sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 1

Jan W. J. Burgers: Diplomatics in the Netherlands

An accomplished scholar of diplomatics and related auxiliary sciences (codicology and palaeography), Jan Burgers raises a rarely asked question. If the discipline of history relies on the science of diplomatics to provide specific techniques for the critique and analysis of documentary sources, how to write a history of diplomatics, and what would such a history have to say about the interactions between diplomatics and historiography? Burgers' answer comes in the shape of an encyclopedic summa, which, although focused on the Netherlands, offers a wealth of information relevant to all students of charters and administrative documents.

Furthermore, the longue durée adopted in Diplomatics in the Netherlands, from the Middle Ages to the present, underscores the study's central argument: that the relationship between diplomatics and history is not adequately captured by the familiar opposition between craft and art, technique and interpretation, but is better understood as a contingent and mutually constitutive engagement with the past and its accessibility. Therefore, the outline of Diplomatics in the Netherlands is firmly chronological, with each chapter covering a period as defined by the practitioners of historiography, including chroniclers, humanists, urban historiographers, antiquarians, historians and charter books, collectors and editors, and professional historians.

The last chapter, which presents the rise of Diplomatics as a discipline in the twentieth century, is followed by an epilogue dedicated to Digital Diplomatics. Curiously, the index of Diplomatics in the Netherlands contains no mention of the printing press, and one is left wondering about the impact of that earlier mediatic shift on the study of charters.

Along with the chronological organization is a strong, quasi-biographical focus on Dutch diplomatists, through which runs a detailed analysis of the flexible network formed by scholars and their expectations of documentary sources, diplomatic studies, historiography, historical writing, patronage, and cultural technology (absent printing). This analysis, in turn, embeds the operations of the 'diplomatics' network within major European intellectual movements from Humanism, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, to Romanticism and Nationalism.

The term 'Diplomatics' was invented in the seventeenth century by Dom Jean Mabillon (De re diplomatica libri VI, 1681) to designate the study of charters and diplomas, as well as the methods for assessing their trustworthiness, activities that were practiced since the central Middle Ages. The growing number of documents that, from the late thirteenth century onward, were transcribed and included within chronicles and other historiographical writings produced in Holland, began to receive explicit criticism about their authenticity in the early sixteenth century. During that century, humanists undertook to compile their own source books, ushering in the age of antiquarian transcripts and documentary scrutiny. By the seventeenth century, diplomatics became the province of antiquarians, as academic historians shunned the critical study of sources.

Dutch historical writings, however, especially the emerging genres of urban and genealogical history, not only included documentary sources but also prompted the publication of charter collections (charter books) and engendered plans for the edition of historical documents related to Holland. These trends registered tensions between Calvinists and Catholics, Orangists and Republicans, nevertheless keeping pace through the eighteenth century, with a lukewarm reception of the theoretical aspects of diplomatic criticism that had been developed in France and Germany. This situation remained largely unchanged during the nineteenth century. Despite the rise of an international form of historiography grounded in archival research and source criticism, and supported by national governments, history in the Netherlands remained in the hands of professors of law or philology, while little, if any, critical method was applied to diplomatic editions. However, when, in the twentieth century, the Dutch government began to support historical research, diplomatic studies grew, waxed and waned, and are now facing the challenges of the digital humanities.

Jan Burgers has resisted the temptation to proclaim a glorious story of Diplomatics in the Netherlands. Instead, he gives us an invaluable account of the local history of a discipline that consistently remained in the hands of local individuals engaged in conversation with their past and current environment. While we do not learn about positivist history, the Annales school, the linguistic turn, material culture studies, and their attitudes toward archival sources, we are made crucially aware of the nature of personal commitment to and belief in the humanities, in their abilities to guide us in the critical reception of information.