A confutation is the act of refuting someone’s point forcefully – so I learned when I looked the word up; it had been flitting around my brain and I wasn’t quite sure if I had the definition right. It came to mind because I was reeling over the fact that something I long believed to be true – that there had been a tulip mania wrecking the Dutch economy in the 17th century – has now been refuted.

 

 

Here you can read all about it for yourself: historians and economists are setting the record straight. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/

Why then, you wonder, was there all this talk about a full scale destruction of the Dutch economy due to mad speculation around those bulbs? The article above points to the moralizing Calvinists; the source was “propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day.”

Pride goes before the fall, and all that.

 

It’s worthwhile to dig out Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987) to read up on the religious evolution in the Netherlands after the war with Spain. I liked the Guardian’s description of the author who teaches at Columbia University: erudite to the point of self-parody. His books sure make me feel in awe.

Confutation was also on the weather’s mind this week, telling the flower fields that their assumptions about the arrival of spring were inane. You could see the havoc reeked by the deluge, the hail, the cold. And yet the tulips’ beauty shone through, as it always does. They seemed not to mind, for the most part.

 

Which could also be said for the various visitors I encountered at The Wooden Shoe who were willing to be photographed in all their colorful outfits matched to the occasion. India, Thailand, China, Mexico – and Massachusetts. Keukenhof (the Dutch tourist attraction par excellence https://keukenhof.nl/en/)  it ain’t, this farm in the middle of nowhere, OR, but it sure attracts a lot of people.

 

 

 

 

And yes, I have gone slightly manic with the number of tulip photos, to make up for the now refuted historical tulip mania…..