Bij het derde eeuwfeest van de martelaren van Atjeh (1138-1938)

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tagsdocument, article, religious, colonial, atjeh, catholic, martyrs, 1138, 1938, 1939, missiewerk, linden, centenary
aliasesDerde eeuwfeest van de martelaren van Atjeh, Third centenary of the Atjeh martyrs, Martelaren van Atjeh 1138-1938, Atjeh martyrs 1138-1938, Linden 1939 Atjeh martelaren, Atjeh martyrs centenary, 800th anniversary of Atjeh martyrs

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Bij het derde eeuwfeest van de martelaren van Atjeh (1138–1938) — “At the third centenary of the martyrs of Atjeh (1138–1938)” — is an article by Luc. van der Linden, O. Carm., published in 1939 in Het Missiewerk (The Mission Work), No. 4, p. 186 e.v., commemorating the third centenary — the derde eeuwfeest — of the martelaren van Atjeh — the martyrs of Atjeh — dated in the article’s title to the period 1138–1938. The article is recorded twice in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940): as No. 581 in the Sumatra chapter and again as No. 1059 in the Sumatra Addenda.

Subject

The article’s subject, as recorded by Van Meurs, is the derde eeuwfeest — the third centenary — of the martelaren van Atjeh, the martyrs of Atjeh. The title’s parenthetical date 1138–1938 is the key to the chronology: if 1938 is the year of the commemoration, then the derde eeuwfeest (third centenary) counted back from 1938 gives a base date of 1638 for the first centenary — that is, the martyrdom itself is placed in 1538. The “1138” in the title is, on its face, inconsistent with a third-centenary commemoration in 1938: a centenary counted from 1138 would, in 1938, be the eighth centenary, not the third. The discrepancy is most plausibly an OCR or transcription error in Van Meurs’s survey — the most likely intended date of the martyrdom is 1538, with 1938 as the fourth centenary, or 1638 with 1938 as the third centenary. The question is one that the article itself, in Het Missiewerk, would resolve; the present entry records the discrepancy as Van Meurs gives it.

The martelaren van Atjeh — martyrs of Atjeh — are, in the context of a Catholic missionary journal (Het Missiewerk), the Catholic missionaries or converts who suffered martyrdom in Atjeh in the period of early Christian missionary contact with the sultanate. The 16th and 17th centuries — the period of the Wessels article Uit de missiegebieden van Sumatra: Atjeh in de 16e en 17e eeuw (No. 652, same year and same survey) — were the period of the principal early Catholic missionary efforts in Atjeh, and the martyrs commemorated are most plausibly to be identified with the missionaries of that period. The Jesuit Wessels’s article, in the same year, gives the broader mission-field context from which the martyrdoms are drawn.

Author and venue

Luc. van der Linden — the O. Carm. (Ordo Carmelitarum, Order of Carmelites) suffix in the Addenda entry (No. 1059) indicates that the author was a Carmelite father — published the article in Het Missiewerk (The Mission Work), No. 4, p. 186 e.v. Het Missiewerk was the principal Dutch Catholic missionary journal, and the choice of venue signals the article’s intended audience: Dutch Catholic readers with an interest in the mission fields of the Netherlands Indies. The Carmelite identification of the author, and the venue, place the article within the tradition of Dutch Catholic missionary historiography on Atjeh — a tradition distinct from, but parallel to, the Protestant and the secular-colonial scholarly traditions.

Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht

The article is recorded twice in Van Meurs’s survey: as No. 581 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) and again as No. 1059 in the Sumatra Addenda (Nos. 1056–1062). The double recording — once in the main Sumatra chapter and once in the Addenda — reflects the bibliographic practice of including, in the Addenda, items that had appeared in the preceding year but had not been recorded in the previous survey. The entry in the Addenda (No. 1059) gives the author’s name in fuller form — LINDEN O. CARM., LUC. VAN DER — and confirms the Carmelite affiliation of the author. The two entries together are the source for the third centenary of the Atjeh martyrs in the corpus.

Significance

For AcehWiki, the article is significant as the 1939 record of the third centenary of the Atjeh martyrs — a commemoration of the Catholic missionary martyrs of Atjeh, observed in 1938 and recorded in a Dutch Catholic missionary journal. The article furnishes an independent source for the Catholic missionary martyrology of Atjeh, and it complements the Wessels article Uit de missiegebieden van Sumatra: Atjeh in de 16e en 17e eeuw (No. 652, same year and same survey), which gives the broader mission-field context of 16th- and 17th-century Atjeh. The two articles together — the Wessels historical survey and the Linden martyrological commemoration — mark 1939 as a year in which the Catholic missionary history of Atjeh was, in several registers, being memorialised in Dutch colonial scholarship. The discrepancy in the title’s date (1138–1938 vs the expected third-centenary chronology) is a question that the article itself would resolve.

See Also

Source

Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 581; and Addenda, No. 1059. Citing: Luc. van der Linden, “Bij het derde eeuwfeest van de martelaren van Atjeh (1138–1938),” Het Missiewerk, No. 4 (1939), p. 186 e.v. The Addenda entry gives the author’s name as Linden O. CARM., LUC. VAN DER.

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