Op 4 en 5 april bracht een forse afvaardiging van de Afdeling Nederlandse Taal en Cultuur van de Radboud Universiteit een bezoek aan onze collega’s aan de Uniwersytet Wrocławski in Polen. De studie Nederlands trekt daar jaarlijks vele tientallen studenten: in totaal zijn het er zelfs 300!

Op de eerste dag gaf prof. dr. Lotte Jensen de studenten een lezing over de Nederlandse identiteit. Daarna volgde een expert meeting tussen de Nijmegenaren en onze Poolse collega’s: om de beurt vertelden we elkaar over lopend of afgerond onderzoek. Zelf vertelde ik over mijn onderzoek naar de zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlandse beeldvorming over Polen als de graanschuur van de Republiek. De volgende dag begon met een bezoek aan de Bijzondere Collecties van de universiteitsbibliotheek, waar dr. Joanna Skubisz ons meerdere oude Nederlandse drukken liet zien. We vervolgden de dag in de plaatselijke afdeling van het Muzeum Narodowe (Nationaal Museum), alwaar dr. Małgorzata Dowlaszewicz onze gids was. Tot slot kregen we een prachtige rondleiding door de historische stad, verzorgd door prof. dr. Stefan Kiedroń. Het bezoek was bovendien op touw gezet door dr. Jan Urbaniak.

Een blog door prof. dr. Lotte Jensen over dit bijzonder prettige en succesvolle bezoek is hier te vinden.

On the 18th of March, I presented a paper at the 65th Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, which took place in Toronto, Canada, from the 17th to the 19th of March. My paper was entitled ‘The Corn Shed of the World: The Evolution of a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Image of Poland-Lithuania’.  As stated in my abstract:

The Dutch Republic owed much of its wealth to the trade in Baltic grain, most of which came from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The importance of this trade is clear from both economic and political developments. There is however also plenty of textual and visual evidence, which has not yet been taken into account. Using a variety of seventeenth-century sources, such as pamphlets, letters, travel accounts, poems and engravings, I will show how widespread the Dutch understanding of Poland-Lithuania’s pivotal role was, and how a Dutch image of Poland-Lithuania as a granary and fertile land of plenty developed over time. It will become clear that the Polish-Swedish wars of the 1620s and 1650s, as well as Dutch migration to Prussia, were crucial in this process. In addition, Joost van den Vondel and the Amsterdam agenda played a vital part in presenting Poland-Lithuania as “the corn shed of the world.”

This week, I presented a paper at the Monarchy and Modernity since 1500 conference, organised by the University of Cambridge on January 8 and 9. My paper was entitled A(n Im)perfect System. Dutch views of the Polish-Lithuanian Political System in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. I discussed why the state system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – even though it was similar to popular rebulican theories formulated in the Northern Netherlands around the year 1600 – was apparently never considered a serious option by Dutch political thinkers. I argued that this was due to the negative opinion the Dutch had of Polish-Lithuanian nobles, who were said to enjoy too much freedom and mistreat their farmers. In the eighteenth century, the ‘chaotic’ Polish Sejm meetings gave rise to the idea that Poland-Lithuana was an anarchic state, rather than a model of freedom. Since then, a disorderly situation is often called ‘een Poolse landdag’.

Two colleagues from Radboud University Nijmegen also presented a paper. Prof. dr. Lotte Jensen and Fons Meijer MA analysed the responses of four Dutch kings to major natural disasters during the nineteenth century. See Dealing with Disasters for more information.