Een weinig spectaculair Darwinjaar
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.7130Keywords:
Charles Darwin, Reception historyAbstract
An Unspectacular Darwin Year
The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species did not provoke heated debate in the Netherlands. Of the few responses that did emerge, the majority were moderate in tone. It was only in 1868, when the German materialist Carl Vogt gave a series of lectures in Rotterdam, that the issue of human evolution in relation to Christian belief gave rise to a short outburst of polemics. And the Dutch situation has not changed since then: the theory of evolution is hardly ever discussed publicly, unless religious issues are at stake. The year 2009 is no exception: the works published on the occasion of the Darwin commemorations sparked no polemics. A number of these works are reviewed here. Two historical PhD theses, by Janneke van der Heide and Bart Leeuwenburgh, add valuable detail to our picture of the Dutch reception of Darwin’s works and confirm that, by and large, quiet appropriation was the customary response. Dirk Van Hulle’s book, based on textual analysis of Darwin’s manuscripts and books, provides an original insight into Darwin’s romantic inspiration. Several popular works, by Chris Buskes et al., Marc van Roosmalen and Job Slok, aim to explain Darwin’s career and ideas to a wider audience; Buskes et al. do the best job.
Downloads
![](https://bmgn-lchr.nl/public/journals/1/submission_5558_5558_coverImage_en_US.jpeg)
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c) Authors are permitted to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
Authors are explicitly encouraged to deposit their published article in their institutional repository.