The Great Dutch Humanist Chronicle of 1517: with 240 Woodcuts, Including Designs by Lucas van Leyden
Aurelius, Cornelius. Die cronycke van Hollandt Zeelandt ende Vrieslant. Leiden, Jan Seversz, 1517.
One of the foundational monuments of early Dutch historiography, richly illustrated with approximately 240 woodcuts, including specially designed cuts by Lucas van Leyden and Cornelis Engelbrechtsz, and printed in Leiden in 1517 at the very threshold of the Reformation.
Cornelius Aurelius, the learned Augustinian canon and humanist historian, attempted nothing less than a complete history of Holland, Zeeland, and Friesland embedded within the universal history of the Christian world. Written in the vernacular rather than Latin, the work became known as the Divisiekroniek and would remain the basis of Dutch historical teaching well into the nineteenth century.
Edition & Physical Description
Large folio (approximately 282 × 195 mm), printed predominantly in double columns, with title in black and red.
Illustrated with around 240 woodcuts from approximately 110 different blocks, together with numerous heraldic devices throughout the text. The illustrations include sacred scenes, battles, tournaments, portraits, city views, dynastic imagery, and historical episodes.
Eighteenth-century calf binding over six raised bands with finely gilt spine compartments and blind-tooled covers, commissioned by the Ghent nobleman and bibliophile Pierre-Jean Borluut. The copy remains broad-margined and remarkably well preserved overall.
Cornelius Aurelius and Dutch Humanism
Cornelius Aurelius (c. 1460–1531) belonged to the intellectual world shaped simultaneously by monastic reform, Christian humanism, and the emerging historical consciousness of the Low Countries.
Educated within the spiritual culture of the Devotio moderna, Aurelius later travelled to Paris to reform the Abbey of Saint-Victor according to the Windesheim Congregation and became acquainted there with the French historian Robert Gaguin. In 1508 he was crowned poet laureate by Emperor Maximilian I.
His Cronycke van Hollandt appeared in 1517, precisely when Luther’s challenge to the established religious order began to fracture the medieval ideal of the universitas christiana. Although Aurelius himself sharply criticized abuses within the Church, particularly the sale of indulgences, he still fundamentally believed in the harmony of empire, Church, morality, and Christian history.
The chronicle therefore occupies a fascinating transitional moment between medieval universal chronicle and modern national historiography.
Dutch History within Universal History
Aurelius begins not with the medieval counts of Holland but with Adam himself.
Like many medieval chroniclers, he embedded local history within sacred and universal history, tracing Holland’s origins through biblical chronology, Roman antiquity, Carolingian history, and finally the Burgundian and Habsburg periods. Yet unlike earlier chroniclers, Aurelius approached history through specifically humanist methods: comparison of sources, rhetorical structure, historical criticism, and conscious selection of facts.
Particularly important was his identification of the Dutch people with the ancient Batavians, whom he described not as subjects conquered by Rome but as free allies of the empire. This idea would become central to later Dutch historical identity.
The work concludes in the immediate political present of 1516 with the restoration of Habsburg authority in Holland after military conflict involving Charles of Guelders and Henry III of Nassau. Aurelius thus presents Holland simultaneously as a regional entity and as an integral part of imperial history.
The Woodcuts and Lucas van Leyden
The extraordinary illustration cycle was central to the ambitions of the Leiden printer Jan Seversz, who sought consciously to rival Hartmann Schedel’s famous Nuremberg Chronicle.
Many of the approximately 240 woodcuts were adapted from earlier illustration cycles, especially after Hans Burgkmair the Elder. Others derive from Burgundian chivalric imagery such as Olivier de la Marche’s Chevalier déliberé. Most were cut by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen.
Particularly important, however, are the specially commissioned designs attributed to the young Lucas van Leyden, among the most influential graphic artists in Northern Europe after Dürer. Seven woodcuts — representing five different compositions — were designed specifically for the Divisiekroniek. These include depictions of God the Father, the Virgin in mandorla, portraits of Count Dirk I of Holland, Saint Boniface, and Duke Pepin of Brabant.
Cornelis Engelbrechtsz, Lucas van Leyden’s teacher, contributed additional important portraits, including Philip the Fair and Philip the Good of Burgundy.
Variants and Survival
The first edition survives in several textual and illustrative variants already identified by early bibliographers such as Nijhoff and Kronenberg.
The present copy contains all four principal variant states described by later scholarship. Like most surviving examples, it lacks the final four index leaves.
Scholar Karin Tilmans estimated that perhaps no more than 150 copies of the first edition were printed, with only slightly more than one hundred actually sold. The present example appears to belong to the immediately distributed issue before the later Antwerp continuation was added.
Provenance
Seventeenth-century ownership inscription of J. F. Van de Velde on front flyleaf. Later in the collection of the Ghent nobleman Pierre-Jean Borluut (1725–1782), whose armorial ex libris remains preserved in the volume. Borluut was an important Flemish bibliophile whose historical and genealogical library was dispersed in Ghent in 1782. Later Pierre Berès, Pays-Bas anciens (Catalogue 71), Paris 1981, number 79.
Literature
Adams A 2253; BM STC Dutch 97; Brunet I, 1888; Ebert 4167; Graesse II, 148; Hollstein, Dutch X; Nijhoff/Kronenberg I, no. 613; Rahir 370.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 38:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume I
