2: The Late Middle Ages and the Age of the Rhetoricians, 1400–1560

Herman Pleij

I. Literary Life in the City

Urban Spectacle

In the late Middle Ages, society in the Low Countries was becoming more and more urban, and this brought with it changes to the literature that flourished there. From the fourteenth century onwards, towns and cities increasingly served as the focal points not only for commerce, finance, and artisan manufacture but also for ecclesiastical authority, worship, the arts, learning, and even courtly life. By the end of the Middle Ages all these activities would be conducted almost exclusively in this urban space. Rather than simply being another arena for things already familiar, the new environment saw the commingling of forms of human socialization and behavior that in previous centuries had remained separate but were now becoming integrated. This melting pot produced all kinds of innovations, adding new facets to a literature that in these urban circles, too, continued to be an instrument of unparalleled ideological importance.

The towns and cities of Flanders and Brabant were the first to emerge as centers of literary life, keeping pace with the relatively rapid spread of literacy within the new milieu. This development sprang from the specific communication needs of industry and commerce and coincided with the speedy growth of a broadly based intellectual middle class of clerks and officials who worked for the municipal administrations and, of course, the judiciary.

Final page of the Book of Professions (Bouc van den ambachten), written c. 1369. Paris, National Library of France.

A bilingual conversation manual written in Bruges around 1369, aimed at teaching Dutch and French, provides useful documentary evidence of the urban community’s awareness of a well-established literacy — a society that was now able to perceive and chronicle itself within a historical context. The Book of Professions (Bouc van den ambachten / Livre des mestiers) was intended for a new kind of school that was attempting to break free from ecclesiastical control. As an initiative of merchants and guildsmen, these new schools were inspired by the needs and aspirations of urban society rather than by those of the church. The Book of Professions therefore strove to approximate the language of everyday life in as direct and practical a manner as possible, using thematically organized dialogues and quasi-spontaneous arguments. It goes without saying that the didactic framework only presents situations and topics that would have been immediately recognized, such as the following:

Gilbert the clerk writes excellent legal and contractual documents, charters and deeds, expenses and incomes, wills, and transcripts. He is also highly skilled in accounting, such as calculating annuities, income from an estate or a loan, and even ground ren­t. Employed in a suitable post, one could profit greatly from him.7

Part and parcel of the urban scene, it appears, is the bookseller, who in those days also dealt in writing supplies: “Joris the bookseller has more books than anyone else in the city. He also sells goose and swan quills, and parchment of both superior and standard quality.” Elsewhere the manual recommends regular school attendance. It describes the activities of the town clerk (renowned for his skill in algebra), a specialist parchment seller, and other artisans and professionals. Together they provide the city with a network of practical learning and other aptitudes in the service of trade and prosperity. However, the crux was still the written word, which had nestled at the heart of the city and was never to abandon it again. The manual draws to a close in similar spirit:

Dearest children, this book need never come to an end, because no matter how much I write there will always be more to be written, providing one makes one’s best effort. For ink is not expensive, and paper is as fine as it is patient and can easily accommodate everything that one would want to commit to it!

The new bureaucracy was the exponent of an intricate system of guilds and fraternities, which supported a large-scale literary enterprise, and not simply by presenting organizational opportunities but also by functioning, together with the city authorities, as patrons of the literary arts. Literature, after all, made it possible to legitimize, defend, embellish, and even expand their newly gained power, vested interests, and ambitions, all under the guise of entertainment. From the very outset this urban literature was richly varied, its chief feature being that almost every literary manifestation was staged in the public sphere.

This is evident from the plentiful street spectacles that brightened up daily life nearly every week, on occasions such as the numerous feast days for saints, and other annual holidays. There were also pageants, fairs, seasonal markets, neighborhood festivities, the tournaments and contests of the civil militias and chambers of rhetoric, and the celebrations of the patron saints of the city’s many guilds and associations, both professional and more recreational in nature. These are only the stimuli from within the urban society; there were also external motives that prompted spectacular celebrations, such as the investiture of a new sovereign or a birth, baptism, marriage, or death among the ruling dynasty, or, of course, its military successes. This exuberance, as necessary as it was strictly orchestrated, reduced the working days per annum to half the number we are accustomed to nowadays. It should be noted, however, that the number of working hours per day was, in principle, determined by daylight hours and could therefore add up to an average of ten to twelve hours per day over the course of a year.

The festivities around the Burgundian court (which later gave birth to the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty) were seized on by towns and cities large and small for solemn celebrations and commemorations, frequently accompanied by great rejoicing among all the strata of a city’s population. First and foremost, however, the civic tribute fulfilled a political function, for while it undoubtedly reflected the city’s fundamental subordination to the sovereign ruler, it did not conceal the fact that for the city the tribute was primarily about promoting its own interests and sometimes even making demands. The priority was to remind the sovereign of his obligations to the urban community, which therefore routinely mobilized the whole institutionalized festivity-machine in its midst.

The increasing autonomy of urban communities from the sovereign ruler, and the incessant conflicts that had paved the way for such a development, determined the late medieval history of the Low Countries under the House of Burgundy. In 1433 the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, settled in Brussels, underscoring that the heart of his domain now lay in the North. Thanks to an ingenious policy of strategic marriages, territorial acquisitions, and imposed protection he quickly expanded his rule across the whole of the Low Countries.

This new European powerhouse, which was extended to include the Austrian and Spanish territories of the Habsburgs in the late fifteenth century, relied greatly on the prosperity of the towns and cities of Flanders and Brabant. Consequently, the lead players in those urban communities — patricians, the upper echelons of the administration, wealthy merchants, guildmasters, and, last but not least, the local ecclesiastical dignitaries — enjoyed considerable power throughout the empire. The sovereign overlord was in fact increasingly dependent on the capital and trade networks made available by the urban elite in exchange for military protection, greater autonomy, and certain forms of obeisance which were intended to gain the burgher a place in the circles of the nobility and knights.

Nevertheless, striking the right balance of power between the ruler and the urban communities proved difficult. Towns and cities repeatedly overplayed their hand and refused to pay taxes, especially when it came to extra taxes to bankroll a ruler’s wars for which they felt little interest. Moreover, relations with the potentate were a persistent cause of internal tensions which often sparked bloody rebellions within the city walls.

It seems as if Ghent, as the most powerful city, sometimes wanted to present itself as a wholly autonomous city-state, following the example of the Italian cities, but neither the ruler nor other cities allowed this to happen. And if Ghent ever believed it could bask in the good grace of Charles V (1500–1558), the emperor who had been born there, then he disproved that with the bloody revenge he wreaked on the city in 1540, after Ghent’s citizens had once again refused to contribute to a campaign of national import. Even more serious was the reputation Ghent had acquired as a hotbed of heretical propaganda for the Reformation, spurred on by the rhetoricians who represented the official literary life of the city. By carrying out a string of executions, demolishing civic bastions, and implanting a military garrison within the city, Charles was perhaps attempting to call a definitive halt to this urban arrogance. This may have served as a warning to other cities as well, but it remained obvious that material and cultural might were by now firmly anchored in the cities.

A fine illustration of the need to exact and secure the desired relationships within the hierarchical order is provided by the spectacle staged by Ghent on 3 March 1500 to mark the christening of the young crown prince who would later become the emperor Charles V. The decorations along the streets made an unforgettable impression on those who saw them. The widely traveled humanist and historian Adrianus Barlandus (1486–1538) wrote of truly wondrous spectacles, to be seen in all quarters of the city. A later chronicler ratifies this, commenting that the eye-witness reports were “well-nigh impossible and almost incredible.” However, their reliability and accuracy seemed unequivocal, so he could do nothing but express his utter amazement at the remarkable inventiveness of the city’s inhabitants.

The route to be followed was covered over, thus forming an extended gallery illuminated by no fewer than 1,800 torches and accentuated by triumphal arches, each of which bore a different message. Even toward the end of the Middle Ages, fire still constituted a distinct at­traction — the natural rhythm of day and night could hardly be influenced otherwise. The baptismal ceremonies were evidently held early in the morning or late in the evening. The baby prince was carried in procession under a series of gantries that impressed on him values such as wisdom, justice, and peace, probably in the form of tableaux vivants or statues adorned with texts. The houses were also decorated with torches, paintings, and banners, and a fanfare of trumpets resounded incessantly.

Whether a festive text by the priest Lieven Boghaert (dates unknown) was also recited here is unknown. As the so-called factor, the artistic leader of the Saint Barbara chamber of rhetoric, he certainly sang the praises of the young prince at length, saluting him as a worldly redeemer in no fewer than twenty-one strophes of nine lines. The age of oppression is now at an end, and browbeaten Ghent can look forward to a new period of prosperity:

Awake now, sleeping souls and depressed spirits.

Rise up in full glory, you troubled hearts!

The text, like other components of the festivities, is certainly lacking in originality, as evidenced by its succession of blatant commonplaces, but these are precisely the elements on which such formulaic literary spectacles rely. The clashes between Ghent’s city authorities and the court were already notorious; the city attempted time and again to assert its independence from the sovereign, hoping to attain a status on a par with, or even above, him. The city authorities were, however, repeatedly and heavy-handedly brought to heel by a government that watched every form of urban particula­rism with eagle-eyed suspicion.

Archers; detail from The Hoboken Fair (De kermis van Hoboken), burin engraving by Frans Hogenberg after Pieter Bruegel, 1559. Brussels, Royal Library Albert I.

The sense of malaise that the rhetorician Lieven Boghaert described was by no means an exaggeration. This applies in equal measure to his imploring supplications that the newborn heir to the throne should enjoy the gifts of wisdom, peaceableness, and justice. In the opinion of the burghers of Ghent, these were qualities that had been distinctly lacking in his forefathers. The hope was that Charles would grow up in their midst as a Fleming, fully alive to the needs of the cities and those of Ghent in particular, the city where he had seen the light, hopefully in more than one sense. His birth and baptism therefore merited the grandiose spectacle of which he could be reminded throughout his life, with a list of demands in the guise of a mark of honor.

Literature in the city was the servant of individual and collective trials and tribulations. When it came to the spectacle and imagery produced for festive parades or religious processions, people were less concerned about the desired relations with their ruler. Yet here, too, the promotion of the city — and the public interest — remained the central concern. The local authorities seized on these occasions with enthusiasm, exuberantly mobilizing the city’s literary and theatrical talent.

Long before the founding of the exclu­sively literary societies known as the chambers of rhetoric, such talent seems to have been readily available among members of the devotional associations known as confraternities, and of the local civil guard or militia. These groups organized the processions and the performances that took place during or after them, which might have consisted of silent spectacles on floats or along the route, or even of complete plays being performed during the course of the procession or at the procession’s end. The fraternities, sometimes referred to as “companies,” refused to relinquish this role even after the chambers of rhetoric split away to form separate organizations. Until well into the sixteenth century they continued to play a prominent role in the organization and realization of urban spectacle, sometimes in association with the members of artisan guilds.

This is demonstrated, for example, by the annual procession of Our Blessed Lady in Brussels, a tradition that lasted for more than two centuries. The chief organizer was the “Great Guild,” which united the city’s crossbowmen. The enduring importance of this guild for the city is evident from the self-awareness so eloquently expressed in their livery, which was issued by the city in 1412: a red cloak, green bows, and a red hat. From 1348 the guild organized the procession, which commemorated the secret transport of a statue of the Virgin Mary from Antwerp to a church in Brussels. From the very start this involved the performance of a Marian mystery play. In 1441 the event was elevated to a higher plane by expanding the spectacle and introducing a cycle of seven plays, the Seven Joys of Mary (Bliscappen van Maria). Only the first and seventh Joys have survived in manuscript. The seven-play cycle was performed each year without interruption until at least 1559, and to judge by various accounts it must have been a magnificent event. Each and every year visitors flocked from far and wide, and high-placed guests — including the sovereign — were also invited.

This religious processional theater, which included tableaux vivants within the actual parade, was seized on by the city of Brussels for exuberant self-promotion. The monies made available were primarily channeled into the expansion and improvement of the play proper, and the new scheme of a seven-part cycle was a stroke of genius. Now the city could advertise a serialized spectacle, designed to establish something like customer loyalty. The organization was also professionalized: it gained a permanent depot for decorations and floats, the times and places of the complete production were set out in a grand scheme, a new stage was provided for the performance of the plays, and it was timetabled so that mealtimes for the guests did not clash with the highlights of the procession or the plays. In addition, the magistracy decreed that other organizations in the city, notably the chambers of rhetoric, were obliged to contribute, and in the years after 1441 these bodies did indeed become involved. Lastly, festival officials on horseback were introduced, charged with maintaining order around the procession and with keeping it moving.

The aims of the procession can also be deduced from the two surviving plays. The material was highly familiar, but it was spectacularly dramatized and, in particular, quite clearly brought up to date for a broad public, in the manner of the exciting tales from the Bible. The Fall of Man, the defeat of Satan, the legend of the Holy Rood, prophecy plays, and the debate of vice and virtue were not only cause for excitement; they were also scripted to be emotionally stirring and even spilled over into slapstick. Examples of the latter include the extremely banal scenes with Adam and Eve, certainly when Eve reduces her husband to a henpecked faint-heart on whom she pours abuse. Eve is approached by the serpent and then informs Adam that she wants to discuss something with him. He is a paragon of obliging reasonableness and affability:

What shall it be,

My Lady Eve, that you most earnestly desire

From me? An explanation I require,

Without delay, then, I shall do

My utmost, out of love for you.

For I would not your anger rouse,

Be it within reason.

However, Adam is profoundly shocked by Eve’s proposal that he taste of the apple. Realizing that this is contrary to God’s will, he tries to reason with her to change her mind. God has emphatically forbidden it! There are trees enough to satisfy her appetite, so why this one in particular? But Eve interrupts him with a crude and somewhat premature curse: “Jesus Christ! Quit whining, Adam. Take it and eat it!” Adam is helpless in the face of such female aggression, and he takes a bite. From that moment on he is transformed into a complaining, henpecked wimp who is bossed around by his wife, even after their expulsion from paradise. Condemned to a life of blood, sweat, and tears in worldly woe, he sits down in despair. And Eve takes the initiative once again. She shoves the spade into his hands for him to go and till the earth, to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, while lamenting that now, poor wretches, they must work to stay alive.

Updating texts in this catchy manner encouraged the audience to make a connection between the tales and their everyday lives. The transformation of Adam into a foolish, henpecked husband, overcome by infatuation, inertia, and fear, would have hit onlookers hard, since it was an exact inversion of how conjugal relations were meant to be. The adaptation of the story of the fall of man served to propagate a new conjugal ethic. The positive ideal that the play strove to project was a stricter division of roles within the household, in which the husband ought to be absolute lord and master and the wife should remain as far removed as possible from public life. Otherwise the city’s economy would surely degenerate into chaos.

Another scene acquires special significance thanks to the addition of a dialogue between two neighbors. They talk about how the impotent Joachim (who was to become Mary’s father) was humiliated by the temple priests, who had driven him out because of his infertility. It is the public nature of this act to which the neighbors take offense, and they want to voice their indignation loudly. However, one of them admonishes the other to be silent, with the warning that you must always be wary of such priests, and the other agrees. The scene clearly recommends being pragmatic, even opportunistic, although it is also sharply critical of the clergy: never speak your mind, for such priests are not to be trusted. And at every performance this message would have been topical and relevant for urban society, whether it was applied to countering the ever-controversial hypocrisy of the clergy, the aggressive moral claims of the mendicant friars in their noisy sermons, or the church’s systematic refusal to pay any form of tax.

The scene also highlights a sense of privacy. The message is that certain things should be kept out of sight and hearing of all and sundry, and should remain within the circle of those directly concerned. The growing inclination to withdraw into one’s private space seems to have been an important goal in the midst of cramped urban living conditions. Here too literature stepped forward in order to offer escape routes and to articulate alternative possibilities, preferably using old and trusted themes that could lend true authority to new aspirations.

Besides guilds, militias, confraternities, and cha­mbers of rhetoric, there were — and continued to be — loosely organized groups of semi-professional entertainers in various towns and cities. It is by no means always clear whether these companies or guilds of actors were groups of bur­ghers who normally pursued another profession but were called on for special occasions, or professional actors who traveled far and wide. We often encounter such companies in municipal records, demonstrating that the authorities were keen to stimulate the urban dynamic with all kinds of manifestations and performances, for which a whole variety of artists stood ready.

The accounting entries sometimes mention a title. We therefore know that a company of actors from Diest performed the Play of Lanseloet (spel van Lanseloet) at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1412. This must be a reference to Lancelot of Denmark (Lanseloet van Denemerken), one of the four so-called abele spelen (“noble” or “beautiful” plays), which are recognized as the oldest known form of serious secular drama in medieval Europe. The play was later distributed in print, and the numerous reprints testify to its success. However, the ledger entries usually mention titles of works that have not survived as drama, though their kinship with the still-prevalent tales of chivalry is obvious. For example, there are entries for a performance of The King of the Moors (den coninc van den Mori­aens) at Kortrijk (Courtrai) in 1418, and of a Play about Aernout (spel van Aernoute) at Tielt in 1431. A play called Roland and Oliver’s Campaign (de batailge van Roeland ende Oliviere) — evidently a dramatized version of The Song of Roland (Roelantslied) — was performed by a company from Geraardsbergen in 1423 and 1424. The 1444 records of the town of Deinze refer to this play as The Play of the Battle of Roncevaux (’t spel van den wijghe van Ronchevale), and also mention performances of dramatized versions of Floris and Blanchefleur, The Four Sons of Aymon, and the Romance of the Rose, which are all texts we know only in epic form.

Occasionally one encounters a whole list with the titles of plays that were performed, as in the records of a confraternity in Ghent dated 1532. This inventory mentions twenty-one plays, eight of which must be considered as religious; the others seem to be secular. Only The Duke of Brunswick (Hertoghe van Bruisewijc) is identifiable as a version of one of the abele spelen, namely Gloriant. The other plays are known only in the form of chivalric romances or novellas, such as The Knight of Couchi (Ridder van Coetchij), Lucretia and Eurialus (Lucresia en Eurialus), The Lord of Trazegnies (van den Heere van Trasengijs), The King of Aragon (Conijnc van Aragoen), The King of England and the Evil Moor of Hainaut (van den Coninc van Ingghelant ende de quade moere huut Henegauwe), and The White Knight (van den Witten Ridder).

Besides the theatrical endeavors of the chambers of rhetoric there must have been plenty of other dramatic activity during the fifteenth century. This was primarily focused on the performance of works more secular in nature, for which popular tales from the world of chivalry could easily be translated into drama. Or could the list above actually refer to the repertoire of puppeteers? The municipal accounts clearly refer to companies of actors, though their status is far from clear. Little of their dramatic material has survived because of the loose structure of these companies and the transient nature of their performances. Plays were rarely written out in full, at best being stored as a number of individual roles known as “parts.” With their more firmly structured and established chambers, the rhetoricians would be the first to establish an institutional repository for theatrical repertoire, which was now recorded in a complete form with a view to later use.

We encounter such a semi-professional actor with his own small theater company in the town of Geraardsbergen in the person of Pieter den Brant. A carpenter by trade, he was also responsible for regular performances for the town with a company of like-minded individuals. In the period 1427–30 he was remunerated for this by the city magistracy. He must have been multitalented, because as justification for the generous payments the records note that “he is skilful in the composition of plays and rhyming texts, as well as in the improvisation of quick rhymes, one after the other.” His aptitude seems to be to produce a popular variant of the thousands of lines of verse that the great medieval poets were able to produce at great speed. The fragment that survives, a one-hundred-line rhyme about the qualities of the four human character types based on the four humors, demonstrates Pieter den Brant’s skill. The theory of humors was a popular notion at the time, and the poem couches it in a very simple rhyme full of padding. This not only suggests that the poem was jotted down à la minute but also leaves the distinct impression that it was intended only for subsequent recitations, and not for reading in private.

Burgher Virtues

In town and city, literature seems to have been the ideal instrument for creating an intellectual space that enabled the burghers to defend their interests and claim their rightful place in the order of things. Within this literary space, the burghers established the freedom of mind to openly confront the traditional powers with an identity of their own. This typical middle-class literature does not hesitate to present its proposed social model as superior to all others. The late-medieval city in the Burgundian Low Countries defined itself, at least on paper, in terms of an unprecedented urge to expand, and in fact aimed to swallow up the aristocratic domain and the countryside, or at least make these spaces subordinate to its own commercial might.

Literature could, moreover, serve as a formidable weapon to establish new hierarchical structures or to protect existing ones. Most feared was the so-called scoffing song, because it could crop up anywhere and authorship proved very difficult to trace. There are numerous extant edicts from the late Middle Ages and the early modern era that announce severe punishments for the singing and distribution of such songs, up to and including public execution. For example, on 25 October 1444, Louvain’s authorities forbade anyone to publicly taunt a certain Roelof Roelofs and others “in poetry or song.” The figures in question must have been local dignitaries, since such attacks would have been understood as mockery of the city in general. The threatened punishment consisted of a pilgrimage of atonement to the Alsace. Not even minors escaped; if they were found guilty, their parents were held accountable. There was good reason for these measures, because in their periodic charivari — rituals with raucous “pots and pans music” which accompanied an alternative dispensation of folk justice — youths would denounce any established burghers who by their adultery appeared to hamper the youths’ own chances of becoming settled, for example by finding suitable brides. That was why, in 1425, the city authorities in Brussels felt compelled to prohibit them from shaming adulterers with their songs.

Almost everyone participated in this urban literary culture, and it found expression almost entirely in the public domain. The boundaries between its conceivers, designers, producers, actors, musicians, followers, and spectators were fluid. Everyone was involved in some way or other. However, all this street theater in an urban setting was not simply intended to serve the validation, consolidation, and projection of a new urban self-perception in relation to the sovereign ruler; people from different urban communities competed with one another as well. The literary forms were no less important as a means of foregrounding and promoting particular social strata within the city, all under the well-intentioned pretext of a fundamental concern with common interests. The city was primarily attempting to shape its own literature based on urban aspirations and frustrations that the new form of cohabitation and community inspired among the burghers. Collective fears and ideas were as much defi­ned by texts as they were manipulated by them. Along with their obvious purpose as recreation, the texts also continued to contribute directly to the regulation of a contented everyday life on earth that, in principle, had to be attainable for all.

It is illuminating how, for example, people tackled the age-old fear of the devil, the incorrigible malefactor who is incessantly setting ingenious traps into which bedazzled humankind has been stumbling since the Fall of Man. This was achieved in the form of a comic play which at first seems to completely deny that such a fear exists. On stage, the devil is consistently presented as a farcical character who breaks wind out of nervousness and can be hoodwinked by the simplest of souls using the simplest of ruses.

This is what happens in The Apple-Tree (Esbatement van den Appelboom), a striking little play from the start of the sixteenth century. God comes to the aid of a truly simple peasant couple in answer to their complaint about the repeated ransacking of an apple tree. God decrees that anyone who climbs into the tree will be trapped there. When Death appears (in the shape of a woman), the peasant couple ask her to pick a last apple for them to quench their thirst. Death is then trapped, and when the devil appears, in a rage, demanding to know why so few people are dying and he is having to make do without the daily delivery of souls to hell:

Brrraaagh! What’s become of darling Death?

I’ve such a longing to see her. Is she lost?

Have the succubi been at her and sucked out her soul,

or has she hidden her might in a mouse’s hole,

seeing the gravediggers’ spades have gone silent?

Lucifer in his blind fury writes Finish

Even for cowerers and skulkers in corners.

I must delve in every direction for Death.

By Lucifer’s sweat, what secret place is she lurking in?

I gaze on the ground and harry the horizon —

they deliver me as much as Madoc’s dream!

— Wait a bit, what’s that up there in the apple-tree?

It’s Death, there’s no doubt! It’s my dear friend Death.

Ahoy, Death darling, what in hell’s name are you doing?

Are you trying your hand at horticulture?8

Prompted by the peasant couple, the devil joins Death in the tree, and then both are trapped.

An amusing play like this channels and allays collective fears of death and the devil. One can negotiate with Death, and the devil is easily duped. Though the deep-seated terror is certainly not banished, it is rendered manageable by a form of communal ritual meant to make life on earth tolerable. Literature teaches us that there is an answer to everything, and confronting the masses with humor and satire plays an important part in this.

The same applies to the recitation of boerden, a genre closely related to the fabliaux of northern France. With their topical humor, these short, comical tales in verse had a much greater impact on the public than we might at first suspect. For example, in The Monk’s Tale (Vanden monick) we encounter a preacher renowned for his tirades against the devil. However, he has made a young woman pregnant and, fearful of retribution, he is intent on escaping the consequences. The devil in disguise obligingly dashes to his aid. He says he can temporarily remove the monk’s dastardly member, enabling him to prove that he does not have the equipment necessary to have committed such a sinful act. No sooner said than done! The monk brags from the pulpit that he will prove his innocence and then lifts his habit. But to everyone’s consternation the devil has that very instant taken his revenge by re-endowing the monk with a member as gorged and erect as it is substantial.

Such tales were recited and even acted out by professional actors, who interpolated plenty of apposite mime, obscene gestures, vocal distortions and, above all, as much audience involvement as possible. They thus enacted a collective ritual, replete with peals of laughter and snickering, in which a shared fear of sex, the devil, and mendicant friars — those hypocrites and quasi-scholars — was rendered manageable by ridiculing and thus temporarily allaying it. Humor was perhaps the most important lubricant in the cogs of human society.

The cozy domesticity and banality of these texts was instrumental to such a handling of collec­tive anxieties. Devil and mendicant friar were also belittled by cutting them down to fit the audience’s immediate surroundings. This made them even more mundane and therefore more intelligible for the masses. The Anti-Christ Play (Antichristspel) of around 1430, from Limburg, seems to contain the outline of a black comedy, but only fragments survive. Two low-ranking devils are seriously concerned about how to keep souls trapped on earth fresh during their journey to hell. Lucifer, their devil-in-chief, will be furious if they do not succeed. They come up with the idea of salting them, and Lucifer advises them to go and find salt in Stockheim on the River Meuse and in Biervliet in Zeeland. As with herring, this will prevent the souls from rotting. Lucifer’s advice refers to a tried and tested technique, since Jan Beukelszoon had introduced the practice of gutting and pickling herring in Biervliet more than a century earlier, while Stockheim was renowned for its salt production. Besides the comic effect of the operation itself, it provides a succinct example of the exploitation of everyday reality.

The urban literature of the late Middle Ages played an active part in molding, defending, and propagating what came to be known as typical middle-class virtues, with pragmatism and utilitarianism as its primary pillars. Literature employed an extensive arsenal of rhetorical techniques in order to achieve this goal, developing a highly particular art of persuasion and an array of new text types. These were intended to provide some consolation for the mishaps that could disrupt the life of the city-dweller. They also supplied the intellectual wherewithal to withstand the daily onslaught of dangers that could strike and throw them off balance at any time: fickle fate, infatuation, and sudden death.

To this end, individual texts, complexes of narrative material, and models from earlier times were annexed and adapted, prompting later characterizations such as “vulgarizing imitation.” However, the suggestion of plagiarism is anachronistic, since the medieval notion of art attached very little value to originali­ty. In fact, originality was suspect, since anyone could make something up. The essence of true art lay in demonstrating mastery in the reworking of familiar materials and examples from the classical, biblical, and earlier medieval canons, in line with the prevailing laws of poetics and rhetoric.

The chivalric verse romance, which had its origins in courtly culture, offered the burghers attractive points of reference, providing the romance was tailored to reflect urban aspirations and morals. The thirteenth-century Henry and Margarita of Limburg (Heinric en Margriete van Limborch), for example, was altered to provide various points of identification for the new city-dwelling audience, first and foremost by concentrating on an individual hero or heroine in the title; as we shall see, a bourgeois readership was primarily interested in the inspirational model of an individual hero. The scene that includes Henry’s elevation to knighthood was also adapted. He must swear to uphold the traditional knightly virtues, such as loyalty to his lord and master and the protection of widows and orphans, but the new prose version adds that he should be creditworthy under all circumstances: “Pay generously wherever you travel, by land or sea, then people will speak honorably of you.” The obligatory concept of honor is retained, but now it is associated with a virtue that belongs specifically to the mindset of an urban society.

Within the urban milieu there was also a growing interest in the function of literature as an uplifting or even therapeutic instrument, resulting in a raft of corresponding adaptations of existing texts. The simplest form of adaptation was the addition of a prologue or foreword, which preached at great length about the recommended manner of reading the ensuing text and mentioned the salutary effect that would follow. For example, the prose version of Hugh of Bordeaux (Huyghe van Bourdeus), printed at the start of the sixteenth century, is accompanied by an instruction that was becoming common practice for such texts: the work, it is said, is primarily intended to provide entertainment and pleasure, “and to lighten people’s spirits if they are troubled by any melan­choly, whether brought on by the evil influence of the devil or by slowness of the blood. For melancholy also generates heaviness and usually thickens the blood, which often makes a person ill.” This well-nigh-clinical explanation emphatically makes the point that the entertainment factor in literature is a means of combating melancholy. The fact that such modifications to the texts were considered necessary reveals how bourgeois the culture of the Low Countries had become. The original version of Henry and Margarita of Limburg opens with Duke Otto stating that he wishes to go out hunting. That was perfectly normal for a nobleman, so an audience in court circles required no explanation. In town and city, however, this was not the case. Nature was no longer regarded as a challenging wilderness to be conquered by knights to their hearts’ content. For the urban middle classes, nature had acquired new functions and significance. Besides being a perilous playground of the devil, who is fond of trying to make vulnerable individuals stumble and fall there, it has also become a place of consolation which can bring pleasure and even healing to desperate souls. Hence an audience of burghers expected a motive when someone — knight or otherwise — headed out into nature. The 1516 prose version accordingly adds that Duke Otto was melancholy and was therefore seeking solace in going hunting.

Such simple interventions are extremely telling. They demonstrate that old literary material has been made useful again. At the same time they reveal the fountainhead of public opinion in urban society: it was primarily courtly culture which furnished the models for behavior worthy of emulation. This was so firmly rooted that many a knight could be transformed into an inspiring entrepreneur by means of a simple rhetorical device. The adventurous merchant setting out into the world liked to perceive himself as a fearless knight. This process of literary annexation and adaptation had already begun in the fourteenth century, when the urban community, which now enjoyed its own solid, centralized administration responsible for maintaining peace and public order within the city walls, took advantage of new opportunities for social differentiation. The emerging urban elite saw literature as an apt vehicle to serve these purposes.

The abele spelen, four plays that represent the world’s oldest known forms of serious, secular drama, provide an early example of this. Together with six farces, the plays have survived in the Van Hul­them manuscript, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, was probably compiled in Brussels around 1400 and contains a range of texts for use in an urban context. The various plays are much more closely related than has generally been assumed, their common focus being the emerging urban elite and its aspirations. The farces ridicule the inverse of the ideals of the urban bourgeoisie, projec­ting them onto caricatures of peasants or rural immigran­ts living in town and city. These folk gesticulate wildly, have disgusting eating habits, lack all inhibitions, and inhabit a world that is devoid of any sense of privacy. We find the same device of the topsy-turvy world in the “realistic” portrayals of peasants in prints and paintings realized a century later.

In later centuries, and even to this day, such cardboard caricatures of undesirable behavior have sometimes been taken for conscientious accounts of medieval life as it actually was. However, if the medieval period ever presented a veiled image of itself, then it is in these documents. A text such as the so-called Song of the Churls (Kerelslied) is a good example. It comes from the most famous collection of secular songs in the vernacular, part of the Gruuthuse manuscript, which was compiled in Bruges by a city confraternity that, under the leadership of Jan van Hulst, undertook a whole range of cultu­ral activities from the late fourteenth century. The “peasant” in this text is a construct, fashioned after the seven cardinal sins and other forms of undesirable behavior that were the very antithesis of how a cultured burgher in Bruges was expected to behave. He is bad-tempered, wears disheveled clothes, has long, unkempt hair, and gorges on food the whole day long:

Bread and cheese, curds and whey,

The bumpkin eats the livelong day,

That’s why he’s such a simpleton,

He eats more than is good for him.

And his wife looks just as scruffy. When he goes to the fair he fancies himself a count and wants to knock everyone out of the way with his gnarled staff. A swig of wine has him tipsy in no time, and then he gets completely carried away, imagining he can lord it over the world. Having returned to his wife’s side, thoroughly drunk, he tries to placate her, but she curses him to high heaven. He manages to get her back on his side, and peace is restored. They become entranced by the sound of the bagpipes and the two of them stamp around wildly. It is high time, the song concludes, that these country bumpkins were taught a lesson by dragging them through town and hanging them.

We also encounter this upside-down world in the farces that accompany the abele spelen. Blow-in-the-Box (Die buskenblaser) opens with a long monologue in which an old peasant claims an improbable portfolio of skills. His lengthy list is a catalogue of distinct trades as they had evolved in the urban milieu, where people had also learned to distinguish between them with a view to the organization of society in general. The peasant declares himself to be a miller of wheat, but he can also sew bags and gloves, knows how to mow grass and flail corn, and claims to possess the commercial acumen of a market trader. And he can pass for a carpenter, though to be honest he has never earned a penny from it. Nor is he averse to making investments using borrowed money, though he concedes he will be tardy with repayment. He is, moreover, equipped to chop down trees and clear thickets, to brew beer, bake bread, build dikes and create polders, and thresh and winnow grain. And there’s more! He is available if a lady or gentleman would like to hire him as a servant, though he readily admits that he likes to sleep late, is rather sluggish in his work, and loves to linger over his food. In order to swiftly dispel the poor impression this could make he concludes with the statement, still meant as a bragging advertisement, that he can also dig and tease flax.

From the perspective of the urban community, the peasant’s hilarious and inane catalogue of skills represents a series of distinct trades. The quack he is speaking to at the market is drawn into a sneering elaboration on this ridiculous list of professional specialties. In his retort, the quack claims he can “cooper” items of pottery such as stoneware dishes and milk cans. At this the peasant cries out in indignation that he must have been sent by the devil to come up with such crazy jokes. The quack is clearly scoffing at the arsenal of skills that the peasant has reeled off by adding an outrageous and nonsensical specialties to the list: wooden barrels are coopered, not pottery.

The peasant’s insistent sales pitch is motivated by a shortage of funds. He can no longer satisfy his young wife’s sexual needs — she curses him for being a useless impotent — and he wants to regain her affections with rejuvenated looks, including the proper functioning of the equipment that has failed him, of course. To that end the quack invites him, at considerable expense, to blow into a box, with the assurance that his looks will be rejuvenated and the more private parts of his anatomy will be reinvigorated, too. The peasant agrees, but when his wife sees him later, his face completely black with the soot the box contained, she immediately grasps what has happened. The farce ends with a spectacular drubbing for the poor peasant.

The peasant’s chaotic recital of so many different professions fits the criteria of didactic caricature. By means of inversion he demonstrates the urban demand for rational coherence and, especially, self-control, both of which are called for in order to constrain the stupidity that the peasant demonstrates time and again. He is so carried away by his self-sung praises that he loses all self-control and unwittingly manifests his total lack of restraint. He has never earned a penny as a carpenter, likes to swill down beer, fails to repay his debts, likes sleeping in, works slowly, and adores lingering over his food. This places the emphasis on the urban ideal of working hard, investing profitably, and exercising moderation in all things.

Above all, however, the peasant represents a world unfamiliar with the benefits of the division of labor, or even averse to the idea. In the eyes of town dwellers, the success of the urban economy can be ascribed to the spectrum of specialized professions organized under the artisan guilds and merchant companies, which reflect the core values of urban self-awareness in their prescribed attire, manners, and rituals. From this perspective, country life may readily be viewed as backward, or at the very least outmoded, because, among other things, everyone living there is still an all-rounder. Peasants, and also their wives, are represented as offering themselves as jacks (and jills) of all trades and as failing precisely to realize that in doing so they stymie every form of progress in the countryside. With his ridiculous behavior the peasant on stage only confirms the city-dwelling public in their ideas.

The abele spelen serve the same purpose, even though in three of the four plays these values are directly projected onto an idealized life of chivalry. The fourth play is distinctive only in its choice of subject matter, the ritualized struggle between summer and winter known from rural folklore, but it is adapted in a similar manner to serve the objectives of the urban middle classes. The knights and young damsels in the first three plays are preoccupied with concerns of an urban nature. These primarily relate to (real or assumed) differences in religion or social rank that present obstacles to true love as the basis for starting a family.

The urban population had a more pragmatic attitude toward these matters; it wanted social mobility based on merit, industriousness, and talent to be as fluid as possible. In this way an abel spel such as Lancelot of Denmark (Lanseloet van Denemarken) could serve as a didactic manual for the leading bourgeois circles, showing how to secure an appropriate marriage, with special consideration for problems regarding social rank. The crux of the tale is that everything is possible in principle, provided that the practices of the city’s new matrimonial mores are observed. Lancelot, the Prince of Denmark (not to be confused with Lancelot, the knight of Arthur’s Round Table), fails to meet the demands of this social code when he falls in love with a maiden of more humble origins. Following the false counsel of his malicious mother, he deflowers the maiden, having promised to marry her, and then abandons her. At the end of the play he will be left even more miserable than in his state of frustrated despair prior to committing the treacherous deed.

The girl flees into the forest, deeply traumatized by the brutish theft of her virginity. Then a second knight makes his entrance, representing the new bourgeois worldview and therefore, to put it mildly, cutting a rather curious figure in this courtly setting. Before he catches sight of the young woman he voices his ideas about work and investment. First he explains why he is roaming through the forests, but his motives are different from those of Duke Otto in the 1516 prose version of Henry and Margarita of Limburg, who was seeking solace for his melancholy. This knight has been out hunting for four days already and has not even “caught a rabbit,” as he puts it himself. He concludes: “I am ashamed at such bad luck, / And that I should lose my labor so.”

Not only is his adventure in the forest explicitly motivated by profit — he is not just hunting as an exercise in the art of war — but he speaks in tradesman’s terms. His investment of time has not yet brought him any success, which is why his efforts (aerbeit, “work, labor”) thus far have been wasted. But then he spies the damsel in distress beside a fountain and exclaims enthusiastically that it seems he might still find success: “Ah Lord God, should I catch her, / My labor would not be in vain.” This knight, who turns out to be a very likeable fellow, does not react by asking the damsel how he might help, what is amiss, which scoundrel has abused her, or some other gallant platitude. Nay, he has a nose for profit, in the form of this eventual reward for all his investment of time and effort. Once this mentality has been made clear to the audience he consoles the girl and asks her to marry him.

The knight tellingly couches his proposal in contractual terms, the most obvious way to certify a human relationship for him and his social milieu. That is why he also defines the young woman as a commodity: as a wife, he says, she is more valuable than a wild boar, even one of gold; and he promises her a life of opulence in his castle in exchange for carnal pleasures. The fact that she has lost her virginity — which would have been a virtually insurmountable problem in court circles — presents no problem for him whatsoever. This knight is very practically minded. He is in need of a wife, she is beautiful, and why would anyone get excited about a blemish on her reputation?

The young woman starts to talk in commercial terms herself. She turns her lost virginity into a selling point by comparing herself to a richly blossoming tree from which a falcon has plucked a single blossom:

Now let us go into this grove,

Sir knight, and let us talk a little.

I pray you understand my riddle:

In courteous words I will tell you all.

Look at this tree shapely and tall,

How gloriously it blossoms out.

Its noble smell goes all about

The orchard and the lovely dell.

So sweet it is, and grown so well,

That all this orchard it doth adorn.

If now a falcon nobly born

From high upon this tree flew down,

And picked one flower, only one,

And after that never one more,

Nor ever took but that one flower,

Now pray you tell me faithfully,

Would you therefore hate the tree?

To buy it would you therefore scorn?9

This knight and young lady are guided by morals that are unlike the traditional codes of honor of court culture. The new concern is to enter into an advantageous marriage for love, but that marriage must of necessity be founded on practical considerations and the careful weighing of investment, work, and profit.

The emergence of a distinctive urban literature involves articulating the philosophical and moral values that acquired special significance in urban society. At the time we are discussing, these values were invariably couched in terms of the qualities a worthy citizen should possess and the goals he ought to pursue. A citizen had to be useful, practically minded, industrious, inquisitive, ambitious, adventurous, self-supporting, enterprising, frugal, smart, individualistic, opportunistic, moderate, reasonable, modest, and self-controlled. It would be a mistake to think that these virtues were “discovered” in town and city. Individualism, hard work, and making a career are not among urban society’s exclusive achievements, no matter how often the city dwellers of the late Middle Ages attempted to present them as novel. Most of the qualities mentioned date back to classical antiquity, many were later adopted at court, and we encounter almost all of them in the earliest monastic milieus. Overlaps in these moral codes are a constant, since the prominent feature of such a mind-set is that it is constantly cross-pollinated.

Broadly speaking, the authors of classical antiquity posited the need for reason and emotional control as a guiding principle for worldly life, together with instructions for the methodical management of household affairs (oeconomia). The latter was also a particular concern of the monastic orders, with their emphasis on diligence and discipline, and the efficient timekeeping required to achieve this. The ideal of constituting a self-sufficient community belongs in this milieu, too. Finally, the lone adventurer who takes on the world and vies with fate (fortuna) initially flourished in the midst of courtly culture, as exemplified by the epics of chivalry.

The unique thing about the city of the late Middle Ages was that a highly original and effective moral code was formulated with a new purpose, based on the legacy handed down by the classical, biblical, and medieval past. It is rooted in an almost primitive survival strategy that, if necessary, subordinates all values to the will to survive, without the help of, but also unhindered by, traditions, rules, inherited power, or the threat of physical or spiritual punishment. This new package of virtues is generated, tested, and propagated in the literature of the late Middle Ages.

This allowed the tale of Reynard the Fox, which in Willem’s thirteenth-century version was so closely associated with the world of the court, to enjoy a new lease of life in the city. With only minor adaptations, the text could inspire audiences to identify with the essence of an evolving civic morality. Of course, various versions of the tale of Reynard had already been produced during the Middle Ages, adapted to meet the demands and expectations of audiences from diverse social strata. Whereas in Willem’s poem the parody on chivalric literature and the courtly world in general is paramount, in later versions we see this focus gradually disappear, and it has become virtually imperceptible in the prose version. Conversely, the tendency to moralize increases, leading to further exaggeration of the human traits of the animal characters.

But who would have enjoyed this ruthless humiliation of the traditional might of aristocratic courts, effected by a widely detested animal to boot? The supposition that we are dealing here with some form of literary self-reflection in these courtly circles is surely belied by the harshness of the satire, which makes a mockery of the principles of feudal society and its courtly machinations. But is that fox really such a despicable creature? His cunning in the face of the dull-witted authorities and their brazen selfishness must have seemed irresistible, especially for those upwardly mobile groups in urban society that were striving to establish a new kind of power structure by means of their economic wealth and marriage politics. In any case, it is hard to see how a medieval text could have become popular if it depended entirely on an anti-hero with whom nobody would ever want to identify.

The late medieval public’s liking for texts that demonstrate how an individual can take on the whole world with prac­tical ingenuity and be self-reliant under all circumstances is indeed striking. The common feature of all these often comical exercises in cunning is that the hero flouts all traditional values and is not weighed down by courtly codes of conduct or any other behavioral norms, although he gleefully respects them if he might profit by them. Reynard is a perfect embodiment of this mentality. He knows the ceremonial posturing of the dispensation of justice like the back of his paw, so to speak, and unerringly exploits the system’s weaknesses. But he remains courteous where that achieves results, for example in the presence of King Nobel the lion and his wife Gente, rendering them defenseless against his boundless scams.

It is as if the text about Reynard’s triumphs prepared the way for the later tales of resourceful villainy, which, in step with the expanding powers of the urban elites, enjoyed increasing popularity. These tales were about the antics of hyper-individualists, such as Marcol­ph, Aesop, pseudo-Villon, Aernout, Everaert, Uilen­spie­gel, the Pastor of Kalenberg, Virgil, Heynken de Luyere, and many more. The edition of Aesop’s Fables (Esopus) printed in 1485 features a prologue which recommends the work as a manual for self-preservation based on personal shrewdness, thus underscoring the proven usefulness of the animal fable to demonstrate those very values and life skills.

Title page of the Histories and fables (Historien ende fabulen) about Aesop, printed 1485. The Hague, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum.

The Repertoire of Popular Festivities

By devoting so much attention to the adaptations of ideologies and subject-matter from the traditionally higher social milieu we may risk losing sight of the fact that urban literature of the time poached a very wide range of materials from popular culture. True, the sources available to document and analyze this bottom-up cultural filtration are much less plentiful. They are also harder to interpret, since, unlike sources on court culture, the materials used are very rarely still in existence in their original form. But the vast majority of city-dwelling burghers originated, directly or indirectly, from the countryside and therefore had first-hand knowledge of popular culture. Also, migration to the urban centers persisted after the Middle Ages, and there continued to be plenty of agricultural activity and tending of livestock within the walls of every town and city, even though space was limited. In other words, the city stood in the middle of the countryside.

Many immigrants and their descendants kept their own culture alive, certainly at the level of the urban neighborhoods, and this culture was only very gradually absorbed into more general urban interests. The forms and rituals were often preserved in essence, even though the aims and orientation acquired an urban signature. We see that phenomenon most clearly in the youthful diversions associated with the charivari. In the countryside, bands of youths could administer an alternative form of justice in the name of their forefathers and with community endorsement. In town and city their activities were limited to jeering and demanding money from those who had contravened urban matrimonial mores, and their rabble-rousing was gradually assimilated into the more general pre-Lenten celebrations. The authorities in many cities also organized these traditionally rowdy gangs of as yet unsettled youngsters into official neighborhood associations and later on even molded them into chambers of rhetoric, which strove to become the exclusive organizers of urban literary life.

Title page of Heynken de Luyere by Cornelis Crul, written c. 1540, printed 1582. The Hague, Royal Library.

Such textual materials have come down to us only when official culture found their subject-matter sufficiently interesting to commit them to paper — usually in an adapted form — and to employ them for events that the authorities themselves organized. This sometimes involved gathering whole collections of folk texts, primarily songs, which were given a new lease of life by the printing press. The so-called Antwerp Songbook (Antwerpse Liedboek), printed in 1544, contains a substantial corpus of such lyrics. Within this collection, material that has its origins in an anonymous folk tradition is usually indicated by the legend “an old song.”

One such example is Of the Beans (Van den boonkens), which denounces all the aforementioned transgressors of the desired marital order. Its short refrain is an insistent reminder that such folly is caused by the scent of the flowering bean plant. As the ritual described also involves the incineration of bean plants at the doors of offenders, producing a malodorous stench, there is a plausible connection:

Men with locks of purest white,

They marry a young maid,

Dance on two stools with all their might,

True sottishness displayed!

And their limbs are all so stiff,

They can’t be counted on to lift.

What makes them move is gout’s sore pain,

Their noses run, their old eyes water,

And those itches in the main

Are an everlasting bother.

When pollen wafts upon the air,

You get more than your fair share!

The original rituals, and those of rural fertility rites in general, are easily discerned in the extant repertoire for feasts of inversion such as Carnival, the purpose of which was to teach, by means of instigating a temporary topsy-turvy order, how life in the real world ought to be conducted. We find such texts preserved in manuscripts and early printed works. They reveal how, for the duration of the festivities, townspeople sought to dispel prevailing fears concerning hunger, sex, cold, and the devil by presenting all manner of jokes and pranks that were scatological or deleterious in nature.

These texts extol the virtues of extreme lasciviousness in a heavily ironic manner, thus indicating by inversion what is expected of every good citizen under normal circumstances: industriousness, thrift, moderation, and self-sufficiency. The best-known specimen in Dutch is the Guild of the Blue Barge (Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit), dated 1413, which includes the mock statutes of a fraternity that organizes the annual Carnival celebrations in various cities. The painter Hieronymus Bosch and the German humanist Sebastian Brant drew extensively on such performances for their moralizing portrayals of fools. Bosch’s The Ship of Fools is one of his most famous paintings, while Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff) was translated into almost every Western European language soon after its initial publication in 1494.

The Blue Barge (Die Blauwe Schuit); burin engraving by Pieter van der Heijden after Hieronymus Bosch, 1559. Brussels, Royal Library Albert I.

The rhyming text about the Guild of the Blue Barge describes in detail who is allowed to become a member of the guild and on what conditions, who is excluded, and when membership must be revoked. Candidate members are subdivided into categories reminiscent of the three medieval “estates” but incorporating later variants specific to urban society, namely profession, age, and marital status.

The crux of the text is a severe critique of any sections of society reputed to behave in a manner no longer desirable within the city walls. Following the spirit of the poem this critique is presented ironically, so the points of criticism assume the character of absolute prerequisites for becoming a member of the guild. And this is taken to such an extreme that even mishaps and calamities that are beyond one’s control are presented as the consequences of individual decisions to live wantonly and sinfully. For example, the Carnival Prince extends an invitation to poverty-stricken nobles with the recommendation to indulge their proclivity for drunkenness, fornication, and gambling to their heart’s content within the guild:

First of all, about those men,

Knights or grooms, whose fief or land

Is sold for money in the hand.

Or to the Lombard make their way

And pawn their goods, but cannot pay

To get them back, too poor, it seems.

They eat their grain while it’s still green.

Their income they can’t wait to spend,

They play at being gentlemen,

And every year they sell some land,

And let their debts get out of hand.

Of indolence they make a habit,

Buying all they can on credit.

They’ve no need of moderation

For they are our prodigal children.

Such insinuations must have hit hard in late-medieval society, where members of a now redundant landed gentry could no longer make ends meet and struggled to participate in the urban economy. The city, however, showed little patience for these nouveaux pauvres, who had nothing but a title to offer a merchant’s daughter. They were contravening one of the principal pillars of urban ethics, namely independence and self-sufficiency. A burgher provided for himself and did not depend on granting and receiving favors. He buys and hires, and does not need to knock on any doors for help. Whoever is reduced to that is harshly reminded of his personal responsibility, with the implication that it is all his own fault. The aged and the infirm are dealt with equally harshly in these ruthless carnival rituals, which were above all meant to define the urban community’s interests.

The invitations continue in a similar fashion, being extended to church prela­tes who abuse their privileges, lusty nuns and monks, the idle children of the wealthy, women of loose morals, aging spinsters, and many others besides. All of them are welcome, on condition that they diligently continue to overindulge their gluttonous and destruc­tive behavior. Indeed, the guild was designed for that very purpose. The fact that, in principle, this involves behavior that could yet be rectified to correspond with the bourgeois order is underscored by the description of the circumstances that would secure release from membership: marriage, wealth, or wisdom.

This defines “tearaway” behavior (the term recurs several times) as a rite of passage: to join well-ordered society you must become a settled burgher by getting married, accumulating wealth and, especially, gaining wisdom, thus quashing the chaotic foolishness of the upside-down world. In addition, it is made clear that serious crimes are an entirely different matter. The Guild of the Blue Barge prescribes the rules of behavior that grant entry to bourgeois society as it had become established by the end of the Middle Ages. The formation of urban elites required the suppression of folk culture. Murderers, arsonists, and traitors do not fit into any social order whatsoever, and they are excluded also from the inverted order of the Guild of the Blue Barge.

These performances and festivities must have been a significant feature of urban society in the late Middle Ages. Mock rulers and mock kingdoms cropped up everywhere, not just in urban neighborhoods but also in villages and hamlets. The temporarily established mock kingdoms assumed all the trappings of true order, so as to transform them into their opposites. The mock sovereign issued decrees (“commandments”) and administered justice, and the kingdom had a mock ecclesiastical hierarchy with all due pomp and circumstance. All these components were depicted and acted out with abandon. Some of the texts that were used as repertoire for such performances — or at least describe them — have been preserved.

Fragment of From the Potty Pulpit (Dit is van den scijtstoel), a work possibly used as toilet paper. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Several mock sermons intended to embellish the alternative Mass have come down to us. One example is From the Potty Pulpit (Dit is van den Scijtstoel), a text in which a merrymaker, garbed as a priest, mounts the pulpit and launches into the well-nigh obligatory scatological and sexual wordplay by treating the pulpit, the usual place to preach God’s truth, as a privy. He then holds a learned disquisition, liberally sprinkled with pig Latin, about materials for wiping one’s behind. He warmly recommends mussel shells, the Fool’s Stone, and even snowflakes. In another text we are blessed with a benediction of farts, and as subjects of the mock kingdom we must swear allegiance to the new sovereign as follows: “Now stick your fingers up your behind, then kiss them.” The priest explains that we can only follow his wishes and those of God by drinking ourselves into a stupor and fornicating the whole time. Entry into hell is guaranteed, he concludes emphatically.

Highly popular throughout Western Europe was a type of mock sermon in which the venerated saint in the upside-down world went by the name of Saint Nobody. This redoubled the irony, because his incessantly repeated commands established a full-blown society that was a match for one based on Christian virtues. “Nobody” urged you to drink yourself silly, commit adultery, and squander your money:

Take pains to understand me well,

The ranks of the heavenly kingdom swell

With drunkards and wastrels, I must explain.

So, dearest, if saving your soul is your aim,

Then spare neither goods nor legacy,

Though your children might starve in misery.

Swig and swill at every opportunity.

The mock preacher reiterates this message time and again: blow your money, drink yourself into a stupor. A little further on he continues:

One may reach the heavenly kingdom by boozing

For those who guzzle too much beer or wine

Release a soul from purgatory each time.

Drink in order to save souls and gain entry into heaven. This is followed by a listing of foods personified, some of which would not appear on the table until Easter, as they were forbidden during Lent: Peter Ox, Roger Rabbit, and John Capon, as well as John Cod, Harry Haddock and Tommy Thornback, and Trish Fig, Kelly Apple, and Betty Raisin. Dozens of these names were concocted, resulting in enumerations that were highly comical and well suited to a spectacular delivery, during which the mock priest probably also attempted to represent these foodstuffs graphically. The text concludes with a blessing of the gathered crowd in the name of Sanctus Drincatibus. Drink as much as you can in his honor, until you’re so sozzled that the booze oozes out of you unnoticed!

The moralizing objectives are evident in these texts. The advice to deviate from accepted moral values serves to demonstrate that such inversion would lead to nothing but chaos, and that those who fail to mend their ways will surely end up in hell. The generous sprinkling of scatological folklore serves as an instrument to invert the established order, which could then be denigrated and ridiculed with ease. The names of the mock rulers already give a clear indication of the intended objects of derision, the targets in the real world that, using hilarity and gravity in equal measure, they wish to pillory or attempt to render tolerable in the year to come. We hear from the gentlemen Empty-Hands, Shabby, Uncle Lombard (a nickname for a pawnbroker), Hunger-Mount, Rowdy-Rule, All-Wrong, Seldom-Rich, and Grim-Church, as well as from pseudo-saints such as Saint Have-Not, Saint Snot-Glob, and Saint Flat-Broke. It is obvious that the main objective here was to dispel the fear of cold, poverty, and hunger as well as to gain control over the sinful behavior that would lead to such predicaments.

These texts, and with them our knowledge of the accompanying carnival celebrations, have been handed down via the well-to-do middle classes, who plundered the popular culture on their doorstep and tailored it to serve their own purposes. A farce from the mid-sixteenth century known as The Fool’s Dubbing (De sotslach) provides an illustration. The Fool tempts the Farmer, who is dissatisfied with his life of drudgery, into joining the Guild of Fools. After some hesitation the Farmer enters the Guild by way of a parody on the dubbing of a knight. The Farmer and the Fool combined stand for everything from which the established burghers wished to distance themselves. On his way to market with half-rotten eggs and poultry, the Farmer initially mistakes the Fool for the Devil, and he is so terrified that he loses control over his bodily functions. The Fool promptly ridicules him as a drunken nincompoop for soiling himself with rotten eggs and his own excrement. The Farmer also rides roughshod over all the rules of etiquette, sometimes literally, for instance when he bursts in on a distinguished company of people at table in his unwieldy clogs. His uncouth behavior is of course the reason he is well suited to join the Guild of Fools.

The inversion of the bourgeois virtues to be cultivated in the real world continues with the Fool listing the privileges of membership: no more work, food in abundance, and endless freeloading. That suits the Farmer down to the ground, especially when he thinks about his miserable life with his ill-tempered and nasty wife, and he eagerly renounces all wisdom in order to be dubbed a fully fledged fool. He then bursts out into a wild song and dance. He has just one question for the Fool: where does he find the guild’s headquarters, so that he can collect his cap with bells and his provender? So the Fool gives him directions, and his answer makes it abundantly clear that foolishness leads to abject misery:

To Churlishness, a city world-renowned,

Lying past Cockaigne, a mile at most,

Through Wretchedness you travel to the coast

Where Mister Drifter ferries folk at speed.

One skipper is called Want, the other Need,

They toil to bring you quickly, safe and sound.

The moral is laid on thickly in this farce: anyone who relinquishes wisdom and thus becomes a complete fool, who does nothing in life but sing, dance, and guzzle, will eventually slip into utter destitution.

A similar exploitation of rural culture can be found in the texts about the Land of Cockaigne. These tales are spun around a kernel of compensatory fantasies of gluttony and laziness in a paradise of worldly abundance. It is easy to discern the rural origins of these tales, as people in the countryside had endured drudgery and a frantic fear of famine since the early Middle Ages. The set ingredients of the Land of Cockaigne included animals presenting themselves in ready-roasted or ready-cooked form (all one has to do is open one’s mouth and take a bite), absolute idleness, and edible architecture — houses and fences constructed from luxurious victuals. This narrative material proved useful to other social strata and was adapted to allay their prevailing fears, feed their cherished fantasies, and trumpet their particular interests. In the new urban milieu, the Land of Cockaigne was recast as the more familiar mundus inversus. In other words, townspeople seized upon the Land of Cockaigne in order to moralize.

Damaged leaf from The Land of Cockaigne (Dat lant van cockaengen). London, British Library.

The two oldest rhyming texts, which are distantly related to French thirteenth-century fabliaux, add a new dimension to the compensatory fantasy of gorging. They are now also employed as a warning against the sin of gluttony: the behavior in this preposterous Land of Plenty is the opposite of the moderation and self-control prescribed in ethical treatises and moralistic sermons. For example, the tables in the Land of Cockaigne are fully laden at all hours of the day, so people can gorge whenever they desire:

In all the streets there you will find

Tables with food of every kind.

On tablecloths of spotless white,

Bread and wine, oh what a sight!

And, moreover, meat and fish,

And everything that you could wish.

You can eat and drink the livelong day

And never even have to pay,

As is the custom here with us.

Handbooks of Penance leave no doubt that eating whenever one feels the urge is one of the features of the cardinal sin of gluttony. The sin of sloth is inverted in a similar manner: in the Land of Cockaigne those who sleep longest earn the most, which also serves as a topical critique of the usurers from whom the urban work ethic sharply differentiates itself.

The Land of Cockaigne portrayed in these texts is further tainted by a suspicion of heresy, since they claim the Holy Ghost as Cockaigne’s lord and ruler. The Holy Ghost had long been associated with the thousand-year reign of peace and prosperity of which the Book of Revelation speaks. Unorthodox millenarianist ideas about the imminence of Utopia gave rise to blasphemous practices throughout the Middle Ages. Lay preachers frequently proclaimed the imminence of this biblical paradise on earth, in which poverty and inequality would be consigned to history. Their exhortations to start preparing for such a kingdom often sparked social unrest due to the accompanying imposition of community of property and free sex, mirroring the situation that was supposed to have existed in the Garden of Eden. For the church, such fantasies, and the resulting deeds, smacked of heresy.

The moralizing tone, presented ironically and against the backdrop of the mundus inversus, receives even greater emphasis in Of Lazy-Luscious Land (Van ’t Luye-Lecker-Lant) published in 1546, a free adaptation of a work by Hans Sachs, the master poet of Nuremberg. In this prose text the imaginary land appears as a quasi-idyll for rebellious youngsters, a place where they can learn how not to do things. The theme of laziness is amplified by means of an inverted work ethic: the greatest apathy reaps the highest rewards. Whoever shoots widest of the bull’s-eye at archery tournaments wins first prize, and the same applies for whoever comes last in a running race. Gruff and coarse behavior such as belching and farting brings financial reward and even elevation to the highest posts at court: “Whoever is found to be the biggest good-for-nothing, the most untrustworthy, the rudest, dumbest, and moreover the laziest, most debauched vagabond and champion rogue — he is proclaimed king. And whoever is merely coarse and stupid is made a prince.” For industrious and civilized burghers the Land of Cockaigne has become a living hell. They cannot enter there anyway, as the text reminds them. Not that they needed reminding. Access was restricted to youngsters, those still unsure how one ought to behave in the civilized world of adults.

II. The Chambers of Rhetoric

The Reign of the Rhetoricians

Urban literature was a means of propagating ideas and consoling people, of entertaining them and alleviating their melancholy, as well as an instrument to edify, educate, and exorcise. Material on any subject could be employed to achieve those goals, whether drawn from the court, the monastery, or the countryside. Urban literature of the fourteenth century strongly resembles an assem­blage, and no trouble was taken to disguise the joins in the resulting construct. During the fifteenth century there was a shift toward meeting the growing demand among the urban elites for a literature tailored to burghers and artisans that was firmly rooted in rhetoric, a concept whose sole guiding principle was the art of letters.

The exponents of that innovative literary life in the city were the tightly organized chambers of rhetoric. Even though the city already had many organizations that engaged with literature or at least played an active role in public festivities, the need for a specific grouping focused exclusively on literature was apparently so strong that every municipality quickly established its own chamber, while the cities of Brabant and Flanders even had three or four.

What we today call literature was known to the members of these chambers as retorike, from the Latin rhetorica, the art of eloquence. They believed that by developing skills in an aesthetic use of language they could bring themselves and others to true piety and the behavior appropriate to attaining salvation. The statutes of the Ophasselt chamber, dated 1482, prescribe exercises in rational argumentation and stylistic embellishment as the best way to achieve the principal aim of praising God and leading a life of piety. Other chambers mention the composition of texts as a means of assuaging life’s vicissitudes and a useful antidote against the evil of melancholy, which primarily afflicted intellectu­als, artists, and poets, and which, unless it was countered, would irrevocably lead to suicide.

All these motives and objectives were summarized in 1448 in the rules and regulations of the Ghent chamber of rhetoric called The Fountain (De Fonteine), which was to become the leading chamber in Flanders. Rhetorical diversions were meant to stave off melancholy, inspire devotion, and result in the spiritual elevation of the community. This could only be achieved within the scope of a layperson’s horizons, thus circumscribing a world governed by the vernacular. This does not imply that their aspirations were any lower than those of the Latin-speaking elite, who were finding new inspiration with the rise of humanism. The ties were and would remain close. The rhetoricians created a vernacular humanism on the basis of an artistically sophisticated language, which had not really existed before as an identifiable idiom. The consciously chosen rhetorical foundation underscored the intention to persuade by means of both reason and emotion.

Many rhetoricians appear to have been familiar not only with the literature of the French rhétoriqueurs but also with the work of the Latin-writing humanists. The latter dominated secondary education in the cities, and their philosophy dictated new attitudes to humankind, culminating in urgent appeals for peace, tolerance, civilized forms of behavior, and the observation of mutual respect in general. Toward the end of the fifteenth century such views would increasingly influence the work of the rhetoricians, as did a corresponding growth in interest in the potential of language in general. During the sixteenth century, many of the rhetoricians were inspired in particular by Erasmus.

Nevertheless, rhetoricians such as Jan Pertchevael, Jan Smeken, Jan van den Dale, and, in the sixteenth century, Jan van den Berghe and Cornelis van Ghistele, were more than simply adherents of the humanist body of thought. They actively competed with their inspirers, no doubt convinced that an artistically deployed vernacular presented greater opportunity for the expression of emotions than the essentially academic Latin. The rhetoricians’ interest in a literary revaluation and embellishment of the vernacular was certainly novel.

Their veneration of rhetoric was undergirded by an intense competitiveness, which tied in very well with the new urban élan. Contests were held frequently, both within individual chambers and at large-scale festivals lasting several days, to which competing chambers flocked from far and wide. As the above-mentioned statutes suggest, the members of The Fountain constantly practiced variations on given themes and models, always before a jury. Literature was about winning, and the art of rhetoric was a direct invitation to pursue this goal. After all, persuading means winning.

The preoccupation with the art of rhetoric as well as the competitive spirit and organizational structure of the chambers of rhetoric in the Low Countries derived from the so-called puys (“stages” or “rostrums”) of northern France. These urban literary companies were first established in Hainault and Artois, especially in the cities of Arras, Lille, Valenciennes, and Douai, which were also within the territory of the Burgundian realm. The puy of Arras is probably the oldest, having been founded as early as the twelfth century and undergoing its first revival and restructuring in the thirteenth century. The connection with the chambers of the Low Countries is demonstrated by the many French loanwords used by the rhetoricians — rhéthorique, ballade, refrain, facteur, prince (d’amour) — and also from the subdivision of the refrain into three types: didactic, amorous, and comic.

There were also differences between France and the Low Countries. The French puys distinguished themselves by specializing in particular lyrical forms, unlike the rhetoricians of the Low Countries, who continued to cultivate a wide variety of rhetorical genres. Nor did the latter restrict their competi­tiveness to the refrain as the preferred lyrical form. The chambers in the Low Countries vied with each other in everything: from every conceivable dramatic form to the mounting of the most beautiful procession for a joyous entrance, from the most spectacular firework display to the most clownish performance by a chamber’s accompanying knaves.

Title page of Comic, Amorous, and Didactic Refrains (Refreynen int sot, amoreus, wijs), printed c. 1529. Ghent, University Library.

The chambers of Brabant actually organized an ambitious seven-year cycle of drama festivals, which they called a landjuweel. The idea derived from competitions staged by the guilds of crossbowmen. The main event at a landjuweel consisted of the performance of a serious play, and the winner was obliged to organize the following year’s contest. The letters of invitation to the various chambers reveal that the competitors were expected to pay particular attention to the formal aspects of the performance. The play had to be new and diverting (in the sense of entertaining), and the chambers would be judged on whichever made fewest mistakes and came up with the best dramatic show. The actors were urged to act in a lifelike manner, to avoid unsightly grimaces, and to keep the prompter out of sight and earshot.

The Antwerp landjuweel of 1561 was unsurpassed in its opulence, fancifulness, and allure. It would also be the last in the cycle of contests that had begun in Brabant in the fifteenth century. The rhetoricians’ vehement outbursts against the church enjoyed an alarming degree of approval among their audiences, and, as a result, the authorities made it increasingly difficult for the chambers to stage public events. The County of Flanders did not hold contests of the landjuweel type, though the chambers there organized local and interregional contests on an incidental basis, some of them bilingual when chambers from northern France took part. The inflammatory effect of these competitions was of growing concern to the authorities. Outspoken attacks on the church and thinly veiled expositions of Reformation doctrines were prevalent at the Ghent refrain and drama contest of 1539, stretching governmental tolerance to the limit. Henceforth the activities of the rhetoricians were subject to severe constraints, including a ban on dissemination of their texts in print.

It would be a mistake to think that the rhetoricians were commoners, even though this misconception was propagated by the first rhetoricians themselves. From the outset they boasted of their simplicity and mere craftsmanship, wholly in keeping with the tenets of urban society in general. In later times this resulted in the received notion that they must therefore have been manual workers who wrote the odd verse in their free time. The stated professions of some prominent rhetoricians lent credence to this view. For example, Anthonis de Roovere of Bruges was referred to as a mason; however, rather than equating him with a modern-day construction worker, we should think of him as an architect or master builder, and it is worth asking to what extent he continued practicing that trade once he had established his name as a rhetorician and was earning a living in that capacity. This also applies to Corne­lis Everaert, who likewise hailed from Bruges and authored a large number of plays in the sixteenth century. He is mentioned as a dyer of linen and clerk of the guild of archers, which recruited from the local elite. However, the post of clerk should not be understood as that of a lowly official but more as an influential municipal secretary. It would be reasonable to assume that Everaert, too, became an author paid by various official bodies and therefore enjoyed a degree of independence.

What then were the origins of the chambers of rhetoric, and from which social milieus did they draw their members? As we have seen, they certainly do not represent the first manifestations of urban literature, but the distinctive organizational form of chambers of rhetoric did derive from those early literary activities. This can often be deduced from the mottoes or devices adopted by a chamber. The “Youth brings Joy” (Jeugd sticht Vreugd) motto of the chamber known as The Cornflower (De Corenbloem) from Brussels betrays its origins in the semi-organized charivari. However, it was more common for the chambers to have their roots in a religious fraternity, as the name of the Bruges chamber the Holy Ghost (Heilige Gheest) tells us. One also regularly encounters chambers that had their roots in the civic militias, and perhaps these were most common, though unfortunately the documentary evidence is often lacking.

The emergence of the chambers in the larger towns and cities went hand in glove with the rise of local elites, and one should not be misled by their names. In order to dispel any suspicion of arrogance — the thirst for knowledge was tainted by associations with the Fall of Man until well into the Middle Ages — rhetoricians sometimes chose names or devices for their chambers that humbly claim a sore lack of knowledge: The Uneducated (De ongeleerde) in Lier, The Lightly Laden (De lichtgheladen) in Ypres, The Dull-Witted (Plomp van verstande) in Arne­muiden, The Unesteemed (De ongeachte) in Antwerp, Simple-Minded (Simpel van sinnen) in Sint-Niklaas, and Scant of Wisdom (Van vroescepen dinne) in Nieuwpoort. One would have to take these names very literally to read them as personal testimonies to ignorance or lowly origins.

The members of the chambers were primarily from the literate middle classes. It does seem as if the formation of the first autonomous chambers of rhetoric could only begin around 1400, when the infrastructure of the cities generated an ample volume of written communication and admini­stration and had at its disposal sufficient clerks to sustain an organized literary culture. Among these clerks — an umbrella term for laymen and clerics who earned their living by copying or writing texts — there were civil servants, teachers, secretaries, scribes for the guilds, notaries, mendicant friars, curates, canons, and the numerous copyists who made the urban bureaucra­cy viable. They accounted for the large majority of members of the chambers of rhetoric. The proportion of religious clerics remained surprisingly high throughout the fifteenth century. Generally speaking very few members were wealthy merchants and aristocrats, or, at the other end of the social spectrum, artisans, even though these groups were represented in most chambers.

However, there were marked differences between the chambers from the outset, and with the passing of time these became even more pronounced. Sizable cities like Ghent or Bruges started out with more than one chamber. They usually had diverse origins and were sometimes associated with specific districts or even neighborhoods. Different forms evolved in different cities, depending on their geographical location and, above all, their size and power. The phenomenon of village rhetoricians, with chamber and all, also emerged relatively swiftly, though we have little more than snippets of information about such chambers.

Whether inside or outside the city walls, the chambers also, and increasingly, differentiated themselves on the basis of their membership. The most distinguished chambers can be reliably deduced from the lists of participants in the landjuweel contests and other events. These representative chambers were highly consistent in their organization. Membership was subject to fairly strict conditions. Membership fees and other commitments (including the earliest forms of health insurance) amounted to a substantial sum of money, a sum that few townspeople could easily afford. Even so, the ability to pay did not automatically grant membership, given that the prerequisites included a certain level of erudition and proficiency in the vernacular. Members usually had to demonstrate some grasp of the art of rhetoric as well.

Did this mean that all the members were also poets, or at least had to make efforts to master this literary skill? The chambers cloaked themselves in a remarkable silence in this regard. It seems reasonable to assume that all the members occasionally pitted their skills against one another, though records provide us with no detailed information, not even in the form of text­s they composed to demonstrate their acumen. There also seems to have been a certain differentiation in their duties. Many members primarily performed as actors in the plays written by the factor, while some of them concentrated on the staging, decor, props, or direction, and even on the role of fool. For a few chambers, the composition and performance of music and lyrical dramas occupied a special place, and that also presupposes specialization. However, when performing in public at important contests, joyful entrances, and other public festivities and commemorative events, it was only a few celebrity writers who supplied the texts required.

As a rule the factor was the author of these texts. He (female members are never mentioned) was the chamber’s poetic genius, a professional who was often paid a stipend by the local government but could also generate a substantial income from other commissions. The big cities guarded such poets jealously, because to all intents and purposes they were the ones supplying their internal and external propaganda. We even have evidence of city authorities attempting to poach a great talent from elsewhere or endeavoring to retain a resident talent with an annual salary or bonus. This was the experience of Anthonis de Roovere in Bruges, Colijn Caillieu in Brussels, and Andries van der Meulen in Oudenaarde. Toward the end of the fifteenth century there seems to have been a growing belief — in Brussels this was stated openly — that any self-respecting city should have a city rhetorician at its disposal.

To complete the picture there was the figure of the so-called prince, the chamber’s patron and protector. It was not unusual for the prince to belong to society’s upper echelons, and the leading chambers were even able to convince the sovereign to accept this honorary position. It generally required little effort to attract the attention of the highest levels of government: the dukes of Brabant displayed an early interest in the chambers, and from 1430 the dukes of Burgundy followed in their footsteps. The chambers provided them with a controlling vehicle to garner influence within the city, especially since the chambers supported and represented the established burghers during the fifteenth century. Sometimes they were even “ordinary” members, doubtless for similar reasons. The Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Fair, was a member of the Brussels chamber known as The Book (Den Boeck) and regularly attended banquets and festivities. On one occasion, in 1500 or thereabouts, he personally organized a contest based on questions that he himself had devised. The celebrated rhetorician Jan van den Dale, who would later be employed by the city, won the first prize, a diamond ring.

For the rhetoricians, the poet was more than a servant: he was also a visionary. By virtue of his craftsmanship he had to elucidate the divine plan, both in retrospect and with a view to the heralded hereafter. Technique alone was insufficient for performing this mission; the rhetorician derived his visionary gifts from the Holy Spirit, who had bequeathed him his talent as exalted inspiration. Nevertheless, all that interpreting, elucidating, and prophesying depended on the rhetorician’s persuasive skill, which is where “art” came into play once again as an inspired system of literary resources and techniques that enabled the poet to fashion language into exceptional forms and structures. Such a distinctive use of language, based on the classical theory of eloquence, was the only means of drawing the attention of a broad public to life’s trials and tribulations and pointing out the true path to salvation.

If the rhetoricians did not quite declare rhetoric sacred, they certainly came close, missing no opportunity to sing its praises and going to extremes to highlight its special character. The Brussels-based rhetorician Jan Pertchevael provides an instance of this in the laudatory preface to The Combat with Death (Den camp vander doot), printed circa 1500, an adaptation of Olivier de la Marche’s The Resolute Knight (Le chevalier délibéré). He cautions that the work must be read several times and mulled over carefully, “because it is replete with spiritual reflections, biblical wisdom and proverbial sayings, and myriad exempla from the great poets, all formulated with exceptional artistry in accordance with the rules of rhetoric.” His colleagues expressed themselves in similar terms.

At the same time these words strike a defensive note, and we regularly encounter this combination of praise and defense among the rhetoricians. Anna Bijns (1493–1575), who achieved fame in her lifetime, repeatedly defends the art of rhetoric against money-grubbing storytellers and street poets who besmirch litera­ture and ruin its reputation, while insistently underscoring the standing and prestige of true rhetoricians. She describes the latter as “esthetic creators, noble disciples of Mercury, rhétoriciens, subtle artists,” all variations on what true poets are meant to be, and repeated these terms insistently. She addresses her fellow poets by means of a refrain in which each stanza ends with the line “’Tis a waste to cast pearls before swine.” Poets, she laments, are having to display their treasures for a public as uncivilized as it is indifferent: “dull-witted beasts,” “scathing spiders,” and “uncultured churls.” Elsewhere she lambasts the dregs of society who dare to label the true artist a poser and prattler. “The artist must always yield to the plebeian,” she concludes, disheartened.

The complaints of the rhetoricians were, however, principally targeted at street poets and others who sullied Rhetorica’s blazon. The metaphor of staining and tearing precious textiles is used explicitly by Matthijs de Caste­lein in The Art of Rhetoric (De const van rhetoriken), the manual for rhetoricians that he wrote in 1548 (though it was not printed until 1555, after his death):

Idiots with their dirty, unwashed hands,

Are tearing your costly clothes to pieces.

The slander told of you daily increases,

Invented by street poets everywhere.

Unwilling to learn, their knowledge ceases,

They can’t tell A from B, nor do they care.

De Castelein’s publisher, Jan Cauweel, also mentions such illiterate street poets in the foreword, noting that they should be vigorously challenged by rhetoricians, who therefore ought to make it a priority to distribute their own work in print during their lifetime. Out of a misplaced sense of modesty, he adds, the rhetoricians are often reluctant to go into print, but how else will those charlatans ever be outsmarted? A refrain in the 1528 collection by Jan van Stijevoort, a canon from Utrecht, uses even stronger language. The person speaking in the poem, a rhetorician, is so livid he can hardly eat. Nowadays rhetori­c is being peddled on the streets, he complains, and its practitioners even tempt the public with farces. Surely those performers lack the brains to grasp what they are talking about, and they deserve to be beaten with sticks for disturbing the peace. The songs they compose to get people to dip into their pockets are crafty enough, but then they drink away the proceeds at the tavern. They thrust themselves on people with political ditties: “They sing and squawk like ravens: / Kraw-kraw, will no one buy my new songs?”

In the literature of the rhetoricians, attacks on street poets who abuse rhetoric for financial gain are legion. These versifying vagabonds were also very real historical figures. They are often mentioned in municipal ledgers and court records, and in the rules and regulations of hostels and other places of refuge for wayfarers and the destitute. Hostels were charitable institutions for vagrants and the homeless, as well as for the sick, infirm, and elderly without financial means. In the rules and regulations dating from 1418 for the hostel in Deventer, these street poets and singers are told how to behave:

Should they start to recite rhymes and tell stories, then we shall forbid it. If they reply that there is no harm in it, then our response will be that we find their hogwash unacceptable. For it is the devil who inspires such empty words, and that is why it must cease. If they continue their banter in bed, telling stories and gossiping, then they will be told to pray and keep silence and not to keep awake those who are sick or tired from long journeys.

There is evidence of a clear distinction in real life between wandering singers and men of letters. A decree issued at the behest of the authorities in Haarlem in 1503 observes: “A clerk who makes his living by keeping a brothel, alehouse, or gambling den, who wanders the highways and scrounges money by singing in taverns, or who leads a life of licentiousness in some other form is not worthy of the title of clerk.” Such wandering poets and their ways also feature in other literary texts, and those describing the favored pastimes of the so-called “Aernout brothers” (Aernoutsbroeders) are particularly colorful. The name of these louche wayfarers is probably an allusion to Saint Arnold, patron saint of brewers. They are encouraged to entertain the mixed public of nobility, clerics, and burghers at the inn by singing about hunting and courtly love games, falcons and hounds, tournaments and round tables, and all the other noble sports and pastimes. They will then be able to collect money, goods, or weapons as recompense.

The fact that poets of this type sometimes pretended to be rhetoricians and, conversely, that many a rhetorician had no qualms about making a profit, can also be inferred from numerous records of payments made to rhetoricians by local authorities, as remuneration for public performances or for composing texts for them. As a result, rhetoricians might accuse someone from their own circle of being a “street poet,” meaning an illiterate or semi-literate person willing to curry public favor for material gain with texts written on demand — which might, on occasion, target religious and secular figures of authority. Street poets were also similar to wandering storytellers or their successors in the urban milieu. In other words, the charge of abusing rhetoric can be confusing, since the intended target need not be a member of a chamber of rhetoric but could be anyone who turned rhetoric to his own advantage or profit. It could also be a reference to oral literature, which was losing credibility and came to be associated with the marginal culture of drifters and other unreliable characters.

For many humanists, however, all these disputes were a matter of the pot calling the kettle black. From the fifteenth century onwards, they dismissed all vernacular literature as the work of uneducated street poets. Even Matthijs de Castelein, codifier of rhetorical poetics in the vernacular, seems to concur with this view when, prior to launching his attack on street poets, he also chides the many serious practitioners of the “noble art of sweet Rhetoric” who bring her into disgrace with their lame doggerels.

Morality Plays and Refrains

The rhetoricians were, nevertheless, highly successful in transforming the subservient medieval poet into a literary and visionary artist. In the refrain and morality play they found the most effective vehicles for achieving their mission of rhetoricizing, stirring emotions, and persuading. A few hundred examples of morality plays have been preserved, mainly because the chambers also started to amass a repertoire.

Many of these plays show the same structure. Mankind yields to the forces of evil, is admonished or repents, and eventually returns to the path of righteousness. The framework allowed for the composition of morality plays based on biblical, histo­rical, or novelistic material. It made for demonstrative and didactic theater, with sometimes lengthy debates between fixed standpoints, due to the fact that the allegorical characters embodied a single opinion or condition, which either triumphed or came to grief. That does not mean that didactic drama of this kind would have been stilted on stage. On the contrary, the public could not get enough of it. The staging was extremely lively, full of song and dance, and interspersed with tableaux illustrating key momen­ts in the debate or supplying biblical and classical parallels. Moreover, the rhetoricians always strove to present the allegorical messages against the most everyday backdrop.

The play by the Antwerp chamber The Gillyflowers (De Violieren) at the landjuweel it hosted in 1561 is a good illustration. The author, Willem van Haecht, gives a very contemporary twist to a classical tale, namely the fable about Midas’s poor judgment: as punishment for Midas’s preference for Pan’s flutes to his own lyre, Apollo transforms Midas’s ears into those of an ass. Midas goes to great pains to hide them. It is impossible, however, to keep something from God — a pointed appeal to the jury to pass fair judgment during the drama contest. Midas’s foolish attempts to hide his ears are comically portrayed in a long-drawn-out scene at the barbershop that comes across as very true to life. Scenes like these help us understand why the chambers had no trouble appealing to a diverse audience:

Barber (draping a sheet over Midas): How would you like it, Midas?

Midas: Out of my face and each strand of hair the same length, just above the shoulders.

Barber (putting on his spectacles): I’ve never seen such an unruly head of hair in my life, and I’m the oldest barber in the land: this hair hasn’t been combed for two months.

Midas: I always do it with my hand: each finger is a tooth of my comb.

Barber: You’re one of the rudest ilk for sure, and that makes me furious. I’ve got to thin out your hair, but it’s simply impossible. . . .

Midas: Dear man, I’m getting on in years, so don’t tug so heartily, my scalp is sensitive.

Barber (combing Midas’s hair): Not I, not I.

Midas: Ow, ow! By God, you’re hurting me too much. Stop that roughshod grooming, or I’ll be away from here.

The scene continues in this vein for quite a while. The barber keeps on complaining about the tangled hair; Midas about the rough treatment. For actors this must be a wonderful scene to perform, one that could give rise to true farce. They could also flaunt their talent by hinting that the story is ultimately about something else, a hidden message that can only be distilled by an allegorical reading of every realistic detail. Audiences were actually quite accustomed to this, and such scenes demonstrate how vital and entertaining the theater of the rhetoricians could be without deviating from its essential aim: signposting the path to eternal life and redemption.

Another appealing aspect of these plays is the so-called sinnekens, devilish personifications of sins and scamps who exhorted mankind to behave in an ungodly way. These impish characters served to link stage and public. They com­mented on the action and the characters on stage, drawing the public’s attention to the flaws of the representatives of virtue. These amusing altercations between the sinnekens were sometimes truly satanic in character. During the performance of The Play of the Holy Sacrament of Nyeuwervaert (Spel vanden heilig­hen sacramente vander Nyeuwervaert) by Breda’s chamber of rhetoric on 24 June 1500, such devilish scenes occur repeatedly and to hilarious effect. Transitions between scenes are marked by slanging matches between two devils called Tempt to Sin (Son­dich Becoren) and Bar from Virtue (Belet van Dueghden). They excoriate each other in highly inventive language, some of it picked from the street but interlaced with creative neologisms with a marked slant toward the scabrous. The sinnekens often open their scenes with a hefty brawl, calling each other names like freeloader, dirty dwarf, sordid gimp, and ugly black mole. This provocative use of language must have been hilarious. Both devils talk gibberish, like peasants or simpletons, and throughout the play they are united in a profound fear of their master, Lucifer. “Our heads will be smashed to smithereens,” they exclaim when they think about Lucifer’s wrath should they fail in their mission to visit ruination on mankind. And after their quarrels they are reconciled in waggish kissing-up rituals: “Now let’s smooch on the mouth and make up.” With all this fear and affection they can barely keep still. They shiver, quake, and feel their buttocks jiggling or wobbling, which they mention repeatedly with much screeching and bellowing.

The play, by Jan Smeken, a celebrated rhetorician from Brussels (more about him later), concerns a bleeding host that is found in a peat bog, is brought to the local parish church, and works numerous miracles. When a professional lawyer arrives to verify the authenticity of this wafer of bread, the body of Christ transubstantiated, he pricks the host five times (representing the divine wounds), immediately causing it to bleed again. The lawyer flees, utterly distraught, and is reputed to have bitten off his own hands and eaten them.

In terms of theatrics, the devilish imps with their squabbling and constant harping are a fortuitous invention, making it possible for the author to generate dramatic tension in what would otherwise be little more than a staged account of the facts. The devils must prevent the miraculous powers of the host from being discovered and used to mankind’s advantage. Lacking in self-control but driven by their frantic fear of Luci­fer, they devise one plan after the other, but everything fails. However, the devils interpolate the main narrative with their constantly rekindled hopes and aspirations, their trepidation, and their glee at the prospect of surprising Lucifer with something new. When someone is on the verge of finding the host in the mud, one devil encourages the other: “Break his neck without making a rumpus; Lucifer will snort with pleasure.”

The pre-eminent poetic form of the chambers of rhetoric was the refrain, which developed from the fourteenth-century French ballade. In response to a provocative question or a challenging theme (the stock, which returned as the last line of each stanza), arguments and counter-arguments were presented in four or more stanzas. The final stanza elevated the debate with the public, God, a loved one, or the poet himself to a higher plane by directly addressing the so-called prince, the chamber’s patron to whom the outcome of the debate was presented. Besides being the authority with whom the wisdom expressed in the refrain was associated, the prince was expected to consider it from his exalted position and bestow the requisite authority on it.

Broadly speaking, there were three different kinds of refrain: religious or didactic, amorous, and comic. All provided ample opportunity for spiritual reflection and introspection, social critique, languorous outpourings, and nonsense poems pur sang. A true rhetorician was expected to be proficient in all three variants, with the emphasis always on oral delivery. Of course, the only way for us to appreciate the texts is in their written form. All the same, the manuscript or printed pages provide sufficient indication of how much these poems, like the literature of the rhetoricians in general, were meant to be heard and even watched. They have most often survived in the oblong octavo format (known today as landscape format), with which we are also familiar from songbooks. Prints and paintings from the period show people standing in groups around someone holding such a book in their hands, singing or reciting together.

Delivery was the crux of the contests within and between chambers. The invitations underscore the prime importance of a performance imbued with drama, and there were special prizes for the best acting or declamation. The Antwerp rhetoricians’ festival of 1561 provides a fine example, with awards for the actors who were most convincing in their gestures and made the fewest slips of the tongue. The first prize was a silver dove meant to represent the Holy Ghost, the fountainhead of all eloquence. The second prize, a gilded tongue, emphasizes even more clearly the chambers’ esteem for oratory or acting.

The refrain was the ideal literary form for gripping, provocative, or uproarious delivery. The texts were composed of ingenious rhyming garlands, assonances, syntactic parallels, and repetitions of words and phrases, especially in the insistent stock — the repeated tagline that pulls no punches about its rectitude. Refrains could never have been intended for reading alone in private. Moreover, given the employment of all these formal characteristics, what might come across as intensely passionate in a recital would have been tiresome when read silently to oneself. Enumerations would have been particularly effective in a professional recitation, at least if they have a tension-building structure. Rabelais was a master of this, but a great many rhetoricians succeeded in making such lists the dramatic climax of the recital. A comic refrain by Jan van Stijevoort on the theme “These people deserve to join the ranks of our guild” offers ample opportunity to portray disparate social types in caricature, using vocal inflexions, facial expressions, and gestures, all the while intensifying the dramatic tension. Which group or type would be mentioned next as a prospective member of the quasi-guild of characters and behavior personified, who represent what is no longer fitting or welcome in normal society? Another comic refrain in Stijevoort’s collection (which was compiled in 1524) demonstrates even more clearly how the text only works when performed before an audience. The poem on the theme “A man is not a man unless he has long legs” features as a narrator a very small man who tries to stand his ground with exaggerated bravado. This requires the convincing interpretation of each line in a very individual recital.

The structure of many refrains presents opportunities to address the audience directly. “The Feast of Moles” (Vander Mollenfeeste), a famous ballad by Anthonis de Roovere (more about him later), is an extended satire on social rank. The members of the audience simply have to wait their turn before becoming the butt of ridicule. The reciter would turn directly to the specific social group to which the author clearly wished to address his message: “Ye mighty burghers and distinguished citizens,” “Ye wealthy farmers and capitalists,” and “Ye merchants and drapers.” The opening line had already announced the technique: “Hear ye, worthy citizens one and all.” Other social ranks and professions escaped with slightly less personal attacks. The tone of such recitals was undoubtedly less serene than the modern sense of the term suggests. The performances ranged from the solemn to the bombastic in their vocal treatment, though for the comic refrains the farcical aspect would have predominated. The invitation to a refrain contest at the Bruges chamber The Holy Ghost in 1572 could not be clearer: “Present the sottish refrain with jokes and antics” — and this befits rhetoric: it is an art that must be heard.

The Antwerp schoolmistress Anna Bijns excelled like no other in this poetic form, though she was not officially a rhetorician, since women could not become members of a chamber. Her skill is clearly evident in the first collection of her refrains, printed in 1528. The title pa­ge reads: “This is a beautiful and pure little book containing many attractive and artful refrains, . . . comprising diverse matters, . . . all very skillfully realized by the virtuous and ingenious maiden Anna Bijns, in subtle and rhetorical fashion.” The inspired author, upholder of art’s loftiest ideals, wishes to address only the equally enlightened, and opens her dedicatory verse by calling upon “minds appreciative of art who hanker after Rhetoric.” In other words, her verses are intended for connoisseurs who might be filled with the greatest suspicion when encountering this revered literary form in the vulgar guise of a printed booklet and, what’s more, composed by a woman.

For many people, the printing of such refined literary texts must have reeked of something approaching blasphemy. Printed text in the vernacular normally meant religious propaganda in prose for laypersons; in other words, stories that were often sensational, pictorially illustrated, and published with the barely disguised intention of reaching a mass audience. Moreover, it was considered an unwarranted vanity for living poets to seek to have their work preserved for posterity in this manner. Anna Bijns and her Antwerp printer, Jacob van Liesveldt, therefore had a great deal to put to rights if they wished to persuade a public to ignore all these objections.

This explains the over-emphasis on the artistic, both in the texts selected for the collection and in its flattery of the public. Any hint of vanity had to be banished, and this is immediately tackled in the second line of the dedication: “This work could only have sprung from an unshakable faith in God.” Take this to heart, she continues, then you will be properly receptive to the blessings of this wordcraft, and in the fourth line the truth will out: “And if something is amiss, then bear in mind that this is all the work of a woman.” While male authors routinely attributed their shortcomings to carelessness and lack of schooling in comparable prefaces, for Bijns it was sufficient to refer to her sex. This does not imply that she is any less quick-witted than her male colleagues, but, on the contrary, that she is more interesting and also less susceptible to being accused of errors, inconsistencies, and unsound reasoning in her refrains, which are as vehement as they are didactic. Readers and audiences had to remember that this was the “work of a woman,” something that came to stand for quality in the light of her technical feats, her selection of themes, her line of reasoning, and her manner of fulmination.

All the same, Bijns remained a somewhat marginal figure. Despite her renown, there is no evidence that she was ever accepted as a full member of a chamber. She never married, but neither did she become a nun or Beguine. She supported herself by working as a schoolmistress and found a trusty circle of friends among the Friars Minor of Antwerp. They read and listened to her work, collected her poems in manuscripts, encouraged and inspired her, and took the initiative (it remains unclear whether this was with or without her consent) for seeing her work into print. The acrostics of her refrains reveal an extensive network, and a few texts even have the feel of a “letter” or a response. However, the close contacts between Bijns and the friars seem to have been decisive for her choice of subject matter and the elaboration of her texts, whether in her violent outbursts against the Lutherans, her mockery of marriage — and especially of hen-pecked husbands — or her comically scabrous refrains about “sordid” married couples and farting Beguines.

These contacts explain both the cohesion in her oeuvre and its mode of production. Her literary testimonies of unswerving piety and faith in God were intended for the masses, and the printing press stood ready and waiting. But while rhetoricians were generally slow to entrust their work to the press, the monks were not, for they had always been keen to enlighten a broad public. Bijns’s tirades against the Lutheran mob, with whom she associated anyone who dared to rise up against the Mother Church, were clearly meant to reach a very wide audience.

This was not the case with her marriage satires or the hilarious diversions in the poems about househusbands, decrepit lovebirds, and foolish Beguines. The hen-pecked husband was one of her favorite targets. In many of her refrains Bijns poked fun at these wimps, who are unable to keep their deceitful, battle-axe wives under control. In this way she became a highly popular mouthpiece for the typical urban mindset that favored a strict order within the nuclear family. Here is the whinging househusband himself in the third stanza of “It’s the cruelest of fates to be stuck with a wife!”:

Thread I must spin, to fill every spindle

When in the evening I sit by the fire,

She’d skin me alive if they got in a tangle.

When the child cries, I must grab it and dandle

It on my knee, singing songs till I tire.

When it does poop-poop I straightaway go

And hasten to rinse the worst out of the nappy.

Pee, child, pee, little one, that’s what I crow

When it does poop-poop or just needs to pee.

On every spoonful of porridge I blow

And feed it each mouthful, there’s no escaping,

Nevertheless, it seems all the folk know

Not one toe of that child is of my making.

With lots of assistance from others, I guess,

The child I conceived, as I sadly confess.

Woe is me, to her whoredom I turn a blind eye

Or she’ll strangle me within an inch of my life.

It’s the cruelest of fates to be stuck with a wife!

These texts were recorded in manuscripts for the purposes of amusement within the monastery. There is a long tradition of such entertainment, and from the outset it was used as a weapon against the cardinal sin of acedia (sloth), tardiness or negligence in discharging the religious duties that were supposed to occupy the idle hands for which Satan soon finds work. The ecclesiastic Feast of Fools, the donkey bishop, and the child pope also belong to this tradition, and gave rise to the amassing of a festive repertoire of parodies and satires that were dubious in tone, to say the least. Bijns demonstrated far more than a cursory understanding of such demands. Not only did she write a whole series of refrains on the favorite themes within the monastic milieu (primarily ill-chosen marriages), but she also made the need for light-hearted relaxation for monks the theme of a poem: “The bow cannot always be drawn.”

Bijns had a talent for capturing the tenor of the day-to-day concerns of people from every walk of life. She could write in a simple style, using everyday words that fall naturally within the strict predetermined forms that rein in the emotion. In “O death! How bitter it is to remember you!” she articulates the fear of death that can seize anyone:

As wisps of smoke our days do pass away,

Our lives, like breaths of wind, last but a sigh.

We open up like flowers, doomed to fade,

Till all-devouring death comes, and we die.

A child is born and in its infancy

It finds itself weighed down by Adam’s sin,

For God ordained mankind’s mortality,

Since Adam touched the fruit forbidden him.

Man comes into the world a stranger scorned,

He starts to die as soon as he is born.

The conventions of the rhetoricians and the support of the Friars Minor of Antwerp cannot, of course, explain all aspects of her repertoire. There were also many upheavals in her private life that help clarify choices made in her literary work. She was abandoned, even betrayed, on two separate occasions — first by her sister and then by her brother — with all kinds of unpleasant consequences, including dire financial straits. We know nothing about relationships she may have had, and in the publicity around her work she is portrayed as something of an avowed virgin. All the same, she never became a nun or Beguine, which would have been the obvious choice for a woman forced to provide for herself. Besides, she exhibited an overt admiration for the religious life that she witnessed in the company of the Friars Minor. She seems to have consciously held open the possibility of marriage for a very long time. Perhaps the emotional episodes in her private life provided the incentive to oblige her friends, the mendicant friars, with searing attacks on inappropriate marriages and unfaithful lovers. Alongside the Counter-Reformation tirades these attacks would have pleased the monks, for whom marriage in any case represented the lowe­st possible status to which one could stoop, and who craved diversion to stave off the onset of melancholy.

Luther or Erasmus?

During the sixteenth century the normally harmonious relations between the chambers of rhetoric, wealthy burghers, and the nobility gradually deteriorated. The negative aspects of the burgeoning propagandistic potential of a tightly organized literary enterprise also began to attract attention. With their many public performances in front of the city’s entire population — often including numerous guests from elsewhere — the chambers of rhetoric blossomed into unprecedented shapers of public opinion. Given the economic decline of the cities in the Southern Netherlands — with the notable exception of Antwerp — and the increasing demographic diversity within the chambers of rhetoric’s ranks, such opinions became increasingly rebellious. The first municipal prohibitions against political songs, inflammatory plays, and, especially, literary slander that targeted local figureheads were issued during the course of the fifteenth century. At the start of the sixteenth century, tensions were such that that the criticism of clergymen and usurers by the rhetorician Cornelis Everaert of Bruges prompted the authorities to forbid the performance of at least two of his plays.

The proven impact of the spoken and sung word within urban society was also exploited by the Reformation. The novel ideas about religion and society evidently appealed to many members of the chambers of rhetoric in the big towns and cities. Even interregional literary contests, such as the renowned rhetoricians’ festival at Ghent in 1539, were redolent of the spirit of the Reformation, and the public performances offered prime opportunities for rallying support for the cause. Ghent broke new ground on this occasion by publishing the first-ever printed compilation of the refrains and morality plays that were recited and performed, rendering them even more effective and enduring as propaganda. The authorities responded with a prohibition against reprinting the volume or even having a copy in one’s possession; it was also placed on the index of forbidden books.

The question set by the organizing chamber for the festival’s morality play had been “What is man’s greatest comfort in the hour of his death?” — a provocative question, since it was no secret that many chambers harbored controversial ideas about the matter, and the tenor of that heterodoxy strongly favored the Reformation. According to Luther, Christ is a conciliator, not a stern judge. The best comfort, therefore, was justification by faith, which redeemed sinful man in the eyes of God. In fact, no other comfort came into consideration, a view shared by a majority of the chambers in Ghent.

From that moment on, local and national authorities were deeply suspicious of the chambers of rhetoric and rhetoricians. Several rhetoricians were persecuted for satirical texts that mocked the clergy, still the favorite butt of ridicule. In 1547 the schoolmas­ter and rhetorician Pieter Schuddemate was beheaded on the scaffold in Antwer­p for his ballad about the misdeeds of the local Friars Minor. Immediately after the 1539 rhetoricians’ festival in Ghent the national authorities imposed severe limitations on urban literary life in general, curbing collective and public performances in particular. The writing and performance of plays with a Lutheran slant continued all the same. Examples include The Evangelical Teacher (De evangelische leeraer) of 1543 and the earlier Morality Play on the Work of the Apostles (Spel van sinnen op d’werck der apostelen) in the northern Netherlands.

The most significant play of this kind was The Tree of Scriptures (Den boom der schriftueren), performed at Middelburg on 1 August of 1539 and swiftly distributed in print — the Reformation’s sympathizers, in the Low Countries as elsewhere, obviously knew the potential impact of such rapid promulgation of their provocative ideas. The play offered an undiluted indictment of all the abuses and excesses of the Catholic Church, where the faithful could buy their way to salvation with money and a profusion of “good works.” This was an aberration in itself, but these practices also gave rise, and progressively so, to despicable swindles among the clergy, as the play strove to demonstrate in the most graphic way.

Justification comes from faith alone, and Christ is first and foremost the healer of the sick and the bringer of comfort, regardless of wealth or rank. The Tree of Scriptures concludes with Christ’s urgent call to everyone to allow him to embrace them. Christ speaks these words while hanging on the cross, the dramatic apotheosis of the life of the Word made flesh who sacrifices his body and dies for the good of all mankind. It was at the very height of his suffering that his arms were stretched widest, for the sake of human salvation. Clearly, the peddling of indulgences, the practice of “benefactions,” and the rivalry in doing “good works” only defile Christ’s ultimate self-sacrifice:

Oh listen to my voice, though I be sinful,

Come one and all, souls troubled and dejected,

With my medicines shall you be sated,

My arms are open wide for an embrace,

My yoke and load are light, scorn not my face.

I would search the wildest woods to find you

Come, buy living water, at no cost,

Come, ye pilgrims, rest beneath the Cross,

Bent, crippled, blind and deaf, your every torment

I will cure, so come now, and take comfort.

Come to me, do not seek solace elsewhere,

Prodigal son, face father’s inquisition,

Come to my Lord’s Supper, share communion,

Come freely, cohorts, both high-born and low,

Come one and all, though sunk in sin and woe,

Come, make a pact and let me be your host,

Your sins I’ll pardon, by the Holy Ghost,

Come naked — wretched creatures everywhere,

Come to me, your gloominess laid bare,

For all the erstwhile sins of your commission

Remedies I have for their remission.

Pursuant to an edict from the highest authorities, the rhetoricians’ public activities were almost completely curtailed in 1560. Before they were allowed to perform plays or recite texts in public, the chosen themes had to be subjected to stringent censorship, which excised anything that could conceivably threaten religion or civic order. The measure cut to the very core of the chambers of rhetoric. They wanted to operate in the very heart of society in order to provide succor and comfort in the citizens’ struggle for their daily bread and life everlasting. Once the chambers were prevented from performing this pivotal task, their fate was sealed.

The work of the humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) proved to be a major influence not only on the rhetoricians but also on other sixteenth-century authors. Born in Rotterdam, Erasmus was educated in Deventer, Utrecht, Den Bosch, and finally in Gouda, in a manner inspired by the pedagogical ideals of the Devotio Moderna (see above, chapter 1), but he spent little of the rest of his life in the Low Countries. He was ordained a priest and roamed from one European intellectual hub to the next in the nominal capacity of secretary to a bishop. Everywhere he went he established contact with other humanists, scholars, printers, and officials, with many of whom he maintained a regular correspondence. He quickly gained universal admiration for his erudition, his versatility, and his sharp pen, which could be humorous and nuanced, venomous and gently mocking.

Erasmus’s fundamental belief in a return to the sources and his exclusive focus, in matters both secular and spiritual, on the word and the word alone, held a strong appeal for the rhetoricians. They too venerated the word and wanted to use rhetoric as a guide on the road to ethical living. Many of them also seem to have been open to Erasmus’s unremitting appeals for peace, moderation, and reason, and to his aversion to any form of ideological extremism or outward display. Opting for a middle course or happy medium could also constitute an ideal, with tolerance as a weapon, supported by a proper upbringing and the best education. In addition, the rhetoricians’ active interest in the uses of crafted language was bolstered by Erasmus’s ridicule of outdated notions about literature. He detected these in the sermonizing techniques of the mendicant friars he so often took to task, in which every insignificant event from past and present was dressed in multilayered exegesis. Literature grafted on such inferior models, he lamented in the Praise of Folly (Moriæ Encomium), had managed to overrun the printing press in every language.

In the Low Countries the work of Erasmus, with its marked predilection for the dialectic of argument, was repeatedly translated, printed, reprinted, adapted, and imitated. In their plays and poems rhetoricians often specifically named the master as their source of inspiration. In the prologue to a pro-Reformation “table play” (tafelspel, a short, occasional piece performed for a dining audience) from circa 1540, Erasmus is presented as a founding father of the idea of “freedom of opinion,” which soon thereafter would become a cornerstone of the new Republic of the United Netherlands. In this Table Play for Three Characters (Tafelspel van drie Personagien), Erasmus’s ideas are the justification for having the characters express conflicting opinions about religious and state affairs. This is also how things work in the art of rhetoric, which allows argument and counterargument to be presented. There is no need for the author to state a preference: the audience are invited to draw their own conclusion. Here we have the essence of the freedom of conscience that so many intellectuals, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens yearned for in the midst of the bloody religious conflicts that raged throughout Europe at the time.

Erasmus’s concept of the fool was a great inspiration for the cult of folly among the rhetoricians. The fool is the pseudo-buffoon, who can speak the unadulterated and often painful truth thanks to his profligacy. He lashes out at society with his acerbic and unfettered tongue, but the knave himself is never to blame — “right-minded” individuals can decide for themselves whether to pay any attention to such an inane idiot. This gives the fool carte blanche to scoff at mankind’s blunders and rackets, factual or purported, and especially those of ecclesiastical and secular leaders. However, the certain knowledge that only a knave would dare to cause such offense always provides an escape route.

The technique of veiling the truth by soaking its revelation in irony and ambiguity is demonstrated to perfection by the Praise of Folly, a jeu d’esprit written in the space of just a few days in 1509 and dedicated to Erasmus’s great friend Thomas More. The protagonist, Folly, trumpets her own merits in a eulogy to herself, declaring that she is the initiator of every human undertaking and achievement, from procreation onwards. For what is more foolish than the passion of love, which ensures the very survival of humankind? This rhetorical device allows Folly to take issue with the conduct of every rank and class in society, since they are jointly responsible for the wretched state in which humankind finds itself.

The rhetoricians frequently drew on this Erasmian genius, even down to its finer details, in their comic refrains, farces, and Feasts of Fools. The words of Erasmus’s Stultitia, the personification of the buffoon who mercilessly pokes fun at the people who pray to images of saints for a longer life, healing, or good fortune, are echoed almost literally in a refrain about The Gospels of the Distaffs (Die Evangelien vanden spinrocken), meaning the superstitious humbug of old women; the poem also exists in the form of a printed satire in prose. And where Stultitia laughs at pilgrims who leave behind hearth and home in search of adventure, redemption, or holiday fun, the author of a comical refrain from 1539 closely mirrors what she says. The poem was written for the rhetoricians’ festival in Ghent that same year in answer to the question of who were the biggest fools in the world. The chamber of rhetoric from Tielt responded that it is those who go on pilgrimages, traveling to the ends of the earth and leaving their wife and children without means of support.

Erasmus was also imitated on a grander scale, as in The Court Register of the Guilds (Leenhof der ghilden), written circa 1530 by the Antwerp rhetorician Jan van den Berghe. The tone of this long rhyming text in the shape of a ballad displays a close affinity with Erasmus, as the printer rightly noted in his preface to an edition published in 1564, and its concept and form were strongly influenced by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Van den Berghe also employs the vehicle of the dream state, which, charged with the requisite irony, provides an opportunity to present a varied critique of every human type.

Looking beyond such direct associations — and there are many more — it is primarily the Erasmian sense of quick-wittedness, fed by humor, that became one of the rhetoricians’ highest ideals. This is perhaps best described as “wit,” the translation of the humanist concept of ingenium. The true rhetorician was expected to dispose of this ready wit under all circumstances, to be able to make an ad rem retort on the street or among his confreres, demonstrating to what extent they, as rhetoricians, were “enriched by reason.”

This is how the rhetorician and historiographer Marcus van Vaernewijck, a member of the chamber In Mary’s Honor (Maria ter Eere) in Ghent, refers to his former colleagues. His fellow member Jan Onghena, a notorious Calvinist, was originally a schoolmaster but soon was able to earn a living from his appearances as a rhetorician. He performed everywhere, delivering witty jokes and comic refrains that he had written himself, and he served as a fool and messenger for various city companies. Van Vaernewijck’s portrait of Onghena depicts him as folly personified, in its role as both social critic and nonsense poet, an immensely popular persona at the time. Jan Onghena, for his part, even wielded this weapon on hearing that he had been condemned to death as a heretic. I am not sick, he is reputed to have said, yet I fear I will succumb to this malady. His confrere Willem Poelgier adopted a similar stance before the court. He was warned that the next time he offended the Holy Roman Church he would lose his head without further ado, to which he retorted that he would then be at a loss where to put his hat (a hat being a symbol of freedom).

Erasmus’s greatest admirer and follower was the Antwerp rhetorician Cornelis Crul (c. 1500–c.1550), whose work generally betrays a moderate reformist leaning along the lines of the great humanist himself. In the second quarter of the sixteenth century he wrote a rhymed version of four dialogues by Erasmus, the Colloquies (Colloquia), with the ambition of readying these lively discourses for performance on stage. He went on to write a dramatic monologue of his own invention, the Farce of a Drunkard (Cluchte van eenen dronckaert). Here too the inspiration is wholly Erasmian, employing the motif of swarming humanity regarded from an Olympian perspective, familiar from the Praise of Folly. In Crul’s text the gods, in the company of Stultitia and befuddled by nectar, gaze down on the teeming masses of humanity below, an excuse to broach a whole miscellany of wrongs. A drunkard has set out for heaven, where the best beer is supposed to be served. Already stumbling and falling, he keeps on bumping into other fantastical characters, creating the potential for delightful theatrics as he reviles them for their ill-mannered behavior. He dallies on a cloud en route, and gives an account of all the wrongs he can see taking place down below. He has a penchant for criticizing clerics who trade in ecclesiastical favors, along with other favorite targets of Erasmus’s. He comments on acts of violence and war in particular, calling attention to plundering, pillaging, and murderous soldiers. However, the character holding forth is nothing more than a laughable drunkard, like the fool and other hayseeds who can speak any and every truth because they have placed themselves outside the social order.

The character Charon — in classical mythology, the ferryman who ferries the dead across the River Styx to the underworld — provides another such vehicle to present a world view from the Olympian heights. In a morality play of 1551 this most uncivilized fellow provides commentary on the evil acts of humanity, aided by the supremely polite Mercury. In the sixteenth century the character of the elusive outsider who speaks the truth proved to be a very useful device — perhaps the only possible one — for rhetoricians to fulfill what they considered to be their primary calling, namely setting forth ethical principles in carefully crafted speech. Erasmus was both a guide and a shining example for them in this respect.

Not all the local humanists were imitated so keenly. Because of their use of Latin, the humanists constituted a true European Republic of Letters which followed its own traditions and ignored existing national borders. Above all, they opted for an intense cosmopolitanism rather than the regional scope inherent in literature in the vernacular. For example, Janus Secundus (1511–36), who was born in The Hague and grew up in Mechelen, subsequently moved to France and Spain. His collection of amorous poems, Kisses (Basia, first complete edition 1541), was admired throughout Europe but did not find a sympathetic reception in Dutch-language literature until long after his death.

The inspiration for humanism in the vernacular was only made possible by a renewed Christian ethics that placed a great emphasis on education. To improve the proficiency of their pupils in spoken Latin and instill in them the tenets of a new-style civilization, the rectors of many Latin schools concentrated on the writing and performance of drama. This Latin school drama, performed on feast days and often subsidized by the city, increased its recognizability and appeal by drawing on the ups and downs of local life. Georgius Macropedius (Joris van Lanckvelt), whose positions included that of headmaster in ’s-Hertogenbosch and Utrecht, proved to be a master in this genre. In his Aluta of 1535, written for Carnival celebrations, the speaker of the prologue announces that the most splendid banquets will be presented on stage, but he hastens to tell the public that while the pheasants, geese, doves, larks, and pies will not fly into their mouths, their appetite will be sated by their enjoyment of the play itself. The image of food simply flying through the air is, of course, borrowed from the prevailing notion of the Land of Cockaigne. It provided the formula for Latin school drama that was also employed in the plays of Macropedius and his fellow playwrights, such as Guilelmus Grapheus (Willem de Volder) of The Hague and Eligius Houckaert (Gilles Hoeckaert) of Ghent. Erasmus, too, was fond of using everyday life in town and countryside as a backdrop in his Colloquies.

The rhetoricians’ ultimate aim was the artful conveyance of a serious message. This message was concerned with everything that might govern or affect the life of the established burgher; hence the primary objectives were to provide guidance for life on earth and in eternity, solace and remedy for setbacks, and defenses against every adversity that might threaten the good burgher. The rhetoricians’ ardent appeals for faith in rational thought were central to their endeavors. For it was reason that distinguished mankind from the animal kingdom and from everything earthly and inconstant that threatened to taint the soul. Besides, it was by using reason that humankind could stand its ground in the face of the vicissitudes of a burgher’s existence. Good sense provided constancy, since earthly life and worldly effects are merely on loan — a debt we must repay in death — and proper conduct will be rewarded with a blissful eternity. On the basis of this conviction people could learn to arm themselves against the fickleness of earthly existence, whether in the form of a sudden change in fortune, an unexpected death, or the foolishness of the first flush of a love affair. As noted, some of these themes have classical origins. In particular, the legacy of the Stoa of late antiquity is so clearly present among the sixteenth-century rhetoricians that we can describe them as neo-Stoics.

Sudden changes of fortune were a constant in the life of merchants, who formed the mainstay of urban society. It was not for nothing that the merchant was expected to possess the character of an adventurer, full of courage, imagination, and entrepreneurial drive. He should also display a generous measure of cool-headedness, as Fortuna could strike at the most inopportune moments. He therefore had to learn to use his good sense to restrain the sudden onrush of dizzying emotions. The merchant was also keen to read stories that paraded exemplary models of adventurous loners who ventured undaunted into the world and were not afraid to take risks. Such models were to be found in the medieval epics of chivalry, now transformed into prose tales for this new public to read or listen to, interlarded with supplementary rhetoricians’ verses to reinforce the emotional highpoints.

Title page of Love’s Mirror (De Spiegel der minnen) by Colijn van Rijssele, written c. 1500, printed 1561. Leiden, University Library.

Armed with the same weapon of ratio, people had to learn how to deal with the perils of a foolish infatuation. After all, the future of the enterprises that the merchants had established, and therefore of the city as a whole, lay with their young sons. It was of the utmost importance that they entered into an appropriate marriage, with restraint and due consideration for family plans. They should not allow themselves to be swept away by uncontrolled passion for any young woman. The weight given to this concern is evident from the numerous texts that the rhetoricians devoted to it. The Struggle of Love (Tghevecht van minnen), from 1516, a long indictment of “Venus’s whiners,” who have been duped into all-consuming love, also prescribes remedies to prevent youngsters from being distracted by such stupefying passion. Love’s Mirror (De Spieghel der minnen), a morality play by Colijn van Rijssele dating from circa 1500, shows foolish love to be a disease that can even be fatal. Remarkably, the play is set in merchant circles, the main characters being individuals rather than allegorical figures. Dierick, the son of a wealthy merchant, falls for a simple seamstress. The foolishness of his infatuation is made plain by his choice of an unsuitable partner: Katrijn occupies a social station that is far too lowly. Dierick fails to shake off his “malady” and dies as a direct result of this ill-fated affair.

Ultimately there is sudden death, which can strike at any moment. One had to face it in a calm and self-possessed manner, which was only possible with due preparation. This is the message of Everyman (Elckerlijc), a morality play that enjoyed widespread popularity in the Low Countries and was reprinted several times around 1500. The text was disseminated throughout Europe, as evidenced by its contemporary translation into English and several Latin adaptations over the course of the sixteenth century. The main character, Everyman, has neglected to set aside part of the fortune he amassed as a merchant for the performance of good deeds, as behooves a Christian. God decides to punish him with an unexpected death and commands Death to go and summon him to his reckoning. And Death sets out:

Almighty God, I shall act with zest.

I shall go into the world and then

Call straightway on Everyman.

Beastlike he liveth and carnally,

Without fear, O God, of Thee.

Rather than God he adoreth gold.

For that his eternal bliss is sold.

I will go to him at a quick pace,

Here cometh the man. By Christi grace,

How little careth he for my call!

O, Everyman, thou shalt soon lose all

Thou thinkest to be holding tight.

Heavily burdened before God’s sight

And sin-defeated thou shalt appear.

Everyman, what bringeth thee here

So foppishly dressed? Hast forgotten God?10

Title page of Everyman (Elckerlijc), written in the late 15th century, here in a printed edition from c. 1525. Leiden, University Library.

That was indeed the case. On receiving notice of his impending death, Everyman desperately seeks help from friend and family (Fellowship and Kinship), as well as from his worldly goods (Property), senses (Five Senses), and virtues (Strength, Beauty, and Wisdom). But none of them wants to come to his aid, because he has so seriously neglected them. Wisdom eventually dispatches him to Contrition, whereupon feeble Charity recovers her health sufficiently to agree to accompany him on his journey toward death.

Civilized Lust for Life

The chambers of rhetoric did not exclusively or even primarily intend to appease worldly uncertainties through reason; they were also striving to bring about a more positive reconciliation with worldly life. Even though the devil had been abusing Earth since the Fall of Man by perpetually setting traps for weak-willed mankind, Earth was still essentially the paradisiacal garden — unfortunately forfeited — that God had created for all eternity. People could enjoy themselves in this Garden of Eden, finding pleasure that was never subsequently forbidden as such, though it required watchfulness for the devil’s tricks. It was in fact in the midst of nature that one could find the powers, distractions, and pleasant pastimes that made it possible to combat melancholy, the antechamber to a wretched descent into the infernal domain. Thus Earth and everything earthly also constituted a remedy, bestowed by God himself as willingly as all his spiritual graces.

Anthonis de Roovere (c. 1430–82), a celebrated rhetorician from Bruges, leaves no shadow of a doubt about this. The start of his ballad Four Spiritual Lessons (Vier gheestelijcke leeringhen) presents few surprises with its time-honored cursing of everything earthly. Earth is a transitory abode, while death brings deliverance. De Roovere then discusses four points, the “lessons” of the title, which are meant to expedite the successful completion of this perilous journey, ensuring that life’s course is as smooth and efficient as possible. Predictably, he praises devotion and humility, but then, when the reader or audience would expect the series to continue with wisdom, fear of God, fortitude, or any other gift of the Holy Ghost that might protect man on earth, De Roovere posits happiness as the third point:

The third point is: stay at home happily,

Busy yourself with a pleasant activity:

Thus you succeed in confounding the enemy.

And he repeats this recommendation a number of times:

Ensure that your household is filled with delight

And constant rejoicing, as is only right.

This message did not spring from nowhere; it is directly associated with theological and even medical notions of how to combat the devil and melancholy. Most striking, however, is the disarmingly frank wording that De Roovere chose for the propagation of simple pleasures within the everyday domestic sphere. Another novelty is that the repeated reference to the desired limitations to this familial joy appears to be intended in the worldly sense, not evangelically, and without the usual cautionary note. The message is to be joyful while going about everyday things in the midst of the nuclear family.

It is only when one has acknowledged the positive aspects of earthly pleasures in this recommendation that De Roovere’s fourth point can be properly grasped. Otherwise, following on from devotion and humility, it would seem well-nigh blasphemous to broach the proper procedure for copulation:

The fourth point is: in bed you should display

Kindness and restraint, not undue passion,

In arts of love adept in every way.

Be strong and ardent, full of resolution,

But entre deux, and thus not flouting custom.

De Roovere’s four “lessons” transport us from devotion to the bedstead, where we receive fairly technical instructions on how to experience as much pleasure as possible between the sheets. There is just one limitation, which in itself points to a now-familiar perspective, though it was still fairly novel for the urban milieu at the time: pleasure in bed ought to be enjoyed within the family, between man and wife, “entre deux.”

Apart from that everything else is permitted. To intensify the pleasure, however, be kind and restrained, not savagely passionate. Pay attention to the “arts of love,” and do not hesitate to be ardent. It reads like modern-day marriage counseling, even though De Roovere’s advice is addressed only to the husband, who is given complete freedom within the set bounds but must also learn to perform better — in his own interest, because it enhances the pleasure. And if one should still doubt whether this really is what De Roovere intends, then he dispels any ambiguity with his concluding assurance that exemplary conduct in bed as prescribed will result in the ultimate carnal pleasure:

No higher joy, nor thing so merry

As talking in stark nakedness.

Here, too, we are presented with something new: earthly pleasures are paraded, without inhibition, as part of a treatise on the recommended mental disposition during one’s passage through life toward death. Apparently, one no longer needs to mistrust whatever is transient: on the contrary, one is allowed, even obliged, to look around and expand one’s horizons, to learn to drain the goblets of earthly pleasures. The message, put forward by none other than the official rhetorician of the city of Bruges, and therefore the mouthpiece of the local cultural offensive, entails an optimistic vision of the corporeal faculties that had traditionally been counted among the devil’s favorite targets. It contrasts starkly with the prevailing notions about sexual intercourse with which this same public was inculcated: no pleasure, no peeping, only on certain days, and always for the purpose of procreation.

De Roovere is certainly not an advocate of some form of hedonism that, on a humanistic basis (in the sense of restoring classical antiquity), would advocate the pursuit of Dionysian pleasures or a life of natural savagery as mankind’s proper vocation. His frame of reference is still indisputably founded on the Christian vision, which prescribes a cautious journey toward eternal life. It is only in the formulation of how to achieve this that changes are introduced. These are no less based on theological foundations than were the previously issued and still valid guidelines. However, the existing exegesis of certain passages in the Bible was now applied in different ways, while those who wrote in the vernacular now employed a wide range of material from the Bible and the works of the Church Fathers for the first time. In other words, it was now, in the late Middle Ages, that the time seemed ripe to incorporate into the literary canon — in a concrete and pragmatic sense — a number of age-old theological ideas that were in favor of the enjoyable exploitation of everything associated with worldliness, in order to conquer the devil on the very ground he had gained after the Fall of Man.

This new attitude toward the conspicuous enjoyment of life also shines forth from numerous texts that denounce the horror and cruelty of death. How is it possible that death repeatedly cuts short the most beautiful of lives without the slightest regard for the person in question? Death is the enemy; not only the conciliatory bringer of eternal sleep but also an irrational tyrant who wreaks havoc at will. Sometimes there are truly aggressive outbursts against this evildoer, for instance when he brutally robbed the sporty and dearly beloved duchess Mary of Burgundy of her life in 1482 by causing her to fall from her horse. A contemporary song angrily identifies Death as the main culprit and is a bitter indictment of this inhuman figure, the thief of contentment most pure, who out of jealousy has plucked such loveliness in full bloom from the world. He is immediately called to account in the opening scene:

Oh death, death, death that spares no one,

Now what have you done!

Death is now emphatically portrayed as an enemy. He is no longer just the servant of God who brings life to fulfillment, the brother of sleep, or the portal to life everlasting. To be sure, these images persist until long after the Middle Ages, and they serve to appease human conscience. We find them in treatises that prepare man for the hour of his death, but also in the work of rhetoricians such as Jan van den Dale, where they may appear to contradict the tenor of most of his writing. But the association is dialectical, since Van den Dale’s The Hour of Death (De uure van der doot) of 1515 is addressed to the heart and the soul. Hence the bitter complaint against Death’s unexpected and vengeful visitation can also include the first-person narrator’s realization that he “must go and sleep the long sleep.” This is the only way that dying — and thus life before it — can be rendered acceptable and bearable.

Title page of Jan van den Dale’s Hour of Death (De uure van der doot), printed 1515: the first time the name of a living author of a literary text appeared on a title page. Munich, Bavarian State Library.

The trenchant attacks on Death are an attempt to justify an engaging and attractive life. Authors gave expression to this shift when they gradually replaced the traditional satires on the pitiable vanity of this world with explicit praise for everything that is worldly, while the criticism turned on Death, the ruthless obliterator. A ballad like That Other Land (Dat ander lant), for example, which circulated widely during the fifteenth century, underscores not only the value of living life on earth to the full but also the prospect, as unattractive as it is inevitable, of moving on to the hereafter, the “other land” (which is not necessarily hell):

That life is sweet one can’t deny!

A shame that I should have to die!

When bitter death strikes its last blow

To the other land I go.

This complaint is repeated time and again.

The chambers of rhetoric served as an institution for civilizing the ever-growing urban elites, people hungry for knowledge, erudition, and especially behavioral codes by which to distinguish themselves from the lower classes within and outside the city walls, who were often portrayed in caricatures of peasant folk. A prominent feature of the recommended behavior consisted in a persistent effort to distance oneself from everything associated with nature. The guiding principle was reason, dictating self-control of the highest order. This ratio found expression in the individualization of all kinds of behavior that had until then been quite public, especially among the lower strata of the population. It affected such things as table manners, personal hygiene, and the whole gamut of emotions. The process had started as far back as the fourteenth century, but once again it was organization and the art of persuasion that, in the hands of the rhetoricians, accelerated the changes. We can trace these developments in the rules and regulations of the oldest chambers of rhetoric. Before the desired habits were assimilated by the urban population, they had to be taught and even enforced, which explains the long lists of penalties for swearing, telling dirty jokes, belching, farting, fighting, and such like.

The civilizing offensive is most evident from the literary texts themselves. These often employ an ironically intended negative self-image, in keeping with the urban appetite for the temporary creation of a mundus inversus for festive relief. But it was not only in farces and Carnival performances that such a predilection for civilized refinement, propagated by the bourgeois elites, became evident, but also in the more elevated form of the morality play. An excellent example is found in the play Venus and Mars: How Mars and Venus Dallied Together (Venus en Mars, hue Mars en Venus tsaemen bueleerden), written circa 1500 by the rhetorician Jan Smeken (c. 1450–1517). For this work he drew on a well-known tale from classical mythology that had been employed as a basis for moralizing stories throughout the Middle Ages. But Smeken diverged from the hitherto prevailing norm: the story, in a nutshell, is that the unhappily married Venus allows herself to be seduced by the dashingly handsome Mars. They are caught in bed by Venus’s husband, the misshapen and lame Vulcan, who ensnares them in a net and parades them before the gathered ranks of gods.

In the Middle Ages the fable was seized on as a warning against unrestrained indulgence in lustful urges, which would inevitably lead to the transgressor being exposed by God in the presence of humanity. But Jan Smeken has moved on from this: the adultery is glossed over, and now all attention is turned on Vulcan’s unthinkable uncouthness, a character trait that is laid on thickly. He is misshapen and hunchbacked, and he walks with a limp. He is also stupid, lacking in self-control, and extremely foul-mouthed. The delicately beautiful Venus leaves us in no doubt about his deficiencies:

I have the ugliest, the most repulsive,

the wretchedest, the most insensitive

rude and loutish God of all time,

black and dirty, unclean and begrimed,

to whom all friendliness is foreign.

He does not belong in the company of cultured people, among whom Venus is a prominent figure. She deserves a compatible partner, who presents himself in the guise of Mars, the young god of war and a paragon of refinement, going by bourgeois notions of civilization which continued to be informed by chivalrous models. He introduces himself without further ado:

What provokes more knightly deeds at tournaments

And jousting matches than a woman’s love?

The heated passions it can cool, the fighting fist unglove,

The lout controls himself, the miser keeps his greed concealed,

The lover makes to arm himself, takes up his sword and shield.

Man’s heart begins to palpitate when woman he beholds:

Her praise can lighten all travail and suffering withhold,

All things of noble inclination

Find their source in woman.

Mars and Venus sing, dance, and converse as perfectly matched equals — like attracts like. And that is how it ought to be, according to the mores of the established burghers of the late Middle Ages, who, in order to underscore their elite status, raised ever higher barriers between their own behavioral codes and those they attributed to the uncultured masses. Time and again the chambers of rhetoric proved to be the ideal institution to bring the canons of this civilizing offensive to bear.

III. Literature and the Printing Press

Didactic Fiction

The chambers of rhetoric were neither the sole, nor even the principal exponents of a dynamic literary life in the cities, though that would have been the case were one to regard literature primarily as an instrument in the urban civilizing offensive and as a form of relaxation reserved for the secular elites who had secured positions of power in urban society. That would, however, be to ignore an equally profuse and more wide-ranging literature that continued to circulate widely among the mass­es but rarely found its way onto vellum or caught a whiff of printer’s ink: the songs, performances, and tales of the “street poets,” the repertoire of popular festivities, and the other occasional texts recited by semi-professional entertainers within the city walls and beyond.

There is also the printing press. The introduction of printing into the Low Countries dates from around the middle of the fifteenth century. From those early days, printers were interested in texts in the vernacular that we would now call literature. It is indeed likely that the rapid development of this new means of dissemination was pivotal in changing the form, content, and presentation of fictional texts, as well as their critical reception, but there is little evidence of a spontaneous mutual interest between the rhetoricians and printers.

The rhetoricians had certainly developed a literary code that embraced the notion of immortalizing literary work in the form of hand-written manuscripts by which their words could be passed on to future generations. A distinct antipathy to the use of the printing press persisted for a long time, in part because of the allegedly poor quality of the printing but primarily because of the rhetoricians’ distaste for the pursuit of fleeting, worldly fame. To reproduce the work of living authors for an anonymous public of contemporaries instead of preserving it for succeeding generations within one’s own circle smacked of unacceptable vanity.

Matthijs de Castelein eventually committed the rhetoricians’ views about literature to paper in The Art of Rhetoric, which, as mentioned earlier, he wrote in 1548, though it was not published until after his death. It must have given the printer-publisher Jan Cauweel of Ghent, who printed the work in 1555, reason to bemoan the rhetoricians’ traditional shunning of the printing press, for by then it had been amply demonstrated that a printed text had a much greater chance of survival than a one-off manuscript. That explains Cauweel’s tone, all the more embittered because, according to him, such beliefs were still common:

There is a widely held belief among the majority of today’s rhetoricians, O kind and worthy and reader, that no matter how fine, beautiful and elegant a rhetorical text may be, it is deserving of every reproach when it appears in print. Worse still, the rhetoricians despise and disregard any poet who desires to publish his work in print, especially should he undertake steps to effect this during his lifetime. The poet stands accused of fatal pride and vanity.

Cauweel wholeheartedly deplores this standpoint and calls it an aberration. Nevertheless, a few texts of a rhetorical hue appeared in print from about 1500, though almost always without recording the author’s name, thus leaving open to speculation whether the author was still alive. This situation persisted throughout the era in which rhetoricians held any sway. Cauweel’s complaint is corroborated by the relative rarity of printed work by rhetoricians. It is also evident, for example, from the curious way in which an author like Frans Fraet hides away his name on the verso of the third page of The Theater of Fine Devices (Tpalays der gheleerder ingienen), his translation, printed in 1554, of a French emblem book: “Please note the humble modesty of the anthologist, who only mentions his name, Frans Fraet, on the printer’s insistence.” Fraet complied with the wishes of the printer, the widow of Jacob van Liesveldt of Antwerp, but he made sure that his name was not obvious.

There was no love lost between printers and rhetoricians. Printers were unenthusiastic about assisting rhetoricians in the distribution of their work, intended as it was for an elite, couched in a new-fangled literary idiom that was at loggerheads with the printers’ ideal of employing a language that would be accessible to all readers in the areas where Dutch was spoken. By the end of the Middle Ages, literacy levels among urban populations had increased markedly. Though the great majority of people could read, they had to be encouraged to apply that ability — so essential in the new urban context — to printed fiction, which therefore needed to be cast in a language as universal and familiar as possible. The use of such an idiom also increased the accessibility of a text in many German-speaking regions, where people did not balk at these early forms of a more interregional Dutch.

The idea that the printing press had a far-reaching impact on literature is by no means universally accepted. In fact, many modern scholars have serious doubts about the significance of the printing press for the development of fiction in the vernacular. Some maintain that the printing press actually proved a hindrance to innovation. After all, the early presses printed and reprinted the established successes from the manuscript era, certainly until the start of the sixteenth century. Printers were hesitant about reproducing contemporary literature, and much of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century canon that we now consider important never reached their presses. Even among the reliably popular older works of which the printing press avidly took advantage, a great many texts now regarded as unequivocal highlights of medieval literature are missing. Most surprising of all is that literature about King Arthur and his Round Table, which was also highly popular in the Low Countries, was very rarely produced in printed form — as rarely, in fact, as versions of the Romance of the Rose, though both have survived in manuscript form.

The relative lack of sophistication of the early typographers is also evident in the adaptations — “vulgarizations,” some would say — to which texts originally in verse were often subjected. Verse was turned into prose, and the original symbolism and other “courtly” subtleties were ironed out into a simple recipe of sex and violence to satisfy the growing appetite for reading among the urban middle classes at a baser level.

Nevertheless, the new means of reproduction and distribution was a success. Curiously enough, until 1490 or thereabouts the first printing presses in the Low Countries appeared in a few small towns of the County of Holland, which in every other respect lagged far behind the powerful cities of Brabant and Flanders. Printing did not catch on in the South until later. From the early 1500s until after the middle of the sixteenth century, Antwerp in particular developed into a center of printing activity that also encompassed literature.

Literary texts came to be treated as commodities, and they changed substantially as a result. They had to find buyers on the open market, which required the development of a title page, among other new features. It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of such commercially motivated interventions on both the content and the reception of texts. Within the space of a few decades, literary work in print was routinely furnished with an attractive-sounding title. There was a precedent for this, since in the age of manuscripts, texts usually carried a prologue describing the content that followed. The lure of a full-blown title, however, focused expectations and induced the reader to consume the text in the light of what the title proclaimed. And these titles were designed to increase sales among as broad a public as possible in small towns in Holland such as Gouda, Delft, and Haarlem.

In addition to the titles themselves, the formulae extolling a book’s qualities on the title page, in prologues and forewords, and even in afterwords and colophons, were marketing tools. The same applies to woodcuts and chapter headings, and especially to adaptations of the actual content, as well as other inducements intended to spark the interest of a new, broadly based public. Technical aspects of the reception of printed texts also merit attention. The early printers went out of their way to explain that their products could be consumed in any way imaginable: by listening, reading out loud, reading alone in silence, reading along with a reciter, selectively or discursively, by rereading, leafing back and forth, or just by sampling the illustrations. This unprecedented variety in modes of reception also affected the way literature was handled and interpreted.

So why did all this first emerge in the North? The dialectics of progress must have been at work here. A richly diversified literary life was flourishing at every social level in the South, while in the North a literary culture was sorely lacking. Cities there were still few and far between, they were generally small, and they possessed little resembling a literary infrastructure. With this manifest lack of a substantial literary life, and assuming that there was a potential readership or public for printed texts in the vernacular, there is every reason to speak of a “gap in the market.”

The situation in the North was initially more favorable than in the South as regards potential readers for vernacular work, and not just because of the surfeit of poetry recitals and theatrical performances in the cities of Flanders and Brabant. Another factor was the Devotio Moderna movement, which, under the inspiring leadership of Geert Grote, had taken root in the IJssel region between Zwolle, Deventer, and Zutphen from the end of the fourteenth century. A central aspect of the devotional practice that the indivi­dual was encouraged to pursue consisted in reading spiritually uplifting texts in the vernacular. “In a corner by myself with a little book” is the motto attributed to Thomas à Kempis, long before printed books even existed. The hugely popular Devotio Moderna, which eventually spread across a large part of the Low Countries and the adjoining Germanic territories, was one cause of the growing demand for texts, and hence of the development of more effective means to reproduce them.

The central tenet of the Devotio Moderna’s spiritual message was the personal confrontation of every Chris­tian, whether high or low in social status, with the printed word. It was no longer only the priest who unlocked the mysteries of faith: the individual ought to be familiar with God’s Word and with the lessons contained both in the world around him and in secular literature. Thus a democratized individualism among the urban middle classes started to govern civic life in town and city toward the end of the Middle Ages. Individuals were responsible for their own salvation, and they must reflect on how to achieve this by withdrawing from the distracting crowds. The outdated cult of courtly heroism and the emotional entanglements of aristocratic elites no longer inspired, but neither did the spiritual depth of reclusive mystics and hermits. The burghers now wanted to think and speak for themselves, and the Devotio Moderna helped them to shape their own spiritual destiny. Over the course of the fifteenth century this prepared the way for the Reformation, which would provide a new organizational structure for individual faith and accountability — one that the Mother Church would be unable to accommodate.

As a consequence, the lower middle classes and laypeople in general, especially in the North of the Low Countries, developed a habit of reading, which readily extended to literary texts as well. However, their reading was focused first and foremost on devotional work, spiritual instruction, and profoundly stirring texts that exacted a personal and compassionate response to Christ’s Passion. The conviction that the contemplation of graphic illustrations could inspire fruitful meditation played a significant role in this, subsumed in the much broader maelstrom of a lively intercourse with printed books in the vernacular, whether the material was didactic or inspirational, a rhyming report about a civic occasion, or an exciting tale of chivalry.

The call for active reader participation drew on a long tradition of entertainment, tinged in this case by mystical and devotional literature intended for meditation. This was a literature that aimed to inspire a probing examination of one’s conscience, reducing and simultaneously elevating the collective experience to a highly personal spiritual encounter. The texts were meant to rouse an intense emotional response, particularly when read alone, and they bombarded the reader with graphic descriptions. In The Seven Hours on the Passion of Our Lord (Die VII getiden op die Passie Ons Heeren), printed by Thomas van der Noot in or around 1507, the operative words are “behold” and “contemplate.” The reader is urged to visualize what is described, with the implication that not doing so would be to fall short in one’s duties as a Christian:

And behold how your Creator raises himself from the place where He has fallen and how He wipes the blood from His brow: Worship Him and follow His example. . . . With fond and fervent longing, imagine yourself in His place and contemplate the compassion and emotion of the mother beholding her child and the child beholding his mother. She watched the enchanting face of her beloved child drain of blood and turn pale.

The whole text continues in a similar vein. We need to remember, though, that this recommendation — or commandment — is addressed to readers who are already accustomed to an active reception of vernacular printed texts. Literature, including fiction, was meant to be read aloud: texts were spoken, regardless of whether they were handwritten or printed.

There was also a long-standing tradition of using fantastic tales and fables to convey an exemplary moral; the attractive packaging would help the target pu­blic to digest them. Monks and pries­ts had long been employing this technique to disseminate their messages among the laity. Mendicant friars literally took to the streets with songs, plays, and music. This tradition dates back to the high Middle Ages, when Franciscans and Dominicans in particular devised novel strategies to inculcate the laity with God’s word. There was a growing conviction, justified by harking back to the example of the preaching Christ as much as to the rhetoric of antiquity, that reaching the masses required the use of straightforward examples and parables communicated in the vernacular and set against a familiar or identifiable backdrop. Above all, laypeople had to be informed about the beginning, unfolding, and conclusion of the story of salvation, and their personal place and role therein. Typology could help people to discern the road to eternity as mapped out by God at the time of the Creation, so that every event had, in principle, been foretold by events in the past and also unveiled something of the future. This quest for God, pursued by reading the signs that he had left behind in the Bible and the natural world, was the duty of each and every Christian. History and fiction, whether fables or chivalric epics, were ideally suited to clarifying the intended role and mission of barely literate laypeople in the larger scheme of things.

We may surmise that the intentions of these mendicant friars were sometimes less than honorable, and that the intended lesson was not always properly understood. The swelling chorus of critique strongly suggests that financial gain and the appetite for titillation often gained the upper hand. Erasmus stated several times that the spiritual populism of these wayside preachers tainted literature and misled common folk. For Holland’s early printers, however, this was an interesting market, and their publishing ventures were stimulated and sometimes even financed by the clergy.

The clergy’s involvement with the early printing press was a phenomenon common throughout Europe. Monks occasionally established printing offices themselves, which is hardly surprising in the light of their activities as copyists. As a rule, however, the influence and contributions of the clergy were restricted to practical tasks and advisory duties concerning the choice of text, adaptation, and sometimes translation. The instructive forewords, especially, breathe the spirit of the sermon. The printer Gerard Leeu of Gouda, for example, was particularly successful at boosting the commercial potential of this preferred mode of consumption; he achieved this by putting himself in the shoes of private readers and imagining their desires and requirements. Leeu initially published literature in the vernacular exclusively for reading out loud, a matter of course for him and his public, and whether or not a text was printed had little bearing on this. Whether the consumer listened as part of a group or read aloud in private was equally irrelevant. Reading was speaking: “Here begins the history of the Seven Sages of Rome. This story is especially beautiful and pleasant to hear, but it is unfamiliar and rarely heard, since this is the first time it has been translated, anno 1479.” Listening to someone reading fiction out loud would continue to be the standard manner of reception for a lay public until well into the sixteenth century, but there is evidence of growing consideration for the plight of the lowly private reader, who still had very little experience of reading ficti­onal texts on his own. This explains why Leeu provided some of his texts with reading instructions and other pointers, so as to facilitate the individual reader’s experience. He wrote a lengthy preface to the first surviving printed edition in Dutch of Reynard the Fox (1479), which can best be characterized as just such an instruction for reading in private. The story must have been familiar to his intended public, and Leeu probably considered this a prerequisite for its chances of success in print. It would have been difficult to introduce­ a new technique using an unfamiliar text, because there had to be a certain degree of familiarity with the object in the reader’s hands. The tone of Leeu’s foreword simultaneously implores and reassures. He starts by assuring his readers that the book is particularly suitable for education and enjoyment, and that it is not a textbook, as an untrained reader might think when faced with printed matter. The book is about the tricks of conmen familiar from everyday life, a warning so that no one should fall victim to them. It therefore has an important message for everyone: we can learn how to be on our guard in this world. But how can you extract those wise lessons from the book in your lap? Leeu fully understands the reader’s hesitation:

And whoever wants to understand all this fully must try to read through it often and take careful note of what he reads. For it is all set out subtly and precisely, as you will notice while reading, and you will not be able to grasp the proper meaning or import by reading it only once over. But by reading it through often enough, you shall understand it well.

Here Leeu is addressing someone about to read fiction alone, without the help of a reciter who interacts with his public, speeding up, slowing down, placing emphases, winking, repeating, and foreshadowing what is still to come. And if that reader should succeed in finishing the book, then he can feel flattered by Leeu’s promise at the close of his prefatory instruction: this effort will reward the wise with the greatest joy and profit. Leeu’s comments may seem childish and somewhat imperious to us, but this erudite printer and shrewd businessman understood the public he wished to reach with vernacular literature better than anyone: readers are literate and have an interest in fiction, but they are unaccustomed to absorbing fiction from a book and to reading in solitude.

Leeu also recast the formula of amusing didacticism and didactic amuse­ment as a selling point that should make a book attractive to everyone, from high to low. All these elements are present in the foreword to the Dialogue of the Creatures (Twispraec der creaturen), a natural encyclopedia from 1481, which Leeu reprinted a year later. One can “apply these lessons, in keeping with the spiritual implication, in either an entertaining or an edifying manner,” and the afterword reiterates that the reader has been reading a voluminous book full of “pleasant fables that are also very profitable as lessons for humankind.” In his foreword Leeu had stated that collections like these are meant especially for “all proclaimers of God’s word and all others of sound mind.” The content should touch “the hearts of simple folk,” for whom this hybrid form of instruction and entertainment was intended. This is probably an indication that Leeu saw a fairly substantial and expensively finished book like this primarily in the hands of clerics and wealthy citizens who could use it to their advantage, which implies the transmission of its content to the less fortunate masses. This also applies to the other instances of didactic fiction that Leeu published in large formats and illustrated with woodcuts, such as Aesop’s Fables (Esopus) in 1485, The Deeds or Histories of Rome (Gesten of gheschiedenissen van Romen) in 1479, and The Game of Chess (Dat scaecspul) in 1481.

The many texts about heroes from the past, from chronicles to epics of chivalry, provide fine examples of the catechizing input of ecclesiastical teachers in these early printed books from the northern Netherlands, usually in the guise of supplementary or adapted forewords. We find a didactic prologue of this type in the Dutch version of the story of the Crusades, Godfrey of Bouillon (Gode­vaert van Boloen), which was printed between 1486 and 1489 in Gouda by an unknown printer. The story about the widely famed Crusader had been translated from the Latin, but that was not the case with the prologue. This pulls no punches with its references to the ancient Roman historiographer Sallust, who was popular in the Middle Ages. Quoting him was common practice in prologues to works of fiction and demonstrates the sermonizing intent, since it relied on the gravitas of the pronouncements of an authori­ty.

Sallust concluded that many people are governed by sin, leading aimless and irrational lives like beas­ts. They no longer know the distinction between good and evil and, above all, are completely unaware of how the struggle against evil was conducted in the past. Such people ought to be inspired to change their lives. Happily, God has blessed enough of them with the desire to read and learn about God-fearing deeds of the past: “All deserve equal praise: people who perform honorable deeds, those who painstakingly record them in writing, and also those who take pains to gain access to their books and to read them.” There is an unmistakable commercial insight behind this formulation: the hero himself, the chronicler who describes his deeds, and whoever purchases and reads the book are worthy of praise in equal measure.

This marketing strategy was initially pursued by printers in Gouda, Delft, and Haarlem, who were the first to present Dutch litera­ture in print, in the form of a list of the greatest successes from previous centuries, fastidiously provided with reading instructions and moral recommendations. First of all there are the bestiaries and related tales, which were already famous for their instructive value and moralizing significance in classical antiquity: the abovementioned Dialogue of Creation (1481), Reynard the Fox (1479), and Aesop’s Fables (1485), but also a text like The Parables of Cyrillus (Cirilus parabolen, 1481). Most of these books were printed more than once within a short period. A closely related genre is the anecdo­te turned into a moralizing tale, based on or interspersed with medieval exempla, such as the Deeds or Histories of Rome (1481), The Game of Chess Moralized (1479), The Game of Handball Moralized (Dat caetspel) by Jan van den Berghe (1477), The Seven Sages of Rome (Seven wijse mannen van Romen, 1479), the Doctrine of Time (Doctrinael des tyts; 1486), and Solace for the Soul (Der zyelen troeste, 1477). Also belonging to this genre are novellas such as Griseldis (c. 1492) and Countering Cupid’s Darts (Teghen die strael der minnen, c. 1484), translated from Italian sources adapted from the Latin. Using a similar formula, they are presented as didactic material for youngsters who have yet to taste the pleasures of marriage. The intended lesson is often pointed out explicitly in the context of each individual story.

Texts like these proved highly popular, because they offered their predominantly urban public a practical guide for appropriate conduct in daily life in public and at home within the family. The books were presented within the overarching framework of a clear-cut social order, which could be deduced from familiar games such as chess or handball. After all, God placed the signs of his divine order in everything he created. As the Mid­dle Ages drew to a close, a lay public would have been particularly receptive to intimations of a new order, grafted onto the feudal i­deology of the three medieval estates, which had fallen into abeyance long ago. They had gone under in a cesspool of sin, as reported in the instructive and thrilling accounts of journeys to hell that a few blessed souls had been permitted to experience in a vision: Of Arent Bosman (Van Arent Bosman, c. 1484) and The Vision of Tundale (Tondalus vysioen, 1482).

The largest corpus of printed work consisted of historical texts, which presented a long series of god-fearing heroes, replete with indications that the events were real. The protagonists might be heroes from classical antiquity, but that was no objection, since many of them were seen as prefigurations of the Christian heroes of the Middle Ages. The tales were again supplied with forewords and afterwords, in order to leave no doubt about their meaning. The comments harked back to the typologies and moralizations that were standard in the manuscript age — to such an extent that many heroes and scoundrels represented speci­fic virtues as well as sins — but they were made even more explicit with the distribution of these texts in print. There is a marked preference for classical heroes, such as The History of King Alexander (Historie des conincs A­lexanders), The History of Troy (Historien van Troyen), The History of Jason (Historie van Jason), and The Deeds of Julius Caesar (Die Jeeste van Julius Cesar), while medieval heroes are featured in Seghelijn of Jerusalem (Seghelijn van Jherusalem), The Destruction of Jerusalem (Destructien van Jherusalem), Godfrey of Bouillon (Godevaert van Boloen), The Four Sons of Aymon (Vier Heemskinderen), and Charles and Elegast (Karel ende Elegast). All were printed and reprinted in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. And all these heroes were meant to serve as examples for a new, urban public.

The physician, from an edition of The Game of Chess (Dat scaecspul), printed 1483. Paris, National Library of France.

Title page of Charles and Elegast (Karel ende Elegast), printed c. 1487–88. The Hague, Royal Library.

Literature on the Open Market

The pioneering activities of the northern printers, led by Gerard Leeu of Gouda, had declined by the end of the 1480s. The market for printed books in and around small towns like Gouda, Delft, Haarlem, and even Schiedam proved too limited for the new type of enterprise. This did not apply to literary texts alone. Printers eventually learned to specialize and mine a corresponding market, but that business strategy was only arrived at after numerous costly failures. Many printers went bankrupt, while the more resilient sought out new locations where they could try out a more specialized catalogue of printed material.

For the printers of literature this meant relocating to the booming mercantile metropolis of Antwerp. Not only Gerard Leeu from Gouda and Hendrik Eckert from Delft began anew in Antwerp; many other printers from the North saw the city as a place of unprecedented opportunities for their commercially as yet untried profession. For the time being they continued to pursue the strategy they had used in the North, producing proven literary successes cast in a new form, but in Antwerp these were much more lucrative. The printers brought out an expanding range of titles in the aforementioned genres, while a new genre was introduced, the so-called prose romances, which were adaptations of medieval tales of chivalry. Examples include Paris and Vienna (Parijs ende Vienna), Sir Beves of Hamtoun (Buevijn), Melusina (Meluzine), and Oliver of Castile (Olyvier van Castillen), to name just a few that were printed and reprinted from the end of the fifteenth century.

There might be an argument here for the claim that the introduction of the printing press slowed down or even reversed literary development. After all, the literature printed was almost exclusively time-honored material. This would be to underestimate the effect of the printing press on literary life, though, which went far beyond the expansion — sizeable as it was — of the listening and reading public for fiction in the vernacular. For the first time in history a great many works became available simultaneously, creating the conditions for a new literary climate through a massive increase in choice and the opportunity to draw comparisons. The result would be the accelerated and intensified production in print of new, contemporary texts during the sixteenth century.

Generally speaking, the success of the prose romances can best be explained by the way they mirrored the questions, problems, and aspirations of burghers in the big trading centers, and especially those of merchants, the literate middle classes, and also young people. Merchants could apparently relate to these adventurous knights, who also took huge risks and faced unforeseen perils. The reference point here is Fortuna, who must be met with rational self-control. Love, marriage, and the family were further core themes of the prose romances and other literary texts. Young people are warned time and again about the consequences of infatuation, which can turn the mind and heart so seriously that one loses all grip on reality. At the same time the texts reflect the prevailing view that a suitable course in worldly love will result in an advantageous marriage. Especially when these texts targeted young people, they sometimes retained a moralizing introduc­tion, underscoring the lessons of the ensuing tale by alluding to a passage in the Bible or some other authority. This also made it possible to justify the propagation of these highly fantastical tales, replete with sex and violence, among a public that thoroughly enjoyed such prose ro­mances.

The printing press, the work of the rhetoricians, prose romances, and even the repertoire of popular festivities became increasingly intertwined and intermingled during the course of the sixteenth century. Texts no longer targeted distinct audiences, and their exact intention is often hard to discern. Control of production was seized once and for all by professional publishers and professional authors: that is, individuals who could exploit their erudition by writing for remuneration. The urban population, which now also included the clergy, the nobility, and the patriciate, was easily the most important customer base for literature in the vernacular.

Rhetoricians provided rhyming interludes to brighten up the prose romances based on old tales of chivalry, they translated authors from classical antiquity, and had their refrains and morality plays printed and reprinted. But they also turned their attention to the adaptation of traditional tales, tailoring them to a new mass public, and they continued to supply popular texts for festivities, which remained favorites among actors and the public during Carnival and other celebrations. In his Art of Rhetoric (printed 1555), Matthijs de Castelein even included models of festive ­re­frains for Holy Innocents’ Day (28 December) and for other occasions when a mock bishop swayed his miter over a temporarily inverted realm, which he governed with an ironic anti-moral. Long before De Castelein, Anna Bijns and Anthonis de Roovere had already demonstrated how common it was for the leading literary talents to incorporate material from popular culture. All of them give the clear impression that they possessed first-hand knowledge of the festivities in question and actively participated in them.

A fine example of this commingling of elitist lite­rature, popular material, and printing is Of the Milquetoast (Van den hinnentastere), which was printed in Antwerp circa 1550. In keeping with the spirit of the old-fashioned rhetoricians, no author is mentioned on the title page, but an acrostic at the end suggests that the author must have been Anthonis de Roovere of Bruges. Whether the text was specially adapted for the printing press is difficult to ascertain, but its rhyming stanzas employ remarkably few rhetorical devices and would therefore have been readily accessible to a broader public. A farmer returns home exhausted from toiling in the fields. To his annoyance his food is not ready and waiting for him on the table. What else do these women actually have to do? His wife’s retort is that he clearly does not have the slightest inkling of what she has to accomplish every day. She proposes switching roles for a day, so that in future they will know what they are talking about when quarreling about their respective duties. For the sake of clarity, the wife quickly enumerates her tasks, interrupting her work instructions just once, to warn him: “You’ll have to take off your trousers while you’re at it,” meaning that he will have to put his back into it. Unlike the peasant, we immediately understand that this is sailing precariously close to the wind as regards the question of who should wear the trousers in the household. The following day, the wife and her daughter have a wonderful time in the fields. They plow and harrow with gusto, and return home tired but contented as evening draws in. There they find the peasant well-nigh hysterical amid the havoc he has wreaked, while babe and beasts are bellowing from lack of care. He had started the milking, but so clumsily that the cow urinated on him. The baby’s soiled nappies were swept away while he was washing them in the river. Then everything quickly degenerated into chaos, and he was sweating blood and tears. The conclusion is unequivocal: “Put plainly, men were not made to do women’s work.”

Title page of Mary of Nemmegen, printed c. 1518 (Mariken van Nieumeghen). San Marino (California), Huntington Library.

Women, however, seem to have no difficulty performing men’s work. Such a topsy-turvy world presents an alarming picture: it is men who fare worse in every way. Women, for their part, take control of the reins with the greatest of ease. Is this a warning to men not to meddle in the housekeeping? In the city, the new civic structure based on the nuclear family was under discussion, especially as regards the division of tasks within the household. The desired ideal was that the wife should govern the household with a firm hand, including taking responsibility for the rearing of the children, while the husband should look after the interests of his family outside the home and fulfill the role of provider and overall manager. This debate was accompanied, or rather stoked up, by an abundance of texts, illustrated poems, and paintings that forcefully depicted the perils of role reversal and emphatically warned against the usurping of power by women.

Was it always rhetoricians who created texts like these? While few authors reveal their names, many texts show evidence of the rhetoricians’ modes of writing, without necessarily applying them rigorously. A relatively early instance of this is A Marvelous History of Mary of Nemmegen (Mariken van Nieumeghen), first printed circa 1515 by Willem Vorsterman of Antwerp and usually regarded as a miracle play refashioned to serve as a book for reading or reciting. Its structure is puzzling in a number of respects. The characters are individuals of flesh and blood, very different from the abstractions found in the morality plays. The language can hardly be called rhetorical, although it features some colorful neologisms after the French model, a device widely used among the rhetoricians. There are sections of prose that serve to link scenes, when prose enjoyed no status in rhetoricians’ circles. There are also emphatic references to the current affairs of the late fifteenth century, including the repeated mention of actual locations, a typical feature of a legend that lays claim to factual veracity. Lastly, the text includes a refrain pouring scorn on the enemies of rhetoric, wholly in the manner of the rhetoricians themselves but, because it comes from the mouth of Mary while she is possessed by the devil (when she goes by the name of Emily), the defense of the noble art of rhetoric acquires a diabolical hue.

When considering a text like this we may well be misled by our — inevitable — tendency to think in terms of historical categorizations. Was Mary of Nemmegen actually a play that we know only in a version presen­ted as a tale for reading? It may well be that one of the most famous dramas in the history of Dutch-language theater did not start out as a drama at all. Mary of Nemmegen began to be performed as if it were a regular play at the end of the nineteenth century, and since then it has continued to be seen as a play. Prior to this, however, there is no known mention of performances.

From a rapid sequence of scenes we learn how Mary, the innocent niece of Master Gisbrecht, ends up in the claws of the devil, Moenen, with whom she makes a pact. Moenen and Mary, who has now taken the name Emily, join forces to paint the town red. Were towns not created for the purpose of bringing out the worst in people? And surely that was evident from the great many thieves, whores, and crooks they attracted? That is why, having led Mary astray, Moenen takes her to a city, in order to groom her evil streak to perfection. And in that day and age, somewhere around 1500, that city was bound to be Antwerp, which offered the right conditions to train her in wickedness of the darkest order. Their first stop had been ’s-Hertogenbosch, which failed to offer sufficient inspiration. So Moenen can now exclaim triumphantly:

Now be we in Antwerp, as ye well would,

Here will we triumph and scatter our good.

Whereupon they head to the Golden Tree, an inn where the highlights of Antwerp’s debauchery are played out, where the seamy fringes of society reside, and all inhibitions evaporate.

There are rich pickings to be had on such fertile soil, and Moenen has little difficulty in transforming the market square outside the Golden Tree into a daily battlefield of brawls and murders. He congratulates himself on having discovered this wonderful place:

’Twere a pity this good inn to quit,

For all who live in riot and wantonness

And win a profit of very idleness,

Gamblers, fighters, daughters of the game,

Bawds and all they who use the same,

Of these there be here a goodly retinue,

And ’tis of them my profit doth accrue.11

Moenen and Mary end up staying at the Golden Tree for about six years,

Where every day, through their instrumentation,

Murders and killings and other evil deeds were done.

During all those years of untold sin, however, Mary manages to preserve an inkling of faith, and she is prompted to repent when she sees a processional play for Rogation Day that bears the name of the devil’s advocate, Maskeroon. In this play within a play, Maskeroon complains before God’s seat of judgment that human beings are consistently shown mercy despite their daily transgressions, whereas devils — who are fallen angels — are damned for all eternity for a single misdeed. Do humans not deserve to be punished with equal severity? Thanks to Our Blessed Lady’s intercessions, however, God continues to be merciful toward mankind. Having been reminded of this hopeful prospect, Mary finds the courage to detach herself from Moenen, and sets out on a long and arduous penance before eventually receiving absolution.

The chief indication that Mary of Nemmegen is something other than a dramatic play is provided by an English version of the story as a legend in prose. Printed in Antwerp by Jan van Doesborch in or around 1518, this version was intended for export to the English market. The structure of the English prose text is much better: titles and woodcuts are printed in the correct places and announce what follows, and unnecessary digressions are absent. This makes it highly likely that Van Doesborch printed a Dutch prose version first, which was then translated into English and also adapted into a dramatized verse form. Such adaptations were fairly common. Prose romances, the result of the de-versification of the courtly epics of earlier centuries, could easily be reconverted into rhetori­cally styled verses, which could then be spoken by the main characters. Narrative prose was considered unsuitable for expressing emotions, and this explains the flight into verse in direct speech. Also, printed texts in the vernacular would be read or recited out loud, usually in the company of others, and the listeners were expected to develop an emotional bond with what was being read.

Indeed, when presenting a text the printers emphasized its emotional impact, something that seems self-evident in light of the medieval tradition. Readers were promised tears, laughter, consolation, and dramatic tension, along with profound emotion and compassion. But a public used to vernacular texts might have felt they were incapable of rendering those effects without the aid of a storyteller or entertainer. This explains why these prose texts were embellished with passages in verse, in which the protagonists express their deepest emotions in the form of refrains or full-blown dramatizations. That might lead us to believe we are dealing with original drama, as is the case with Mary of Nemmegen.

Be that as it may, stories about innocent girls being led astray by the devil were eminently marketable in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In church, the struggle against the devil was heightened by meticulous descriptions of his methods. These primarily involved girls and women selling their souls to the devil in exchange for knowledge, wealth, power, and anything else that might tempt them into unending commission of the cardinal sins. Being among the most popular narrative material in the late Middle Ages, literary representations like those in Mary of Nemmegen helped to propagate this superstition, which fed into the wholesale witch-hunts at the dawn of the modern era.

Remarkable in this respect are the close ties between the book trade in England and the Low Countries around the turn of the sixteenth century. They centered on vernacular narrative texts, from chronicles and news reports to fables, prose romances, and also texts relating a Marian miracle, such as Mary of Nemmegen. The bridge-builder was William Caxton, governor of the English merchants in Bruges, who was afflicted with a passion for printed books. He developed into a man of letters who made creative adaptations of French courtly texts for an English audience, while from his base in Bruges he produced French texts for an international market consisting of the nobility and upper echelons of the bourgeoisie.

He also turned his attention to Dutch literature, as evidenced by his later venture of publishing The History of Reynard the Fox in Westminster in 1481. He had translated it from the Dutch himself, using the 1479 edition printed by Gerard Leeu of Gouda. Caxton’s relationship with Leeu, who later moved to Antwerp and was one of the first successful printing entrepreneurs, very probably prompted Leeu to attempt to fill Caxton’s place on the English market soon after the latter’s death in 1492, since printing in England had been slow to develop. At a remarkable pace, Leeu produced reprints of texts that had already been translated and published by Caxton, imitating Caxton’s strategy of producing parallel editions in two languages but in separate print runs. Caxton did this with English and French editions; Leeu followed his example with various combinations of English, French, Low German, and Dutch. He printed the remarkable prose romance Paris and Vienna (Parijs ende Vienna) in all these languages, the English version being a reprint of Caxton’s translation.

The method proved highly profitable until well into the sixteenth century. Jan van Doesborch in particular — though he was by no means the only one — printed a whole series of parallel Dutch and English editions in Antwerp. As a result, a good deal of popular literature from the Low Countries became widely read in England: Howleglass, Friar Rush, Frederyke of Jennen, Vergilius, The Parson of Kalenborowe, The Deceyte of Women, The Gospelles of Dystaves, Of the Newe Landes, and many other early printed works from the first half of the sixteenth century either stemmed from the Low Countries or were translated into English via Dutch. The heightened interest in Dutch literature among the early English printers and publishers led, among other things, to Everyman, a morality play about the possibilities of redemption for a soul well-nigh doomed, based on the Dutch Elckerlijc.

IV. Farewell to the Middle Ages

Just about everything that the sixteenth century had managed to produce in terms of innovative literature was assembled, in all its lavish diversity, at the Antwerp landjuweel of 1561. All the prominent chambers of rhetoric from the Duchy of Brabant participated in this drama and poetry contest, the grandest ever held in such circles. The unprecedented number of program components in which the chambers competed for first prize ranged from the most spectacular entry into town, through the craziest knave, to the most beautiful morality play. There were also competitions for the liveliest farce, the wildest comedy, the most graceful prologue play, and the most gripping faction (a short play incorporating song). These are all slightly differentiated dramatic forms, though they share the principal feature of being short.

Though the rhetoricians might have perceived and presented themselves as a social and artistic elite, more popular forms and motifs had by this point been fully incorporated into the repertoire. The antics of the chambers’ knaves bore witness to this, but so did, for example, the amusing faction performed by the chamber The Heatherbell (Het Heybloemken) from Turnhout. The play harked back to the ever-popular rituals of inversion, which, besides poking fun at sex and the devil, also often took the fear of hunger and scarcity as their theme. Around the mid-sixteenth century the Low Countries had suffered repeated bouts of serious food shortages — they had occurred most recently in 1557–58 — and light-hearted farces like this one served to counterbalance and exorcize these constant anxieties. The Turnhout chamber’s faction also took a satirical sideswipe at the hordes of marauding mercenaries, who were feared as much for their pillaging as for their official confiscation of foodstuffs. In retrospect, the immediate impact of wartime violence on shortages and famine seems to have been limited, but people must have perceived this rather differently at the time.

Title page of the Morality Plays (Spelen van sinne), printed 1562, from the Antwerp Festival of the year before. Ghent, University Library.

Very little actually happens in this play. The emphasis is on the comic enumeration of mock figures whose names and appearance caricature eating habits. Captain Spoil-Kitchen, for instance, is described as “a fat man,” accompanied by a whole regiment of potential mercenaries who will be more or less press-ganged into the army of the Count of Gorgeland. The enrollment procedure makes it clear that all the candidates are eminently capable of defending such a country: Long-Gut is able to consume twelve bowls of porridge in one go; Hollow-Belly recently wolfed down fifteen plates of beans; Big-Dish, whose jaws never rest, can shovel in ten or more bowls of peas at a single sitting, with a couple of hams and twenty pounds of bread for good measure; Swallow-Chunk recently polished off a whole sheep together with fifteen pounds of bread, and still felt hungry afterwards; Seldom-Sozzled can drink a whole wine cellar dry, and Ever-Peckish thinks nothing of emptying a whole trough of gruel. The game with mock names — a late echo of typical Carnival amusement — was perhaps not as far removed from common parlance as today’s readers might think. People have always given each other nicknames inspired by embarrassing physical traits or habits, and in the past these readily found their way into official records.

However, formalized folk rituals of this kind, dressed up in a rhetorical style, were clearly on the wane by this time. Elitist ostentation prevailed, which automatically relegated the public — active co-participants in earlier collective manifestations of urban culture — to the role of passive onlookers. At about one o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, 3 August 1561, the rhetoricians of the Antwerp chamber The Gillyflowers (De Violieren), the festival’s hosts, were standing in full regalia awaiting the arrival of twelve chambers from elsewhere in Brabant. When these started to arrive in long cavalcades, the public could not believe their eyes. Most impressive of all was the Brussels chamber called Mary’s Crown (Maria­cransken). Its delegation was made up of no fewer than 340 men on horseback, dressed in red satin cloaks with white piping, white doublets, and white boots. Their red hoods resembled classical war helmets, and their belts were no less spectacular. This chamber’s processional entry alone comprised seven floats with theatrical scenery in the midst of seventy-eight carts illuminated with torches, which were also covered with red-and-white striped drapes and driven by wagoners in red cloaks. The wagons bearing tableaux vivants were peopled by a large number of characters decked out in classical costume, acting out all kinds of homecomings and farewells. It was two o’clock in the morning before all twelve chambers finally reached Antwerp’s main market square. The spectacle, all thirteen hours of it, enthralled an English onlooker, a certain Richard Clough, business agent of Sir Thomas Gresham. “Thys was the strangyst matter that ever I sawe, or I thynke that ever I shall see,” he wrote, concluding his detailed account with the slightly ominous reflection that “they that can do thys, can do more.”

Despite the great diversity of competition components, the morality play was still the most important. After the commotion caused by the Ghent festival in 1539, which prompted the authorities to impose a well-nigh-blanket censorship of all the chambers of rhetoric, the government also decreed that the set themes for literary contests required prior approval. And it was made clear that approval would only be granted to innocuous themes that could not conceivably inspire subversive ideas with regard to the secular or spiritual authorities.

With great difficulty, the organizers of the Antwerp contest eventually came up with a solution. The assignment for the morality play consisted in the dramatization of a response to the question: “What is it that most inspires man to practice the arts?” For another component, the competing chambers acted out a response to a slightly self-indulgent question about the importance of the merchant. Antwerp’s standing in the world was wholly reliant on the commitment and reputation of its merchants. Around the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the good name of these merchants had became sullied when a series of pamphlets accused them of fraudulent practices. The worries caused by these attacks can explain why an important part of the contest was devoted to a public confirmation of the usefulness of these courageous and industrious merchants for society. The participating chambers addressed this leading question — a nega­tive response was practically impossible — in a so-called pro­logue play, a short dramatic form. Compared with the other components of the festival, the generosity of the prizes for this item is telling: the subject was clearly a matter of urgency.

The Antwerp landjuweel lasted about a month altogether. As was to be expected, the chambers fell over each other to sing the praises of merchants, and Antwerp’s merchants first and foremost. One of the local chambers, The Marigold (De Goudsblom), argued straightforwardly that all other lines of business are dependent on merchants and commerce. Moses’s Thorn (Moyses Doorn) of Den Bosch expounded the view that Antwerp’s merchants had inherited the mantle of Columbus and Vespucci, so that “all Europe now sparkled with silver and gold.” The city’s spectacular growth in prosperity was to be credited to “the ingenuity of the pious merchants,” Antwerp being now so powerful that there was no longer any comparison with cities like Cairo, Alexandria, Venice, Lyon, Paris, or London. Most convincing, however, was the response by the Mechelen chamber, De Lischbloem (The Water Flag). It opened with a description of Antwerp’s illustrious past, a trading metropolis to be reckoned with as far back as antiquity. Under the influence of the pagan gods Mercury and Neptune, who were venerated as patrons of trade and the sea, deception and trickery raised their ugly heads, but with the arrival of the Christian truth, honest trading practices returned. Whatever the case may be, the rhetoricians of Mechelen credited Antwerp with a long and distinguished history, driven from the very beginning by its assiduous trading activities.

This sublime Antwerp event of 1561 was the last manifestation of the collective experience and sheer exuberance of a form of literature that found its apogee and apotheosis in its public presentation. There was still a reasonable balance between the number of performing participants and the number of spectators, and the boundary between them remained fluid. However, the Antwerp rhetoricians’ festival was the final curtain. After that, the hubs of literary life withdrew into more private quarters, where solitary scribes would shape the literary future by publishing the fruits of their labor through the printing press. Henceforth, the theater stage would be the only public manifestation of literature, but it maintained a strict division between actors and spectators.

Both the production and consumption of literature became individual pursuits. Public manifestations on the street took the form of imposing showpieces, replete with allegorized myths in Latin, or even in Greek and Hebrew, and the public could only stand and gape. The Middle Ages were over. The distant memory of the medieval street poets and purveyors of refrains, artists in whom author, orator, and even actor could be seamlessly united, survived only in folkloric rituals in the countryside, around songs and poems that hardly ever reached the printing presses.

The engine of literary innovation had shifted elsewhere, and as far as the southern Netherlands were concerned it had certainly moved beyond the chambers of rhetoric. In the northern Netherlands the innovations were taking place as part of a sweeping renewal that transformed rhetoricians into true Renaissance writers who reviled the “old” rhetoricians. From around the middle of the sixteenth century, humanists working in the vernacular, such as Dirck Coornhert, Jan van Mussem, and Jan van Hout, launched trenchant attacks in which they denounce the old-style rhetoricians and street poets as uneducated amateurs ignorant of the proper meaning of the word “rhetoric,” who spend their time wining and dining, and who degrade the language with foreign expressions, the unbridled use of superficial rhymes, and the peddling of mythological names they do not understand. They cough, splutter, belch, hiccup, and grunt their uninspired rondeaux and refrains. Jan van Hout of Leiden piles it on:

There are those who, their bellies full of drink and bloated like a pig’s bladder so that their flabby bodies are stretched to the point of bursting, manage to belch out a rondeau in eight lines, which they have scrounged together like magpies hopping from one branch to the next and then think they have crafted a masterpiece.

The Middle Ages are consigned to the past, as are the rhetoricians. Withdrawn in his patrician’s house, the Antwerp poet Jan van der Noot composes an extended series of sonnets. The rhetoricians in the North instigate an elaborate program to “purify” the language and promote cultured discourse according to modern norms. The theater awaits comedies and trage­dies, taking literature indoors and off the street: the days of the public standing outside in the open air are over.

— Translated by Andrew May

 

 

7 Unless indicated otherwise, translations of quotations in this chapter are by Andrew May.

8 Translation Edwin Morgan.

9 Translation Pieter Geyl.

10 Translation Adriaan Barnouw.

11 Translated by Harry Morgan Ayres.