The Travels of Mare liberum

Scholars have also been complacent about the reception of Mare liberum. For instance, we rarely note the existence of a second 1609 edition, let alone the third, only recently discovered^[814] One non-Elzevir edition features briefly as item 542 in the 1950 bibliography of Grotius' works by Ter Meulen and Dier- manse.

Another flaw in accounts of Mare liberum's reception is the absence of atĀ­tempts to estimate the editions' print run, or gain insights into this seminal work's reception by examining the surviving printed copies' physical characĀ­teristics, such as their location, provenance marks, handwritten annotations, and the choice of other texts they were bound with. The history of reading has exploded over the past thirty years, in the wake of the pathbreaking work of Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine.^[817] Reception history, once a highly theoretiĀ­cal literary discipline, has been transformed into the study of what notes acĀ­tual readers left in their books^[818] A spate of excellent case studies followed, reconstructing the mental world of John Dee, Gabriel Harvey and others from the copious marginalia they have left in their volumes.^[819] Curiously, these methods have not yet enriched our understanding of Grotius, let alone Selden.

Margocsy and I compiled a census and survey of all surviving copies of the first, 1609 Mare liberum. We identified 78 copies, 3 of which are lost, 52 belong to the well-known Leiden edition, 23 to the mystery edition (probably printed in Cologne or Arnhem) that has been misattributed to Antwerp and is scarcely ever mentioned, and a single unique copy that survives in Santiago, Chile, that looks quite unlike the other two. The survey also revealed that copies seldom moved after they were first acquired, and that the highest concentration of copies today is in north German ports: an aspect of Mare liberumā€™s reception absent from existing academic literature. Two thirds of the surviving copies of the mystery edition alone are in German libraries, and no copy of this edition is preserved in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, or the Iberian peninsula.

The north German concentration may be a sign of Hanseatic towns' interest in new justifications of their right to trade, in the success of their Dutch colĀ­leagues and competitors, and in Grotius' exposition of the respective rights of corporations and the state in joint efforts. If the mystery edition was printed in Cologne, either before or shortly after Mare liberum was placed on the papal index of forbidden books in 1610, another possible motive for the pirated ediĀ­tion was the intent of Cologne authorities to sabotage the Twelve Years' Truce in the wake of the 1583-88 Cologne War, which reestablished the city's CathoĀ­lic allegiance. Moreover, Cologne's own rise as a member of the Hanseatic League and a long-distance trade centre on the Rhine made Mare liberum an attractive justification of the right to free trade, possibly creating interest in a locally produced and accessible edition.

The systematic survey of marginalia in surviving copies of Mare liberum confirm that such were the interests of early readers. Selden's underlinings in his own copy of Mare liberum, now in the Bodleian, are equally suggestive. The margins are cropped close and several annotations are lost, but it is still clear that some of them map onto Selden's published criticisms, while others reveal lines of inquiry, even direct adaptations from Mare liberum to Mare clausum, that remained covert.^[820]

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