Law and Literature: Batavische Gebroeders (1663)

On the view that it is high time to return to our European humanistic roots of Law and Literature rather than be largely concerned with the academic work done in the US and the UK, whence the Law and Literature movement originates, such reconsideration is relevant because in the early modern period the separation of fields of knowledge into disciplines had not yet developed and monodisciplinarity as we have known it since the late nineteenth century was not an isue; law was seen as part and parcel of the humanities, and literary works operated as sources for law. This speaks for a return to the literatures of the early modern period. Claiming that humanist jurisprudence in the Dutch Republic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deserves more than just the attention of legal historians and that, conversely, literature deserves more than just the attention of literary theorists, I investigate the reception of Vondel’s play Batavische gebroeders of Onderdruckte Vryheit (Batavian Brothers, or Liberty Oppressed) informed by the Law and Literature movement to which I claim adherence.