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A Genre of Their Own:
Kiliaen van Rensselaer as Guide to the Reading and Writing Practices of Early Modern Businessmen
Donna Merwick
| ONE hundred years ago, the New York State Library published the Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts. The volume included memoranda, notarized documents, certificates of purchase for land near present-day Albany, the log of a ship crossing the Atlantic, a petition of colonists departing from Amsterdam to New Netherland, inventories and contracts with colonists, and correspondence with West India Company officials. Many of the documents were kept in Kiliaen van Rensselaer's letter book, a compilation of manuscripts numbered from folio 1 to folio 183. In all the volume set out 804 pages of largely unpublished material.1 |
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The 1908 volume was intended as an adjunct to celebrations planned for the following year. The state prepared to mark the tercentenary of Henry Hudson's discovery of the Hudson River and, in effect, the founding of New York. Publication of the Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts was itself also a kind of celebration. Prefatory pages froze into proud cooperation the three institutions that had collaborated in its appearance: the New York State Library, the New York State Education Department, and the University of the State of New York. The leading Dutch New York families were also there to say something congratulatory about themselves and to claim a guardianship of the seventeenth-century past that was the privilege of the state's social, as much as its academic, elite.2 The volume's editor and translator, A. J. F. van Laer, meticulously searched out additional sources, supplying supplementary information in about 1,250 footnotes and presenting forty-six pages of biographical data on Rensselaerswyck settlers from 1630 to 1657. |
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Since 1908 scores of historians have published studies making use of the Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts. Some have teased out the colony's evolution from a farming community struggling for survival under the first patroon's oversight to a manorial estate claiming eight hundred fifty thousand acres in 1685. Others have used it to answer questions about Dutch-Amerindian encounters, the mutation of a Dutch spatial imagination in the presence of a North American frontier, or the rate of change colonists brought to traditional European agricultural occupations and habitats. The volume has also been the basis for studies concerning Dutch practices in exploiting the fur trade as well as the rivalry between the West India Company and the patroons. Several scholars have done longitudinal studies, carrying the history of Rensselaerswyck forward from years as a manor under English rule (after 1664) to the 1766 tenant riots. All have recognized that there are questions that only the Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts can answer. And many that it cannot.3 |
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Van Laer envisioned a future in which scholars would use the published manuscripts to address questions about colonial North America then being explored in their disciplines. But the Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts can be read for meanings in another sense. It can answer what the papers meant to Van Rensselaer or, a more valuable consideration, how he experienced them. Posed in a register that moves out from him to the seventeenth-century Netherlands society of which he was a part, the same question asks whether there is a relationship between the production of such mercantile papers and the choice of a dominantly commercial society to remain a commercial society. Why is it that the men and women of seventeenth-century New Netherland left an archive where understandings of reality and self-realization were largely worked out in account books, business correspondence, official reports, notarized papers, and records of local judicial proceedings that were actually the operations of courts merchant? Researchers will be greatly disappointed if they are searching for Dutch equivalents of a polemicist writing New England's Tears for Old England Fears or John Smith and William Bradford employing familiar poetic or dramatic genres to shape the unknown North American world "into texts intelligible to Europeans."4 |
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