ABSTRACT

In his mid-twenties, the young Dutchman Willem Jonckbloet (1817-1885) undertook a journey through Germany. Following in the footsteps of German poets and authors like Wilhelm Grimm and August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, he went in search of undiscovered manuscripts and fragments, as well as connections with the German scholars whom he so admired. For Jonckbloet, this journey played an important role in the way he positioned himself as a young scholar. He was driven by two main ambitions: to modernise his discipline – the study of medieval Dutch literature – in order to bring it up to the level of international scholarship and to become a leading gure in his eld. But this journey was not only meant to gain symbolic capital, as Pierre Bourdieu has termed it, or simply to position himself alongside established professors in Germany.1 Jonckbloet also aimed to broaden his experience in working with manuscripts and to learn about the German philological tradition from the men he held in such high esteem. This journey, the rst performance on the international stage of scholarship by the young Jonckbloet, was also meant as an educational round trip. He must have felt a strong desire to reshape what constituted his own identity, thus becoming a better scholar and positioning himself more centrally in the world of learned men: in short, to reect upon and modify accordingly his own “self-fashioning”, to borrow the term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, to full his intellectual aspirations.2 This chapter starts by exploring Jonckbloet’s background and early life, before turning to the most important sources that enable us to reconstruct his journey and present as complete an itinerary of the period from May to October 1842 as possible. It then analyses the extent to which he succeeded in his twofold quest: nding manuscripts and meeting like-minded scholars.