Album Amicorum of Wilhelm Böckel

Albums of friendship, or alba amicorum, were wildly popular in the century between 1550 and 1650. Sometimes, it seems that every scholar, student, politician, and artist traveled with a book in which to gather clever inscriptions, coats of arms, drawings, eloges, and other reminders of the people they met and the places they went. Like autograph hounds in the nineteenth century, some collectors even solicited contributions from people they had never met, pestering dukes and humanists for entries they could add to their books. The most famous albums, like the one assembled by the Antwerp cartographer Abraham Ortelius, provide critical evidence about the intricate networks of exchange that knit together the intellectual world of early modern Europe, often in surprising ways that crossed national and confessional boundaries. But the albums of less well known figures also provide a vivid picture of the multinational networks of the period and the lively, creative use to which people put works on paper.

Wilhelm Böckel, who was trained as a lawyer, carried his album with him for the better part of four decades, back and forth on his many trips through Germany and into the United Provinces of the Netherlands. His album tells of those travels and features hundreds of entries---from noblemen, scholars, merchants, and lawyers---many of which included drawings and watercolors in Böckel’s honor. The drawings range from extremely finished works, clearly done by professionals and added specially, perhaps by Böckel himself, to more personal and awkward sheets that were likely drawn by the people who signed the book. There are also collaged pages and many prints, some of which were, in fact, issued expressly for use in such albums. The book is a vivid and very personal window into the life of a worldly seventeenth-century traveler---not one whose name has echoed down the centuries, but nonetheless a person of achievement, if not fame.