Although not a well-known figure, even to specialists in eighteenth-century culture, the Dutch physician and author Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens (1726–1801) was in many ways an exemplary Enlightenment man of letters. A well-travelled and Jesuit-trained polymath who wrote convincingly on subjects from medicine to ornithology, and who managed to impress acquaintances as discerning as Voltaire and d'Alembert, Heerkens embodied the intellectual inquisitiveness, interdisciplinary range and cosmopolitan ease of the Encylopédie. He also deserves mention in this journal thanks to his participation in what H., in the first book-length study of Heerkens, calls the ‘Latin Enlightenment’ (p. 1). Flying in the face of increasing calls that literature and scholarship be written in the vernacular, Heerkens composed most of his published work in Latin, from early satirical pamphlets to his three-volume verse treatise on the physical hardships of the academic lifestyle, De Valetudine Literatorum (1790). In H.'s account, Heerkens's unfashionable fealty to the learned language derived from several sources: his Jesuit schooling, his sincere and almost lifelong love of Augustan poetry (Ovid above all), and an enduring embarrassment about what he saw as the parochialism of his native tongue, Dutch.
H. follows a biographical survey of Heerkens's career with six chapters of close and mostly admiring analysis of his eclectic literary output, from which she quotes generously, both in the original Latin and in her own English translations. Some of these works are more inviting to modern readers than others. While Heerkens's juvenile squibs against the literary establishment in Groningen are tiresome and trivial even in paraphrase, hardly meriting the full chapter of attention that they receive here, a long Italian travelogue has an appealing astringency reminiscent of Smollett, and his verse excursus on avian life in the Netherlands, Aves Frisciae, reveals its author to have been an observant naturalist as well as a surprisingly readable didactic poet.
According to H., Heerkens sometimes employs ‘a “stream of consciousness” style of reportage, an organically evolving narrative as opposed to the fastidious and systematic distribution of facts’ (p. 133); unfortunately, the same could be said of H.'s monograph. The opening biography is long and circuitous, withholding crucial data or sidelining it into footnotes (the year of Heerkens's birth, for instance) and failing to provide a coherent narrative framework for the remainder of the volume. As a consequence the reader often feels compelled to flip ahead to an appended biographical timeline, which itself is unduly cryptic. Nor is the book's partly-thematic and partly-chronological structure ever fully explained, even in the précis provided by the introduction, and H. sometimes surprises by switching topics midway through a chapter. Beginning with its punning title, the book is written in a colloquial and joke-heavy dialect that quickly grates on the reader's nerves: we hear, for instance, that one literary dispute left Heerkens with ‘egg on his face’, and that he was beset on his Italian travels by ‘bitchy cardinals’ (pp. 189, 130).
The aggressive jocularity of the book's tone only partially conceals a disappointing lack of argumentative rigour. Heerkens's career might well be of interest to historians of medicine, of eighteenth-century Latinity and of the Dutch Enlightenment, but we never learn exactly how H. intends her study to redirect or complement recent scholarship in those fields. H. has a frustrating tendency to conclude a stage of her discussion with an unanswered question or a speculative pseudo-assertion. A largely descriptive account of a sequence of historical poems by Heerkens, for instance, ends with the suggestion that they ‘might also be read as, if you like, butch Batavian counterparts to Ovid's Heroides’ (p. 172) – an intriguing argument that H. opts not to pursue. Even Heerkens's interest in Ovid, which provides the study with its clearest structural principle, is too often assumed rather than proven, and many of the Ovidian echoes that H. claims to detect in Heerkens's work are left unexplored. We learn, for example, that a poeticised argument for vegetarianism ‘cannot fail to put us in mind of Pythagoras's diatribe against meat-eating near the end of the Metamorphoses’ (p. 185), but we are left to ponder exactly how Heerkens adapts his putative model, or how Metamorphoses 15 was interpreted in the period more generally. H., then, has successfully reintroduced the world to a peripheral but intriguing Enlightenment personality, but the more ponderous task of situating Heerkens's accomplishments in the larger context of Enlightenment thought and literary practice remains unaccomplished. Perhaps a scholarly edition of one of Heerkens's more accessible and influential poems, such as the Aves Frisciae, would do more to revive the reputation of the amiably erudite Dr Heerkens than another uninviting monograph.
