Enfilade

From Brill (with thanks to Hélène Bremer for noting it — chapter 7 addresses Huygens as an art connoisseur) . . .

Rudolf Dekker, Family, Culture, and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr, Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 195 pages, ISBN: 978-9004250949. €98 / $136.

Based on analysis of a diary kept by Constantijn Huygens Jr, the secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange, this book proposes a new explanation for the invention of the modern, private diary in the 17th century. At the same time it sketches a panoramic view of Europe at the time of the Glorious Revolution and the Nine Years’ War, recorded by an eyewitness. The book includes chapters on such subjects as the changing perception of time, book collecting, Huygens’s role as connoisseur of art, belief in magic and witchcraft, and gossip and sexuality at the court of William and Mary. Finally this study shows how modern scientific ideas, developed by Huygens’s brother Christiaan Huygens, changed our way of looking at the world around us.

Rudolf Dekker taught history at Erasmus University Rotterdam and directs the Institute for the Study of Egodocuments and History, Amsterdam. He is the author of several books, including Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Palgrave 2001). With Arianne Baggerman he wrote Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary (Brill 2005).

From The University of Chicago Press (with thanks to Hélène Bremer for noting it) . . .

Eric Jorink and Ad Maas, eds., Newton and the Netherlands: How Isaac Newton was Fashioned in the Dutch Republic (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-9087281373, $37.

The Dutch Republic proved to be extremely receptive to the groundbreaking ideas of Isaac Newton (1643­-1727). Dutch scholars such as Willem Jacob Gravesande and Petrus van Musschenbroek played a crucial role in the dissemination of Newton’s work, not only in the Netherlands, but also in the rest of Europe. With Newton and the Netherlands, editors Eric Jorink and Ad Maas collect a variety of essays that seek to contextualize Newtonian ideas within Dutch intellectual history and examine Newton’s powerful influence on his contemporaries in the Netherlands.

Eric Jorink is researcher at the Huygens Institute for Netherlands History (Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences). He is the author of Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575-1715 (Leiden 2010). Ad Maas is curator at the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.