Johan van Heemskerk - Batavische Arcadia - 1647-1756

The jurist Van Heemskerck (1597-1656) was an advocate in The Hague and Amsterdam, an alderman of Amsterdam and eventually a member of the Hoge Raad van Holland (the Supreme Court of Holland). He wrote a number of poems and tragedies. In this arcadia (first edition 1637) he treats, in the description of a playful journey from The Hague to Katwijk, a large portion of the national history. The book was very popular. The second edition (1647) was edited and annotated by Caspar van Baerle, and in this form the book was reprinted about ten more times, well into the 19th century. The engraved title page of this fifth edition is different from that of the third edition and contains, among other things, two faces of a party riding in a coach in a landscape. In the preliminaries a privilege is recorded from the States of Holland for Joh. van Ravensteyn, dated 26 September 1662, and the transfer by him to Jan Bouman dated 17 March 1676. There is also a 1647 dated “Na-reden van den tweeden uyt-geever” and a 1678 dated “Bericht van den vijfden drucker,” in which it is stated that the author had increased this edition by more than a third before his death. At the end of the book a short list of editions by Jan Bouman is printed. Besides reprints there were also imitations, in which the Hague–Katwijk local color was replaced by that of other places in our country. An “arcadia” became a synonym for a travelogue that could be spiced with various tales and historical and tourism digressions. One might think of the arcadias of Soeteboom, Lambert van den Bosch, Claas Bruin and others.