Dichterschap en koopmanschap in de zestiende eeuw. Omtrent de dichters Guillaume de Poetou en Jan vander Noot

Summary

Poets and Merchants in the Sixteenth Century. The beginnings of Dutch Renaissance poetry
General outline.

This doctoral thesis discusses the ways in which the connection between the Netherlandish Renaissance poetry of Jan vander Noot and French Pléiade poetry was established in the 1560s. In the process special attention is paid to the Italian merchant-adventurers in the Low Countries, especially to those belonging to the Antwerp elite. Members of Italian mercantile colonies living in Antwerp should be regarded as major agents of the Renaissance in the Low Countries.

Jan vander Noot (c. 1538-c. 1596) is generally regarded as the first outstanding poet in Netherlandish early Renaissance literature. His mastery of the Netherlandish language and the new literary forms makes him preeminent among all his contemporaries. From the very start of the Vander Noot studies in the nineteenth century, scholars tended to regard the poet as a disciple of Pierre de Ronsard. ‘Here you have the Pléiade poet of the Low Countries’, thus wrote Albert Verwey when he presented Vander Noot to the readers of his well-known selection of Vander Noot's poetry. Research since has in many ways confirmed Verwey's original statement. But whilst the connection between the art of the Pléiade and Vander Noot's poetry was clear, one was still left with the following question: since Vander Noot never formed part of the famous Paris circle, what or who taught him to write like those Pléiade poets? How did Vander Noot come to master their thought and idiom?

Vander Noot had a great poetic talent. A devoted reader of the new French poetry, he could have perfected his natural ability on his own by simply reading Pléiade lyrics. On the other hand, there is a poet in Vander Noot's entourage who could have played the role of intermediary between the Pléiade and Vander Noot. This is the Artesian poet Guillaume de Poetou (c. 1528-1568?). Poetou, Vander Noot's elder by some ten years, in 1566 published his Suite du Labeur en Liesse. In this we find the first poems Vander Noot ever published. Like the poems by Poetou, his are written in French, in the same Pléiade style. They are composed in answer to Poetou's dedicatory poetry for Vander Noot. From these poems, we learn that these two poets maintained a special relationship to each other, Vander Noot appearing as Poetou's Maecenas and Vander Noot figuring as a patron who shows himself willing to support his friend's literary and academic pursuits.

The new poetry by Poetou and Vander Noot did not appear out of the blue. They met in Antwerp, then the cultural as well as economic centre of the Low Countries. In this melting pot literary ingredients were blended. The outcome was a new poetry in which we can still easily detect the traditional, the humanist and the Italo-French components.

Chapter 1. The genesis of Netherlandish Renaissance literature.

As the Middle Ages were ‘waning’, two vernaculars were current in the Low Countries. In the northern provinces Netherlandish dialects were spoken, whilst in southern provinces, such as Flanders, Brabant, Hainaut and Artois some inhabitants spoke Netherlandish, others French dialects. There was still no standard language. However, from the fifteenth century on, the chances of a standard French in the Low Countries were much better than those of a standard Netherlandish, due to French predominance in the country's administration. For, the ruling dukes of Burgundy, being of French extraction themselves, introduced the Paris court language (i.e. future standard French) as early as the fifteenth century, whereas standard Netherlandish did not develop before the seventeenth century.

Bilingualism was still rare. In those days most of the people never crossed the borders of their villages or towns, let alone of their provinces. For their needs the familiar dialect - whether Netherlandish or French - was sufficient. Only the few people who did move around, such as civil servants, clerics and merchants, were bound to have a working knowledge of both vernaculars.

In the course of the sixteenth century a Netherlandish national feeling was arising. Before 1548 the Low Countries belonged partly to Germany, partly to France. It took a Flemish-born emperor like Charles V to weld this territory into a formal unity - through the Augsburg Transaction of 1548. But there existed as yet no national feeling. That feeling came first to be found with the ruling nobility: they frequently crossed provincial borders, followed their emperor into Spain, Italy and Germany and therefore tended to regard the whole of the Low Countries as a nation. In merchants, scholars and artists - all those who had worked in foreign parts - we recognize the same tendency. One might even state that the further from home a Netherlander, the greater the part of the Low Countries that he was inclined to regard as his country. During the aftermath of the 1566 iconoclasm, when many thousands of Netherlanders had to leave the Low Countries and went to England or Germany, the newly originating national feeling was very much encouraged.

Humanism coming to the Low Countries in the second half of the fifteenth century met with an indigenous tradition favouring classical scholarship. From this sprung the special blend of so-called Dutch or northern Humanism, nowadays better known as Christian Humanism. Long before the Brethren of Common Life, who belonged to a fourteenth century religious movement founded by Geert Groote and known as the ‘Devotio moderna’, had fostered textual criticism avoiding medieval Latin in abhorrence when copying texts of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers. The Brethren also established student homes where they gave shelter, spiritual guidance and tutorial classes to young students of the Latin Schools, rich and poor. Through their textual criticism and their educational efforts the Brethren of Common Life paved the way to Humanism unawares. This movement - Italian in its origin - came to the Low Countries via many channels, the most important being students of the Low Countries coming home after having completed their studies at Italian universities.

Italian merchants, dealing with the Burgundian Court of Charles the Bold, formed another effective channel for introducing both Italian Humanism as the Italian Renaissance.

In the Netherlandish literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a major part was played by literary organizations known as Chambers of Rhetoric. The origin of these Chambers was probably neither Netherlandish nor French, but ‘Burgundian’. The art of the Rederijkers (‘Rhetoricians’) has been rightly characterized as technical mannerism. As such, this art is an international literary phenomenon which can for instance be traced in Spanish, Portuguese and English literature. In the Low Countries it has been extremely important as a movement in creating a general climate that favoured writing poetry in the vernacular. Poets not only rivalled each other within their own Chamber or even town, but they defended the honour of their hometown through official competitions with poets of rival towns. In about 1480 Humanistic ideas began to enter Netherlandish vernacular poetry. And the more this vernacular poetry came under the influence of Humanistic ideas and ideals, the more it became respectable.

In the Low Countries of the fifteenth century, Italian merchants such as Tommaso Portinari, the manager of the Bruges branch of the Medici bank, can be regarded as prime agents of the Italian Renaissance. People like Portinari had their portraits painted by Flemish artists. Subsequently, those portraits were shipped to Italy to adorn the walls of family chapels in Florence and elsewhere. But the mediation of the Italian merchants worked also in reverse: as early as 1469 the first Renaissance high-relief sculptures were brought into Bruges to decorate the court-yard of the Medici bank. These sculptures were the busts of Lorenzo il Magnifico and his wife Clara Orsini.

Something similar happened in booktrade: a few copies of a Plinius in Italian and of histories of Florence in Latin, all printed in Venice in commission of the merchant Girolamo Strozzi, were sent to the Bruges Medici bank in 1476 to be distributed from there.

During the first decades of the sixteenth century, when Antwerp took over Bruges's position as the economic centre of the Low Countries, Italian merchants also moved to this town on the Scheldt. We know that an Italian literary society operated in Antwerp perhaps as early as 1555. For the 1560s and 1570s two such ‘academies’, the all Italian ‘Gioiosi’ and the Genovese ‘Confusi’, are mentioned by the Antwerp poet of Genovese extraction Stefano Ambrosia Schiappalaria. From the collections of poems Schiappalaria himself published in Antwerp we learn that already in the 1550s he must have dedicated his poems in Italian to members of the Netherlandish nobility and patriciate, but also to Italian merchants established in Antwerp, such as the Genovese Stefano Gentili and Giovanni Grimaldi. Here we spot a direct link between him and Vander Noot's client, Guillaume de Poetou. For the same Genovese merchants Gentili and Grimaldi are the dedicatees of Poetou's first publication of poems, entitled La grande Labeur (1565).

In a broader sense we can even signalize a connection between Vander Noot and Schiappalaria, the ‘auctor intellectualis’ of monuments on behalf of the Genovese in Antwerp. For after Schiappalaria had died in 1581, on the first occasion the Genovese merchant colony needed a monument, it was to Vander Noot the Genovese turned for ‘inventing’ their monument to honour Alexander Farnese in 1585.

On the Antwerp cultural scene more Italians played an important part. The best known of them is undoubtedly the Florentine merchant and historian Lodovico Guicciardini, a staunch admirer of his famous uncle the historian Francesco Guicciardini. On the eve of the Dutch Revolt, the author of the Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567) gave a full and richly illustrated account in Italian not only of the Netherlandish history and geography but also of contemporary economic and cultural life in the Low Countries. It was a remarkable feat. Here for the first time, the Low Countries were presented to the international public as a nation on its own with Antwerp as its very heart.

It is in this Mediterranean flavoured cultural context that we must place Vander Noot in the days he wrote his first poems. In a dedicatory sonnet for Guillaume de Poetou of the beginning of 1566, he states that writing French poetry is something he is not used to. However, he mentions in the same breath writing poems in Dutch, Italian and Spanish as something his Muse is well accustomed to. So we have the poet's word for it that writing French poems in the Pléiade style was a skill not easily acquired by him.

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The sixteenth century was the Age of the Reformation. In that age, like most people, poets changed their religion and some changed it even more than once. Therefore, literary historians have always tried to assess the religious allegiance of Netherlandish Renaissance poets. Their works were searched for Roman Catholic, Protestant or even sectarian traces. The question is if such assessments are at all possible, considering for instance the zigzag line followed by Jan vander Noot in the field of religion. Religious convictions expressed by these authors in their literary works tell us probably more about the convictions of their intended public than about their own religious views. If we want to know more about their beliefs, we should not turn to literary, but to historical sources: letters, diaries and such like material. The case of Vander Noot is typical in this respect, for he became a Calvinist Protestant about 1566, but about 1583 he seems to have returned to the old Roman-Catholic faith. According to Jan van Dorsten and other scholars, there might be a chance that he actually belonged to Hendrik Niclaes' sect of the Family of Love. Van Dorsten considered it likely that Vander Noot's fellow Renaissance authors in London in 1568 were also niclaïtes. The painter-poet Lucas d'Heere and the learned merchant Johan Radermacher were close friends in 1568; so were in the same year D'Heere and Vander Noot. As for D'Heere's Family membership, there is plenty of room for scepticism, but less so with respect to Radermacher. On the other hand, we are certain that Vander Noot was a Calvinist for some time at least. In 1566-1567 he carne to the fore as one of the leading Antwerp Calvinists and as such was heading an abortive rebellion. He fled to England and was sentenced in his absence by Alba's Blood Council on the 14th of May 1568 with banishment and loss of all his goods. From that day he must have regarded a clear position in religious matters as unnecessary fool- hardiness: never again was his case to be brought to trial. As far as we know, Vander Noot bartered away his sympathies with the Calvinist party for moderate sympathies with the Roman Catholics, without apparently hurting the feelings of contemporaries such as Paulus de Kempenaer. A passionate hater of Roman Catholicism, this secretary of the Protestant Council of Brabant at The Hague did not accuse Vander Noot of betrayal of the Protestant cause. On the contrary, in his diary he mused over memories of the poet in sympathetic terms, even some twenty years after Vander Noot had died.

Chapter 2. Guillaume de Poetou, a biography

Guillaume de Poetou was the son of Gérard Poitou (c. 1497-c. 1557) from Labeuvrière, a village near Béthune in Artois. His mother, Jeanne Warrive, originated from Béthune. Before marrying, his father appears to have been a military man who served in Scotland and France. Apparently he enlisted in the French army, since he was held captive by the Imperial troops after the Battle of Pavia in 1525. When he married in 1527 or 1528, he had probably left the French army. It is therefore unlikely that his son, the poet, was born before 1528. Gérard Poitou settled in Béthune, at first as a surgeon, but in the end he became a corn merchant.

Guillaume de Poetou probably attended the Latin School in Béthune, where he befriended the later Neolatin poet Gulielmus Warlincurius. After his father's death, he apparently took over the family trade and almost immediately met with a financial set-back, condemned as he was to pay an unexpected tax on his corn exports. This event may have prompted his decision to move to Italy. We have his own word for it that he served Genovese merchants on the Mediterranean Sea for twenty months and that after having fallen seriously ill he had been taken to Genoa. So he lived amongst the Genovese for another nine months. Afterwards he worked for merchants from Lombardy and Tuscany and visited Rome. He got into the service of Spanish merchants and sailed to ‘five islands in the Atlantic’. He returned to Europe, discovered and admired the French Pléiade poetry of Ronsard and Jodelle, and served French merchants as their interpreter in Denmark and the North-German towns. Later on he was employed in the same capacity by merchants from Hamburg and Lubeck. He also paid a visit to England, but, finally, in or before 1562 settled in Antwerp. As an interpreter he must have been conversant with several languages, such as Italian, Spanish, German and Netherlandish, in addition to his native French.

In Antwerp Guillaume de Poetou renewed his friendship with friends from the old days in Béthune, when he used to be a corn merchant. They were people like Hugues and François Fasse, the Lille woad merchants. At that time he gathered all sorts of information about the activities of the Italian merchants in Antwerp and started to visit the Antwerp Stock Exchange in order to get personally acquainted with these Italians. Besides Italian merchants, his most sought-after patrons were merchants from Artois and from the French-speaking part of Flanders. In February 1564 Poetou borrowed 700 carolus guilders from the Lille merchant Jehan du Bois on security of the in all 1000 guilders he had formerly lent to some twenty people. This financial transaction might have been instigated by the printing cost of his first poems which came out at the beginning of the following year. Amongst all sorts of occasional poetry this collection contains a poem in a rare personal tone. It was dedicated to his cousin Jacques Bernoulli (who was to become a leading Lutheran in Frankfurt and is further known as the ancestor of several eminent mathematicians). In this poem he effusively thanks his cousin for having saved his reputation, unfortunately without leaving us any clue of his wrongdoing at that time. From a poem Vander Noot wrote for him, we gather that at the beginning of 1566 he intended to take up the study of medicine at Leuven University, hardly a surprising choice with his father being an ex-surgeon. In the light of what was going to happen it is odd that Vander Noot should support his friend's ambition of studying at a Roman-Catholic university, whilst before long both friends became staunch Calvinists. Poetou seems to have forgotten about his academie ambitions in the process. Instead, he proceeded with his literary work and dedicated a collection of poems to the Prince of Orange and Count Hendrik of Brederode, the latter becoming the uncrowned head of the opposition in January 1567, when he was elected leader of the Gueux by twelve delegates, half of the Calvinist consistories and half of the Calvinist merchants. Poetou's new collection never appeared in print, but remained in manuscript in Brederode's library at Vianen. On 3 May 1567 Vianen feil. Brederode admitted defeat and fled to Emden. His library was confiscated by the Government and according to a marginal note in the Vianen inventory, the Count of Meghen took his pick, Poetou's poems apparently being the only item in that library he cared to possess.

Like so many other Calvinists, Guillaume de Poetou probably had to leave the country in 1567, but since his condemnation by Alba's Council has not been traced, we must assume that he died before the Council was able to sentence him. As to this dates we therefore propose: c. 1528-c. 1568.

Chapter 3. A bibliography of Poetou's works

Since 1585 references to Poetou's published works often differ in names of printers and in dates of impressions. However, we are certain about the following titles:

Hymne de la Marchandise, Antwerp, Willem Silvius, 1565. (Copy in Bibliothèque Municipale, Versailles).

La grande Liesse, Antwerp, Willem Silvius, 1565. (Copies in BM Versailles; Centrale Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Ghent and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

A Iesv-Christ Cantiqve, Antwerp, AEg. Diest, 1566. (Copies in Universiteitsbibliotheek, Leiden and BN, Paris).

Svite dv Labevr en Liesse, Antwerp, AEg. Diest, 1566. (Copies in UL, Leiden and BN, Paris).

Hymne de la Marchandise, Antwerp, Willem Silvius, 1569. (Copies in UL, Ghent and BN, Paris).

Poetou's collection of poems dedicated to the Prince of Orange and to the leader of the Gueux, Hendrik van Brederode, probably remained in manuscript. This collection is lost since May 1567, when it was confiscated by Karel van Brimeu, Count of Meghen, but perhaps the manuscript is not altogether lost and might be traced one day in some public or private collection.

Several of Poetou's laudatory poems were reissued in Jan vander Noot's works. Notwithstanding Vander Noot's obvious care over correct texts, a lot of new printing errors can be proven to occur in them.

Chapter 4. Poetou 's works, an inventory

In this inventory the full title is given of each poem in Poetou 's works, followed by the number of stanzas, lines and line-length. Next comes a short note about content and function of the poem and a prosopography of the addressee. These descriptions of the lives of the 83 people concerned are based on unpublished archival material, as well as on published documents and historical monographs. Here we catch a glimpse of the 1560s Antwerp elite, united in their sympathy for and interest in Renaissance poetry. At the same time we come close to the milieu in which Vander Noot's poetry was going to flourish.

Chapter 5. Interpretation and comment

To which literary genre does Poetou's occasional poetry belong? In Classica! Antiquity occasional poems were often called silvae. Definitions of this literary genre, however, are rather scarce. In 1475 the Statius-editor Domizio Calderini used the term ‘silva’ to denote a single poem as well as a collection of occasional poetry and stressed its extempore character, whilst in 1561 J.C. Scaliger regarded also diversity and repetition as characteristics of the silva. Scaliger's definition is useful when used to test Neolatin silva poetry as well as vernacular poetry, called ‘selva’, ‘bocage’, ‘bosken’, ‘timber’ and ‘Wälder’. Poetou's poems and collections of poetry also fit in with the characteristics given in Scaliger's definition, the only somewhat obscure characteristic being repetition. When we look for repetition in Statius' Silvae we mainly meet it in the poems dedicated to the emperor. The frequent praise of the emperor's authority and his beneficence is the only theme that figures repeatedly in Statius' work of occasional poetry. Something similar is to be seen in Poetou's work, Antwerp's municipal government and its beneficence to the merchant class being therein the parallel theme.

Amongst Poetou's occasional poetry we find many so-called new year verses (‘étrennes’). This genre, an ancestor of our modern seasonal greeting cards, can be traced back to the times of Classica! Rome. Characteristic of the genre is that those verses are new year presents, accompanied by praise of the addressee and by wishes of seasonal good will. We find them in a considerable quantity in Poetou's La grande Liesse en plus grand Labeur. Moreover, to judge from their full titles, both La grande Liesse and the Hymne de la Marchandise as a whole belong to the genre of new year poetry.

Not unlike the ancient Roman poet, who had to be sponsored by his patron to write an epic or a tragedy, the sixteenth century poet used to be equally keen on a Maecenas sponsoring a lengthy and costly work. To arouse interest in his abilities, such a poet presented his prospective patron wich laudatory poems, a means that seems to have but rarely failed in eliciting a literary assignment. Although Poetou never gave vent to such an intention, writing an epic may have occurred to him as it occurred to his contemporaries. If we do not know much about his literary ambitions, we know more about his addressees. They were mainly merchants and members of the municipal government.

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In his monograph on Statius' Silvae Newmyer provides the theoretical background that can be used to find the structural principles in Poetou's ‘silvae’. Newmyer distinguishes between external and internal structural principles; external structure being based on a formal principle like chronology, variation of metre and line-length, whilst the internal structure is based on ideas and themes. In Statius' Silvae, as well as in Poetou's poetry, the internal structural principle yields the more interesting results. Poetou's silvae prove to be structured by making use of programmatic poems which prepare the public for a series of poems of similar content, like the love-poem in La grande Liesse that heralds more love-poetry. Another internal structural principle is the reverence for the Antwerp municipal government as it can also be read in the full title of the Hymne de la Marchandise and in the prose dedication of A Jesu-Christ, Cantique. The same principle figures in the naming of government offices directly after mentioning the name of the dedicatee in the Suite du Labeur.

Quite differently La grande Liesse turns out to be structured according to the principle of common geographical origin of patrons: Italians come first, they even precede Netherlandish nobility. Poems for fellow townsmen of the poet and for those of his wife are - like the poems for merchants from Lille - obviously put together according to that same principle of common geographical origin.

Equally interesting is the ‘recessed panel pattern’ structure in the Suite du Labeur, as it is identified by the poet himself in the closing poem (‘Je croy, ó VAN-DER NOOT, fauteur de bons Esprits,/ Qu'a mes Labeurs seras dans LIESSE confits/ Advangarde, Bataille, & preuse Ariergarde’). In this way we may trace the core of the book (called ‘la Bataille’ by the poet): a sonnet dedicated to Vander Noot, proclaiming him to be the Netherlandish Ronsard. If we apply the same recessed panel pattern to La grande Liesse, we come halfway the collection upon Poetou's ode for his cousin Jacques Bernoulli, the main theme of it being the rehabilitation of Poetou himself.

In Poetou's perception a poet was a man of learning. To achieve scholarly heights demanded a life of strenuous effort, of dedication and austerity. His Hymne de la Marchandise is full of biblical and classical argument proving that the poet had taken part in the Pléiade revival of learning. The ‘labeur’ mentioned on the title-pages in half of Poetou's publications, hinted at the constant correcting and polishing of poetry as advised by the leader of the Pléiade. Apparently, Vander Noot learnt a lot from Poetou. Before he met the poet from Artois, Vander Noot used to write poems in Dutch, Italian and Spanish. When answering Poetou's dedicatory ode, he felt obliged therefore to apologize for his Muse's not being accustomed to singing in French. Once under the influence of the propagandist of Pléiade-poetry in the Low Countries, Vander Noot was turning rapidly into a disciple of Ronsard. Both poets expanded on common themes (also favourite Pléiade-themes), such as divine inspiration, the poet's immortal fame and immortality acquired on behalf of the meritorious.

Poetou and Vander Noot did not belong to a Chamber of Rhetoric. They trained themselves in the use of the isosyllabic verse, the caesura and the new literary genres. What they had in common though with the traditional art of the ‘rederijkers’ (‘rhetoricians’) was that their poetry was still performance poetry. From their works we gather that several poems were written on existing melodies, whilst other poems functioned as lyrics for musical composers. Of all things existing melodies helped a beginning Renaissance poet most to achieve the intended regularity in his verse, both in metre and rhythm.

Poetou's technical skill matured at an earlier stage than Vander Noot's, as can be judged from the sonnets both poets wrote in those early days. It is therefore plausible that the bilingual poet from Artois was tutoring Vander Noot in becoming a perfect Pléiade-poet, well versed in writing both French and Dutch Pléiade-poetry.

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Of all foreign merchants in Antwerp the Italians gave the most valuable contribution to the modernization of trade and industry. Their mentality of audacity, entrepreneurship and speculation, unhampered by religious scruples, stimulated Netherlandish merchants to adopt new business techniques. Those techniques sixteenth-century Antwerp accepted the more readily for being something of a melting pot of Netherlanders and foreign nationals. In medieval Bruges Italian merchants formed a community of their own, living practically apart from the rest of the population and employing exclusively their kinfolk and countrymen. In Antwerp, however, Italian merchants employed a number of Netherlandish servants and taught them the mentality and techniques befitting their trade, but this new mentality clashed with the principles of Christian Humanism.

To be a true Christian and a merchant at the same time was virtually impossible, taught both Erasmus and Agrippa of Nettesheym. Although issued from a family of merchants himself, a Christian Humanist like Coornhert was not prepared to have merchants make capital out of scarcity. It is in the same vein that the majority of the short plays on the usefulness of just merchants were written, which were performed on the occasion of the Antwerp ‘landjuweel’ (i.e. a cycle of seven competitions between Chambers of Rhetoric). This particular cycle had started in Mechelen in 1515. The final competition in Antwerp - and a magnificent climax it was indeed - took place during the whole month of August 1561, when fifteen Brabantine Chambers competed in performing plays on set themes. Sadly enough this ‘landjuweel’ concluded one-and-a-half century of this sort of literary activity. No one was then to know that the political conditions, permitting such events, were changing for the worse.

The plays were published in 1562 by Willem Silvius in one volume. But the ‘esbattementen’ (comedies) were wanting, for the organizing Chamber had planned its own edition. It is therefore interesting to see that Guillaume de Poetou, who had Silvius publish his first two books, made use of the plays on the just merchant, published three years before. In his Hymne de la Marchandise he dwells on the social and individual advantages of trading and gives a full account of its history, beginning in biblical times, moving to Greece, Rome and to the days after the decline of the Roman Empire, ending with the miraculous flourishing of trade in the Low Countries. A great deal of this subject-matter he took from several plays, especially from those of the Diest Chambers. In those plays the positive effects of trading and the essential role played by foreign merchants in Antwerp were prominent, whilst in the majority of plays by their competitors the Christian virtue of caritas was prescribed to merchants in explicit terms.

In his Hymne there is also a new element when compared to the plays of the ‘landjuweel’: Poetou puts the stress on the intrinsic worth of the merchant. A true merchant is not greedy, hut has a high moral standard. The basis of his ethics is not caritas but industria. Industry is the major virtue and the industrious are blessed by God with fortune here and hereafter. In Poetou's later works, however, the ethos of industry gives way to the virtue of prudentia (being provident). The merchant is now represented as a ‘prudent’ man - as a man, providing for his future when he turns to literature for an everlasting good reputation, either as a poet or as a Maecenas. In this respect, Vander Noot may have learnt something from his tutor in Pléiade-poetry.

It took until the 1580s before Vander Noot considered the time ripe for following Poetou's example and decided to dedicate most of the poems of his Poeticsche Werken (Poetical Works) to individual merchants. Maybe the Netherlandish public was not too eager for that kind of poetry, for as in the days of Poetou he dedicated most of the poems in this category to Italian merchants, especially to Genovese merchants. As to their content, Vander Noot's poems differ subtly from those written by Poetou. It is not so much the virtues of industry and ‘prudence’ that are stressed by Vander Noot as the absence of greed. But in their ultimate beliefs both poets hardly differ, since to both a merchant's generosity is an absolute condition for gaining an everlasting reputation.

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At the end of the book the complete text of Poetou's Suite du Labeur is published in a critical transcription.