By Emily Monty
Dr Emily Monty was the Fagel Collection Visiting Research Fellow in autumn 2022 hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute. She will present her work at the symposium on Unlocking the Fagel Collection: The Library and its Context (June 21-23, 2023).
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Trinity College Dublin had the remarkable opportunity to purchase the entire library of Hendrik Fagel the Younger (1765-1838), Greffier, or Chief Minister, of the Dutch Republic. Drawing on funds provided by the Erasmus Smith Foundation, TCD acquired the Fagel Library in 1802. This purchase included over 20,000 volumes and increased the number of books in the Trinity College Library by about 40 per cent.
While these books came from the collection of Hendrik the Younger, many of the volumes have a longer provenance, or history of ownership, not only because they were passed down through generations of Fagel patriarchs, but also because they were purchased second-hand. In fact, the Dutch Republic was a centre of public book auctions in the early modern period, making it a place where one could readily find and acquire antiquarian and used books.
The books in the Fagel Collection are remarkable for their high level of preservation, making them particularly valuable as objects of Dutch cultural heritage. Yet, for historians studying the Fagel Collection from a socio-cultural perspective, the near pristine quality of these books is a source of frustration, as the books yield very little information about how they were used. Bits of evidence appear, however, in annotations or inscriptions recording names and mottoes written by previous owners. In keeping with period conventions, these notations usually appear on the title page or blank endleaves of the books. In 1962 the Dutch historian Ernest Braches produced a bibliographic analysis of the Fagel Collection. As part of that study, he recorded names and signatures appearing in books in the Fagel Collection. His report (Annex V) can be consulted in the Research Collections reading room at TCD. My encounter with these inscriptions was more organic than Braches’, as it was not the main purpose of my research during my time as a Fellow last autumn. Nevertheless, these inscriptions captivated my interest for their potential to reveal new layers of history within the collection.
Focusing on the annotations in the Fagel Library, we might think of the collection of books as an alternative archive of family history. In the Fagel family archives, now preserved at the National Archives in The Hague, we find documents pertaining to the public and private lives of the Fagels. One account book from 1730 records a purchase made by François Fagel the Elder (1659-1746) – the grandfather of Hendrik the Younger – from Hendrik Scheurleer (1724-1768), a prominent bookseller in The Hague (see figure 4 in this blog post by Alex Alsemgeest). Traces of such transactions within the books themselves substantiate this kind of archival evidence. For example, a loose sheet of paper inside an undated atlas by the Dutch printmaker and publisher Frederick de Wit (1630-1706), notes that that book was acquired from Scheurleer. Could this be one of the volumes mentioned in the account book? Either way, it supports archival evidence for the commercial relationship between the Greffier and the bookseller.
In addition to helping us understand how the Fagels acquired their books, evidence of sales or previous ownership found within the volumes also establishes the provenance of books in the collection. Fag.A.4.36, a book published in Amsterdam in 1622 that describes the circumnavigation of the globe by the Dutch explorer Jacob Le Maire, has an annotation on the first free endleaf. There, the previous, and perhaps the first owner of the book, wrote their name and the year 1654.
The Natural History of the Antilles by Louis de Poincy, published in Rotterdam in 1658, also has a previous owner’s name scribbled on a free endleaf. Beyond a name, these kinds of annotations provide precious little information, especially when they are difficult to decipher. But the very presence of such notations points to the vibrant market for used books in the Dutch Republic and provides valuable evidence that this exchange was an important source for the Fagel Library.
In addition to shedding light on previous owners, some annotations place the books within a broader intellectual context. A volume of Bartolomé de las Casas’s bestselling account of the horrific treatment of Indigenous Americans by the Spanish, published in Frankfurt am Main in 1598 with famous illustrations by Theodor de Bry, allows us to reflect on this possibility. It is inscribed on the title page with a previous owner’s name and a Latin motto. While the name has been crossed out, the Latin motto is still legible: non si male nunc, et olim sic erit. Taken from Horace, this phrase is an expression of tepid optimism in the face of hardship: “If matters go on badly at present, they may take a better turn in the hereafter” (Stone, 77). This motto could be a personal one. This same motto was inscribed by a different hand in a book on Euclidian geometry now in the collection of the John Hay Library in Providence, Rhode Island, suggesting that it was more widely adopted.
Possibly, however, the motto was even meant as an expression of hope for a less violent future in the Americas. The latter interpretation is particularly appealing when the inscription is read alongside the vignettes that illustrate the title-page, where a captive Native American is chained at the centre while other natives run from gunfire, lie wounded, and lug precious materials to the greedy Spanish conquistadors. The rest of the volume is pristine, making it difficult to draw any further conclusions about the opinions of the annotator.
Noticing these annotations in the Fagel volumes reinforced for me that books acquire meaning over time and in relation to their readers. Recognizing this, I am prompted to reflect on Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the biography of things. The Fagel Collection is made up of thousands of individual books, each with their own history of production, ownership, and use. In writing this blog-post and sharing photographs taken over the course of my time studying the Fagel Library at Trinity College, I hope to make these marks of early modern book ownership accessible to the readers of this blog, who form a new kind of audience for the Fagel Collection. Like a letter in a bottle thrown to sea, I also hope that these pictures will be found by other scholars, so that, together, we can continue to piece together the rich history of the Fagel Collection, and the individual books held within.
Resources:
Bostoen, K. J. S. et al. Book Sales Catalogues Online: Book Auctioning in the Dutch Republic, ca. 1500-ca. 1800. Ed. K. J. S. Bostoen et al. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Jackson, Timothy R. Frozen in Time: The Fagel Collection in the Library of Trinity College Dublin. Dublin, Ireland: The Lilliput Press, 2016.
Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64-92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Pettegree, Andrew and Arthur der Weduwen. The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Repertorium van Nederlandse publieke boekenveilingen 1660-1805 (Repertoire of Dutch Public Book Auctions 1660-1805).
Stone, Jon R. The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations: The Illiterati’s Guide to Latin Maxims, Mottoes, Proverbs and Sayings. New York: Routledge, 2005.