Willem Frijhoff

• Website: http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl/handle/1871/1863 [DARE Repository]
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• Willem Frijhoff (*1942) studied philosophy and theology in the Netherlands 1960-1966, and history and social sciences in Paris 1966-1971 (Sorbonne and EHESS). He obtained his MA (history) degree in Paris 1970 (Sorbonne/EHESS), his DEA (historical anthropology) in 1972 (EHESS, Paris), and his PhD (social sciences) in 1981 at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. He was given an honorary doctorate (history of education) at the University of Mons-Hainaut (Belgium) in 1998, and was made Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite (France) and Officier in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau (Netherlands).
• In 1971-1981 he was a research fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and as from 1977 also at the Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique (INRP), in Paris. He taught social history at Tilburg University 1981-1983, held the chair of cultural history and history of mentalities at the Erasmus University Rotterdam 1983-1997 (faculty dean 1986-1989), and was from 1997 to his retirement in 2007 professor of early modern history, in particular cultural history, at the VU-University (Free University), Amsterdam, and faculty dean 2002-2006. He was a visiting professor in Paris and Florence (both twice), and will hold the same position in Antwerp in February-June 2009. From May 1999 to May 2008 he was a member of the board of directors of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Amsterdam), and from 2005 to 2008 he chaired the division of Humanities and Social Sciences. At present, he chairs the research program Cultural Heritage and Cultural Dynamics of the Dutch National Research Organization (NOW).
• He published many learned articles on different themes of cultural history and history of education in Western Europe (in particular France and the Netherlands) and colonial North America: on social memory and identity, history of secondary schooling and history of universities, social history of language and intellectual history, cultural transfer and forms of appropriation, popular religion and sorcery. His present research is on the transmission of religious experience and models of holiness in early modern Europe and colonial America, and on the so-called lieux de mémoire of the Low Countries and Europe. His books in French include École et société dans la France d'Ancien Régime (with Dominique Julia) (Paris: A. Colin, 1975) [Cahiers des Annales, 35], his PhD dissertation La Société néerlandaise et ses gradués, 1575-1814. Une recherche sérielle sur le statut des intellectuels à partir des registres universitaires (Amsterdam/Maarssen: APA, 1981) [awarded with the Prins Bernhard Fonds Prijs by the Holland Society of Sciences at Haarlem], Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales (co-ed. with Pim den Boer) (Amsterdam UP, 1993), the special issue 'Autodidaxies, XVIe-XIXe siècles' of Histoire de l'éducation (Paris), n° 70, May 1996, and the teachers textbook in the form of a special issue 'Histoire de la diffusion et de l'enseignement du français dans le monde' (co-ed. with André Reboullet) of Le français dans le monde: recherches et applications (Paris, 1998).
• Among his publications in English are the collected essays Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Man and the Scholar (co-ed. with J. Sperna Weiland) (Leiden: Brill, 1988), Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the fourteenth to the twentieth century (co-ed. with Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra) (Rotterdam UP, 1991), and the chapters on 'The Golden Age of Holland' (together with Marijke Spies and Gary Schwartz) in The Drama of the Low Countries. Twenty centuries of civilization between Seine and Rhine (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator Paribas 1996). His synthesis on Dutch culture in the Golden Age written together with Marijke Spies under the title 1650: Bevochten eendracht (The Hague: Sdu, 1999), has been translated into English under the title 1650: Hard-Won Unity (Assen: Royal van Gorcum / Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
• His collected essays on religious history have been translated into English and published under the title Embodied belief: Ten essays on religious culture in Dutch history (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002). He is also the author of chapter 2 ('Patterns') and 9 ('Graduation and careers'), in Hilde Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in Europe. Volume II: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800) (Cambridge UP, 1996), 43-110, 355-415 (transl. into German, Portuguese and Spanish). He was editor and co-author of three major urban histories in the Netherlands, that of the cities of Zutphen (1989), Dordrecht (3 volumes, 1996-2000), and Amsterdam (vol. II-1 and II-2, 2004-2005).
• His work on the Dutch Golden Age and colonial America includes Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf 1607-1647 [The Quest of Evert Willemsz: a Dutch orphan in search of himself] (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995), a contextual biography giving a cultural analysis of the life story of a poor orphan child, who through a mystical youth experience became a Reformed minister, and as one of the first settlers of New Amsterdam was a major personality of early New York history. The revised version of this book has been translated into English by Myra Heerspink Scholz: Fulfilling God's Mission. The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607-1647 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007), and has been awarded with the Hendricks Manuscript Award 2008 of the New Netherland Institute at Albany.