Renovation

The rapid assimilation of Cartesianism into the young Dutch universities is often regarded as evidence of the unique open-mindedness of Dutch society and culture during the Golden Age. Absent from such accounts is the fact that a disproportionate share of the earliest and most avid ‘Dutch Cartestians’ were in fact first- or second-generation refugees, displaced from the heartland of the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition in Reformed Germany during the course of the Thirty Years War (section 5.i). Particularly instructive is a group of early defenders of Cartesianism—Tobias Andreae, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich—educated in the Reformed academy in Bremen under the little-known figure of Gerhard de Neufville (section 5.ii). To this group can be added the Bremen-born Johannes Coccejus, whose variety of covenant theology was combined with Cartesianism to generate a tradition characteristic of the early Dutch moderate Enlightenment (section 5.iii). Placing the advent of academic Cartesianism within the intellectual diaspora of the Thirty Years War therefore opens fresh perspective on the Dutch Golden Age of the mid-seventeenth century and the intellectual fertility of Holy Roman Empire during the previous period (section 5.iv).