#On the Name in the File
"The record gives me a name, a title, a city and one piece of work. I have condemned men on less, though I preferred not to."
Dr. Gerrit Lemstra of Amsterdam is one of the three names under which the Year of Letters is filed. The other two are Dr. Pieter van Hoorn and Dr. Jan de Waal. The three share a collective dossier, and most clerks are happy to leave them there, bundled together like co-signatories on a bad loan. This entry takes the middle name on its own, and the middle name comes with a thin file.
The file gives his title, his partners and his city. Through the published account of the Bone Census, it also credits him with one labour: he wrote the inquiries that travelled with the table. It gives no birthplace and no year of birth. It names no university, no household and no face, and it does not say when he died. I will not supply any of these. A Warden who invents a heretic's childhood to fill out a folio has committed forgery, and the Bureau of Records punishes forgery whatever the forger's rank. Mine included.
#On the Courtesy of Inquiry
"Van Hoorn counted. Lemstra asked. The asking did more damage."
The published account divides the work of the Bone Census three ways, and I keep the division as I received it. Van Hoorn compiled the comparative evidence and wrote the short, restrained commentary under the table. De Waal handled the addresses, the money and the copyists. Lemstra wrote the inquiries attached to each letter: formal requests to the holding clergy, worded to suit whoever was to read them.
Credit for the whole letter is not his. Nor is credit for the Census, or the campaign. His credit is narrower and, to a man in my office, more interesting.
The inquiry used the clergy's own documents against them. Every reliquary of Saint Aldebrand had its provenance ledger, its notarised authentication, its sworn statement that this bone was the sole and true relic of the Blessed. Lemstra's requests took those claims at their word. In the language of one learned correspondent writing to another, they asked each institution to reconcile its certified claim with the certified claims recorded elsewhere. That was the whole request. It cited the clergy's paperwork back to them and waited.
The trap is in the reply. If an institution kept silent, its credibility suffered, because a specific documentary question left unanswered reads as a concession in any chapter house that has ever audited a tithe. If it denounced the letter, the discrepancy was still sitting on the page with the bishop's anathema on top of it. If it answered, it had accepted the question as a proper one for scholars to discuss, and from then on it was arguing arithmetic with men who had brought the arithmetic.
I know the form. A request for reconciliation is the oldest tool in the Ledger. I send such requests to provincial archivists by the dozen every quarter, in exactly that register of icy deference, and I know what the recipient goes through on opening one. Lemstra sent them to cathedrals.
I cannot say what he intended. Only his method has come down to me, recorded at great cost by the people it hurt. The method shows a man who knew that a clerk can always refuse an insult and can never decently refuse a properly drafted query.
#On the Forty Addresses
"A question asked once is a discourtesy. Asked in forty cities in one season, it is a policy."
Van Hoorn conceived the campaign in the winter of 1677. The Synod would later number that winter A.S. −33, a date assigned to it more than a century after the fact. According to the surviving postal records, dispatch began in March 1678, A.S. −32. The Concordats of Ulm were already twenty-three years old. De Vera Luce was thirty-two years in the future.
The table at the centre of each letter collected registered claims from the German states, the Lowlands, northern France and the Swiss cantons. It recorded two hundred and forty-three relics attributed to Saint Aldebrand: forty-one femurs, nineteen skulls, twelve hands, and the rest ribs, vertebrae and a collarbone that turned up in three inventories at once. Seventeen of the femurs belonged to Cologne, each certified as the only one. Nobody in Amsterdam held a single bone. The Census compared testimony with testimony, and Lemstra's inquiries asked that testimony to account for itself.
De Waal's arrangements are what made the letters travel. Fourteen copyists wrote the correspondence out by hand. Three of them were later found to be former seminary students, a detail the Bureau of Purity has never got over. Using Amsterdam's commercial connections, the letters reached forty cities in three months. They went to universities, parish bodies, town councils, merchant guilds and print-houses. Every copy carried the request, which meant every copy was waiting for an answer.
#On the Answers Returned
"The dioceses replied. That was the mistake."
The answers came back mutually incompatible, which is the most an inquiry of this kind can hope for. In public, the Bishop of Münster burned the letter, and the number of femurs stayed exactly where it was. The Diocese of Trier argued that the multiplication of relics was itself a miracle. That was an answer, and in giving it Trier conceded the multiplication. Cologne stated that faith, not arithmetic, governs authentication. A later Church would adopt that position whole. In 1678 it convinced nobody. Father Grauss of Düsseldorf ate his copy, which earned him the magistrate's punishment and three days in the municipal gaol. I count his as the only reply that left nothing for the other side to read.
Vienna's answer was the most thorough. The diocesan hierarchy of the old Holy See, under Archbishop Rupert III, struck the Reliquary of Saint Aldebrand from the inventories, sealed the ledgers and cut the Custodial Chain. You cannot reconcile a claim about an object that, officially, no longer exists. Later Bureau filings took this act into the Bureau's own lineage, as they take in most things. The reliquary kept glowing in its case. That fact belongs to the Miracle of Saint Aldebrand and its own docket. The Census was never in a position to explain it, and the inquiries never asked about it.
"…a femur is a femur and forty-one of them in one city is forty-one of them in one city…" — Year of Letters entry, as carried into the Bureau's summary file on the three scholars.
The figure is wrong as placed. The forty-one femurs were spread across the whole surveyed network. Cologne held seventeen. The parent entry's own tally gives the correct numbers. The summary file has been corrected to match the parent's arithmetic, which the Bureau has always regarded as accurate.
#On the Scholar's Later Classification
"His career ends with the letters. His file goes on without him."
Lemstra's documented career consists of the inquiries of 1678. Everything after that belongs to other people, and the record keeps them separate even where clerks have not.
The Amsterdam Academy published De Vera Luce in 1710, A.S. 0, and the Rationalists turned the scholars' approach into doctrine and then into a continental system. The Continental Post was compared with the Amsterdam distribution and did not match its pace until A.S. 110, a comparison that flatters de Waal and leaves Lemstra out. In 1721, A.S. 11, Dr. Matthias Voll put the method to work at the Trial of Saint Aldebrand's Reliquary. Lemstra was not there, and no record puts him there. In 1805, A.S. 95, the relic blazed at the Siege of Vienna. The faithful call that an answer, but it was given a hundred and twenty-seven years too late to reach any address in Amsterdam, and it does not respond to his letter.
The Bureau classifies all three scholars as Category A heretics, posthumously. No lifetime trial is recorded, and I have found no date of condemnation to go with the classification. The Bureau did not exist when Lemstra wrote. Neither did the Synod, the formal calendar or the Category system. He was condemned by an office founded after his death, under a numbering adopted after his death, for questions that office has since filed as resolved.
The questions are still on file. I have been through the diocesan replies kept with the predecessor documents. Each one either refuses the inquiry or answers it, and none of them reconciles anything. As far as the record goes, the requests he drafted are still open.