, some 430 illustrated newsletters from the sixteenth century collected by the Swiss protestant vicar Johann Jacob Wick (1522-1580) who also wrote a chronicle about events in Zürich. The Zentralbibliothek in Zürich has digitized the Wickiana. This source is not only a form of communicating news, but it offers also a window to popular culture and protestant views of culture and life. The Wickiana shows the use of images and relate also to the perception of all kind of events and elements of culture at large. From the perspective of book history they belong to the category of pamphlets, or even more precisely to the Einblattdrücke. On my website for legal history I have created an overview of digitized pamphlet collections. Wick’s collection contains also many of his own coloured drawings.

The exhibition shows materials bearing directly on the way courts dealt with witches. There is for example a copy of Joost de Damhouder’s Praxis rerum criminalium (Antverpiae 1556). You can look at archival records from the castle Huis Bergh in ‘s-Heerenberg from 1605 about a trial against Mechteld ten Ham who was accused of sorcery (available online [Archief Huis Bergh, inv. no. 7268]). Interesting is also the so-called schandhuik, the “cover of shame”, from ‘s-Hertogenbosch, an object designed to parade infamous women. Among the books on display is also a treatise by the Jesuit Martin Antonio Delrio (1551-1608), Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Lovanio 1599), a book dealing both with the theological interpretation of witchcraft and with the role of judicial courts. Delrio was a humanist scholar, a nephew of Michel de Montaigne and a friend of Justus Lipsius. It prompted me to look at the number of books dealing with witchcraft and demonology signalled by the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) in St. Andrews. The USTC gives you hundreds of titles, and you find of many works several editions. By the way, the book of De Damhouder appeared also in Dutch and French. The USTC is one of the portals indicating also access to digital versions of these works.

Firing the imagination

When you visit the exhibition at Utrecht, you can view the works of art, artefacts, books and pamphlets using a summary guide (Dutch or English), use an audio tour or dive into a fine classical exhibition catalogue. Walking through the rooms and corridors of this exhibition can thus be a rather normal contemporary museum experience, or you can choose a multimedia approach to submerge yourself into the dark world of Early Modern imagination. However strong images and imaginary worlds may be, they combined with the forces of churches and courts to create images of women. Even when they escaped from outright persecution women had to cope with very powerful unfavorable representations of their gender. Imagination, perspectives on gender and anxieties were part and parcel of the period which saw the growing impact of real and imagined magic and sorcery. The role of courts in dealing with witchcraft surely did not always do credit to law and justice.

This exhibition at Utrecht is visually attractive and seduces you to some extent to revel in the imagery of witchcraft, but there is a sober and more disconcerting reality behind which should not be lost out of view. Malcolm Gaskill’s volume Witchcraft. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, etc., 2010) has been translated into Dutch in 2011 by Nynke Goinga [Hekserij, Een kort overzicht (Rotterdam 2011)]. I seldom condemn books or translations, but this translator succeeds in utterly missing the crux of the matters under discussion. Many translated sentences sound strange as if she did not understand at all the subject of this book. Alas witchcraft as a historical subject will remain open to the fascination of those people searching for sensation and esoteric phenomena. There is too much at stake around this subject to leave it to thrill seekers and freaks. However, such statements do not make it easier to face the challenges to deal with this complex subject, starting with the oceans of publications about witches and sorcerers. We need the powers of deep thinking and applying all of the (legal) historian’s crafts to do justice to this aspects of Early Modern history. If this exhibition convinces you at least of the value of this conclusion, your visit will be fruitful.

De heksen van Breugel / Bruegel’s Witches – Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent, September 19, 2015-January 31, 2016, and Bruges, Sint-Janshospitaal, February 25 to June 26, 2016

A postscript

Klaus Graf pointed in one of his latest 2015 posts at Archivalia at the online version [PDF, 200 MB] of the dissertation by Renilde Vervoort: “Vrouwen op den besem en derghelijck ghespoock.” Pieter Bruegel en de traditie van hekserijvoorstellingen in de Nederlanden tussen 1450 en 1700 [“Women on brooms and similar ghostly things”. Pieter Bruegel and the tradition of witchcraft iconography in the Low Countries between 1450 and 1700] (Nijmegen 2011).