Willem Frijhoff – författare

This multinational collection of essays challenges the traditional image of a monolingual Ancient Regime in Enlightenment Europe, both East and West. Its archival research explores the important role played by selective language use in social life and in the educational provisions in the early constitution of modern society. A broad range of case studies show how language was viewed and used symbolically by social groups - ranging from the nobility to the peasantry - to develop, express, and mark their identities.

The policies relating to language pursued by European monarchies and states have been widely studied, but far less attention has been given to their linguistic and cultural policies in territories outside their own borders. This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to filling that gap, distinguishing and analysing several different types of linguistic and foreign cultural policies. Such policies, the contributors show, tended not to be proclaimed officially, but they nonetheless had lasting effects on both language and culture in Europe and beyond.

Before the modern nation-state became a stable, widespread phenomenon throughout northern Europe, multilingualism-the use of multiple languages in one geographical area-was common throughout the region. This book brings together historians and linguists, who apply their respective analytic tools to offer an interdisciplinary interpretation of the functions of multilingualism in identity-building in the period, and, from that, draw valuable lessons for understanding today's cosmopolitan societies.

This biography recalls the fascinating life of the second Reformed minister of New Amsterdam (present-day New York), Everardus Bogardus, a poor but gifted youth who worked himself upward into the ministry. The first part of the book provides an in-depth analysis of his mystical experience as a 15-year old orphan in his hometown Woerden (Holland) and its significance in the Dutch context. The second part explores Bogardus’s agency in the colonial context and his appropriation of his new fatherland - as a minister among the Europeans, the Native Americans, and the blacks, as a spokesman of the opposition during Kieft’s War, and as a colonist married to the famous Anneke Jans. This biography is conceived as a mentality history of an early modern male individual.Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607-1647 has been granted the 2008 Hendrick's Award.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to distinguishing and analysing several different types of linguistic and foreign cultural policie pursued by European monarchies and states outside their own borders.

This book brings together historians and linguists, who apply their respective analytic tools to offer an interdisciplinary interpretation of the functions of multilingualism in identity-building in 16th-19th century Europe.