The written word has always been part of politics. Many authors wrote treatises on how to rule subordinates or how to be ruled by their superiors. The impact of the written word on the development of political thought and culture over time have been widely studied. It is also generally accepted that books played a crucial role in shaping the political and cultural climate of the late eighteenth century, marking an epoch in history. What is harder to undercover is what communities and individuals did with the words and books they consumed. This project examines readers and the books that might and might not have played a role in their political behaviour. I will focus on the governing political elite who made use of the Dutch National Library during the Revolutionary era.
A disruptive change of political regimes characterized the decades between 1798 and 1830. During this period the literary and library culture also changed drastically. It is therefore fascinating to study book-reader interactions during this period. After its establishment in 1798, the Dutch National Library grew from the private collection of stadtholder William V to a reference library for officials. The library was deliberately created to assist the political elite, in active government service, in their parliamentary activities. The entire collection was available for consultation and advice and, therefore, could have had an ideological, political, or intellectual impact on their readers
This subproject studies the role of books on readers by digitizing and analyzing the lending registers of the Dutch National Library. The borrowings of the representatives were carefully charted. The lending registers of the National Library reflect the borrowing, and presumably also the reading behaviour of those men who held office between 1798 and 1830 and shines new light on the reading practices of the long eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The lending records of the Dutch National Library are the most complete library lending source for this period in the Netherlands. These records are an exceptionally rich, but practically neglected, source, as full recordings of the borrowings (book borrowed, date of borrowing and return, name of lender) have been preserved from the library’s creation in 1798 until 1830, the cut-off date for this subproject. The registers provide ideal material to study the relationship between books and the ideological positionings of individuals and will therefore serve as the backbone of this study.
