Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/284

 276 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April historiography is not clearly shown, all the names of the Dutch historians of the two centuries reappearing in every chapter. The earliest authors in whom the influence of the Renaissance is noticeable, Cornelius Aurelius (1460-1523 or later), Renerus Snoyus (1477-1537), and even Gerardus Noviomagus (Geldenhauer) (1482-1542), are yet in most essentials medieval. Their innovations are to be found mainly in their treatment of the Roman period. They gave that prominence to the Batavi, mentioned in the much-admired Caesar and Tacitus, which in popular Dutch history they never wholly lost. At the same time, and while they were disputing very acutely, and with all the heat which provincial chauvinism could engender, about the limits of the old Insula Batavorum, whether it included the whole of the county of Holland, or part of it only with a part of the duchy of Gelderland, they scarcely raised a question, or at the most only very timidly hinted their doubts, about the most extravagant legends from which the traditional history of the middle ages was constructed. It was only a later generation, men like Janus Dousa (Johan van der Does, 1575-1604) and Petrus Scriverius (who flourished in the first decade of the seventeenth century), who, being Calvinists as well as humanists, made short work of those tales as ridiculoxis ' inventions of the monks '. Historical criticism now reached a high grade of development. Especially Arnoldus Buchelius of Utrecht (1565-1641) was an expert in the inter- pretation and in the use of medieval documents. He was careful to publish old diplomata accurately. He had noticed that each succeeding age had its particular handwriting, and he adds : ' Atque inde optimam Kpiaiv nos sumere licebit verorum fictitiorumque monumentorum.' At the same time insight into historical problems deepened. One of the central problems which the history of the early middle ages offered was that of the coming into existence of the county of Holland. There are a number of documents, mostly grants of land, some very difficult of interpretation, some false, with which historians had, and have still to work. Dousa not only sifted the true from the false very creditably, but he also had a good notion of the general history of the count's office in the later Carolingian period. These scholars, Buchelius perhaps especially, had acquired a much better grasp of the continuous change to which all human affairs are subject, but to which the medieval mind had been curiously blind. In the same period, however, historical science, which seemed to be progressing so steadily, was led into dangerous tracks by some brilliant men, whose influence was all to the bad. The chief wrong-doer was no less a person than Grotius, whose Z/i6er de antiquitate reijniblicae Batavicae (1610) was a monument of perverted ingenuity. His object was to prove that the states of Holland had been ever since the days of the Batavi the bearers of the sovereignty ; also, that Holland had always been free and independent. He therefore pictures a ' Batavian state ' which is simply drawn from the extreme aristocratic party-theories of his own day, and he boldly denies that Holland ever formed part of the Holy Roman Empire. His theories, which inspired Vossius, had a considerable influence. Nevertheless, some fifty or sixty years after him, two members of his own party, although certainly belonging to the more democratic wing of it, appear quite free from these errors, except for their anti-