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Presidential Address: Great Historical Enterprises. I. The Bollandists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

M. D. Knowles
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Abstract

ON several occasions during the last twenty or thirty years students of the past have had their attention directed to the seventeenth century by historians of science and of scholarship. We have been told that we shall find there the authentic beginnings of the modern world, and that in that age reliance on the traditions and books of the past gives way to experiment, to analysis and to criticism. In the realm of history, there is a shift from the classical, literary traditions to the original sources and to official records, while the historical writings of the past are subjected to the new technique which for a hundred years had been applied to the literary masterpieces of the ancient world by a succession of great scholars from Valla and Erasmus to Scaliger and Casaubon. Certainly, in many ways the seventeenth century is more significant in the annals of historiography than is the century that followed. In England it is the age of Dodsworth, Dugdale, Twysden, Wharton, Wanley and Hearne. In France, it is the age of D'Achéry, Labbé, Ducange and the Maurists. In the part of the Netherlands that is now Belgium it is the age of the first Bollandists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 8 , January 1958 , pp. 147 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1958

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References

page 147 note 1 I am indebted to Père Paul Grosjean, S.J., for his kindness in reading this paper in typescript and suggesting many emendations. There is no full-scale history of the Bollandists. There are several authoritative articles in encyclopedias, &c, of which the best are perhaps those by De Smedt, Ch. in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907)Google Scholarand de Bil, A. in the Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques (1937)Google Scholar. To these may be added the section on the Bollandists in Aigrain, R., L'Hagiographie (Paris, 1953), pp. 329–50Google Scholar, which is largely a précis of Delehaye's account (below). The reader who wishes for an approach which is at once broader and more intimate will find it in three historical essays by modern Bollandists: A travers trois siècles: L'Œuvre des Bollandistes, 1615–1915, by Delehaye, H. (Brussels, 1920)Google Scholar; L'Œuvre des Bollandistes (Mémoires de l' Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres, tome xxxix, fascicule 4, 1942)Google Scholar, by Peeters, P., and the same writer's ‘Après un siècle (1837–1937)’ in Analecta Bollandiana, lv, pp. iv–xlivGoogle Scholar. To these should be added, for Bollandists of the past, the memoirs published from time to time in the Acta Sanctorum, and articles in Biographie National by A. Poncelet, H. Delehaye and others; and for more recent personalities the biographical sketches by P. Peeters, reprinted from the Analecta in Figures Bollandiennes contemporaines (sc. Ch. De Smedt, A. Poncelet, J. Van den Gheyn, F. Van Ortroy and H. Delehaye), published in Brussels, 1948, and the same writer's ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux du R. P. H. Delehaye’ in Annuaire de l' Académie Royale de Belgique (1943). Finally, there is the memoir of P. Peeters himself by Devos, P. in Analecta Bollandiana, lxix (1951), pp. i–xlviiCrossRefGoogle Scholar. All the above sources, it will be noted, are works by the Bollandists themselves, or are based upon these, as is likewise the present paper. Indeed, no scholar from outside the house could have access to the essential records and papers. It will, however, be appreciated that a domestic history, however scholarly and candid, cannot be expected to see Bollandism as it appears ab extra and in the round.

page 148 note 1 An absolutely accurate statement would be more complicated. From 1612 to 1773 there were two Belgian provinces, Flandro-Belgica and GalloBelgica, covering an area greater than modern Belgium, and the Bollandists were recruited from the former of these. From 1832 to 1929 modern Belgium (with Luxembourg) formed a single province, which in 1929 was divided into two, northern and southern, both of which now supply recruits.

page 148 note 2 For Rosweyde, see De Smedt, Ch., ‘Les fondateurs du Bollandisme’, in Mélanges Godefroid Kurth, i. 295–9Google Scholar, and Poncelet, A. in Biographie Nationale, xxGoogle Scholar, col. 170–8. For the religious background see Poncelet, A., Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les Pays-Bas (Brussels, 1928)Google Scholar. Rosweyde also published a series of Lives of the Saints for each day of the year, translated into Flemish.

page 150 note 1 As, for example, in the extracts so felicitously translated by MissWaddell, Helen in The Desert Fathers (1936)Google Scholar.

page 150 note 2 A memoir, De vita, operibus et virtutibus Joannis Bollandi, by D. Papebroch, is in Acta SS., tom. I Martii.

page 150 note 3 Papebroch contributed a memoir of Henskens in Acta SS., t. VII Maii.

page 152 note 1 In the most recent volumes, more than a hundred names appear each day among those praetermissi et in alios dies relati.

page 153 note 1 For Papebroch, see the memoir in Acta SS., t. VI Junii, and Delehaye, H. in Biographie Nationale, xviGoogle Scholar.

page 155 note 1 February has only twenty-eight days in the Roman calendar followed by the Bollandists.

page 156 note 1 This episode in particular would clearly demand much careful and critical research before the whole story could be put fairly in its contemporary setting.

page 156 note 2 Memoir in Acta SS., t. III Julii.

Page 157 note 1 Memoir in Acta SS., t. V Augusti; it is by Stiltingh.

page 157 note 2 Memoir in Acta SS., t. VI Augusti.

page 158 note 1 ‘Le flot intarissable de son improvisation érudite’, Peeters, , L'Œuvre des Bollandistes, p. 46Google Scholar.

page 158 note 2 Memoir in Acta SS., t. IV Octobris.

page 159 note 1 For these see Peeters, , ‘Apràs un siècle’, pp. xxiii, xxviii.Google Scholar

page 159 note 2 For him, see article by Baesten, P. V. in Précis historiques, xxv (1876), 389–410Google Scholar.

page 162 note 1 The various editions of the martyrologies may confuse a casual reader. The text of the vulgate version of the martyrology of Jerome was critically edited by Duchesne and de Rossi in 1894 for Acta SS., t. II i Novembris. The martyrology itself was dismembered and reconstructed critically by Delehaye, and published (text by Dom H. Quentin, commentary by H. Delehaye) in 1931 as t. II ii Novembris. The commentary on the Roman martyrology, to which all the Bollandists of the day under Delehaye's leadership contributed, is the introductory volume to December, and appeared in 1940.