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Fagel Symposium - Trinity College, Dublin
Thursday 4th - Saturday 6th September 2008
In 1802, at the height of the Napoleonic War, Hendrik Fagel, Greffier of Holland, was effectively exiled in London, where he was eventually forced to sell the family library. Christie's prepared and circulated an auction catalogue, but Trinity College put in a pre-emptive bid and acquired the entire collection before the auction took place. At a stroke the holdings of the library were increased by 40%, from 50 000 to 70 000 volumes. Today the overwhelming proportion of Fagel's books, pamphlets and maps remains on shelf as a discrete collection in the East Pavilion of Trinity's magnificent Old Library.
Representing the intellectual and social interests of a wealthy and distinguished Dutch family over a period of some 200 years, the collection also transformed the content of a university library that had until then been dominated by theology. Published in the principal languages of Europe, the newly acquired holdings were particularly strong in such areas as history, politics, law, belles lettres, geography, cartography (everything from cosmography to manuscript plans of dyke systems), natural history and philosophy. However, the existence of the Fagel collection is virtually unknown outside Dublin and the research potential of these resources has thus been little exploited.
It is hoped that the symposium, which is taking place under the aegis of the Long Room Hub (Trinity College's research resource for the arts and humanities), will help to remedy this situation. Details of the the programme can be found below. There will also be an opportunity to visit the Collection and look at specific items from it, and there will be a musical event. The symposium will run from lunchtime on 4th to lunchtime on 6th September of this year and we now invite you to attend. An application form is attached below. Maximum attendance will be 60 and we will notify as quickly as possible those whom we can fit in, so that they can make arrangements for travel and accommodation.
There will be a non-refundable registration fee of €30. Lunch and an evening reception/ meal will be provided on the Thursday and Friday, coffee/tea on all three days. The cost of these should be under €100. We have received financial support from several funding bodies (including the Long Room Hub and the Dutch and Belgian embassies) and it will be possible to use a proportion of this to reduce travel and/or accommodation costs.
Further information is accessible via: http://www.tcd.ie/longroomhub/calls/ or from Tim Jackson at <tjackson@tcd.ie>.
Charles Benson Helga Robinson-Hammerstein
Keeper of Early Printed Books Senior Lecturer in Modern History
Tim Jackson Martine Van Berlo
Associate Professor of German Lektor in Dutch
Fagel Symposium - papers as of 25.7.2008
THE GENESIS OF THE COLLECTION
Theo Thomassen (Director, Reinwardt Academie, Amsterdam)
Generating, managing and collecting knowledge: Hendrik Fagel as politician, greffier and private collector
Pierre Delsaerdt (Universiteit Antwerpen - Katholieke Universiteit Leuven):
The Canon of Collecting in the 18th century. Bibliography, Book History and Book Collecting in the Fagel Library
Jos van Heel (Curator of the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum, The Hague)
Before Trinity: the Fagel collections in eighteenth century Holland
Policy of administrating, cataloguing, binding, and removing duplicates
Rengenier Rittersma (NWO Fellow, Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Botany as an intellectual and horticultural interest in the Netherlands (17th century)
THE ACQUISITION OF THE COLLECTION
Peter Fox (University Librarian, Cambridge)
The acquisition of the Fagel collection by TCD
THE CONTENTS OF THE COLLECTION
Willie Kelly (Research Fellow, Scottish Centre for the Book, Edinburgh)
Medical, scientific and legal imprints
John Loughman (University College, Dublin)
Two manuscript sources from the Fagel Collection
[One associated with the famous Alkmaar bulb auction of 1637, the other with a series of building plans for the Fagel residence on the Noordeinde, The Hague, from 1706]
Jason Harris (University College, Cork)
Belgium and Batavia as described in the early antiquarian holdings of the Fagel collection
Tim Jackson (Trinity College, Dublin)
Hibernica in the Fagel Collection
THE MANAGEMENT OF THE COLLECTION
Matthijs van Otegem (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague)
The collection as a collection Š to be used: cataloguing, digitisation, preservation
THE COLLECTION AS A RESOURCE
Matthew Yeo (Chetham's Library, Manchester)
Books, library catalogues and the postgraduate student
Kees Kaldenbach (Independent scholar, Amsterdam)
Atlases and topographic images, with a special focus on Dutch maps as they are reproduced in paintings by Johannes Vermeer and other Dutch 17th Century painters
Clare Guest (Agder University Kristiansand, Norway)
Italian Renaissance editions of poetry and poetics (classical and Renaissance) in the Fagel collection
Jean-Paul Pittion (University of Tours)
The Huguenot struggle for recognition as monitored by the Fagels
Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (Trinity College, Dublin)
Changing attitudes to miracles as reflected in the Fagel holdings
Charles Benson (Trinity College, Dublin)
Festival books