Brill

Chapter Title: Foreword

Chapter Author(s): Piet Steenbakkers

Book Title: Printing Spinoza

Book Subtitle: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Works Published in the Seventeenth
Century
Book Author(s): Jeroen M.M. van de Ven
Published by: Brill. (2022)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv2kqwzdf.3

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Foreword
Studying philosophy means, first and foremost, studying
texts written by philosophers. It is tempting to take the
existence and the transmitted form of a text for granted,
and to focus on its concepts and arguments. Yet books
have their fates, even before they reach their readers.
Their final shape is affected by their genesis, growth, cir-
culation and dissemination, and their initial reception in
turn influences the way their authors evolve. In the case of
Spinoza’s works, we have highly sophisticated and contro-
versial treatises that survived only in print: no philosoph-
ical work of his came down to us in his own handwriting.
(The Short Treatise, transmitted in a seventeenth-century
apograph of a contemporary Dutch translation, was not
printed until the 1860s.) Because Spinoza wrote in Latin,
scholars handle his texts much in the way they treat clas-
sical authors: they bring out critical editions, translations
in the vernacular and commentaries. Though this work is
essential, we should also keep in mind that Spinoza was
a decidedly modern thinker, too. He was abreast of sci-
entific developments in the seventeenth century, crafted
optical tools, had a select network of correspondents and
contacts, and acquired international fame and notoriety
for the novelty of his ideas – initially by word of mouth
and through circulation of manuscripts, but (as from 1663)
faster and on a much larger scale through printed books.
In order to study the formation of his thought and its ear-
liest reception, we must understand how his texts passed
from manuscript into print, who were involved in that
process (friends, scribes, editors, compositors, printers,
translators, censors, enemies) and how the books found
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their way to an audience. Precisely because Spinoza was
a highly controversial author, the publishing history of his
books – banned but (by the same token) also much sought
after – offers unexpected perspectives on the develop-
ment and diffusion of his thought.
Jeroen van de Ven has been studying Spinoza’s life and
works for over fifteen years. His research into the minut-
est details of the printing of Spinoza’s books started
more than a decade ago; it has come into fruition in the
present descriptive bibliography. It is a dazzling achieve-
ment. Van de Ven’s expertise includes research on man-
uscripts, early printing, archives, bibliographies, learned
journals, and correspondence collections. Building upon
the work of pioneers like Land, Gebhardt, Bamberger,
Kingma, Offenberg, and Gerritsen, he here combines and
multiplies the perspectives and methods of earlier biblio-
graphical scholarship. In addition Van de Ven exploits the
countless new possibilities opened up by online research.
He thus brought to light the astounding number of 1,246
extant copies of early printed works of Spinoza all over
the globe.
In his scholarly career, Jeroen van de Ven has always
integrated the meticulousness of the bibliographer and
archival researcher with a broad historian’s view. This
book testifies to his distinctively individual research
profile. It is bound to become an indispensible tool for
Spinoza scholarship; no academic library can do without.
Piet Steenbakkers
8 May 2021