Hadrianus Junius (1511-1575): Een humanist uit Hoorn

This book does not pretend to be a scholarly biography. It sketches the life of Hadrianus Junius and provides some
political, religious, psychological and scholarly contexts for it. Particular attention is devoted to the tradition of
humanism, without which Junius’ scholarly output cannot be properly assessed and understood. The portrait of
Junius gives insight into some of the key events of the sixteenth century, such as the Reformation, the birth of the
Church of England, and the Dutch Revolt. Like many fellow humanists, Junius studied in Louvain and travelled
around Europe. But unlike most of his learned compatriots, he returned to his home country and settled in Haarlem.
Because Junius was the single most learned scholar during the third quarter of the sixteenth century in the
Northern Netherlands, his life and letters teach us many things about the world of learning in those decades. Junius
anticipated some of the most successful literary enterprises of the Dutch Golden Age: historiography, emblem literature
and the Leiden school of philology. The first generations of scholars at Leiden University, founded in 1575,
considered Junius to be the grand old man of Dutch humanism. They were inspired by the scope and depth of his
works, which they acknowledged by nicknaming him a Second Erasmus.
Adriaen de Jonge or Hadrianus Junius, was born in the Westfrisian town of Hoorn on 1 July 1511, from a
family of local regents. He attended the Latin School in Haarlem. At the relatively advanced age of 23, he went to
study in Louvain, where he spent a couple of years. He then embarked on his peregrinatio academica, which led
him through Siena, Bologna, Venice and Rome. In his letters, he reports on his visits to the famous legal humanist
Andrea Alciato, his attendance at an interrupted Greek-orthodox liturgical service in Venice, and on an experiment
with glow-worms in the Bolognese countryside. He obtained his doctoral degree in philosophy and medicine in
Bologna in 1540. Not long after his graduation, Junius left for Paris, a centre of printing. There he acted as an agent
for the printer Christian Wechel, who published his first work: an edition with Latin translation of Cassius Felix
Iatrosophista (1541). In Paris Junius seems to have met Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, with whom he visited
Ghent. In April 1544 he headed for London, where Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, made him his physician.
Howard’s son Henry, the ‘poet earl of Surrey’ (who was naturally interested in literary men like Junius) enlisted
him as a tutor to his children. Junius spent much of his time in Norfolk, at the family’s castle in Kenninghall. He
divided his time between private instruction to the children (about whom he complained) and on various scholarly
projects: an edition of Curtius Rufus’ biography of Alexander the Great (published 1546), an edition with translation
of part of Plutarch’s Moral essays (published 1547) and a Greek-Latin Lexicon (1548). The alliance with the
Howards came to an abrupt end when Thomas and Henry Howard were imprisoned on allegations of high treason.
Junius lost a large part of his library when his patron’s belongings were confiscated. Even before Henry Howard
was executed by Henry VIII, on 19 January 1547, Junius successfully solicited the patronage of Charles V’s envoy
Franciscus van der Dilft (or Dilfius), to whom he dedicated his edition of Plutarch. He dedicated his Lexicon to the
new king: the very young protestant Edward VI. Apparently, Junius tried to secure a position at the English court;
in 1550 he dedicated the manuscript of his work on calendars to Edward as well. Meanwhile, he also praised Charles
V in his edition of Curtius and perhaps he tried his luck, through Van der Dilft, at the Habsburg court as well, since
he did not feel entirely comfortable witnessing the conversion of the English Church to Protestantism. In his letters,
he describes the stripping of the altars as a result of the Edwardian injunctions.
In 1550 Junius left for Holland to marry and take up a post as rector of the Latin School in Haarlem. The job
was not to his liking, and after two years he exchanged it for a post as city physician. Meanwhile, he had not given up
on the English and the Habsburg courts, for he dedicated the published version of his book on calendars to Edward
VI (1553) and the revised edition to his successor, the Catholic Mary Tudor (1556). In the meantime he had travelled
to London to present his epic poem Philippeis to Mary on the occasion of her wedding to Philip of Spain in 1554.
He dedicated his commentary on Horace’s Odes to Gonsalvo Perez, and that on the third book of Vergil’s Aeneid
to Juan de Verzosa. Both of these dedicatees were loyal servants to the Spanish crown and humanists in their own
right. But the clean copies he prepared for the press were never printed and attempts to enter the inner circle around
Bijlage 5
English abstract
English abstract
the Spanish throne through the intervention of, amongst others, bishop Stephen Gardiner and the future Cardinal
Granvelle, faltered as well. All his dedications to mighty Protestants and Catholics alike had remained fruitless.
During the 1550s, Junius’ works appeared with various printers in Basle. Despite a fire in his study in 1554,
which cost him ‘months, if not years of work’, his hodge-podge collection of philological annotations on classical
literature appeared in 1556: the Animadversa. He dedicated it to Granvelle and its pages repeatedly pay tribute to
Granvelle’s secretary, the antiquarian Antoine Morillon. To the Animadversa was appended a long treatise De coma
commentarium (Commentary on hair), a paradoxical encomium, purportedly written in defiance of critique on the
short Italian haircut which he had adopted in Italy. The commentary was crushed under its own weight as a result of
its endless strings of quotations and lack of humour, but it demonstrates Junius’ antiquarian interests and his ability
to group together hundreds of fragments. In 1558 his edition of the Homeric commentator Eustathius appeared
in Basle, prefaced by the anti-Catholic Laurence Humphrey. Junius himself would have preferred to see the work
printed with a dedication to Joachim Hopper, a man who soon was to rise at Philip II’s court. The year 1558 also saw
the publication of Junius’ supplement of 850 proverbs to Erasmus’ famous and much used Adagia. All these works
show a preference for the juxtaposition of fragments from all sorts of sources.
Junius’ first marriage had resulted in the birth of two children, Clara and Petrus. After the death of his wife
he remarried, in 1555. His new wife was Adriana Hasselaer, sister of Kenau, who became legendary for her supposedly
heroic role in defending Haarlem against the Spanish during the siege of 1573. Junius became well integrated
into the cultural élite of the Haarlem, which included the philosopher Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert, the engraver
Philips Galle, the painter Maarten van Heemskerck, and, later, the school rector and Latin playwright Cornelius
Schonaeus. He also set up a private school in his own house, to teach the sons of the élite he knew so well and to
secure himself a stable income in addition to the salary he gained from his post as a physician. We know very little of
his medical practice: it seems to have been more of an honorary post, but he occasionally acted as advisor on medical
politics in the city.
An expedition to Copenhagen in 1564, answering the call to become professor of medicine and royal physician,
resulted in disillusion after just three months, due to lack of payment, bad weather and his unconfident speech
(Junius stammered). In the years leading up to the Danish adventure, he had been preparing a number of works. In
1564 appeared a curious booklet with a description of a mushroom found in the dunes and shaped in the form of a
penis: the fungus is still known as the Phallus hadriani today. After his return Junius
focused with renewed energy
on another project. He cashed in on his by now firmly established fame by striking a deal with Europe’s leading
printer Christopher Plantin, who published his religious poem Anastaurosis, his influential Emblemata and his
edition of the lexicographer Nonius Marcellus. The Emblems show that the political situation of that time was not
as clearcut as it would become in the years which followed. Some of the Emblems are dedicated to representatives
of the Spanish crown (including Granvelle and some Dutch administrators), but Junius also managed to secure the
support of William the Silent in his bid to be appointed as historiographer of the States of Holland and Westfrisia.
Perhaps the dedication of his octolingual dictionary Nomenclator (printed 1567) to William’s son Philip William had
contributed to his success. Junius was charged with collecting historical evidence for the States’ right to convene independently
from the central government in Brussels. Junius made plans to travel around Holland to do research for
his history, but he worked on other projects as well: in 1568 he republished his edition of Martial. The first edition,
based on a manuscript he had obtained in England, had appeared in 1559 in Basel without his name being mentioned
anywhere in the book, much to his annoyance. In 1568 he also travelled to London, to present his edition and Latin
translation of Eunapius’ Life of philosophers to Queen Elizabeth. To his disappointment, she ignored the gesture
and after failed attempts to further his cause via William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Junius returned home. But he first
asked the Queen’s direct permission to export sixty dickers of cow’s skins, presumably destined for Christopher
Plantin, who needed parchment to print a number of luxurious editions of his famous Antwerp Polyglot Bible. In
1570, Junius finished the first draft of his Batavia. By then, the political landscape had altered dramatically: 1566
saw a wave of iconoclasm (Junius reported on the smashing of statues in churches in Amsterdam), in 1567 the Duke
of Alba arrived and William the Silent went into exile, and in 1568, Alba had the counts of Egmond and Horne
beheaded in Brussels. The States of Holland now recoiled from publishing a work which openly defended the plea
for more independence of Holland. Yet, there is very little politics in Junius’ Batavia: it is more a loosely organised
overview of all sorts of individual histories and antiquarian aspects of ‘Batavia’ (i.e. Holland, the territory roughly
Junius_binnenw.indd 156-157 09-06-11 09:45
Hadrianus Junius - Een humanist uit Hoorn
158 159
coinciding with the modern westernmost part of The Netherlands). The most famous story is no doubt the legend
that the printing press was invented in Haarlem at the beginning of the 1540s by Laurens Jansz. Coster. An employee
of Coster was supposed to have fled with the instruments and the know-how to Mainz.
The Batavia was eventually printed in 1588, long after the Dutch Revolt had developed into a full blown
war following the Act of Abjuration in 1581, the murder on William in 1584, and the failed attempts, in 1585-87, to
have Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, rule the rebellious provinces. In some copies of the Batavia
kept in Spain,
the few passages in which the Spaniards are criticized are censored, in accordance with seventeenth-century indices
purgatorii (lists of books and passages in books which were deemed harmful to Catholic dogma). It was not the only
work of Junius which would appear on the Index. In the first Index of Forbidden Books (1559) his name already
appeared among authors of the first class, because of the dedication of his Greek-Latin dictionary to the Protestant
Edward VI. Junius successfully lobbied for rehabilitation, partly with the help of his friend Benito Arias Montano.
Nevertheless, indices purgatorii continued to instruct Catholic readers to remove dedications to Protestant princes
in Junius’ works and cross out passages which could be interpreted as critical of Catholicism. Yet, there is no sign
that Junius ever converted to Protestantism. He is likely to have remained, like so many other intellectuals of the
period, a tolerant Catholic. In the midst of the war, he kept on working, this time on the edition of the lexicographer
Hesychius (1572). Not long after its appearance, Haarlem was besieged and Junius fled the city, settling temporarily
in Delft in 1573. He lost part of his library when Haarlem fell in July 1573. In February 1574, on the recommendation
of William the Silent, he was appointed city physician of Middelburg. Later that year, he briefly assisted his
friend the physician Petrus Forestus, at the sick bed of William the Silent in Rotterdam. In the meantime, Junius’
own health was declining. He had never had a very good constitution: his letters are rife with descriptions of his bad
physical state and the measures he took to cure himself. In 1575, Junius was hastily appointed professor of medicine
of Leiden University, which was inaugurated at the beginning of the year but which still needed to be properly set
up. Junius never had the chance to start lecturing: he succumbed on 16 June 1575 in Arnemuiden, where he was
buried. His remains were relocated to the Grote Kerk at Middelburg four years later. After 1816 his gravestone there
disappeared, never to be found again.
Junius lives on through his learned works, but, contrary to the opinion of some of his contemporary admirers,
he was no Second Erasmus. His scope was much more limited. He devoted himself primarily to linguistic,
lexicographical and philological work, and he loved to dip into etymologies, antiquarian explanations and geographical
detail. Even his most literary work, his Emblems,
testify to his preference for short, self-contained entities
above structural narratives and philosophical argument. His Batavia was scheduled to be followed by two volumes
of historical narrative, starting from the first Counts of Holland and leading up to the Burgundian kings, but Junius
never even embarked on this political history. Instead, he chose to polish up his ‘logistorical’ Batavia in the
few years which left him. He was not the theologian Erasmus was, but he did share Erasmus’ taste for pedagogy.
He was above all a man of encyclopaedic learning. Nothing has remained of what was perhaps his largest project,
an edition and translation of the Suda, on which he worked for at least two decades but which never saw the light.
He pillaged this Byzantine encyclopaedia, as he ransacked other encyclopaedic works and dictionaries for his own
works. A commonplace book, now kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, does not reflect the immense learning
of this somewhat ill-fated scholar. Yet, Junius also carried out research away from his books, as is demonstrated
by his mushroom-treatise, the glow-worm story and his enquiries from chariot drivers concerning the technical
terms of their trade, for the benefit of his hugely successful Nomenclator. His learning was acknowledged by his
contemporaries: his correspondence, of which 426 letters survive, show that he enjoyed unlocking the vast resources
of his erudition. They also show his sometimes ill-fated, but often successful, attempts to gain the patronage of
the high and mighty. His descendants managed to secure some of his literary and scholarly heritage: his son Petrus
Junius collected his letters (which did not then see the light of day, but were handed on to later generations, to be
published only in 1652), his grand-son Albert Verlaen publish his religious poetry (1598), and several books from
his estate are still to be found in Leiden University library and other libraries. Many of his poems, and his Batavia,
were posthumously published by his friend Janus Dousa, who contributed to establishing Junius’ reputation for
future generations as ‘the most learned man in Holland after Erasmus’.