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SKILLNET– Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks
Dear volunteer,

We are experiencing the largest global social crisis since the end of the Second World War, and this is nowhere more painfully evident than in hospitals and nursing homes around the world. Therefore, I sincerely hope that you manage to deal with this situation well and that the corona virus has spared you and your loved ones as much as possible. Members of the SKILLNET team, like everyone else, have experienced that the health impact is huge, and we are experiencing its social consequences on a daily basis. Nevertheless, we are able to do our work reasonably well via the computer. However, we are forced to make more use of 'remote conversations' than before. Strikingly enough, this is exactly how a letter was defined in the 16th century: as part of a 'conversation with an absent friend'. In a sense, today we are still a Republic of Letters, one that is even closer and larger than before, and in which the interaction is much faster as well, because we resort to social media for every little thing we want to share. The written 'conversation at a distance' has also increased in recent years: the traditional telephone traffic has been reduced by the many written contact moments via WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook. This means that more data will become available for later generations of historians to analyse how we respond to the corona crisis, because, as the ancients said: 'Verba volant, scripta manent' (Words fly away, but writing remains).

Written letters allow us to see that there is much in the Republic of Letters that is familiar to us. Take the letter that the French top official Jacques-Auguste de Thou sent from Paris in 1602 to his learned friend Joseph Scaliger in Leiden: 'We received the news here that the contagion is striking the place where you live very violently. Or, three years later, the letter from another Frenchman to the same Scaliger: 'I can say that here, in all the provinces of France, we have been struck by a contagious dysentery which causes a lot of blood to flow. In all the cities of Champagne and Burgundy there are many deaths, and even more so in the villages, where there is no help. I saw that for myself when I passed through, and I myself have been ill.' Or take the scholar Isaac Casaubon, who normally lived in Paris, but in 1606, only a year later, wrote to a friend elsewhere in France: 'I am writing this letter to you from La Bretonnière, 8 miles outside of Paris. I fled here with my family because of the plague.' Three waves of deadly contagious diseases in less than four years. This is also what these learned letters really make you feel: the fear and horror a contagious disease causes, and its disruptive influence on everyday life.

Compared to this, we in the SKILLNET project have little reason to complain; in fact, now that people are more at home, the number of volunteers contributing to CEMROL is increasing. And for that we are all the more grateful – and when I say 'we', I also mean the new project members, who are introducing themselves below and who are busy processing the many data you are so diligently gathering.

Dirk van Miert
project leader

New SKILLNET team members introduce themselves

Liliana Melgar (data specialist)
I am Liliana Melgar. I have a background in library and information sciences and since April I have been working as a data specialist in the SKILLNET project. I support the researchers and look for solutions in the field of data. This usually involves the semi-automatic extraction, harmonisation and linking of historical person and place names from data sets from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. In this way I facilitate the two methodological approaches of the research team. Firstly, large-scale social network analysis to unravel the social structure of the Republic of Letters and its development over time, to which CEMROL contributes. And secondly, semiautomatic analysis of a large corpus of texts to trace changes in the meaning of key ethical concepts, such as 'sharing knowledge' and 'identity', through time and space.

Other new team members are:

Lars Punt (intern)


Teunie Rouwendal (intern)

Nathalie Smit (intern)

Article in EU Research

The latest issue of EU Research features an interview with project leader Dirk van Miert. EU Research is a journal that presents research sponsored by the European Research Council to a worldwide audience. In the article, Dirk talks about the background and methods of the SKILLNET project. In particular, he discusses CEMROL and our volunteers! Read the interview here: https://issuu.com/euresearcher/docs/digital_magazine_eur22/72.

Data sprint CEMROL

Because we would like to organise another public meeting, but are unable to meet physically, we are organising an online data sprint. In a data sprint you collect as much data as possible with a group in one meeting. We will meet each other online on Friday 26 June at 3:00PM via a video conference programme. We will start with a short update of the project. After that, everyone will work in CEMROL from their own computer. To ensure interaction and increase the atmosphere, we will hold a knowledge quiz about the early modern era in between. The meeting will be in Dutch, but another meeting in English might follow. If you would like to attend, please register via skillnet@uu.nl.

Volunteer in the spotlight: Marianne van der Weiden

In May, we held an online interview with Marianne van der Weiden, a committed CEMROL volunteer from the very start.

Could you tell us more about your background and what you do in daily life?

I first studied psychology in Utrecht, but when it was difficult to find a job after graduating (in the late 70's) I embarked on studying classics while working in an administrative job, because in high school I always liked Latin and Greek best. After a year, I found a 'real' job, but continued to combine that with studying classics. Even after graduation I combined both interests: I obtained a PhD position to publish the Dithyrambs of Pindar, and also worked at the VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands). Eventually, I opted for a career in (higher) education policy. Since 2012, I have been working as a freelance auditor/secretary for external assessments of educational programs in higher education. In order to resume my old interest, especially if the freelance work is a bit less (as it is now), in 2014-2015 I translated a Greek novel (Heliodorus, an Ethiopian love story) and now I am working on a translation of the Cyropaedia of Xenophon. That keeps me sharp.

Could you tell us something about how you spend your free time?

Apart from the above, I prefer to spend my time cycling. Holidays are always cycling holidays, and preferably long distances. I have crossed many countries in Europe and have cycled four times in the US from east to west. I also like to make myself useful, for instance a few years ago as a language buddy at VluchtelingenWerk (Dutch Council for Refugees), or soon as a home school buddy at Taal doet meer ('Language does more'). And finally, I like books and language a lot.

Why did you decide to volunteer for CEMROL?

I read about CEMROL in the alumni magazine of the UU. The combination of being able to do something useful and working on/with books made me enthusiastic. At first I expected it to be a more social activity, but the advantage of CEMROL is that you can do it at any time, for as short or as long a period of time as you like.

How do you experience marking and transcribing the metadata of letters?

What I like about marking and transcribing is the puzzling, coming on the names of people you once heard about, such as Erasmus, Hugo de Groot, Maarten Luther and Boerhaave, and the broad range of subjects written about. I find it funny that there are so many different spellings of place names and dates, so many variations to greet each other and to express pleasure or impatience when yet another letter has been received, or not. In the beginning there were still some technical imperfections in the software and it was sometimes difficult to work with, but that has improved over time. I think it would be good if the statistics of the number of marked and still to be marked letters would be updated more often. Now it seems as if nothing has happened for weeks. My preference lately has been marking, because I often started with transcribing Latin texts, but soon I got letters in another language on my screen, and I didn't want that. Maybe that's solved by now. 

How much time do you spend on CEMROL?

My time investment depends on how busy I am. Work and my Greek translation come first. But usually I try to work on CEMROL at least a couple of times a week for an hour or so. It's pretty addictive.

What did you learn from CEMROL?

Sometimes I read parts of the content of a letter I'm working on. I continue to find it astonishing how people change little over the centuries: between the lines on scientific and religious subjects there are sometimes personal expressions that witness to that. I prefer to work on Latin letters. I think my contribution to these is most useful, because the majority of letters is in Latin and because more people will feel at home with English, French or German. I like to attend the public meetings organised around or by CEMROL, both to meet other volunteers and to hear how our work contributes to the research.

Epistolary Imagery in Early Modern Genre and History Paintings

by Robin Buning

The article below follows up on the blogpost about epistolary imagery in early modern portraits on the SKILLNET website.

Letters became a particularly popular theme in Dutch genre paintings, or genre scenes. Genre paintings depict fictitious people engaged in common activities. Those with letters commonly portray a person in a domestic setting writing or reading a letter – often with an accessory figure, such as a friend, or a servant or postman delivering a letter, or waiting to take it away. Over time these accessory figures became increasingly rare, possibly because the love letter became the most popular subject of genre painting. This emotion, not seldomly expressed by erotic symbols, was regarded as a private matter and such letters were obviously opened and read without spectators.


Young Woman in an Interior, Receiving a Letter (c.1670), by Pieter de Hooch

So the depiction of letters is not just reserved for paintings with scholars in them, but refers to epistolary culture in general – although there are, of course, also genre paintings portraying men of learned professions in their study holding letters, such as lawyers and apothecaries:


A Lawyer Seated at a Desk Reading a Letter, by Adriaen van Ostade

History painting
Genre painting is closely related to history (in the original sense, meaning 'story') painting, which depicts a moment in a narrative story or a specific action instead of a static subject. The subjects of history paintings are taken from the Bible, classical mythology, or historical events. Letters do not often occur in history paintings, but when they do they are not depicted randomly but as part of a decisive turn in the story, such as in this scene in which Christina Gyllenstierna, a Swedish resistance leader against Christian II of Denmark, receives a letter of amnesty after her capitulation:


Christina Gyllenstierna with the Letter of Safe Conduct before Christian II, by Pehr Hilleström

Comparable to the sometimes vague boundaries between genre paintings and portraits (see the blogpost about epistolary imagery in early modern portraits), it can be difficult to distinguish between genre paintings and history paintings. For people who are less knowledgeable about biblical, mythological and historical themes, or who are unable to read the iconography of such paintings – and that increasingly holds for us, modern viewers – it can be difficult to recognise the stories told. Also, sometimes scenes are depicted in a contemporary setting. For instance, this Biblical scene, by Jan Steen, of Bathsheba receiving a letter from King David:


Bathsheba Receiving David's Letter (c.1656-1660), by Jan Steen

Domestic settings
Above all, the epistolary theme is an expression of the fashion for letters in the early modern period. The rise of the use of letters in genre paintings coincided with that of the depiction of women in the bourgeois homes that were their domain. Letters contributed to the modern and fashionable image of these women. Whilst the depicted in portraits almost always are the typical ‘men of letters’, in genre paintings letters often occur as an attribute of well-dressed ladies in sumptuous interiors.


Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid (c.1670-1671), by Johannes Vermeer

Occasionally one also finds other high-society scenes, such as a military officer in the field writing a letter to his lover, but Dutch paintings also depict rural scenes featuring letters, which underlines the widespread literacy in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic:


Peasants Reading a Letter, Drinking and Smoking in an Inn, Figures by a Fireplace Beyond, in the manner of David Teniers the Younger 

In portraits letters functioned as an attribute of learning that advertised the literary status of the sitters. In genre paintings, however, the people depicted are fictitious and the letters not only act as a fashion statement, but also convey symbolic meanings. They are almost always a symbol of love. This fashion was started in the early 1630s by Dirck Hals, one of the pioneers of  genre painting. He has the reputation to have been the first to depict women reading letters in domestic interiors. In his Seated Woman Tearing a Letter the tearing-up functions as a warning for love:


Seated Woman Tearing a Letter (1631), by Dirck Hals

The popularity of the love letter theme played a central role in the shift, around the middle of the seventeenth century, from scenes of the daily life of common people to that of the upper class, particularly of women. Other painters associated with the genre of the love letter are Gerard ter Borch the Younger, Frans van Mieris, Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher, Aert van der Neer, Vermeer (see his Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid above), Jan Steen, and De Hooch (see his Young Woman in an Interior, Receiving a Letter above). Their paintings of women – and men, for that matter – reading, writing, receiving and dispatching letters would become the model for painters in the rest of Europe, especially in France.

For those who want to see more examples of genre paintings involving letters, see the galery on the SKILLNET website.
The research leading to these results is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 724972).

 
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