Literature of the Low Countries

A Short History of Dutch Literature in the Netherlands and Belgium

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III
Rulers and rhetoricians
Fifteenth century

During the fifteenth century radical changes took place in the political situation of the Low Countries. The foundation for these changes was laid in the second half of the fourteenth century when the daughter of the Count of Flanders married a French prince, Philip, Duke of Burgundy. This marriage brought the House of Burgundy into the Low Countries and with it a force of such energy that one might be justified in calling the fifteenth century after them. By means of a cleverly worked-out marital policy, and helped considerably by deaths occurring at the right times and places, the Burgundians in an incredibly short time brought the whole of the Low Countries under their rule. In 1383 the Duke of Burgundy succeeded to the county of Flanders, and in 1430, less than two generations later, Holland, Zealand, Brabant, Limburg and Hainault were Burgundian, while the dioceses of Utrecht and Liege were also governed by members of the Burgundian clan.

The acquisition of territories was only the first stage of the Burgundian grand design. The main object was to forge these territories into a new state, a new Burgundy outside France. The Dukes visualized this state as a kind of ‘third force’ on the continent of Europe, in between France and Germany, and they hoped in due course to have it recognized as a kingdom. Charles the Bold came close to the royal crown, and even negotiated to be nominated successor to the Emperor of Germany, but both plans misfired. The Burgundian creation remained a kind of federal state,

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without royal status, even without a name: the Burgundians simply referred to it as ‘the lands over here’.

In their endeavours to mould the various provinces into one single unit, the Burgundians were guided by the concept of a central administration such as existed in France. Several institutions were set up to bring about this centralization: a Grand Council as a central advisory body, audit-offices for the implementation of financial policy, a central Court of Justice. These measures which made the fourteenth-century efforts at unification look very puny, clashed in many cases with local privileges and prerogatives, and were therefore not always accepted without resistance. Several peasant rebellions occurred in Holland in the 1420s, and a serious revolt took place in Flanders in the 1450s when the cities of Bruges and Ghent made a firm stand against the Burgundian policies. The rebellions were forcibly put down by the Duke, Philip the Good, and Ghent was humiliated in the same way as Calais had been a hundred years earlier. The reason for these uprisings was primarily economic (the regular taxes which the Burgundians introduced were highly unpopular), but dissatisfaction with the language situation often played a part too. For the Burgundians were French, very consciously so, whereas the federation over which they ruled was predominantly Dutch-speaking. The language of the administration was French, and this led to clashes, particularly where juridical matters were concerned. In much of the resistance that was put up against the Burgundian rule one can detect an undertone of resentment of the discrimination against the Dutch language. In 1477, when the last of the strong Dukes died and an organized reaction set in, one of the first concessions made was the introduction of Dutch as the language of the administration in all Dutch-speaking provinces.

During the fifteenth century Dutch civilization was steadily developing its own characteristics and was no longer largely a derivative of French civilization. A clear example of this is to be found in the fifteenth century Flemish school of

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painting: Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, Dirc Bouts, Hans Memlinc who for the first time developed a really national style. In architecture one could point to Dutch Gothic, which although based on French Gothic, acquired in a short while a character all its own. In music it was the polyphonic school of Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht and Josquin des Prez which for almost a century dominated musical life in Europe. In literature the growing autonomy of Dutch civilization was illustrated by the emergence of secular drama without any foreign models or predecessors. On the whole one can say, contradictory as it may seem, that when the French Burgundians came to power in the Low Countries, the French influence on their culture had passed its peak.

The Burgundians took a great interest in the arts, far more so than the former rulers of the various provinces had done (with the possible exception of the thirteenth-century Duke Jan I of Brabant, who was a poet himself). Jan van Eyck was made official painter of the court of Philip the Good and received several commissions from him, among which was an assignment to go to Portugal to paint Philip's future wife. The sculptor Claus Sluter, originally from Haarlem, worked at the Burgundian court at Dijon as head of the ducal studios. It goes without saying that the French-speaking Burgundians took a greater interest in the painting, sculpture and music of the Low Countries than in the literature which was foreign to them (although Philip the Good had learned to read and speak Dutch reasonably well). Their library, famous for its size, contained very few manuscripts of Dutch works; almost everything was in French and Latin. They did show some interest in the literary organizations known as Chambers of Rhetoric by allowing themselves to be appointed honorary members and by attending their festivals. But there is no doubt that the organization of literature in the Low Countries was closer to their hearts than the literature itself. Interested in unification as they were, they realized that these Chambers of Rhetoric

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could play a part in their policies. They therefore approved wholeheartedly of the literary festivals which the Chambers organized and which, in days of little inter-provincial traffic, drew large crowds from various parts of the country. They recognized the value these meetings had for intensification of contact between the provinces, the levelling out of dissimilarities and the increase of homogeneity. Philip the Fair even concerned himself with the organization of the Chambers: in 1493, guided by the Burgundian ideal of centralization, he appointed the Chamber of Ghent as the central and sovereign Chamber. But the other Chambers resented and opposed his interference, and nothing much came of this.

The development of these Chambers of Rhetoric - the organization of literature in an age of organization - is the most curious aspect of fifteenth-century literature. It is no exaggeration to say that the literature of that period was entirely dominated by the Chambers. The Rederijkers, as the members of the Chambers called themselves, also put their stamp on a great deal of the literature of the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth century several of the prominent writers were still influenced by and connected with the Chambers of Rhetoric. The origin of the Chambers was not Dutch, but French. Associations of Rhétoriqueurs existed in the north of France as early as the twelfth century, and in the fifteenth century we also find them centred on the court of Burgundy. Their theorist was Jean Molinet, a Walloon who worked at the Burgundian court in Brussels, and whose L'art de rhétorique had some influence on the aesthetic ideas of the Dutch writers.

The oldest Chambers of Rhetoric in the Low Countries date back to the first years of the fifteenth century, although they were not known by that name yet. The name Camer van Rhetorica appeared for the first time in 1441 at Oudenaarde in Flanders. The Chambers may have originated from the Church, as associations which added lustre to processions and celebrations, and which performed religious plays. At all events, there was a close relationship between the Chambers

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and the Church, particularly in the South. But the Rederijkers were also in demand by the secular authorities. They were called upon by the local governments to organize pageants, to entertain at receptions, to put on plays or mimes on festive occasions. In exchange for these services they often received financial subsidies and privileges such as exemption from certain taxes. Membership of a Chamber was regarded as an honour and gave considerable standing in society.

The Chambers were organized very much like trade-guilds. Their membership varied a great deal, some Chambers had only ten or a dozen members, others well over a hundred. The head of the Chamber, called the Prince, was usually a prominent and well-to-do citizen who was chosen for his administrative rather than for his poetic capacities. The most important man from the point of view of literature was the Factor. He was the man in charge of all literary activities: he wrote the plays or the poems for performances and contests, and he was the producer of the plays. Apart from these functionaries, the Chambers also had a standard bearer and a fool. Every Chamber had a standard with a blazon (often a flower) and a motto: the Amsterdam Chamber, for instance, was called De Eglantier (The Eglantine) and had as motto ‘In Liefde bloeiende’ which meant both ‘flowering in love’ and ‘bleeding in love’; the pun was continued in its blazon which showed Christ crucified on an eglantine tree.

A characteristic aspect of the Rederijkers was their competitiveness. From the beginning of the fifteenth century the Chambers organized drama contests in which plays were performed that had been written for the occasion on a set subject. Sometimes the contest was between two Chambers only, but in the bigger contests many Chambers took part, as in Antwerp in 1498 when twenty-eight Chambers participated. Contests such as these developed into popular festivals lasting for days, sometimes for weeks. After the performances of the serious plays, there was the light relief of comedies and farces, there were pageants and banquets. The popularity of these contests

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shows that the Rederijkers played a very important part in the social life of the time. Belonging to a Chamber and taking part in its proceedings was a respected social activity. In this way writing poetry and plays, acting and reciting became a widespread, almost popular occupation, without anything esoteric about it. When the number of Chambers increased greatly during the sixteenth century, this meant that for several generations a considerable part of the population was actively engaged in literary activities. Much of what was written was understandably of little literary value, but the main thing was that the Rederijkers created a climate in which writing poetry became a regular, recognized and respected occupation. And although quantity is not a precondition for quality, the existence of a training ground such as they provided increased the possibility for works of superior quality to develop. It certainly helped to improve the standard of technique.

The Rederijkers were very interested in technique, unhealthily so, it has been said. Experimentation with form became one of their main concerns. Their favourite form was the refrein (refrain), a poem which developed from the fourteenth-century French ballade, and which consisted of an irregular number of stanzas, between eight and twenty-four lines long. Each stanza had the same last line, which stated the subject of the poem. The last stanza was as a rule dedicated to the head of the Chamber and began with the word Prince. In later years this basically simple form was decked out with all kinds of technical refinements and complexities. Not only in the refrain, but in their lyrical poetry in general, the Rederijkers exhausted themselves in showing what could be done with form. They wrote poems in which a date was concealed, acrostics of several kinds which gave names or mottoes when one deciphered them, poems that could be read backwards, and combinations of all this. Another popular form was the palindrome, a line that was identical whether one read it from left to right or from right to left: ‘ons leven sy een snee ijs nevel sno’ (our life is snow,

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ice, mist of little value), and a form which they called ‘aldicht’ (all-poem) in which the lines rhymed word for word. The most complicated tour de force was the chess-board: each of the 64 squares contained a line and if one made the right moves, 38 different poems could be produced. Add to this their experiments with rhyme: rich rhymes, double rhymes, or long stanzas with only two rhymes, expansion of rhyming possibilities by using intricate circumlocutions instead of a simple word, and one has some idea of what these poets did to form.

One can laugh, of course, at the technical games of the Rederijkers, and write off their poetry as artificial and gimmicky, but that would be ignoring the real importance they had for the development of form. The great advances in literary techniques made during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot be understood without taking into account these technical experiments, even the most outrageous ones. In many cases the Rederijkers were completely carried away by their verbal ingenuity, to the loss of poetry. But later generations, while ignoring the extremist forms, could start on the basis of the Rederijker discoveries and experiments; they could develop them into meaningful forms by handling them naturally, in the same way as Bach could handle the complicated form of the fugue in a natural manner.

The preoccupation with form and technique was not peculiar to literature only. On the contrary, one must regard it as one of the main characteristics of fifteenth-century cultural development. In several other fields we find the same dissatisfaction with traditional medieval form and similar attempts to expand the range of expression. We find it in the work of Jan van Eyck who constantly experimented with form, who broke with the traditional way of painting a flat background and who introduced a new element of realism into his portraits. Van Eyck also experimented with the composition of paint, in a persistent search to achieve the greatest possible richness of colour. In music, too, we meet

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this interest in technique, particularly in the second Flemish polyphonic school of Johannes Ockeghem († 1495) and Jacob Obrecht († 1505). The advances in the technique of composition made by this school were as striking as those of the Rederijkers and some of their experiments in form were amazingly similar to the extravagances of the poets, especially with regard to the canon: they wrote retrograde canons, inverted canons, augmented and diminished canons, canons containing a riddle etc. On another level the general interest in technique expressed itself in the often extremely complicated machinery designed to make the festivities of the Burgundians into great spectacles: a self-propelling pie on wheels containing a fourteen piece orchestra, wine-spouting fountains erected along the route the duke travelled, angels coming down from the ceiling during a banquet, and most spectacular of them all, Charles the Bold's floating palace with its mechanical monkeys, wolves and bears that danced and sang. Seen in this light, the Rederijker activities no longer look like unfortunate aberrations of eccentric poets, but become very much part and parcel of the general interest of the time.

Although the main function of the Rederijkers may seem in retrospect to have been that of pioneers whose work was brought to fruition by those who came after them, that does not mean that they left no literature of intrinsic value. Plays such as Elckerlyc and Mariken van Nimweghen show that they were capable of better things than just the verbal fireworks for which they are notorious. They were very active in the field of religious drama and practised the same three types of religious plays as their French and English contemporaries: mystery plays, miracle plays and morality plays.

The morality plays were often written in the form of an allegory, they were strongly didactic, often dull, and on the whole of little literary value. But there is one great exception to the rule: the play of Elckerlyc, known in English as Everyman. Elckerlyc was written about 1470, gained first

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prize at a Rederijker contest held at Antwerp about 1485, and was first printed in 1495. There has been a sixty years' war between English and Dutch literary historians about the question of originality and translation, and although occasional shots are still fired by snipers on either side, the decisive blow has been struck. It is to the credit of the participants that nationalist prejudices played no part in the arguments: the staunchest defender of Everyman's priority was a Fleming, H. de Vocht, while it was an Englishman, E.R. Tigg, who finally proved that Elckerlyc must have been the original play. Tigg¹ closely examined the rhymes of both plays and found that in many cases the rhymes of Elckerlyc are present within the lines of the English play, followed by a more or less meaningless tag. In other words, the English poet translated quite literally and then had to add a few words in order to rhyme:

Wilt mi vergheven mijn mesdade,
Want ic begheer aen u ghenade.

Forgyve me my grevous offence
Here I crye the mercy in this presence.

Hier in desen aertschen leven
Die heylighe sacramenten seven.

Here in this transitory lyfe for the and me
The blessed sacraments seven there be

In the morality plays the didactic usually dominated the theatrical: they appealed to the intellect rather than to the eye. In this respect Elckerlyc is no exception. Right through the play the emphasis is on the text, on the spoken word rather than on the action. In its allegorical form, its choice of words and occasional complexity - as in the double rondeau towards the end - Elckerlyc is clearly the work of a Rederijker, but of a moderate who preferred a simple and

1 ‘Is Elckerlyc prior to Everyman?’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1939, pp 568-96.

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sober style to superficial brilliance. We know his name as Pieter van Diest, who must have been an inhabitant of the province of Brabant but about whom we know nothing further. The Rederijker literature of the fifteenth century was still largely anonymous: when a work was awarded a prize, as in the case of Elckerlyc, the prize went to the Chamber, not to the author.

The success of Elckerlyc was great, not only in the Low Countries, but also abroad, as can be seen from the many translations and adaptations that were made of it. The English translation was the first, and must have been made shortly after the play was written, in any case before the end of the fifteenth century. It remained popular in England up to the Reformation. In 1536 it was translated into Latin as Homulus, and this translation served as the basis for a freer adaptation, also in Latin, made by Macropedius in 1539 under the title of Hecastus, which in its turn was translated into German by Hans Sachs about ten years later. In Macropedius's adaptation Everyman is no longer saved by Virtue as in the original version, but by Faith and Repentance, so that the character of the play began to change and Protestant tendencies were becoming obvious. These tendencies did not pass unnoticed and in the preface to a later edition of Hecastus, Macropedius had to defend himself against accusations of heresy. At the same time the play began to lose its allegorical aspect. The main character in Macropedius's version is not so much ‘everyman’ as ‘a rich citizen’. The transformation of the allegorical figure into a realist character was completed by Hugo von Hofmannsthal with his play Jedermann (1911) based on the English Everyman and the version of Hans Sachs.

The miracle plays were more theatrical than the moralities; there was more action in them, more scene-shifting and more pageantry. The best example of the miracle play in Dutch is Mariken van Nimweghen (Mary of Nimeguen), commonly regarded as the masterpiece of medieval drama in the Low Countries. The central figure in this play is a young

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girl who lives in a village three miles out of Nimeguen with her uncle, the village priest. She goes shopping in Nimeguen, but when she is about to return, she finds that it is late and she decides to spend the night with an aunt who lives in the town. When she asks for shelter for the night, the aunt brutally insults and abuses her. In utter despair Mariken walks out of the town, sits down by the road side, crying for help from ‘God or Devil, it is all the same to me’. Out of nowhere appears a one-eyed man who promises to make her rich and famous and to teach her the seven liberal arts if she will come along with him. Although Mariken realizes who he is, she agrees: even Lucifer himself would not frighten her in her present frame of mind, she says. So she becomes the devil's pupil and mistress, and together they travel through the country. They settle down in Antwerp where the devil reaps a rich harvest of souls from the many unfortunates who are killed in brawls about Mariken. After some years Mariken insists that they go back to Nimeguen. There they witness a wagon-play in which it is shown that even the most wicked sinner may be saved if he is sincerely repentant. This proves the turning point for Mariken and she rejects the devil. But he, fearing that her soul will escape him, tries to kill her: he takes her high up into the air and flings her down to the ground. Mariken lives, however, and is found by her uncle. He takes her to the Pope as the only man who could absolve her sins. The Pope gives her three iron rings, to be forged around her neck and arms: if the rings fall off, her sins will be forgiven. After many years of penance in a convent, the miracle happens.

Although Mariken van Nimweghen is a religious play it has much of the raciness of realist drama, as for instance in the scene in which Mariken is chased away by her aunt, or in the dialogue between the aunt and the uncle, or in the elaborate inn-scene in Antwerp in which we are shown the kind of life Mariken and the devil are leading. Moreover, the play is not written in the elevated style of Elckerlyc, but in a much faster moving, far more colloquial and very uninhibit-

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ed idiom. The Rederijkers touch is clearly recognizable in the frequent double and internal rhymes, and in some intricate stanza forms. But the author was not suffering from any obsession with form for form's sake as some of his contemporaries were. On the contrary, he must have been one of the first Rederijkers to use form in a significant manner. He saved his most complicated piece of prosody - a richly dressed up refrain - for a moment when such a form was really necessary: in the inn-scene, when Mariken, accomplished in the liberal arts, recites a eulogy of rhetoric. Another example of his ability to use form in a meaningful way is to be found in his use of the rondeau. He used it twice, both times in dialogue, and in both cases the form adds to the expressiveness of the scene: in the first instance the recurring lines underscore the incredulity of the uncle when the aunt tells him that Mariken had been drunk when she came to her house, in the second rondeau they bring out the hypocrisy of the devil. Apart from this sophisticated use of form, the author of Mariken was also a first-rate dramatist with a keen sense of how to keep his play moving and how to obtain optimal effects. Memorable in this connection is the wagon-play scene. At the very moment of a dramatic climax - Mariken's rejection of the devil - the author compels the audience to identify themselves with Mariken through the mirror-effect of the play within a play. His psychological motivation was also far more elaborate than that of his predecessors in the field of drama. For his subject-material he probably drew upon the many devil-and-witch stories that were current at that time. The end of the fifteenth century was a period in which the fear of witches was beginning to become epidemic. The Low Countries were mercifully free from witch-hunting on a large scale but not unaware of what was going on: in 1460 several witches were burned in Atrecht, in 1484 Pope Innocentius VIII issued his bull against witches and appointed two Dominicans as special inquisitors who two years later published their gruesome findings and recommendations in Malleus Malifi-

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carum (The Witch Hammer), the most notorious anti-witch book ever written. In this atmosphere the play of Mariken must have been topical. Mariken, after all, is a kind of witch, a girl who gives herself to the devil in exchange for wealth and knowledge. Several details in the play help to create the atmosphere of witch and witchcraft: the devil refuses to teach Mariken necromancy as she would then become his equal, he forbids her to cross herself and orders her to drop her name since the name of Mary would make it impossible for him to exercise full power over her (she is allowed to keep the first letter, M, and calls herself Emmeken). It speaks highly for the author that he made no concession to the witch-hysteria and simply presented his character as an innocent girl who in a moment of weakness and great vulnerability enters into an agreement with the devil and extricates herself from it through her faith and repentance. Right through the play, his sympathy, and that of his audience, remains with Mariken.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Mariken van Nimweghen is its realism, in a period when plays were often completely allegorical or at least contained some allegorical features. From the first page to the last, the author binds his play to time and place. In the prologue he tells that Mariken lived at the time when Duke Arend of Guelders was imprisoned by his son Duke Adolf. What is more, he uses this not simply as an indication of time, but presents the imprisonment as the incident that sparks off the action of the play: when Mariken knocks at her aunt's door, the aunt has just had a violent argument about these two dukes with some of her neighbours, and in her excitement she bursts out against Mariken, causing her to fall for the devil. Later on in the play the motif of the misery of political passions is taken up again when the aunt commits suicide after hearing that the old duke has escaped from prison. Realism pervades the whole play and all its characters. It is present in small details, as in the opening scene when Mariken's uncle gives her eightpence to buy candles, oil, vinegar, salt, onions, and

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sulphur-matches; it is also present in the representation of the devil, who on the one hand combines several features of the devil as we know him from medieval literature, but who at the same time must have been recognizable to the audience as one of the numerous clever-but-seedy wandering students and scholars. The realism is so marked that although the play is basically a dramatized account of a miracle, it has also been called the first realist drama.

This realism, always one of the strong suits of Dutch literature, is also found in other miracle plays, but never to the same extent. Het Spel vanden Heilighen Sacramente vander Nyeuwervaert (The Play of the Holy Sacrament of Nieuwervaart) is also bound to a specific time and place, and also contains some realistic scenes, but it does not give the same picture of every-day life as Mariken van Nimweghen does, nor does it give a representation of predominantly ‘round’ characters. Significant in this respect are the two devils who keep up a lively enough dialogue and who every now and then take part in the action, but who are allegorical figures, presented under the allegorical names of ‘Sinful Temptation’ and ‘Prevention of Virtue’ and who to the modern observer are far removed from the realism of Mariken's devil. The main function of the devils in this and other plays was to provide comic relief, as the author of the play of Nyeuwervaert says himself in the prologue: ‘We have put in devilry on purpose in order to prevent any heavy seriousness’. Medieval plays, however religious they may have been, very often mixed the serious content with broad comedy. The English mystery plays of the same period, the Towneley plays for instance, do exactly the same. In the English plays, as in the Dutch ones, the comedy part has the greatest appeal to the modern reader, probably because the author could let himself go more and was not bound to his source, whether it was the Bible or a chronicle, as in the case of the play of Nyeuwervaert.

Comic pairs such as the devils in Nyeuwervaert became an integral part of the later plays, and developed gradually from

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quarrelling and squabbling minor characters into important symbolical figures, personifying human qualities, usually defects of character, vices, passions, stupidities. The fact that they never appear by themselves in a play, but always at least in pairs, sets them aside from the allegorical figures in the French and English plays of the same period and gives the Dutch plays a character of their own. In the later plays their function was not only to provide comic relief, but there they often determine the action of the play, and by expressing approval or disapproval, comment on the action, not unlike the chorus in the classical play. This development, too, is typical of the Dutch plays.

Allegorical figures are also present in the mystery plays, which on the whole are older than the moralities and miracle plays, and which dramatize scenes from the Bible. They are not very fully represented in Dutch, but we know that there used to be more than we have now. There must have existed a cycle of seven plays celebrating the Joys of Mary, but only the first and the last have been preserved. When exactly they were written is uncertain, but we do know that they were performed, one every year, in Brussels in the years between 1448 and 1455. The Eerste Bliscap van Maria (First Joy of Mary) describes Mary's life up to the Annunciation, the Seventh Joy begins after the Ascension and deals with Mary's last days and her death. The two plays may have been written by the same author, but if this is so, his technique, particularly his sense of composition, must have developed considerably between the first and the last play.

There is still much uncertainty about the way in which these plays were performed. As a rule performances took place in the open air, on a stage which grew in the course of time from a simple platform into the complicated structures that were used in the sixteenth century. Stage directions are very rare in medieval plays; the four abele spelen together contain only one, the laconic ‘here they hang Robert’. One of the mystery plays is a little more generous with stage directions and from those we can form some idea of how

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plays of this kind were staged. The play is called Spel van de V Vroede ende van de V Dwaeze Maegden (Play of the Five Wise and the Five Foolish Virgins) and deals with a subject from the Bible that was also dramatized in France and Germany. The conception of the play is allegorical: the virgins bear names such as Hope, Fear, Vain Glory and are simply personifications of human characteristics. In this respect the play is not of any special importance although it has distinct dramatic qualities. But it is unique because of its stage directions from which we may conclude that the days of the simple stage were over. It seems that a heaven was built in the middle of the stage, with a hell behind it; both could be opened and closed, probably with curtains. In between the two there may have been water, as mention is made of crossing over by boat. On either side of the stage were five cubicles (‘little houses’ they are called in the text) for the virgins. We also learn from the stage directions that music was played during the intervals and that songs were sung as part of the performance.

All these plays were still largely anonymous. We do not know the author of the play of the Virgins, nor do we know who wrote the Joys of Mary. We know the name of the author of Elckerlyc but our knowledge of the man ends with his name. Even the author of Mariken van Nimweghen is not known by name; all we know about him is that he probably was an Antwerp Rederijker. The play of Nyeuwervaert may have been written by a certain Jan Smeken, but there is no certainty about this and some scholars regard Smeken merely as the copyist of the manuscript. Even when we know the name of an author, we never come to know him in his entire literary production, but only in the one or two works that were more or less accidentally preserved. Anonymity prevailed throughout the fifteenth century, and the Rederijkers of that period had no ambition beyond it. They did not strive for any personal fame, but only for that of the Chamber of Rhetoric to which they belonged. Their art was collective, not yet individual. Not only the plays were

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anonymous, but also the many secular and religious songs which were written in this century and of which a great variety has been preserved: love songs, drinking songs, ballads and romances, some historical songs, songs for Christmas and Easter, many hymns of praise for Mary and Jesus. They have been handed down in manuscripts and also in some sixteenth-century prints, the most important of which are Een Devoot ende Profitelijck Boecxken (A Devout and Useful Book) of 1539, for the religious songs, and the so-called Antwerpse Liedboek (Antwerp Song Book) of 1544, for secular songs. There were, however, some exceptions to the general rule of anonymity. One of them was Anthonis de Roovere, a Rederijker from Bruges, another was Dirc Potter, a non-Rederijker and civil servant from The Hague.

Anthonis de Roovere was born between 1430 and 1435, and died in 1482. He must have been a precocious poet, for when he was seventeen years old the Chamber at Bruges conferred on him the title of Prince of Rhetoric. He became famous, at least locally, and the city of Bruges honoured him with a small annuity, which he probably needed for it seems that he was not well off. In the city records he is mentioned as a bricklayer, and although some scholars have tried to elevate him to the rank of builder or architect, the indications are that his social circumstances were humble. From his poetry one forms the impression that he was an embittered and thoroughly disillusioned man. It has been suggested that he had expected more recognition than was actually given, and one is tempted to draw the conclusion that he was one of the first poets who were no longer content to write for the honour of the Chamber but who wanted a larger measure of individual fame. De Roovere did not state this explicitly in his poetry; on the contrary, he assailed all power and glory, and wrote many satires in which he elaborated on the transitoriness of all worldly vanities. But his satire had such an unusually personal undertone of bitterness that some kind of personal disappointment must be at the bottom of it. ‘He who in these days wants to succeed

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in the world’, he wrote in one rondeau, ‘must know the tricks’. And in another: ‘He who wants to make his way in the world will have to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’. In one of his satires - one that looks very much like being the immediate reflection of a particularly cruel disillusionment - he wrote: ‘Now I no longer believe anyone’. This personal tone makes his work stand apart from the rank and file of medieval poetry, even more so if the interpretation of his bitterness as due to lack of recognition is correct.

On the whole his work is undeniably medieval, but there are some elements of newness in it which seem to foreshadow the Renaissance. One of his most remarkable, though not one of his best poems, describes a dream, The Dream of De Roovere about the Death of Duke Charles of Burgundy of Blessed Memory. The fact that he put his name in the title instead of masking it in an acrostic at the end, as was customary, almost proclaims the growing sense of individuality. The poet dreams that he walks through a cemetery in which the heroes of the past are buried. In addition to names from Biblical history, he also mentions classical and mythological names: Nestor, Aeneas, Alexander, Troilus, Caesar, Hector, Paris. The poet is then taken away from the cemetery by Compassion and is conducted to St. Salvator's at Bruges to watch Charles's funeral. Three allegorical figures, Clergy, Nobility and Commonalty, lament Charles's death. They evoke him as the protector of the Church, as the splendid hero, and the upholder of law and order. Compassion tries to console the poet and to reconcile him with his loss, not with the traditional notion of sub specie aeternitatis, as one would have expected, but by pointing out that Charles will gain immortality through his fame - a typical Renaissance notion. One cannot say that the Dutch Renaissance begins with De Roovere, but one can see that it will begin soon.

De Roovere's work has come to us in an edition put together in 1562, that is eighty years after his death, by Eduard de Dene, also a Rederijker from Bruges and a great

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admirer of De Roovere. De Dene's edition was a selection, not a complete edition, which means that the contents may reflect the preferences of the editor rather than those of the author. This may explain why there are so many religious poems, and, considering the popularity of the genre, so few erotic ones. We know that De Roovere made his name with a religious poem, Lof van den Heylighen Sacramente (Praise of the Holy Sacrament) which was accorded the high honour of being framed and hung in the cathedral of Bruges. Much of his religious poetry strikes us as contrived and arid, as if it were written without any inspiration or even enthusiasm at all. This applies in particular to his many Praises of Mary in which he employed all the tricks of the Rederijker trade: ABC poems of various kinds, retrogrades, and even a chessboard. To the modern reader he seems far more successful in his secular poetry, his satires and the few specimens of erotic poetry that have been preserved. His most impressive poem is Vanden Mollenfeeste (The Feast of the Moles), a poem that is related to the dance macabre which was so popular in the Burgundian period. All classes of people, each and everyone, are bidden underground to the King of the Moles. The satirical tone is subdued in this poem, yet one cannot help hearing a note of satisfaction in his description of how the noblemen, the clergy and the rich citizens, leaving behind their attics full of corn and their boxes full of money, will have to present themselves to the Mole, as well as in his advice to women to leave their finery at home, as the moles happen to be blind.

Although there were some Chambers of Rhetoric in the northern provinces at this time, the centre of Rederijker activity was in the South. All writings mentioned so far in this chapter were the works of southern poets, and all new ideas, all literary experiments and innovations originated from the South. The literature of the North was more conservative and closer to the fourteenth-century tradition than that of the southern provinces. There was no De Roovere in Holland, no one who experimented with language

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and form as he did, no one who admitted such a personal tone to his poetry. The best-known poet in Holland was Dirc Potter, who, it is true, was about sixty years older than De Roovere, but whose work, even when allowances are made for those sixty years, appears to be that of a straggler, not that of an innovator. In his approach to literature, Potter was closer to Willem van Hildegaersberch than to De Roovere. Yet, in contrast to De Roovere, Potter did not lack the opportunity to discover what was new in European literature, for he went on various missions abroad as an envoy of the Counts of Holland and even spent more than a year in Rome. In spite of this the Italian Renaissance completely bypassed him. There is no indication in his work that he followed Italian literature, he does not seem to have read anything by Dante, Petrarch or Boccaccio, nor is there any suggestion that he noticed any other aspect of Renaissance art. All he had to say about Italians was that they were ‘dirty dogs’ who lived in sin, beat their wives and were only capable of savagery, treason, lies and robbery. It is curious that a man like De Roovere, who so far as we know had no links with Italy, was closer to the Renaissance than Dirc Potter who for some time lived in the midst of it.

Potter's main work was a long poem in four parts, Der Minnen Loep (The Course of Love). It is a poem that belongs to the same family as John Gower's Confessio Amantis, written about thirty years earlier. It is also related, but more distantly, to the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, although Potter had probably never heard of any of these books. Like Gower's poem, Der Minnen Loep is a compilation of stories illustrating various aspects of love. The first part deals with what he calls ‘silly love’, passionate love unchecked by reason, demonstrated by the case-histories of Jason and Medea, Paris and Helen, and others. Potter condemns this kind of love and shows that it always ends badly. In the second part he is concerned with ‘good, pure love’, by which he means courtly love free from the bonds of marriage, as found in the stories of Pyramis and

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Thisbe, Tristan and Isolde. The third part is devoted to ‘illicit love’, illustrated by the exploits of wretches such as Pasiphae and Semiramis. This is the shortest book, not for lack of material, but because he feels that he should not be too generous with unsavoury detail. The fourth part finally brings him to married love - ‘lawful love’ he calls it - of which Penelope is the paragon. Potter's intention was obviously moralistic, but one hesitates to call him a didactic poet: he was really too much of an entertainer to be classified as such. He moralizes, of course, he quotes shattering examples of people who became involved in the wrong kind of love, but at the same time he relates their stories with great relish, and although there are certain things that he says are ‘unspeakable’, he rarely misses the opportunity to tell a good story. He is not free of a certain measure of hypocrisy and his moral yardstick is not always of the same length, but he deserves the credit of being a very entertaining story-teller. It seems that in later years Potter became aware of his ambivalent motives, for he gives the impression of being a little embarrassed, even ashamed, about Der Minnen Loep. In a prose book, Blome der Doechden (Flowers of Virtue), adapted from Gozzadini's Fiore di virtu, he apologized for the earlier poem and regretted the many untruths it contained, his excuse being that he was young when he wrote it.

Potter's prose - he also wrote a second prose book called Mellibeus - is entirely moralistic and didactic, as one would expect from a prose book at that time. Whoever wanted to entertain, to write fiction, or to give his work an artistic form, wrote poetry; prose was almost exclusively reserved for didactic purposes. Several prose writers of this period were associated with the Devotio Moderna. Hendrik Mande, ‘the Ruusbroec of the North’, was one of them, Gerlach Peters, author of the Devote Epistele (Devout Epistle) was another. The most famous among his contemporaries was the Franciscan Johannes Brugman (born about 1400) whose life in several respects ran parallel to that of Geert Groote: after

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years of study and a certain amount of high living, he suddenly turned over a new leaf and became an extremely successful popular preacher. His fame was so great that his name still lives on in the expression ‘praten als Brugman’: to talk very eloquently and persuasively. As an author he is known for his prose book Leven van Jezus, and two songs. In the first half of the fifteenth century Dirc van Delft, the first doctor of theology in Holland, wrote a long treatise Tafel van den Kersten Ghelove (Table of the Christian Faith), a book that was widely read at the time. Secular didactic prose was represented by an adaptation of the medieval classic Ludus Scaccorum, an allegory in which chess-men symbolize the various layers of society. It inspired a certain Jan van den Bergh to write a book in the same vein, Dat Kaetsspel Ghemoralizeert (Moralized Hand-ball) in which a hand-ball game is used to describe the rights and wrongs of juridical procedure.

All these authors were competent prose writers who were able to set out clearly what they wanted to say and who helped to shape prose in its infancy. Yet for none of them could a claim of exceptional literary talent be made. The honour of being the most genuine literary talent among the prose writers of this period should go to Sister Bertken, whose work has imaginative touches that make it stand out from the average prose of the time. She was the daughter of an Utrecht priest and she lived for several years as a nun in one of the convents of the Windesheim chapter. Then she decided to withdraw even further from the world and asked for permission to be locked in a cell attached to one of the churches of Utrecht. This happened in 1456 or 1457, and Sister Bertken stayed in her cell until her death, fifty-seven years later, submitting herself to a rigorous regime which forbade meat, butter, and cheese as well as shoes and heating, while the keys to her cell were kept in safe custody by the prior of a nearby monastery. Her literary output was not very large: all that literature gained from those fifty-seven years of seclusion were two short prose books and a

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few songs. It is a great pity that she did not write more, for the literary value of this small quantity of writing is greater than that of many large prose books. One should not expect from her any very profound or original thought; Bertken was not an original thinker as Ruusbroec was, nor was she a poet of the calibre of Hadewych. Her religious world was simple and so was her representation of it; the cliché of ‘charming medieval simplicity’ might have been coined to describe her work. In a way her work is didactic, written in the form of treatises, but it may never have been intended for an audience larger than herself: it was quite customary for nuns and monks to write this kind of book only for their own edification, as an aid to contemplation. Bertken's first book describes and discusses the most important events in the life of Christ, the second book contains prayers, a description of the birth of Christ, a dialogue between Bridegroom Jesus and the Loving Soul, and eight songs. What gives her work its special literary value is her eye for vivid detail and her ability to think herself into a situation and to enter into the feelings of the persons whom she writes about. This approach made her account of the birth of Christ almost that of an eye-witness and certainly one of the best pieces of prose writing of the fifteenth century. Little though she wrote, she was undoubtedly a born writer.

Bertken's poetry is characterized by the same simplicity as her prose, but it is more clearly mystical in its symbolism and imagery. Her feeling for form was obviously not very developed, but what her poetry lacks in art, it gains through artlessness:

I went to pick herbs in my garden
But I found only thistles and thorns.

The thistles and thorns I threw out,
I should like to grow other plants.

Now I have found a good gardener:
He will like to take over my cares.

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A tree grew tall in very short time;

 

I could not take it out of the earth.

 

 

 

He was aware of this troublesome tree:

 

He pulled it out with root and branch.

 

 

 

Now I must be his servant,

 

Or he will not care for my garden.

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century prose writing was greatly boosted by the invention of the printing press which revolutionized book production. The price of books came down and the demand increased rapidly, particularly the demand for literature of entertainment. And, curiously enough, the demand then seems to have been for prose in preference to poetry. Admittedly, there were some poems among the early printed editions - the very popular Karel ende Elegast was one of them - but they were completely outnumbered by prose books. This was an important development, for although none of these prose books was an original work of fiction, and although it would be a long time before anything comparable to our modern novel appeared, these books were the first indications that prose was swinging away from its exclusively didactic tradition. The majority of these books were prose versions of the romances of chivalry, sometimes adapted from the Dutch poems, in other cases from French or German prose books. Before the middle of the sixteenth century the greater part of the epic romances had been treated and published in this way. The Frankish romances were represented by De Historie van de Vier Heemskinderen (The History of Haymijn's Four Children), an adaptation of Renout van Montalbaen printed about 1490; the classical ones were represented by a history of Alexander and one of the Trojan war, and the eastern ones by the Parthenopeus story and De Historie van Floris ende Blancefloer . A curious omission in this series are the British romances for which there seems to have been no demand, in contrast to the situation in France and England where they are well represented among the

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early printed prose books. One of the earliest printed books in Dutch was De Historie van Reinaert de Vos, printed in the 1470s, and translated into English by William Caxton as The Historye of Reynart the Foxe. The most successful of them all was De Reis van Jan van Mandeville, printed before 1470, as a translation of Jean de Bourgogne's famous mystification which became also a spectacular success in England under the title of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. In the Low Countries the book went through more than twenty editions and was still in print in the eighteenth century.