Willem Th.M. Frijhoff is a renowned Dutch historian who has had a distinguished academic career spanning over 50 years. He has held professorships at multiple universities in the Netherlands and has published extensively on the cultural history of the Low Countries, France, and colonial North America. His research focuses on topics like popular religion, education history, urban history, and cultural transfer between places in early modern Western Europe. He is recognized as one of the foremost experts on the history of the Dutch Golden Age and is still actively involved in research and editing scholarly works late in his career.

1. Willem Th.M. Frijhoff (*Zutphen [NL], May 31, 1942) studied philosophy and theology at the
theological seminaries of the archbishopric of Utrecht in the Netherlands 1960-1966, and history
and social sciences in Paris 1966-1971 (Sorbonne and École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales [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 awarded with an honorary doctorate (history of
education) at the University of Mons-Hainaut (Belgium) in 1998. He was made Chevalier de
l’Ordre National du Mérite (France) and Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau (Netherlands).
He was the Dutch recipient 2011 of the bi-national Dutch and French Descartes-Huygens Award
for Franco-Dutch Scientific Cooperation.
After research assignments for the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in
1969-1971, he was in 1971-1981 a research fellow in religious anthropology at the EHESS (chair
of Alphonse Dupront) and as from 1977 also at the history of education department of the Institut
National de Recherche Pédagogique (INRP), both in Paris. In 1981-1983 he taught social history
at Tilburg University. In 1983-1997 he held the newly founded chair of cultural history and
history of mentalities of pre-industrial societies at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam (faculty
dean 1986-1989), and he was from 1997 to his retirement in 2007 professor of early modern
history at the Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam (faculty dean 2002-2006). He supervised or
co-supervised 56 finished PhD dissertations in the Netherlands, at the EUI (Florence, Italy), in
Great Britain (Cambridge) and in France (Paris-I), and is still co-supervisor of some other PhD
dissertations, and he presided the honorary doctorate of the Dutch writer Gerrit Krol (VU 2005).
He served on many PhD juries in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the USA. From 2003 to
2014 he chaired the thematic research program ‘Cultural Heritage’, later ‘Cultural Dynamics’, of
the Dutch National Research Organization (NWO) with sixteen research projects involving about
50 research positions), for which he drafted the initial program and supervised its elaboration. He
has chaired the national evaluation committees of the Meertens Instituut (Ethnology and
Linguistics), the International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam), and for QANU the
departments of Theology and religious studies in the Netherlands (2012-2013). He pertains to the
first group of selected scholars at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam whose work has been
included in the digital DARE Repository.
He was a visiting professor at the EHESS in Paris (1987, 1999) and at the European University at
Florence (1990, 1991), held the UCSIA visiting professorship at Antwerp University in
February-June 2009, and throughout 2009 a part-time visiting professorship at the Radboud
University Nijmegen, where he acted as a coordinator of the research program ‘Culture, Religion
and Memory’. Since 2010 he holds the Erasmus Chair in the Humanities of the G.Ph. Verhagen
Foundation at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, where his teaching (in 2010-2012) focused on
the theme of Memory and oblivion in history. In 2009 he was appointed a member of the jury of
the grand prix Claude Lévi-Strauss (Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques) by the French
Secretary of State of Scientific research. In 2013 he acted as a member of the selection committee
for the Starting Grants in Humanities ( SH6: History and Archaeology) of the European Research
Council (Brussels), and in 2015 for the Consolidator Grants. At the demand of the mayors of the
cities and the vice-chancellors of the universities of Marburg and Tübingen (Germany), he has
prepared in 2012 as an external expert a double report for their candidacy as typical ‘university
towns’ on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List.
In 1990 he was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
(KNAW, Amsterdam), which he served 1999-2008 as a member of the executive board, and
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2. 2005-2008 as chair of its division of Humanities and Social Sciences (and functional vice-
president). Among other services within the KNAW, he chaired the committee on the use of
Dutch as a language of science (report 2003), and served from 1995 to 2008 on the board the Dr.
A.H. Heineken Prize for Historical Scholarship, first as a member and a secretary, finally as
chair. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Flemish Academy at Brussels in 2006 and a
member of the Academia Europaea (London) in 2009. Since 2008 he is also a fellow of the New
Netherland Institute at Albany (NY). Among his public lectures are the Goltzius lecture (Venlo
1992), the Willem van Oranje lecture (Delft 2000), the Johan de Witt lecture (Dordrecht 2008),
the Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis lecture (Heerenveen 2013), and the Erasmus Birthday
lecture (2014). Two of his academic lectures at the KNAW have been published in a more
elaborate version: Volkskunde en cultuurwetenschap: de ups en downs van een dialoog [KNAW,
Mededelingen van de afd. Letterkunde, NR 60, 3] (Amsterdam: KNAW, 1997) 60 p., and
Meertaligheid in de Gouden eeuw: een verkenning [KNAW, Mededelingen van afd. Letterkunde,
NR 73, 2] (Amsterdam: KNAW Press, 2010), 68 p., to be republished in an English translation in
the first volume of the series Languages and Culture in History (Amsterdam: AUP, 2016).
He published many learned articles on themes of cultural and religious history, history of
education and history of universities in Western Europe (in particular France and the
Netherlands) and colonial North America (New Netherland), with a strong accent on cultural
practices and representations: on social memory, representation, and identity; on the history of
secondary schooling, higher education and the universities, and urban history; on the social
history of language and intellectual history; on cultural transfer and forms of appropriation, and
on popular religion, inter-confessional coexistence and toleration, and issues of prophecy, magic
and sorcery. His present research is on the transmission of religious experience, on religious
survival strategies, toleration, cultural identities and models of coexistence in early modern
Western Europe, colonial America and the Atlantic area, and on heritage, memory and oblivion,
including the so-called lieux de mémoire of the Low Countries and Europe. Together with Karène
Summerer-Sanchez (Leiden University) and Marie-Christine Kok-Escalle (Utrecht University), he
is the editor of the series Languages and Culture in History, started in 2015 at Amsterdam UP.
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; awarded as Le Choix des Annales],
Prophètes et sorciers dans les Pays-Bas aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, with Robert Muchembled
and Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat (Paris: Hachette-Littérature, 1978); 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 Prize by the Holland Society of Sciences, Haarlem]; Lieux de mémoire et
identités nationales, co-ed. with Pim den Boer (Amsterdam: AUP, 1993), the special issue
« Autodidaxies, XVIe-XIXe siècles » of Histoire de l'éducation (Paris), n° 70, May 1996, and the
teacher textbook « Histoire de la diffusion et de l'enseignement du français dans le monde », co-ed.
with André Reboullet, a special issue of Le Français dans le monde (Paris, 1998). Together with
Niek Pas (University of Amsterdam) and Thomas Beaufils (University Lille-3, and French
Embassy/Maison Descartes, Amsterdam) he edited a collection of essays on Franco-Dutch
Relations in History, in the French yearbook Deshima (2014). He is also one of the editors of the
Dictionnaire des Pays-Bas au Siècle d’Or (general editor Catherine Secretan), set up in 2015 and
scheduled to be published at the Éditions du CNRS (Paris).
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, reprinted), Witchcraft in the
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3. 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”, 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; also published in French). His
broad synthesis on Dutch culture in the Golden Age under the title 1650: Bevochten eendracht,
with Marijke Spies, with the collaboration of Wiep van Bunge and Natasja Veldhorst (The
Hague: Sdu, 1999), has been translated into English as 1650: Hard-Won Unity (Assen: Royal
van Gorcum / Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). He wrote the synthesis on “Popular
Religion” in the Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. VII (2006). He coordinated and wrote
the introduction to the early modern division of the handbook Four Centuries of Dutch-
American Relations (Amsterdam: Boom / Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), and co-edited with
Laura Cruz the conference volume Myth in History, History in Myth (Leiden & Boston: Brill,
2009).
A collection of his Dutch and French essays on religious history has been translated into English
and published under the title Embodied belief: Ten essays on religious culture in Dutch history
(Hilversum: Verloren, 2002); this book has been the subject of much discussion in the
international historical media. 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), pp. 43-110, 355-415
(transl. into German, Portuguese and Spanish). He was editor and co-author of three urban histories
in the Netherlands, that of the cities of Zutphen (1989, reprinted), Dordrecht (3 volumes, 1996-
2000), and Amsterdam (vol. II-1 and II-2, with Maarten Prak, 2004-2005, reprinted), and the
Historische Atlas van Zutphen (2011, reprinted). As a member of the editorial board of the series
Historische Stedenatlassen (Vantilt) he has in particular supervised the atlases of Dordrecht,
Schiedam, Delft and Deventer. Since the 1980s, he edited three major scholarly book collections in
the humanities: Sporen (SUN), Memoria (SUN), and IJkpunt 1650 (Sdu). His inaugural lectures
Cultuur, mentaliteit: illusies van elites? (Erasmus University Rotterdam, 1984) and Heiligen,
idolen, iconen (Free University 1998), his valedictory lecture Dynamisch erfgoed (Free University,
2007), all published by SUN, and the publication of three other academic lectures De mist van de
geschiedenis (Nijmegen: Vantilt 2011) are widely used in teaching and research, and found their
way in German, French or English translations. With Leo Wessels he edited the Open University
course on early modern European history Veelvormige dynamiek: Europa in het ancien régime
1450-1800 (Amsterdam & Heerlen 2006), at present under revision.
Beside many learned articles, his scholarly work on the Dutch Golden Age and colonial America
includes the contextual biography 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) [awarded as Le Choix des Annales], widely considered in the scholarly
world as his magnum opus. This monograph conceived at the core of his conception of cultural
history, provides a cultural analysis of the life story of a poor orphan child, who through a
mystical youth experience became a Reformed minister at New Amsterdam (present-day New
York); one of the first settlers, Bogardus was a major personality of early New York history, and
his memory is still subject to a broad variety of interpretations. The revised version translated by
Myra Heerspink Scholz, Fulfilling God’s Mission. The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus
Bogardus 1607-1647 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007), has obtained the Hendricks Manuscript
Award 2008 of the New Netherland Institute at Albany, NY. The making of this book, that has
been at the core of various conferences, key lectures and interpretations, and his inspired several
writers and artists, has been analyzed in: “The Improbable Biography: Uncommon Sources, a
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4. Moving Identity, a Plural Story?” in: Volker R. Berghahn & Simone Lässig (eds.), Biography
between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography [Studies in
German History, 9] (Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 215-233. A revised version
of the Dutch edition, including the 34 watercolors on Bogardus’s life made by the artist Jan
Roelof van den Brink after the first publication of the book and exposed at New York, has been
published as Evert Willemsz. Een zeventiende-eeuws weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf (Nijmegen:
Vantilt, 2013).
His scholarly work has much benefited from his contacts with the late French historian and
psychoanalyst Michel de Certeau, about whom he published several articles, including the
biographical assessment “Michel de Certeau (1925-1986)”, in: Philip Daileader & Philip Whalen
(eds.), French Historians 1900-2000. The New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France
(Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 77-92. Throughout his academic career, he has
maintained a fruitful cooperation with Professor Dominique Julia (CNRS), at the EHESS (Centre
d’Anthropologie Religieuse Européenne); at present, their common research is concerned with a
cultural and social analysis of the French religious congregation of the Oratory as an educational
body during the Ancient Regime, about which several learned articles have already been published.
At present he is an editor, co-editor, member of the editorial board, the scientific council or the
advisory board of the following periodicals or collections: Histoire de l'éducation (Paris); History
of Universities (Oxford); Paedagogica historica (Ghent/Rotterdam, published by Taylor & Francis);
Pedagogiek; Ons geestelijk erf (Antwerp); The History of Science and of Scientific Institutions
( KNAW); Documents pour l’histoire du français langue étrangère ou seconde (SIHFLES, Lyon) ;
History of Education and Children’s Literature (Macerata) ; Revue du Nord (Lille);Tijdschrift voor
Geschiedenis (The Hague); Studium. Tijdschrift voor Wetenschaps- en
Universiteitsgeschiedenis/Revue d’Histoire des Sciences et des Universités (The Hague/Rotterdam);
Historische Stedenatlassen (Vantilt, Nijmegen); Dordts Biografisch Woordenboek,(on-line);
Ethnography (Sage Publications, Keele, UK); De Achttiende Eeuw; De Nederlandsche Leeuw (The
Hague); Heloïse: Historical Academic Databases (on-line); Stichting Nieuwe Tijdinghe
(Rotterdam); Langues, cultures et identités. Approches historiques / Languages, cultures and
identities. Historical approaches (Amsterdam University Press).
He is also a member of the jury of the Paltsprijs for the restoration of historical monuments by
private parties in the Dutch town of Zutphen (Wijnhuisfonds Zutphen), and is one of the organizers
of the very popular local history course Zutphenkunde, for which he teaches the first lesson on the
DNA/the identity of the town.
His current research is about the socio-economic, religious and cultural aspects of an
international network (ca. 1550-ca. 1650) around the interwoven Catholic trading families
Eelkens, Van Dulmen, Buyck and Diepenbroeck, established at Bois-le-Duc, Amsterdam,
Antwerp, Rouen, Cologne and Oslo, also involved in the fur trade on North America and
Canada.
On behalf of a Spanish yearbook, he has published a reflection on his scholarly work and his
personal evolution as a cultural historian: “A short essay in ego-history, with some prospects for
the future, on demand of Historia de la Educación”, in: Historia de la Educación, nº 30 (2011), pp.
323-350.
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