My First Dutch Book

Today, I received my first copy of a Dutch edition of one of Jonathan Edwards's works. I have previously posted about my copy of the first edition of The Life of David Brainerd, published at Boston in 1749. I now own a copy of Historiesch Verhaal, van Het Godvruchtig Levenen den Zaligen Doodt, Van den Eerwaarden Heer David Brainerd, Onlangs Bedienaardes Euangeliums, gezonden van de Eerwaarde Maatschappye in Schotland, totvoortplantinge der Christelyke kennisse; en Leeraar eener Gemeinte van ChristenIndianen, te Nieuwe-Jersey. Alles getrokken uit zyn Dag-register, en anderebyzondere Schriften, welke tot zyn eigen gebruik waren opgestelt; en nu totalgemeen nut uitgegeven, door Jonathan Edwwards, A. M. Bedienaar desEuangeliums te Northampton. Uit het Engels Vertaalt door J. Ros. Met een koorVoorberigt van G. V. Schuylenborgh, Dienaar in J. C. Kerke te Thienhoven. This is the first Dutch edition of The Life of David Brainerd, published at Utrecht in 1756 by the booksellers, Jan Jacob van Poolsum and Abraham van Paddenburg. This is a really cool edition, consisting of over 500 pages of text, a title page with red lettering, and a preface by Gerardus Schuylenburg.

The Dutch edition of The Life of Brainerd was translated by Jan Ross, a Rotterdam merchant who had connections with the Scots Church in that city. Ross was friends with Hugh Kennedy, one of the pastors of the Scots Church at Rotterdam. Kennedy emigrated from Scotland to Rotterdam in 1737 to serve as a minister there, but he continued to maintain correspondences with evangelicals in Britain. When a major Dutch revival took place in the Veluwe region of Gelderland in the Netherlands in 1749, Kennedy published a Dutch account of the awakening in 1751 (Nederige verdediging van het werk des Heiligen Geestes), defending the revivals as the authentic work of God. One year later, he published an English version of the Dutch awakening in London entitled, Short Account of the Rise and Continuing Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace in the United Netherlands. 

It is very possible that Kennedy approached Jan Ross to translate a Dutch edition of The Life of Brainerd since the latter had already established himself as a capable translator of such works as Robert Wodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution and Daniel Neal's History of the Puritans in the early 1750s. Historiesch Verhaal, however, was published at Utrecht, and not Rotterdam. My theory is that Gerardus Schuylenburg, Reformed pastor of Tienhoven (near Utrecht), probably arranged for the book to be published there. Schuylenburg wrote the six-page preface, which presented a providential account of New England church history, from its early settlement to the recent time of the revivals. In my previous post, I mentioned that Schuylenburg housed John Frelinghuysen at his parsonage during the Dutch awakening. John Frelinghuysen was the son of the legendary revivalist Theodore Frelinghuysen, a progenitor of the American Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. His son John had been in the Netherlands studying for the ministry before he traveled to America to assume his duties as a pastor in his father's place. 

I am slowly working my way through the literature on the Dutch revivals in 1749-50, and I hope to incorporate some of this information in my forthcoming book on how this awakening relates to some of Edwards's Dutch publications. 

I also am close to finishing a digital humanities project involving the geographical plotting of four subscription lists for Freedom of the Will (1754), Original Sin (1758), A History of the Work of Redemption (New York: 1786), and Religious Affections (Elizabethtown: 1787). I am in conversation with the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale about creating an online exhibit for these subscription lists. Keep checking in for further information on this development.

Dutch, Dutch, Dutch!

For the past several days I have been tracking down information on the dozen or so Dutch publications of Jonathan Edwards's works in the 18th century. This has been no easy task for me. Despite the benefits of the digital age in which we now live, it has been challenging to find sources online that talk about 18th-century Dutch publishing. Brill has an online database of booksale catalogues that I would love to peruse, however, it is extremely pricey. So pricey that Harvard isn't even a subscriber!

I have found the Dutch historian Fred Lieburg's article on "Interpreting the Dutch Great Awakening, 1749-1755," published in the journal Church History in 2008, to be especially helpful for my research. Also useful is the edited volume, Een golf van beroering: De Omstreden religiuze opwekking in Nederland in het midden van de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum, 2001), which features some very good articles by Lieburg and Joris van Eijnatten (among others). Thanks to Google Books and Google Translate, I have been able to read the pertinent sections that I need for my research.

The central topic in many of these essays is a significant revival that took place in the Veluwe region of Gelderland around 1750. The impetus for this revival seems to have been the fervent preaching of the Nijkerk Reformed pastor Gerardus Kuypers, who later recorded the events surrounding this spiritual resurgence in a Dutch publication. Kuypers also relayed information on the Dutch awakening to the Glasgow evangelical minister John Gillies, who published an account of the revival in the second volume of his Historical Collections Relating to Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel in 1754.

Jonathan Edwards learned of the Dutch awakening from extracts of Kuypers's letters to Gillies as well as James Davenport, who received a firsthand account from John Frelinghuysen, the second son of the Reformed Dutch minister Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, who emigrated to the Raritan Valley of New Jersey in the 1720s to begin his influential ministry as an itinerant preacher. John Frelinghuysen apparently had been in the Netherlands during the Nijkerk revival, staying at the parsonage of Gerardus van Schuylenburg, a Reformed pastor at Tienhoven near Utrecht. News of the Dutch awakening also made its way to Britain when Hugh Kennedy, one of the pastors at the Scots Church at Rotterdam, published his Short Account of the Rise and Continuing Progress of a Remarkable Work of Grace in the United Netherlands at London in 1752.

I don't want to go into all the details here, but there is an intricate network of correspondence among evangelical ministers in the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and America all of whom help propagate the news of the Dutch awakening on both sides of the Atlantic. These networks are also related to the publications of several Dutch editions of Edwards's books, including his Faithful Narrative (twice at Amsterdam in 1740, and once in Leeuwarden in 1750), The Life of Brainerd (published at Utrecht in 1756, with a preface by Gerardus van Schuylenburg), Freedom of the Will (Utrecht, 1774), A History of the Work of Redemption (Utrecht, 1776), Religious Affections (Utrecht, 1779), Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (Amsterdam, 1788), Original Sin (published in two parts at Amsterdam in 1790 and 1792), The Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin (Utrecht, 1791), and Samuel Hopkins's Life of Edwards (Utrecht, 1791). Many of the people involved in translating and publishing these editions had intimate ties with key members of a transatlantic network of evangelical ministers.


Recently, Frans Huisman, at the Library of Vrije Univeristiet Amsterdam, has helpfully alerted me to a valuable digital database of Dutch translated works prior to 1800 that he began assembling in 1995. In 2011, the Pietas database became active online, with some 6,200 texts. Although the website comes up in Dutch, you can use Google Translate to change it to English. There are also Dutch and English interfaces. Running a search on Pietas, I was amazed to find what appear to be two Dutch editions of Jonathan Edwards's works that are not listed in Thomas H. Johnson's The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards. One is a sermon on Psalm 65:[2] entitled, De allerhoogste God is een hoorder der gebeden (1793), and the other is a 1792 Dutch edition of Edwards's sermon on the eternity of hell torments (Betoog voor de eeuwigheid der straffen in een toekomstig leeven).

I am still working on assembling a coherent narrative on how Jonathan Edwards's works were published in the Netherlands, but I am enjoying the research so far.

Jonathan Edwards and Scotland

I recently finished reading the essays in Jonathan Edwards and Scotland, edited by Ken Minkema, Adriaan Neele, and Kelly van Andel. I wish that I could afford to purchase the book, but as it is priced over $100, it is beyond my budget.

John Erskine features prominently in this eclectic collection of essays related to Edwards's connection with Scotland. I particularly enjoyed reading Adriaan Neele's chapter on "Exchanges in Scotland, the Netherlands, and America: The Reception of the Theoretico-practica theologia  and A History of the Work of Redemption."

There is not much written on eighteenth-century Dutch evangelicalism even though there were important links between the Netherlands and Britain as well as America. In the seventeenth century, and into the early eighteenth century, Scots traveled abroad to study at Leiden and Utrecht. John Erskine's grandfather, for example, studied in the Netherlands. In my book Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine, I mention that John Henry Livingston, who corresponded with Erskine and become the president of Queen's College (Rutgers), was a pupil of Gisbert Bonnet, an important orthodox Calvinist and another person who corresponded with Erskine. There was also the Scots Church at Rotterdam and Amsterdam that kept alive a connection between Dutch and Scottish Calvinists. Erskine was involved in the process of recommending minister to the Scots Church at Rotterdam as its pulpit became vacant. At one time, the Rotterdam Kirk hoped to secure John Witherspoon as its minister (see William Steven's The History of the Scottish Church, Rotterdam).

Besides Randall Balmer's A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies, I found Joris van Eijnatten's Liberty and Concord in the United Provinces: Religious Toleration and the Public in the Eighteenth-Century Netherlands very helpful for my research on the relationship between British and American evangelicals and Christians living in the Netherlands. I've sometimes toyed with the idea of learning Dutch because I am sure that there would be a mountain of manuscripts in the Netherlands that could shed light on this important, but relatively unexplored, connection between many of the Dutch Calvinists and the revivalists in America and Britain. Perhaps someone else will choose this subject for his or her dissertation topic.