Table Of ContentAncient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination
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Metaforms
Studies in the Reception of
Classical Antiquity
Editors-in-Chief
Almut-Barbara Renger (Freie Universität Berlin)
Jon Solomon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
John T. Hamilton (Harvard University)
Editorial Board
Kyriakos Demetriou (University of Cyprus)
Constanze Güthenke (Oxford University)
Miriam Leonard (University College London)
Mira Seo (Yale-nus College)
volume 12
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/srca
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Ancient Models in the Early
Modern Republican Imagination
Edited by
Wyger Velema
Arthur Weststeijn
leiden | boston
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Cover illustration: Caesar van Everdingen, Lycurgus Showing the Importance of Education (1660–61),
courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017027625
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Contents
List of Illustrations VII
List of Contributors VIII
Introduction: Classical Republicanism and Ancient
Republican Models 1
Wyger Velema and Arthur Weststeijn
1 Renaissance Historicism and the Model of Rome in Florentine
Historiography 20
Jacques Bos
2 The Roman Republic as a Constitutional Order in the Italian
Renaissance 40
Benjamin Straumann
3 Commonwealths for Preservation and Increase: Ancient Rome in Venice
and the Dutch Republic 62
Arthur Weststeijn
4 Early Modern Greek Histories and Republican Political Thought 86
William Stenhouse
5 A Classical Confederacy: The Example of the Achaean League in the
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic 109
Jaap Nieuwstraten
6 From Failed Republic to Polite Polis: Ancient Athens in Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century England 131
Christine Zabel
7 Painting Plutarch: Images of Sparta in the Dutch Republic and
Enlightenment France 157
Wessel Krul
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vi Contents
8 Against Democracy: Dutch Eighteenth-Century Critics of Ancient and
Modern Popular Government 189
Wyger Velema
9 The Hebrew Republic in Sixteenth-Century Political Debate: The
Struggle for Jurisdiction 214
Guido Bartolucci
10 The Hebrew Republic in Dutch Political Thought, c. 1650–1675 234
René Koekkoek
11 The Helvetians as Ancestors and Brutus as a Model: The Classical Past
in the Early Modern Swiss Confederation 259
Thomas Maissen
12 Classical Models in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania 285
Tomasz Gromelski
13 America’s Antiquities: The Ancient Past in the Creation of the
American Republic 306
Eran Shalev
Index 329
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List of Illustrations
6.1 Frontispiece to Charles Gildon, The History of the Athenian Society
(London, 1692) 145
7.1 Caesar van Everdingen, Lycurgus Showing the Importance of Education
(1660–61) 162
7.2 Charles Cochin, Lycurgus Showing Himself to the People of Sparta After Being
Wounded in a Sedition (1761) 169
7.3 Louis Lagrenée, A Spartan Mother Admonishing her Son (1771) 177
7.4 Jean Pierre Saint Ours, The Selection of Children in Sparta (1784–86) 181
7.5 Jean Pierre Saint Ours, The Selection of Children in Sparta, preliminary
drawing 183
7.6 Jacques-Louis David, Leonidas at Thermopylae, Drawing (1813) 186
11.1 Johann Carl Balthasar, Roma teaching Hollandia, Venetia and Helvetia,
c. 1690, Lucerne 261
11.2 Excerpts of Johannes Stumpf, Landtaflen, Zurich, 1548 273
11.3 Excerpts of Johannes Stumpf, Landtaflen, Zurich, 1548 274
11.4 Bust of Lucius Iunius Brutus, Zurich town hall, 1698 279
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List of Contributors
Guido Bartolucci
is Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at the Department of Politi-
cal and Social Sciences, University of Calabria. He is the author of a book on
the Hebrew Republic in sixteenth-century European thought, and he has also
worked on the origin of the Christian Kabbalah in the fifteenth century and
on the life and political thought of the Jewish physician David de’ Pomis. His
recent research interests focus on the influence of the Jewish political tradi-
tion on Christian thought, particularly in the debate between Calvinist and
Lutheran scholars in the seventeenth century.
Jacques Bos
studied history, philosophy and political science at the University of Leiden.
In 2003 he obtained his Ph.D. at the same university with a study of the early
modern concept of character. At the moment, he is university lecturer in phi-
losophy at the University of Amsterdam. His main field of research is early
modern intellectual history, with an emphasis on the history of the self, the
history of the human sciences, and the development of historical thought.
Tomasz Gromelski
is Research Fellow in the Humanities at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Re-
search Associate at the History Faculty in Cambridge. His research interests
are in the intellectual, social and political history of Britain and Europe in the
late-medieval and early-modern periods (c. 1400–1650), and in everyday life
and material culture in pre-industrial Europe. His chief interest is in the com-
parative study of political and constitutional thought and political culture in
sixteenth-century Europe. He has published a number of articles and chapters
on the subject and is currently completing a study of political thought and
political practices in Poland-Lithuania.
René Koekkoek
is lecturer in Modern European History in the European Studies program at the
University of Amsterdam. He holds a Research Master in History from Utrecht
University (cum laude) and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual His-
tory from the University of Cambridge (distinction). In 2016, he obtained his
PhD from Utrecht University. He published on Carl Schmitt and the challenge of
Spinozism in Modern Intellectual History and on Dutch late eighteenth- century
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List of Contributors ix
political thought. His book manuscript The Citizenship E xperiment. Contesting
the Limits of Civic Equality and Participation in the Age of Revolutions is cur-
rently under review.
Wessel Krul
is Professor Emeritus of Modern Art and Cultural History at the University of
Groningen. He has published widely on art, art theory and historiography from
the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and has translated and edited several
philosophical classics (Hobbes, Lessing, Burke, J.S. Mill). Recent publications:
“A Slight Correction. Petrus Camper on the Visual Arts,” in: Petrus Camper in
Context. Science, the Arts, and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Repub-
lic, ed. Klaas van Berkel and Bart Ramakers (Hilversum, 2015), 215–242; “An
Ambivalent Conservatism. Edmund Burke in the Netherlands, 1770–1870,” in:
The Reception of Edmund Burke, ed. Martin Hugh Fitzpatrick and Peter Jones
(London, 2016), 149–170.
Thomas Maissen
has been Associate Professor at the University of Lucerne from 2002 to 2004 and
Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Heidelberg. Since 2006
he has been a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Science and H umanities.
He was Professeur invité at the ehess Paris, visiting Fellow at the Institute
for Advanced Studies, Princeton, and co-director of the Heidelberg Cluster of
Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.” Since 2013, Maissen has been
the director of the German Historical Institute in Paris. Central areas of his re-
search are the history of political thought, history of religion and mentalities,
historical iconography and Swiss history.
Jaap Nieuwstraten
studied at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he received a Ph.D. in
History for a dissertation on the historical and political thought of the Dutch
scholar Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn (1612–1653) in 2012. He currently works as a
freelance researcher and writer, focussing primarily on the history of the Low
Countries, the long nineteenth century and the ‘age of extremes.’
Eran Shalev
is Professor of American History and Chair of the History Department at Haifa
University. He is the author of Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imag-
ination and the Creation of the American Republic (2009) and American Zion:
The Bible as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (2013).
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x List of Contributors
William Stenhouse
teaches history at Yeshiva University, New York. He works on the history of
classical scholarship in the sixteenth century, and especially the reception of
ancient material remains. His books include Reading Inscriptions and Writing
Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (2005).
Benjamin Straumann
is Alberico Gentili Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law. A his-
torian of ideas, he works on classical political and legal thought, the history of
natural and international law, constitutionalism, and the reception of ancient
political thought and Roman law. Benjamin is the author of Roman Law in the
State of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and of Crisis and Constitu-
tionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of
Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is a co-editor of the new oup
series The History and Theory of International Law.
Wyger Velema
is Jan Romein Professor in the Department of History of the University of
Amsterdam. He is specialized in early modern history, with an emphasis on
the eighteenth century, the history of political thought - in particular that
of republicanism - and conceptual history. He has published widely in these
fields, including Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic. The
Political Thought of Elie Luzac (1993) and Republicans. Essays on Eighteenth-
Century Dutch Political Thought (2007). He is currently working on a study of
the role of the classics in Dutch Enlightenment culture.
Arthur Weststeijn
teaches Italian history at Utrecht University and was between 2011 and 2017
Director of Historical Studies at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. He
specialises in Dutch and Italian intellectual and cultural history, with a specific
focus on early modern political thought, colonialism and imperialism, and the
manifold uses of the classical past. He is the author of Commercial Republican-
ism in the Dutch Golden Age (Brill, 2012) and, together with Frederick Whitling,
Termini. Cornerstone of Modern Rome (Quasar, 2017).
Christine Zabel
is a Postdoctoral Faculty Member at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Ger-
many, where she teaches courses on cultural and intellectual history. She re-
ceived her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University, Germany, and a Master of Arts
from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (ehess), France. She is
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