ABSTRACT
Robert Fruin, who was appointed the first professor of Dutch national history in the Netherlands at the University of Leiden in 1860, was seen by contemporaries and later commentators as a model of the modern historian. This raises questions about the historiographical practices and the daily routine in which Fruin conducted his discipline. The science of the modern historian was a domestic science, in which the tone was set not by the verses of the poet but by the prose of the bourgeois. Fruin’s published works were mostly short, solid, meticulous and clearly formulated. They were based on extensive material collections and a highly individualised process of constant revision and correction. At the same time, a process of community-building was taking place in the historical world. The cement binding that community together was the new ‘scientific principle’ that was being cultivated by aspiring historians, based on the central values of indomitability, discipline and character. This science of small acts was celebrated in commemorative practices. These were modest manifestations, in which self-awareness and self-repudiation went hand in hand. The effect was to throw the scientific identity of the modern historian into sharper relief and to cause the historical profession to develop as a process of corporatist distinction.
