EGO DOCUMENTS FROM THE NETHERLANDS, 16TH CENTURY - 1814
PART I: MANUSCRIPT TRAVEL JOURNALS IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN DUTCH, 16TH CENTURY-1814
Edited by R.M. Dekker, Erasmus University Rotterdam
On microfiche
Inventory of Dutch Ego Documents
Dutch historian Jacques Presser coined the term "ego document" to describe historical materials written in the first person singular ("I", "Ego") that reveal something about the personal thoughts and feelings of the author, such as diaries, autobiographies and travel journals. Contemporary historians are making more and more use of such sources in imaginative research projects.
Recognizing the need to make the whereabouts of such materials known, historians at Erasmus University in the Netherlands have compiled an inventory of hundreds of "ego documents" from the early modern period held in the manuscript collections of Dutch archives and libraries and never before made available for serious study outside the country. For the project they visited all the manuscript collections of Dutch repositories and family archives kept in public libraries.
The project as a whole brought to light some 1,120 texts of ego documents, of which 490 proved to be travel journals (inventoried in Reisverslagen van Noord Nederlanders uit de zestiende tot begin negentiende eeuw, [Travel journals by North Netherlanders from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century] by Dekker, Lindeman and Scherf). Of these a significant number had been written in languages other than Dutch, such as French, English and German (82 texts held by some 22 different archives or libraries).
Type of documents selected
The travel accounts included in the project all have the character of ego documents. The authors describe and comment on their own personal experiences while traveling. They represent different social backgrounds: the nobility and regent class, big merchants and entrepreneurs, various professional people with a university education, and some from the lower orders of society. They undertook various types of journeys for a variety of reasons. In this period the "Grand tour" was becoming more popular while pilgrimages were in decline. People traveled for business, for pleasure, to learn or see something, for example, famous cabinets of curiosities, or to improve one's health. The destinations could vary from the distant islands of the East and West Indies to the neighboring European countries of England, France and especially Germany.
Microfiche Project
The present microfiche project aims to make this fascinating body of source material available for research. As a first step, the travel accounts in languages other than Dutch have been chosen. If there is sufficient interest, texts in the Dutch language and other types of ego documents will also be considered for publication in microform.