You can’t call it an obsession, but Wim Visscher, the idiosyncratic historian from New Amsterdam, has been researching the history of the Battle of Ane for about fifty years. The former lawyer and secretary of the Battle of Ane Commemoration Association, felt time panting on his neck and now there is the book: The Battle of Ane 1227, a battle, a field and a monastery.
“In four years’ time it will be eight hundred years ago and that was a good reason to publish a book. I already started fifty years ago when I was a student,” says Visscher. He thought he could work on his book for another four years, but then he experienced a ‘break in his health’, as he describes it himself. “Then I started to think seriously about whether it could be done a little earlier.”
Anyone who thinks that the Battle of Ane is sometimes portrayed a bit too heroically and that the Drenthe farmer of that time was a bit much praised, will find no ally in Wim Visscher. In fact, Visscher likes to go the extra mile: “The Drenths were the smartest population group in Western Europe.”
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