Union Académique Internationale

Project nº71, adopted in 2005

Corpus Humanisticarum Praefationum (Europa Humanistica)

Since 2001, the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands participates in a pan-European project entitled Europa Humanistica. In this project, a large number of prefaces to early modern editions of classical and postclassical Greek or Latin texts published between ca. 1480-ca. 1670, has been and will be edited and discussed.

The principal aim of the project is to offer a series of sources that enable researchers to trace the ways in which humanist scholars handled these texts. The project will shed light on both the processing of manuscripts and the choice and evaluation of the edited texts as well as on the mutual relationships the philologists maintained to advance their work.

The project was initiated by the Paris-based Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) and counts twelve participating institutions. It is carried out by scholars from several European countries who edit and annotate the prefaces to these editions made in their own neighbourhood. The volumes have been and will be published by Brepols publishers in Turnhout (Belgium). In 2018 nineteen volumes have been published on Bohemia, the Carpathians, France, Germany, Italy and Moravia; other ones are foreseen for Austria, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Hungary, Mexico, Portugal, and the Netherlands.

The prefaces of the northern Netherlands are edited by drs. Steven Surdèl, under the supervision of Prof. Henk Nellen (2001-2014) and, after his retirement, Dr habil. Jan Bloemendal (2014-present). The Dutch project covers sixteenth-century editions of classical and post-classical texts by humanists from the northern Netherlands up to 1575, when a university was established in Leiden. In close cooperation their colleagues from the Catholic University of Leuven (Prof. Dirk Sacré, Dr. Jeanine De Landtsheer, Prof. Jan Papy and Prof. Monique Mund-Dopchie) will edit those from the southern Netherlands. Since in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire the Low Countries were still under one single ruler, in 2003 a list of humanist editors was established and a division was made according to the educational centres that had their own printing offices: Deventer (editions by Pafraet), where works by Rodolphus Agricola, Johannes Murmellius en Gisbertus Longolius were printed, Haarlem (van Zuren), with editions by Hadrianus Junius and Dirck Volckerstz. Coornhert, and Antwerp (de Laet and Cock), with the editors Theodorus Pulmannus and Cornelis Van Ghistele, are treated by the Dutch scholars, whereas their Belgian colleagues will cover the editions of the Collegium Trilingue in Leuven (mainly printed by Martens). These publications will give important humanists from the northern and southern Netherlands, who are still all too often overshadowed by the figure of Erasmus, the attention that is due to them.

In 2018 Nellen and Surdèl have completed the list of printers and the collection and transcription of prefaces, but the final redaction, the introduction and the annotation are still in progress. Two volumes on the Netherlands (Les Pay-Bas des Humanistes, c. 1480-c. 1575) are to be expected, one on the northern Netherlands, one on the southern provinces.