{"id":6984,"date":"2016-04-30T12:56:10","date_gmt":"2016-04-30T12:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=6984"},"modified":"2016-05-03T19:20:36","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T19:20:36","slug":"an-emlo-archive-the-dutch-church-in-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=6984","title":{"rendered":"An EMLO archive: the Dutch Church in London"},"content":{"rendered":"

The scholar John Henry [Jan, or Johann, Hendrick] Hessels spent most of his working life in Cambridge. The son of an engineer, he was born in 1836 and raised in Haarlem, and his entry in Venn’s\u00a0Alumni Cantabrigienses<\/em> tells us he ‘lived in Cambridge for some forty years, working daily in the University Library’. He studied the history of printing in Holland, he edited Lex Salica<\/a>, <\/em>and most important for early modern scholars, he transcribed and published the archive of the Dutch Church in London<\/a>. It is the metadata for these letters that EMLO is\u00a0publishing<\/a> volume by volume at present.\"hessels\"<\/p>\n

The archive consists of more than 4,400 letters which span the years 1544 to 1874.\u00a0Following a major\u00a0fire at the church of Austin Friars <\/a>in 1862, the correspondence archive and the Church’s library were deposited in the Library of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall. At this point the archive contained the correspondence of the\u00a0cartographer Abraham Ortelius<\/a> (which was published earlier this year in EMLO<\/a>) in addition to\u00a0the letters concerned with the affairs of the Church and its members. Hessels, who\u00a0was admitted to St John’s College, Cambridge, on 21 November 1894, arranged for the archive to be removed in 1884 to Cambridge University Library. There he prepared the letters for publication and, after completing\u00a0two volumes (that of the Ortelius\/Collius collection\u00a0in 1887 and\u00a0then\u00a0the letters of the members of the Church in 1889), worked to reorder a significant number of letters \u2014 from boxes that came to light subsequently \u2014 into a chronological listing for\u00a0a two-part third volume, which came out in 1897.<\/p>\n

To date EMLO has published records for the letters contained in\u00a0the first two volumes of Hessels’s\u00a0edition and will be working to upload metadata for\u00a0the letters in the third volume in the later months\u00a0of this year. This catalogue\u00a0is a welcome addition to the growing list of EMLO’s ‘archive collections’ which may be consulted\u00a0via the\u00a0thematic listing<\/a> page. With the exception of the Ortelius letters \u2014 these were dispersed via the saleroom to fund repairs to the Church following damage during wartime air raids \u2014 the manuscripts may be consulted today in the London Metropolitan Archives<\/a>. They make up\u00a0a fascinating collection and\u00a0chart the history of the Church and its members from the earliest days and the\u00a0grant, in 1550 by Royal Charter, of the\u00a0nave of the former friary church at Austin Friars. Following publication of\u00a0the third and final volume, Hessels returned to his work on Latin-Anglo-Saxon glossaries. The\u00a0publication of this\u00a0archive of the Dutch church in London has proved his magnum opus<\/em>, however, and volume two alone\u00a0enables scholars to consult letters from the first\u00a0superintendent of the Church John a Lasco [Jan \u0141aski], from Reformed theologians Theodore Beza, Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, and Jan\u00a0Utenhove, from scholars Lipsius and Junius, and from a host of politicians and diplomats, Walsingham, Burghley, and Duplessis Mornay to name just a few. We hope you will enjoy exploring\u00a0the letters from this rich and varied archive and will follow the links provided to consult Hessels’s printed texts. And as you make use of the\u00a0resource we\u00a0trust you will not emulate its editor too closely (for details you’ll have to consult Hessels’s\u00a0entry in Venn<\/a>)!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The scholar John Henry [Jan, or Johann, Hendrick] Hessels spent most of his working life in Cambridge. The son of an engineer, he was born in 1836 and raised in Haarlem, and his entry in Venn’s\u00a0Alumni Cantabrigienses tells us he ‘lived in Cambridge for some forty years, working daily in the University Library’. He studied […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}