Willem Frijhoff (1942–2024)

Willem Frijhoff was a renowned scholar with a great international reputation in a range of areas and periods of history of culture and mentality.This included university history, history of schooling, history of childhood, history of religion, urban history, and history of Dutch culture and society.In a recent interview he summarised his basic attitude in history as follows: "you can only know what is familiar to you, you cannot judge what you have not investigated in detail, you must do justice to the people from the past to their history, and you must try to take them seriously, not only as a group, as a representative of an ideology, but as an acting human being". 1 Wilhelmus Theodorus Maria Frijhoff was born in the middle of the Second World War, on 31 May 1942, into a Catholic middle-class family in Zutphen, a Dutch Hanseatic city situated on the river IJssel.His family originally came from Kleve in Germany.The family settled in Holland in the eighteenth century as wine-merchants in Rotterdam and grocers in Haarlem and Leiden.His father, born in Leiden, grew up in Zutphen and became a photographer there.Willem's lifelong interest in history arose when he as a primary school boy wandered daily through the medieval city centre of Zutphen. 2 At the archiepiscopal minor seminary in Apeldoorn, his history teacher opened for him the large seminary library and there he laid the foundation for his later great erudition.After studying theology and philosophy at the major seminary of the Archdiocese of Utrecht, he went in 1966 to Paris to study history and social sciences

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