The Netherlands were relatively late with the legislation of author's copyright in 1912. This does not mean that feelings of intellectual ownership or possibilities to profit from literary writings did not exist up until then. Various seventeenth-century authors shared their concerns about the ways others handled their work, and we know several examples of authors who profited financially from their literary work, for example by negotiating cleverly or by self-publishing. 

A source that enables us to achieve more insight in these kinds of early feelings of ownership and possibilities of financial advancement related to literary books, is the booksellers' privilege which could be requested by authors. This project systematically analyses these privileges and requests in order to answer the question how ideas about ownership and financial advancement of literary authors developed during the long seventeenth century. Do the privileges confirm the widely shared hypothesis that authors became increasingly aware of their ownership and financial rights or were ideas about an author's copyrights always present? 

This long duree history of changing conceptions and designations of knowledge builds on existing scholarship on early modern knowledge societies and provides much-needed insight in the formation and modification of understandings of knowledge.

Understandings of knowledge are notoriously complicated in historiography. The use of concepts is fluid, multi-layered, and they have various, context-specific meanings. Moreover, interpretations and uses change over time. This makes it hard to speak of stable, well-defined practices or domains of knowing. Such conceptual unclarity is a particularly relevant problem for the history of knowledge. This group takes up the challenge by developing a multidisciplinary collection of essays discussing changing uses and understandings of knowledge in the Low Countries from roughly 1500- 1900.

https://nias.knaw.nl/themegroup/understanding-knowledge-in-the-low-countries-1500-1900/

Women Writers as Knowledgeable Literary Authors 1600-1800

Research Question: How did the conceptualization of poetic and other types of knowledge in literary publications of women writers contribute to the shaping of female knowledgeable authors in the 17th and 18th centuries?

Project Description
Our subproject focuses on the conceptualization of poetic knowledge in relation to knowledge from other domains (such as religion or science) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We specifically examine how female authors defined the concept of ‘knowledge’ in the paratexts of their literary publications, such as dedications to patrons, dedications to readers, and laudatory poems, written by the female authors of the publications themselves as well as by other (male and female) authors. These preliminaries were often used to explicitly discuss and defend the authority or even superiority of the woman writer, in order to justify both its quality and the fact that a woman’s work was made public. How did women connect their poetic knowledge to other types of knowledge, and to what extent did they represent themselves as skilled literary authors? By analyzing paratexts, we aim to understand if and how women were shaped (by themselves as well as others) as ‘knowledgeable authors’.

• dr. Feike Dietz

• Marieke Hendriksen; Alexander Marr; Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis; Ann Sophie Lehmann; Verena Lehmbrock; Bruno Boute

• Anna-Luna Post MA
• prof. dr. Arnoud Visser

Up until now, researchers did not succeed in describing this history accurately. This project aims to integrate recent insights in the situation in the Dutch Republic with the debates around the traditional narrative of profitable authorship. The traditional narrative placed patronage and professionalism in chronological succession, whereas recent insights show that patronage was not replaced by professionalism, but co-existed in alternate forms. Patronage and professionalism were much more entangled in the Dutch Republic than in other European countries and the Dutch history of profitable authorship thus needs to be part of a new European narrative.