The practice of community: humanist friendship during the Dutch revolt.(Biography)

In 1574 Abraham Ortelius, the renowned Flemish cartographer and antiquarian, began to collect signatures, inscriptions, and pictures from his international network of friends. They entered their contributions in an album, called an "album amicorum" (book of friends). Given the lack of geographical mobility during the Dutch revolt, Ortelius's friends occasionally circulated this album amongst themselves. Others sent their contributions directly to him in Antwerp. As the album grew in scope and prestige over the following twenty-four years, inscriptions were included on behalf of deceased friends. Eventually an index was added by Ortelius's nephew, but as Ortelius reached the end of his life further entries were added. By the time he had died the album contained more than 130 names, making it one of the most distinguished signature collections of the time, including such illustrious figures as Jean Bodin, Justus Lipsius, William Camden, and Gerard Mercator. (1) The contributors cross generational, geographical, and religious boundaries. What was the purpose of collecting such an album? What does it tell us about the humanist culture of the time? And why did a diverse group of academics, artisans, and merchant scholars decide to celebrate friendship?

The first friendship albums (alba amicorum) were kept during the mid-1540s by students at Wittenberg. (2) These students used books (often the Emblem Book of Alciati, or a Bible, or a work by Melanchthon) as albums in which they collected autographs and insignia from professors in Wittenberg and the neighboring protestant universities that they visited in the course of their study. Entries were sometimes written in the margins of these books, sometimes on interleaved pages, and sometimes on liminary pages at the front or back. Most of the entries are brief salutations with short epigrams or quotations. These have been analyzed into various statistical forms by Wolfgang Klose. (3) It is not surprising that most of the quotations come from classical sources. Ovid is the most frequently cited author, no doubt due to the style of his writing as much as to the wellspring of mythological reference found in his works. Third, fourth, and fifth most quoted authors are no less surprising: Cicero, Augustine, and Seneca. It may, however, be worth noting the strong presence of Stoic sources, more common than Aristotelian or Platonic ones. Again, the style of the writings and the nature of the epigrammatic form may have a lot to do with this. Nonetheless, what is most striking about the breakdown of these statistics is that Philip Melanchthon is the second most quoted author, comfortably ahead of Cicero and not far behind Ovid. The next most quoted contemporary writers are Stigelius and Luther, both with fewer than half as many references as Melanchthon. (4) Generally speaking, the Lutheran influence is clear and perhaps not so unusual for a fashion that began in Wittenberg. However, these figures are drawn from Wolfgang Klose's analysis of all alba up to 1573, by which time their geographical range had spread substantially. (5)

The later history of the fashion for friendship albums is complicated. As the fashion spread, it became less uniform. Alba were kept as travel diaries, as sketchbooks; many were still used as students' signature albums. To some extent, early Dutch alba followed the original Wittenberg model. For example, the album of Janus Dousa was initially kept as a record of those he met in his college years in Louvain, Douai, and Paris. By the 1570s a number of nonacademic alba were being kept, though universities remained an important setting in which contributions could be sought. (6) In this article I will explore the Album Amicorum of Abraham Ortelius, collected 1574-1596, for evidence of the multiple sets of social relations in which friendship inhered in the early modern period.

Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) was a Flemish merchant and scholar who began his career selling "curiosities" and maps in Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century. During the 1560s he began to produce his own original maps, and to compile a reference work containing redactions of the most reliable maps of each area of the known world. This was to become his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), the first modern atlas, and the work that secured his reputation as a scholar. In subsequent decades he produced expanded editions of his atlas, a small publication of his collection of ancient coins, various antiquarian studies, and two major dictionaries of ancient geographical place names. He pursued these studies in a period of unprecedented turmoil in the Low Countries. During the 1560s, Dutch and Flemish nobles expressed increasing dissatisfaction with the political and religious policies of their absentee prince, Philip II of Spain. In 1566 the situation became critical, descending into armed conflict in the following year. Philip's response was to attempt forceful suppression of dissent, both political and religious. However, after initial success, the Spanish administration was unable to finish the task of quelling the revolt, resulting in what has come to be known as the "Eighty Years War," during which the modern divisions between Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg took shape. These divisions rapidly adopted the contours of confessional disputes, dividing families, friends, and colleagues along religious as well as political lines. Yet for much of the last quarter of the sixteenth century these distinctions still seemed far from settled or permanent. (7) Within the republic of letters the fissiparous and eirenic existed side by side--while many humanists cashed in on the opportunities afforded by factional dispute, others made their careers by pursuing collaboration and compromise. Indeed, the same person could pursue both paths without any apparent awareness of the contradiction. In this context micro-historical studies of friendship networks open up rich seams of intellectual and cultural tress-work that reveal a great deal about social dynamics and the discourse of early modern friendship.

The Album Amicorum of Ortelius is a small booklet (16 X 11 cm) originally containing 145 pages. Although the album has been clipped at the edges and twenty pages are now missing, it is possible to reconstruct the contents through analysis of the index attached by Ortelius's nephew. This index is an important reminder that the album does not have an author in the modern sense; hence attempts to find coherence within it must have recourse to the 137 contributors. (8) To some extent chance must have affected who inscribed their names on the album and who never got the opportunity. The piecemeal construction of the album adds to its value as a register of sixteenth-century friendships, not only as a broader and more independent sample of attitudes, but also as a gauge of the extent to which friendship occurs in and through social circumstance.