Etchings by Jan Luijken
At the back of the Bible it says that it was copied by Jan de Raadt, schoolmaster, in Hey in 1708. It must have taken him many years and I can see him sitting at home night after night working on it. He also illustrated the Bible. For this he meticulously copied etchings by, among others, the 17th century etcher Jan Luijken. And there is a very accurately drawn map of the Mediterranean.
Online search
As a historian, I immediately wonder who this man was and why he did this. Nowadays, you can do a lot of research online, so I started looking. You can search by place name or by profession. The name Hey does not appear in the register of place names and there are many lists of schoolmasters in the Netherlands, so it is difficult to find Jan de Raadt. So my online search has not yet yielded anything.
Practising penmanship or Bible study?
I did read that copying the Bible used to be a hobby, especially among school teachers. Perhaps they did this to practise the art of calligraphy, as a form of Bible study or to learn the Bible by heart. There are still a few handwritten bibles to be found in the depot; I think this is the most beautiful.
More use of collections in education
I chose this Bible because I would be delighted if a group of our students were to work with an object like this. In our heritage collections, we have a wealth of special objects from many different fields that students could research. The special and academic heritage collections are already used occasionally in education, for example there was a workshop on clay tablets recently, but we can do much more with them. We are going to make more exhibitions in 2018 to show what wonderful things there are in the repositories. If teachers or students see opportunities to use the collections in their research or teaching, we would love to hear about it. We also want to talk to teachers to make a plan how we can use the collections more in education.'
