Refashioning Poets, Fashioning Readers Explorations of the Self-Fashioning of Jacob Arnout Clignett and Jan Steenwinkel, 1781-1784

Two young scholars from Leiden in the 1780s and their historical-linguistic work serve as a starting point for an exploration of the transhistorical usefulness of Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of ‘self-fashioning’ in understanding the history of nationalism and philology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The case consists of early philological publications by Jacob Arnout Clignett and Jan Steenwinkel: their Taelkundige mengelingen (1781-1785) and their edition of Jacob van Maerlant’s Spiegel historiael (1784). The case is at once representative of its time and prefigures the development of historicist culture after 1800.
From Greenblatt’s concept, both the textual and embodied aspects of self-fashioning, aimed at creating authority and independence in weakly demarcated fields of society, are adopted to broaden our view on nationalist philology. This study aims to go beyond analyses of national representations of the linguistic and literary past: studying the philologists’ self-fashioning and their refashioning of Maerlant brings lesser known processes into view, such as their derivation of philological authority from scholarly sociability, the performative creation of a community with their readers, and their emphasis on the pleasure that comes from reading and understanding ancient authors. These processes seem to have created as much historical representations as the historicist illusion.