An edition of the 1697 travel journal of Benjamin Bullivant, with short biography of Bullivant and a brief history of the New Netherlands colony. Bullivant travelled from Boston to New York, New...Show moreAn edition of the 1697 travel journal of Benjamin Bullivant, with short biography of Bullivant and a brief history of the New Netherlands colony. Bullivant travelled from Boston to New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware about 30 years after the Dutch colony was taken over by England. Bullivant describes many aspects of the colony and meets with many key colonial figures throughout his travel. His remarks include observations of some of the remaining Dutch people and cultural heritage which still existed at that time.Show less
The nineteenth century witnessed a change in reading behaviour and in readership. With the changes in readership, the newspaper coverage on books and book related businesses in the Netherlands must...Show moreThe nineteenth century witnessed a change in reading behaviour and in readership. With the changes in readership, the newspaper coverage on books and book related businesses in the Netherlands must also have changed. But how was this change reflected in newspapers? This thesis aims to give an answer to that question. It will review newspapers from three years: 1815, 1850 and 1890 in order to present a broad perspective on the changes during the century. The focus will be on newspapers from larger cities and regions, and on national newspapers. This means that the newspapers that are featured in this study will, for the most part, be from the western parts of The Netherlands.Show less
This thesis concerns a new edition of the manuscript Recollections of a Few Days Spent in Holland in August 1826. This manuscript is preserved in the Special Collections of Leiden University...Show moreThis thesis concerns a new edition of the manuscript Recollections of a Few Days Spent in Holland in August 1826. This manuscript is preserved in the Special Collections of Leiden University Libraries (BPL 3204). It was written by the Englishman William Geary who, together with his sister Sophia, visited Holland for a week in 1826. Brother and sister embarked at Great Yarmouth and after a rather uncomfortable crossing their Dutch tour started in Rotterdam. In a short period of time they also visited The Hague, Amsterdam and a few small villages such as Scheveningen, Broek in Waterland and Katwijk. Geary really made an effort to make his journal entertaining for the reader, and he criticized the dullness and wordiness of many travelogues. Some sights such as the Huis ten Bosch palace and a workhouse in Amsterdam are described in detail, but he never loses himself in endless lists of facts. Here and there Geary even adds an amusing anecdote and he describes the Dutch customs and habits that strike him. In this edition the text of the original manuscript has been edited to enhance readability. A theoretical framework concerning editing has been included to account for the editorial choices that the editor has made. Additionally, a historical context and explanatory annotations are added to provide the reader with more tools to interpret the manuscript’s content.Show less
During an internship project at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands; KB) in The Hague the library’s Special Collections’ department requested a project be set up to...Show moreDuring an internship project at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands; KB) in The Hague the library’s Special Collections’ department requested a project be set up to examine the catalogue objects then described only as ‘collections’. Previous digitization projects had shown that these collections often contained prints or Plano’s that had remained uncatalogued as individual objects. The goal for this Plano project was to find and identify the objects in these collections and add them to the library’s catalogue as new, individual entities. During the first stages of the project over 2500 individual prints were discovered to be part of these ‘collection’ catalogue objects. Among these were eight folders of collected materials accompanied by handwritten notes and indexes. These folders were identified as the work of historian Georges-Joseph Gérard (1734-1814). This thesis argues that the eight folders are a part of Gérard’s planned Monumenta Historiae Belgicae project, a large-scale project with the intention of collecting all available source material on the history of the Southern Netherlands. Was the project important enough for Gérard to cut prints out of undamaged books, or did he acquire the source materials through other methods? The folders from the KB show that Gérard was not only an avid note-taker, but also a collector of prints.Show less
