Migrants and Merchants. Two Early Modern Dutch Readers and Their English Contemporaries more

Migrants and Merchants: Two Early Modern Dutch Readers and Their English Contemporaries Nelleke Moser abstract Against the background of recent English studies on manuscript culture, Nelleke Moser focuses on two Dutch manuscript miscellanies. One was created by Jacob de Moor (1538/39–1599), a physician who fled from Antwerp to the northern Netherlands, the other by his son David de Moor (1598–1643), a merchant and bookkeeper from Amsterdam. Whereas English manuscript culture is often associated with aristocratic circles, universities, and the Inns of Court, Dutch manuscript culture was in the hands of upper-middle-class readers, who participated in literary institutions called chambers of rhetoric. The evidence here presented suggests that upper-middle-class readers compiling manuscript miscellanies deserve more attention in England, too. keywords: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary collections in manuscript and print; literary life in the Low Countries; rhetoricians and chambers of rhetoric; David de Moor; Jacob de Moor students scribbling scurrilous verse, political prisoners penning satire, courtiers copying pastoral poems—these are the images usually associated with early modern English manuscript culture. If it were not for these elite practices, cultivated in the Inns of Court in London, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and royal and aristocratic circles, what would manuscript culture look like? To answer that question it might help to take a look abroad, to a society where these particular institutions are absent, while others are in place. Such a comparative approach has been contemplated before, but so far it has not been put into practice.1 In this essay, I will focus on two Dutch manuscript miscellanies, which were compiled by a father and his son. One collection was completed in 1598 by Jacob 1. H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 7; Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, 1999), 15. Pp. 471–490. ©2010 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2010.73.3.471. huntington library quarterly | vol. 73, no. 3 471 472 nelleke moser de Moor (1538/39–1599), a physician who fled from Antwerp to the northern Netherlands. The other collection was compiled in the 1620s and 1630s by his son David de Moor (1598–1643), who was a wealthy merchant and bookkeeper in Amsterdam. Together, they provide an excellent case study of how social and institutional contexts and reading tastes and habits affected the development of manuscript miscellanies. These two protagonists were witnesses to major changes and events in Dutch literature and society, such as the shift from a late medieval to a Renaissance literary culture, the Reformation, and the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish (1568–1648). These circumstances have left their traces in the manuscript miscellanies these two readers compiled. I will first discuss Jacob de Moor’s manuscript and the miscellany compiled by his son, and then summarize their individual characteristics. Then, I will compare these two Dutch readers to their English contemporaries by using evidence from studies on early modern English manuscript culture. Finally, I will consider to what extent the differences between manuscript miscellanies of the Netherlands and England are attributable to their distinct societies and institutions. A Migrant’s Miscellany: Jacob de Moor Between 1572 and 1630, many Protestant craftsmen and intellectuals fled from the southern Netherlands, which was under the rule of Catholic Spain, to the north, bringing their wealth, professional knowledge, and religious conviction with them, and thus helping the Dutch “Golden Age” to take the prosperous and Protestant shape it did.2 Jacob de Moor was one of them. His miscellany in many ways reflects his background as a well-educated, Protestant migrant from the south. Jacob de Moor was born in ’s-Hertogenbosch (Brabant) in 1539. He was married to Elisabeth Ruyssenbergh (Emmerich 1551—Amsterdam 1635). They had seven children: four daughters and three sons. Jacob worked as a physician in Antwerp for most of his life. That he did well for himself can be judged by the fact that he had his portrait painted three times, in 1560, 1576, and 1598.3 The family left Antwerp on two occasions to escape the pillaging and oppression of the Spanish and the French, as recounted in the family history of his son Bernardt.4 The events can be reconstructed using the dates and places of their children’s births. The de Moors’ first daughter was born in Antwerp in April 1576, six months before the sack of Antwerp known as the “Spanish Fury,” when Spanish troops looted Antwerp and killed thousands of people. The fam- 2. J. Briels, Zuid-Nederlanders in de Republiek 1572–1630: Een demografische en cultuurhistorische studie (Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, [1985]); Maria A. Schenkeveld, Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt: Themes and Ideas (Amsterdam, 1991), 3–5. 3. The first two portraits are mentioned in the online catalogue of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands (http://mail.centraalmuseum.nl/Adlibext); this museum houses the second portrait (see Catalogue of Paintings 1450–1600, Centraal Museum Utrecht, ed. Molly Faries and Liesbeth M. Helmus [Utrecht, 2007]). The third portrait is mentioned in the notes on the family’s history by Bernardt de Moor (“Memorien voor Bernardt de Moor Aengeteeckent,” 1608–66, Nationaal Archief Den Haag, entry 1.11.01.01, inventory no. 812). 4. De Moor, “Memorien voor Bernardt de Moor.” two early modern dutch readers 473 ily fled to Emmerich, just across the border in Germany. This was the native town of Elisabeth Ruyssenbergh de Moor, who gave birth there to a second daughter in December 1577. By 1581 the family was back in Antwerp, for their first son was born in the city that year. The family was forced to leave again in 1585, when the city was again (and definitively) conquered by the Spanish forces. This time they went to Dordrecht in the northern Netherlands, where the rest of the de Moor children were born. The family remained in Dordrecht until after Jacob’s death, on 22 September 1599.5 They then moved to Amsterdam. In 1598, one year before he died, Jacob finished compiling a manuscript verse miscellany.6 It is an oblong octavo booklet made up of sixty-three leaves. The first leaf and the last four leaves are blank. It is bound in plain vellum, with two small green ties. The volume resembles songbooks of the era, which could easily fit inside a pocket, ready at hand whenever the occasion or the company called for a song. If we were to judge the book by its cover, the material aspects of Jacob’s notebook suggest sociability and mobility; this impression is confirmed by its contents. On the first page of his notebook, Jacob de Moor identifies himself as its owner: “Jacobus De Moor est possessor huius libri Anno 1598.” On the same page, he wrote his personal motto, which puns on his name “Tis verloren de moor ghewasschen” (“It is no use washing the moor”). This may not be the only motto used by Jacob de Moor. Ten texts in the manuscript are signed “RSA,” which is likely an abbreviation of the motto “riens sans amour,” used as an acrostic in another poem (20). This motto may be another pun on de Moor’s name, since the first lines of this acrostic encourage “brothers” to give heed to the words written by a certain “Jacob.”7 There is another motto on the title page, “niet sonder God” (“nothing without God”), which may shed light on the institutional context of this manuscript notebook. Although this phrase is rather general and common, it was used by a chamber of rhetoric near Antwerp, De Bloeiende Wijngaard (“The Vineyard in Bloom”) in Berchem, which was active between 1556 and 1585.8 This last motto, together with the texts he copied, places Jacob de Moor’s collection in rhetoricians’ circles. 5. David Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven. Een Haags dagboek uit 1624, ed. Sv. E. Veldhuijzen (Hilversum, the Netherlands, 1993), 256. 6. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, MS 133 H 36. Earlier publications on this manuscript include L. Roose, “Een nieuwe lezing van Cornelis Cruls psalmbewerkingen in een onbekend handschrift van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek te Den Haag,” Spiegel der Letteren 1 (1956–57): 222–24; L. Roose, “De gedichtenverzameling van Jacobus de Moor (1598),” Spiegel der Letteren 8 (1964–65): 241–67; F. van Vinckenroye, “Acrostichons in de gedichtenverzameling van Jacobus de Moor,” Spiegel der Letteren 9 (1965–66): 191–92. 7. “Ras broeders hoort / Jacob die spreeckt waerachtich / En u toch spoort / Naer sijn schrijven seer reijn” (“Quick brothers, listen / to Jacob, who speaks truthfully / And haste you / toward his impeccable writing”). 8. The chamber is listed in Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Repertorium van rederijkerskamers in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden en Luik, 1400–1650 (2004), published online at DBNL: Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren, http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/brua002repe01_01/brua002repe01_ 01_0052.htm; for a song that references the chamber and its motto, see De Nederlandse Liederenbank 474 nelleke moser From the beginning of the fifteenth century, literary life in the Low Countries had been dominated by “chambers of rhetoric.”9 In these societies, which were organized along the lines of craft guilds, “rhetoricians” (rederijkers) would gather to produce, perform, and enjoy literature together. Rhetoricians were amateur poets and playwrights from the middle and upper bourgeoisie, such as clerks, clergymen, schoolmasters, painters, architects, civil servants, and bailiffs. These chambers offered an important platform for the discussion of public issues, organizing literary contests on various moral, social, or religious questions, which had to be addressed in the form of a play or a poem. The literary modes of the rhetoricians included allegorical plays and poems with elaborate rhyming structures. One of the poetic genres was the “refrain,” in which each stanza ends with the same line (generally a saying or sentence summarizing the argument), and the final stanza is addressed to the “prince,” the chairman of the chamber. During the sixteenth century, most rhetoricians supported the Protestant movement. Hence, there are many rhetoricians among the immigrants from the southern Netherlands. They founded their own chambers alongside the original chambers of rhetoric in Holland: in addition to the original Amsterdam chamber of De Eglantier (“The Eglantine”), the immigrants founded the chamber of Het Wit Lavendel (“The White Lavender”), for example. The chambers of rhetoric gradually lost their social function, and they disappeared in the course of the seventeenth century. In the decades around 1600, the rhetoricians’ literary style was replaced by Renaissance fashions and modern genres. It is hard to overestimate the impact of the chambers of rhetoric on manuscript culture in the Low Countries. Dissemination of the rhetoricians’ composition was generally through manuscript because they often chose not to have their work printed. One reason was that they thought print publication for profit was incompatible with the spiritual value of their art, which they claimed was a gift from the Holy Spirit.10 There were more practical reasons as well: in order to widen their repertoire, chambers would barter literary materials with one another. To serve as trading material among the chambers, plays had to be original and could not have appeared in print. In order to preserve their works, the chambers employed a scribe who was responsible for copying the plays and conserving the manuscripts.11 This means that a large part of the rhetori(Dutch Song Database), http://www.liederenbank.nl/liedpresentatie.php?lan=nl&zoek=23511; for a description of the motto, see Roose, “De gedichtenverzameling,” 258–59. 9. More information in English on the rhetoricians may be found in Rhetoric—Rhétoriqueurs— Rederijkers, ed. Jelle Koopmans, Mark A. Meadow, Kees Meerhoff, and Marijke Spies (Amsterdam, 1995); European Theatre, 1470–1600: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Martin Gosman and Rina Walthaus (Groningen, the Netherlands, 1996); Marijke Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics (Amsterdam, 1999); G. Waite, Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515–1556 (Toronto, 2000). A recent overview is offered in A Literary History of the Low Countries, ed. Theo Hermans (Rochester, N.Y., 2009). 10. Nelleke Moser, De strijd voor rhetorica: Poëtica en positie van rederijkers in Vlaanderen, Brabant, Zeeland en Holland tussen 1450 en 1620 (Amsterdam, 2001), 69–97. 11. Anke van Herk, Fabels van liefde: Het mythologisch-amoureuze toneel van de rederijkers (1475–1621) ([Amsterdam], 2009), 170–80. This is similar to theater companies in England, which also had their own scribes who copied the plays (Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 137–40). two early modern dutch readers 475 cians’ theatrical production has been preserved in manuscripts held by chambers of rhetoric, a famous example being the collection of plays of the Haarlem chamber Trou moet blijcken (“Faith must prove itself ” or “Faith must show”). The verse production of the rhetoricians has been preserved in manuscripts as well. These poems were mainly compiled by individual lovers of literature who probably had connections to a chamber of rhetoric. An early example of such a collection was that of the Utrecht canon Jan van Stijevoort in 1524. Others were created during the second half of the sixteenth century, such as those by Jan de Bruyne (Antwerp, 1579–83), Jan Michiels (Brussels, 1584–1600), and Adriaen Wils (Antwerp, 1599–1630).12 Although we do not know whether Jacob was actually a member of a chamber of rhetoric, the literary content of his notebook suggests that he frequented rhetoricians’ circles. Most of the thirty-three texts in his collection are refrains and songs in the rhetoricians’ tradition, mostly in the vernacular, except for one text in Latin (with a Dutch translation), and one text in French. Although more than half the texts are of a religious nature, the collection includes love songs and witty poems as well. The emphasis on these three concerns—the prudent, the amorous, and the comical—is another token of the rhetoricians’ tradition.13 Several refrains that Jacob copied also appear in other collections of rhetoricians’ verse from the period, both printed anthologies and manuscript miscellanies.14 Two refrains were written as entries in literary competitions organized by the chamber of De Violieren (“The Gillyflowers”) in Antwerp in 1559 and in 1561.15 Besides these connections to the circles of rhetoricians, there are several texts that hint at the personal ties and social circumstances of the compiler. For a start, it may be no coincidence that the author of the refrain for the Antwerp contest of 1559 was a citizen from Jacob de Moor’s native town, ’s-Hertogenbosch. De Moor might have chosen to copy this text because of its connection to his hometown—he might even have known the author for that reason. Furthermore, many texts in the collection are related to Antwerp, where Jacob spent most of his life. A telling example is an acrostic on “Antwerpen in Brabant.” In this poem, the town speaks in the first person: she complains that she has been molested and that instead of enjoying the peace she longed for, she was robbed of her wealth by murderers and arsonists. This clearly reflects the situation the de Moor family had to escape in 1576 and in 1585. The selection of poems also indicates the de Moors’ persecution by the French, which Jacob’s son Bernardt described in his memoirs. Jacob de Moor’s notebook includes a French 12. Nelleke Moser, “‘Van papier of uit het hoofd?’ De overlevering van een rederijkersrefrein,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 119 (2003): 187–203 at 188–89. 13. Marijke Spies, “Scaliger in Holland,” in Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and Poets, 29–36 at 32. 14. One text is included in the anthology produced by the Antwerp printer Jan van Doesborch around 1529 (see D. Coigneau, Refreinen in het zotte bij de rederijkers [Ghent, Belgium, 1980–83], 121). Two texts occur (with variant readings) in British Library, MS Sloane 1174; one text has been preserved in Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Brussels, MS II, 129, which was compiled after 1558; another appears in Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Brussels, MS II, 1695, a verse collection compiled by Jan de Bruyne in Antwerp in 1579 (see Roose, “Cornelis Cruls psalmbewerkingen,” 223, and Roose, “De gedichtenverzameling,” 251–53). 15. Roose, “De gedichtenverzameling,” 253–54. 476 nelleke moser poem that criticizes the kings of France by describing their deaths. That poem is followed by an anagram on Charles de Valois that calls him a “chasseur deloyal” (“treacherous hunter”). This epithet also appeared in an influential Huguenot (French Protestant) pamphlet following the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, in which thousands of Huguenots were killed.16 Also referenced in his miscellany is Emmerich, the town where de Moor’s wife was born and where the de Moor family found refuge during their first escape. There is a page containing a number of shorter, witty poems; a note on one of them says that it was written or composed in Emmerich. Together, these poems suggest a circle of friends enjoying each other’s company and singing about wine and love. One of these friends might have been “Gabriel Selbyer,” whose name we find under one of the Emmerich poems. If they were friends, that might explain why Jacob de Moor included the author’s name, something he rarely does. Jacob only mentions the name of one other author, “Aescalis,” or Josephus Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), the famous French intellectual, Huguenot, and professor at Leiden from 1593 onward.17 In that case, the author’s prestige might have been the reason de Moor appended his name. The Scaliger poem is part of a small group of poems that indicate that Jacob’s profession as a physician influenced his selection of texts as well. The poem by Scaliger criticizes ignorant surgeons. Another poem discusses the healing and poisonous qualities of plants (whose Latin botanical names are given), and a refrain argues that the worldly arts, including medicine, are worthless when they are practiced without divine inspiration. In this poem, physicians are accused of treating other people’s illnesses but neglecting their own souls. Each stanza ends with the phrase “What is beneficial for the soul, hurts the body.” This last refrain might have been written by the previously mentioned author from ’s-Hertogenbosch, this time for an Antwerp contest in 1561.18 Jacob de Moor also copied a large number of religious poems and songs, several of which are also found in religious songbooks from the period. Jacob’s precise religious denomination is unknown (as are those of many of his contemporaries), but he was certainly reform-minded. A few of the religious poems are addressed to “brothers” or brethren, urging them to repent or to weed out the bad seeds of the congregation. This might indicate an Anabaptist environment, in which followers aimed for a congregation “without stain or wrinkle.”19 Among the religious texts in his collection are variations on psalm translations by the Antwerp author Cornelis Crul, who lived in the first half of the sixteenth century. Some believe Crul’s work was influenced by Anabaptists, although other scholars have taken him to be a Catholic in the Erasmian sense.20 16. Donald R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge, 1981), 303; Jean-Raymond Fanlo, “Des voix de la nation à celles de l’Eglise: le premier dialogue du Reveille-Matin des François,” Bulletin de l’association de l’étude sur l’humanisme, la réforme et la renaissance 46 (1998): 47–62 at 57. 17. Roose, “De gedichtenverzameling,” 257–58; Spies, “Scaliger in Holland.” 18. Roose, “De gedichtenverzameling,” 253–54. 19. H.-J. Goertz, The Anabaptists (London, 1996), 33. 20. L. Roose, Religieuze poëzie van Cornelis Crul (Zwolle, the Netherlands, 1954), 24–35. two early modern dutch readers 477 De Moor also included a variation on a song by the Anabaptist leader David Joris, from Joris’s spiritual songbook Gheestelijck Liedt-Boecxken, from 1537. These last two texts are examples of how Jacob liberally reworks the texts he appropriates. He rewrites the original texts, reformulating lines, rearranging the verses to change them into a different genre, alternating the stanzas of a poem and a song. We cannot, of course, be certain that de Moor himself was responsible for the rewriting: he may have copied the rewritten texts from another source. But the fact remains that the texts underwent major changes at some stage. The two psalms of Cornelis Crul are combined into one text that alternates stanzas from the prologues of both psalms while changing their order completely.21 This results in a refrain interlaced with a song: one stanza would be recited while the next would be sung. The song by David Joris was completely rewritten as well. The first stanza corresponds with David Joris’s text, but in Jacob’s version, the rest of the song is twice as long and very different.22 In other poems, Jacob sometimes suggests an alternative reading or wording, for example that one might substitute “peaceful powers” for “divine powers.” This may mean that he had other readers in mind when compiling his miscellany. Jacob’s collection does not have an index, but the number of texts is quite modest, so it would not have been too hard to find the text one was looking for without an index. The notebook does, however, include one remarkable paratextual feature: catchwords, which appear at the bottom of the page on pages 88 to 94. This is common in Dutch printed texts but not in manuscripts; it remains unclear why de Moor included these catchwords. It has been suggested that catchwords in printed texts were intended to help readers reading texts aloud, rather than being used by printers to arrange the order of the pages.23 Catchwords in manuscript texts might have the same function. In sum, the texts in Jacob’s collection reflect his connections to rhetoricians’ circles and his personal ties to Antwerp, Emmerich, and ’s-Hertogenbosch. Although Jacob lived in Antwerp and Dordrecht for most of his life, texts from his native town, ’s-Hertogenbosch, and his wife’s native town, Emmerich, where the family found refuge, are also present. He might have had some connection to a local chamber of rhetoric, perhaps De Wijngaerd (“The Vineyard”) in Berchem near Antwerp. The texts he copied also reflect his anti-Spanish and anti-French political views; his profession as a physician; and his Protestant, possibly Anabaptist, beliefs. Jacob completed his collection in 1598, but copied older texts into it as well, some of which had already been circulating in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Most of the texts he copies are in the vernacular, but he includes one work in Latin and one in French as well. His miscellany demonstrates an appropriative attitude toward texts: rarely does he acknowledge the author of a text, and he rewrites texts (or he copies a rewritten version). How much of his behavior as a reader and a scribe was inherited by his son David? 21. Roose, “Cornelis Cruls psalmbewerkingen”; Roose, “De gedichtenverzameling,” 251. 22. Roose, “De gedichtenverzameling,” 251–52. 23. P. J. Verkruijsse, “Wacht u voor de bladwachter! Custodering, signering en paginering in de handpersperiode,” in E Codicibus Impressisque. Opstellen over het boek in de Lage Landen voor Elly Cockx-Indestege, ed. J. Hanselaer and H. Meeus, 3 vols. (Leuven, Belgium, 2004), 2:571–94 at 577. 478 nelleke moser A Merchant’s Miscellany: David de Moor After Jacob had died in 1599, his wife and children moved to Amsterdam, where two of his sons would become cloth merchants: Bernardt (Dordrecht 1588–Amsterdam 1666) and David (Dordrecht 1598–Amsterdam 1643). Both Bernardt and David kept manuscript notebooks, albeit of seemingly very different types. Bernardt compiled a memorial book from 1608 to 1666 that contains biographical notes concerning his family, his career, his international travels (to Archangelsk and Danzig), and a copy of a travel account of a sailor who accompanied Willem Barentsz on his trip in search of the Northeast Passage.24 He not only took careful notes of the dates and places of birth and death of his family members but also wrote down the gifts that he exchanged with the rest of the family, money as well as goods (such as paintings and books), and the salary he received from his employer, the Amsterdam merchant Dirk Alewijn. Bernardt is counted among the 250 wealthiest people in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century—a list that includes Dirk Alewijn himself.25 David’s notebook, by contrast, contains literary texts instead of figures and calculations. Still, there is reason to believe that his miscellany has more in common with Bernardt’s account book than with the literary notebook kept by their father. Like Bernardt, David can be said to have kept account: if Bernardt carefully described his economic capital in his notebook, David used his manuscript miscellany to accumulate and register his social and cultural capital. This is illustrated by the contents of his miscellany as well as by the way he treated the texts he copied. David, unlike his father and brother, does not mention his own name anywhere in his manuscript miscellany. It was only thanks to circumstantial evidence (a diary of his friend David Beck) that David de Moor was identified in 1993 as the compiler of Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 74 G 12.26 Even then, it took until 2007 before the relationship between father and son was established, using information from both of their manuscript miscellanies as well as Bernardt’s family notes and the fact that David once used his father’s device.27 Any further doubts about their kinship are removed by their physical resemblance, which the portrait David had painted in 1640 demonstrates.28 David’s notebook is a sizeable volume in quarto, bound in leather, finely tooled in gilt, with gilt edges. One look at this volume tells us that this was not made to be carried about. This notebook belongs to a man who has settled down, who writes and reads at his desk in his office. It consists of one part printed texts and one part manuscript 24. De Moor, “Memorien voor Bernardt de Moor” (also Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven, 256–57). A brief description of this source is provided by R. Lindeman, Y. Scherf, and R. M. Dekker in their list of autobiographical documents through 1814, part 1, item 60, http://www.egodocument.net/ egodocumententot1814-1.html. 25. Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven, 256; Kees Zandvliet, De 250 rijksten van de Gouden Eeuw: Kapitaal, macht, familie en levensstijl (Amsterdam, 2006), 329. 26. Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven, 19–20 and 24; Jeroen Blaak, Geletterde levens: Dagelijks lezen en schrijven in de vroegmoderne tijd in Nederland 1624–1770 (Hilversum, the Netherlands, 2004), 71, 75. 27. Nelleke Moser, “‘Poezijlust en vriendenliefd’: Literaire sociabiliteit in handschrift en druk na 1600,” Spiegel der Letteren 49 (2007): 247–64 at 257. 28. The painting, by Abraham de Vries, is now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and is viewable online at http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/collectie/zoeken/asset.jsp?id=SK-A-758. two early modern dutch readers 479 texts, which were probably bound together into one volume in or after 1632 (the most recent text is dated 1632, the oldest text 1610). There are separate tables of contents for the sections of printed texts and texts in manuscript. The printed texts consist of four longer poems on religious themes: Daniel Heinsius, Lofsanck van Iesus Christus (“Hymn to Jesus Christ”; Amsterdam, 1616), Dirck Pietersz. Pers, Jonas de Straf-Prediker (“The Prophet Jonah”; Amsterdam, 1623), Joannes Stalpaert van der Wiele, Hemelrijck (“Heavenly Kingdom”; Delft, 1621), and Johan de Brune the Elder, Hemelsfeest (“Heaven’s Feast”; Middelburg, Netherlands, 1621). Interestingly, the poem by Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655) is added in manuscript as well: David copied a later edition of the same text, together with a number of other texts by Heinsius (a pupil of the Leiden professor Scaliger, whose poem Jacob copied). The manuscript section of the miscellany consists of 716 numbered pages, of which 574 have been inscribed with 297 texts by various authors in Dutch, with a few texts in French and a Latin note under one of the poems.29 The texts include mostly religious refrains, psalms, songs, poems, and plays. David copied not only traditional rhetoricians’ genres but also genres popular in his own time, such as sonnets and emblems by canonical authors, both male and female. Whenever he copied a text from a printed source, David gave careful bibliographical notes, including the title, year, part, and even page of the source (in the table of contents as well as with the texts themselves). Because of this accuracy, we are well informed about the books he had on his desk. He consulted two printed anthologies that reflect his taste for traditional as well as modern genres: Vlaerdings redenrijk-berch (“The Parnassus of Vlaardingen”; Amsterdam, 1617), containing the contributions to a rhetoricians’ literary contest in the town of Vlaardingen in 1616, and De Zeeusche Nachtegael (“The Nightingale of Zeeland”; Middelburg, Netherlands, 1623), an anthology of works by Renaissance poets from the province of Zeeland, among them Jacob Cats, who claimed that they were just as good as poets in Amsterdam.30 David also used a number of single-author publications containing Renaissance verse and emblems: Daniel Heinsius, Nederduytsche poemata (“Dutch Poems”; Amsterdam, 1616)31 and Lofsanck van Iesus Christus (“Hymn to Jesus Christ”; Amsterdam, 1616),32 Jacob Cats, Sinne- en Minnebeelden (“Images of Morality and Love”; Middelburg, 1618),33 Maechdenplicht (“Virgins’ Duty”; Middelburg, 1618),34 and Emblemata 29. One text in French is by Anna Maria van Schurman; the second is by David Beck; the third is from a French translation of Joseph Hall, the English bishop. There are two songs in French by P. C. Hooft. The text in Latin is a note under a poem by Simon Ruijtingius, a theologian from London, who wrote the poem in Amsterdam in 1632. The poem on friendship that Beck wrote for David de Moor has a Dutch dedication in Greek letters. This does not imply he knew Greek, only that he knew the Greek alphabet and was able to use it as a kind of cipher. 30. Schenkeveld, Dutch Literature, 18. 31. De Moor notes: “Dan. Heinsii nederduijtsche Poëmata / Pagina 33.” 32. De Moor used the 1622 edition: “dan. Heinsij Lofsang van Iesus Christus den / eenigen ende eeuwigen Sone Godts, gedrukt t’Am- / steldam bij Willem Iansz. Blaeu, inde vergulde / Zonnewyser anno 1622. pag.a. 112. in octavo.” 33. De Moor notes: “Anna Roemers sonnet, gestelt voor ’t / Boek Iacobi Catzij, genaemt Sin ende Minne- / beelden. Folio ****2. / ” 34. De Moor notes: “Maechden Plicht Jacobi Catsij fol.o 2.” 480 nelleke moser (reprint of Sinne- and Minnebeelden, between 1624 and 1632?),35 and P. C. Hooft, Emblemata Amatoria (“Love Emblems”; Amsterdam, 1611).36 Finally, he copied a number of songs from three different volumes of a book of musical scores for lute by Gabriel Bataille (Airs de différents autheurs, mis en tablature de luth par Gabriel Bataille; Paris, 1608–14).37 Other texts in the collection seem to have been copied from manuscript sources. This is most certainly the case when David writes a marginal note indicating that words were crossed out, omitted, or illegible, or when the text was never published in print at all. It is likely that manuscript sources were used for a number of texts by Abraham de Koning, Anna Roemers Visscher, and P. C. Hooft, and for all texts by David and Hendrik Beck, Simeon Ruijting, Samuel van Swol, Anna Maria van Schurman, and Suffridus Sixtinus. Three of these authors are strongly represented in David’s collection: he copied no fewer than 146 poems by the celebrated woman writer Anna Roemers Visscher; thirty-four poems by the schoolmaster, calligrapher, and social author David Beck; and twelve poems and five complete plays by the bookseller and playwright Abraham de Koning. These three authors have been central to earlier publications on David de Moor’s miscellany, partly because it contains the only extant copies of some of their texts.38 Each of the three authors also reflects a particular social or institutional bond of David de Moor: his ties with the local rhetoricians, his family connections, and his acquaintances within the Amsterdam literary and mercantile elite. David’s ties with the local rhetoricians are represented by Abraham de Koning (1588–1619). De Koning was an Antwerp playwright and bookseller who had fled to the northern part of the Netherlands and joined Het Wit Lavendel, the chamber of rhetoric in Amsterdam where immigrants from the south associated. David copied several plays and poems by de Koning into his miscellany. The poems often refer to special occasions in the chamber of Het Wit Lavendel, such as the death of their “prince,” New Year’s Day, or a literary contest. It is not clear why an individual like de Moor would copy the text of entire plays. It is interesting to note that he systematically 35. De Moor notes: “I. C. Emblemata.” On the difficulty of dating this edition: Jacob Cats, Sinne- en minnebeelden. Studie-uitgave met inleiding en commentaar, ed. Hans Luijten, 3 vols. (The Hague, 1996), 3:32. 36. De Moor notes: “Extract uijt de Emblemata van / P.C. Hooft, drost tot Muyden Pa 103 / Sang. Wijse: Esprits qui / souspirez, &c.” 37. De Moor notes: “Premier livre des airs mis sur le luth par Gabriel Bataille fol.66,” “Quatriesme livre des Airs mis sur le luth par Gabriel Bataille. Fol. 2[5],” and “Cincquiesme livre des Airs mis sur le luth par Gabriel Bataille. Fol. 37.” 38. Early studies of de Moor’s collection include: Gedichten van Anna Roemers Visscher, ed. Fr. Kossmann (The Hague, 1925); W. M. H. Hummelen, Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama 1500–ca. 1620 (Assen, the Netherlands, 1968), 136–39; R. Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, “Anna Roemers en Geertruid Gordon over bruiloftskleren,” in Klinkend boeket: Studies over renaissancesonnetten voor Marijke Spies, ed. Henk Duits, Arie Jan Gelderblom, and Mieke B. Smits-Veldt (Hilversum, the Netherlands, 1994), 67–70; Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven; Blaak, Geletterde levens; Moser, “Poezijlust en vriendenliefd”; N. Moser, “Vroegmoderne Nederlandse manuscriptcultuur in diachroon en internationaal perspectief: van blinde vlek tot multifocale glazen,” in neerlandistiek.nl 2007 (http://www.neerlandistiek.nl/07.09d/). two early modern dutch readers 481 underlined the lines of certain characters in his transcription of one play, which might indicate that he performed those parts on stage or in a private performance.39 It is possible that de Moor knew de Koning personally—there is at least one more link between the two outside the miscellany. The 1618 edition of de Koning’s tragedy Achab contains a laudatory poem by de Moor. On this occasion he used his version of his father’s motto to sign the poem, “’Tis verloren gewasschen,” together with his own signature, “D. Moor.”40 The importance of David de Moor’s family roots is reflected in the poems written by David Beck (1594–1634). Beck was born in Cologne; lived in Emmerich from around 1612 to 1617; and then moved to The Hague, where he lived from 1617 to 1625 and was the master of the French school. He probably came to the Netherlands for religious reasons: in his work he professes strong Calvinist and antipapist sentiments.41 From Beck’s diary for the year 1624 we learn that he was introduced to Bernardt and David de Moor by an old friend of his from Emmerich, Bernardt Ruyssenbergh, who was a nephew of Elisabeth Ruyssenbergh and so Bernardt and David de Moor’s cousin.42 Beck also describes David and Bernardt de Moor’s visit to him, when they read poems from his “large book,” a holograph collection of Beck’s own verse.43 Beck provided de Moor with copies of his own work, which de Moor could choose from a catalogue that Beck had compiled especially for this purpose. In addition to psalm translations, a translation of the Song of Songs, and a series of poems for Beck’s deceased wife, David de Moor asked for copies of Beck’s poems in support of Frederick of Bohemia and Prince Maurits. Such poems reflected not only a political but also a religious stance, so the request might place both de Moor and Beck in CounterRemonstrant circles. During the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–21), a controversy developed among Protestants in the Republic that involved religious as well as political factors. Two factions within the Reformed Church opposed one another. The Remonstrants were in favor of the concept of free will, believing that it was up to man to accept the grace that God offered him. The Counter-Remonstrants, by contrast, adhered to the doctrine of predestination, believing that man’s salvation depended solely upon God’s election. This controversy was paralleled by a political conflict between Prince Maurits of Nassau (1567–1625), stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, and the Grand Pensionary Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, who represented the States of Holland, the 39. See for example, pp. 62–65, 70–74, 81, 86–88, 101–2, and 120. 40. F. C. van Boheemen and Th. C. J. van der Heijden, Retoricaal Memoriaal: Bronnen voor de geschiedenis van de Hollandse rederijkerskamers van de middeleeuwen tot het begin van de achttiende eeuw (Delft, the Netherlands, 1999), 97. 41. C. G. N. de Vooys, “Een lijfpoëet van Prins Maurits,” Oud-Holland 37 (1919): 177–88; Fr. Kossmann, “David Beck: Een Haagsch dichter onder Maurits,” Oud-Holland 39 (1921): 76–85. 42. Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven, 264; Irma Thoen, Strategic Affection? Gift Exchange in SeventeenthCentury Holland (Amsterdam, 2006), 31. Bernardt Ruyssenbergh compiled a manuscript miscellany as well; see J. C. Arens, “De rederijker Bernard Ruyssenbergh uit Emmerik,” De nieuwe taalgids 54 (1961): 252–57. 43. Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven, 256–57; Blaak, Geletterde levens, 89–90. See also Ezell, Social Authorship, 21–44, on manuscript volumes similar to David Beck’s created by English “social” authors. 482 nelleke moser governing body of the Republic’s dominant province. Maurits allied himself with the Counter-Remonstrants, sharing their wish to continue the battle against the Spanish, whereas Van Oldenbarneveldt and the Remonstrants were in favor of making peace.44 Thus, by choosing laudatory poems on Maurits, de Moor reveals himself as supportive of the Counter-Remonstrant faction. De Moor did not have to make do with texts that had already been written by Beck; he could also ask for new poems. At least one poem (on King David) was made to order by David Beck for David de Moor. In addition to his own texts, Beck provided de Moor with texts by other authors as well, such as the emblems of Georgette de Montenay. David de Moor had links not only with other immigrants but also with the Amsterdam literary elite, which is represented in his miscellany by the renowned female poet Anna Roemers Visscher (1583–1651). As has been stated above, de Moor’s manuscript miscellany contains many of Visscher’s texts. Some of these were specimens of her social poetry taken from printed collections, as David de Moor himself indicates: the Poemata, edited by Daniel Heinsius, the Zeeusche Nachtegael, and a volume of emblems edited by Jacob Cats. De Moor must have copied the others, many of which were psalm translations, from manuscript sources. This is corroborated by the diary of David Beck. Beck records his visit to David de Moor’s house in Amsterdam, where he was shown paintings and various writings in manuscript, including sermons, music books, and many unpublished poems and psalms by Visscher.45 It is unclear how David de Moor managed to get hold of the manuscripts he copied. There is no evidence that he had a personal connection with Visscher.46 The intermediary from whom David de Moor procured these texts might have been the merchant Rombout Jacobsz.: among the texts by Visscher that de Moor copied was one she had engraved on a drinking glass when she was visiting Jacobsz.; de Moor could have known Jacobsz. through business.47 Professional connections were as important to David de Moor as friends and family when it came to procuring poetry. The example of Rombout Jacobsz. was not the only case where a mercantile connection of David de Moor might have served as an intermediary for literary texts, nor was it the only time that David used an artifact as a source for a text instead of a printed volume or a manuscript. Two poems in David’s collection were written for the Amsterdam merchant Abraham Alewijn (1607–1679). One is a distichon written by Anna Maria van Schurman on a glass of Abraham Alewijn. The other poem, written by Simeon Ruijting, was applied on the woodwork in Alewijn’s house.48 The habit of writing texts on beams, posts, and floors goes back to 44. Schenkeveld, Dutch Literature, 7–8. 45. Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven, 19, 257; Blaak, Geletterde levens, 90. 46. Schenkeveld, “Anna Roemers,” 67–68. 47. Marie-Christine Engels, Merchants, Interlopers, Seamen, and Corsairs: The ‘Flemish’ Community in Livorno and Genoa 1615–1635 (Hilversum, the Netherlands, 1997), 159. 48. The house is mentioned in Zandvliet, De 250 rijksten, 171. two early modern dutch readers 483 the Middle Ages.49 It is plausible that de Moor saw these texts on a visit to Alewijn, because (as noted above) his brother Bernardt was employed by Abraham’s father, Dirk Alewijn.50 This connection, in turn, may have led to his copying a total of fifteen poems by Simeon Ruijting, who was a vicar from a family of Flemish fugitives. Ruijting’s father was born in London from parents who had fled from Ghent (Flanders) to Norwich before 1573. Another example of a poem that was probably seen at an acquaintance’s house, rather than in a printed or written book, is an anonymous verse, originally written under a map of Greenland (the map is not included in the miscellany), that voices a complaint by whales. This theme fits in with a number of departure songs for sailors leaving on voyages abroad, which David copied as well, and which can be linked to the travel accounts of discovery voyages and trade missions that his brother Bernardt included in his manuscript. Whether he knew them personally or not, de Moor notes those connected with the works he copied with meticulous care. There are only eight poems in his entire collection that do not carry the name of an author or intermediary. The same care went into the copying of the texts. De Moor proves to be a very responsible, scrupulous scribe. He carefully describes the layout of the original source when he cannot reproduce or copy it, so that others might imagine what the original looked like (in case of refined calligraphy or the pictura of an emblem). David even copies the marginal glosses from his source texts. This should make us aware of the complex status of marginal notes in miscellanies: they may not be made by the person who copied the text, even if they are in his or her handwriting. The same goes for the catchwords that David uses occasionally, just as his father did. Moreover, he not only copies the corrections he found in his source text but also the passages that were crossed out, adding a note that “this stanza was crossed out.” Thus, de Moor provides the future reader with the rejected reading as well as with the alternative the author preferred. The same care is taken with the marginal notes in his own manuscript. Some of these were cut off when the volume was bound, but in those cases new pieces of paper have been pasted onto the margin and the notes recopied. De Moor sometimes expresses doubts about the accuracy of his source. In those cases he does not alter the text (as far as we can tell), but instead adds his suggestions and corrections, respecting the integrity of the original source much as a modern editor would do. Like his father, David sometimes suggests alternative readings, for example “O Lord” instead of “O Heaven.” When he notices that something went wrong with the order of the stanzas in a poem, he simply adds his observation instead of changing the order. For example, in the middle of a dialogue poem on the Song of Songs, when it should be the bride’s turn to speak, he writes: “seventh stanza, I say eight; bridegroom, I say bride.” He also adds suggestions for a 49. Herman Pleij, Het gevleugelde woord: Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur 1400–1560 (Amsterdam, 2007), 16–17; Mark A. Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Zwolle, the Netherlands, 2002), 91. 50. Beck, Spiegel van zijn leven, 19; Zandvliet, De 250 rijksten, 329. 484 nelleke moser melody to which a song might be sung, copying the musical notes of the melody on a separate leaf or adding a cross-reference to a different page in his manuscript. On the one hand, David’s attitude as a scribe may be a sign of growing philological awareness, influenced by a humanist approach to texts. In the sixteenth century, accurate references to sources and authors were rare in literary texts. Occasionally the important classical sources were mentioned, but not less familiar classical references, contemporary sources, or historiographical works. Moreover, part of the literary “game” for the attentive reader was puzzling out unidentified sources.51 One of the first examples of an author who did carefully list all the authors he drew upon is G. J. Vossius, who cited four hundred authors in his edition of Institutiones oratoriae from 1609. Following this example in the vernacular, in 1612 a poem by Roemer Visscher (the father of Anna Roemers Visscher) was published with a list of names of classical and contemporary authors referenced.52 On the other hand, David’s accuracy might have been a consequence of his profession as an accountant. He kept strict records of the books he consulted, something he presumably was used to doing in his professional life as well. Collecting and copying texts may be viewed as a form of accountancy. These practices were linked in various ways. Those who studied the commercial arts at school were taught elementary accounting as well as writing.53 The two tasks of copying verse and keeping accounts of household affairs were sometimes done by the same person.54 The layout of columns and cross-references in accounting books is imitated in commonplace books.55 Finally, manuscript miscellanies could contain household accounts, business accounts, calculations, and biographical data as well as literary texts.56 Manuscript miscellanies might be seen as bookkeeping tools for tracking social and cultural capital, just as diaries have been described as tools that account for social capital.57 In sum, David’s miscellany is varied: he collects rhetoricians’ literature and Renaissance texts, drama and lyric, print and manuscript verse. He collects some social verse but is primarily interested in texts on religious themes. His appetite for psalm translations and texts that support Prince Maurits place him in Calvinist, CounterRemonstrant circles. The texts in David’s collection show his ties to professional and cultural circles as well as to his family roots: although he was born in the northern Netherlands and had settled permanently in Amsterdam, he still cherished his connections with his parents’ background. Counted in pages, the renowned woman poet Anna Roemer Visscher from Amsterdam, the immigrant playwright Abraham 51. Jeroen Jansen, Imitatio: Literaire navolging (imitatio auctorum) in de Europese letterkunde van de renaissance (1500–1700) (Hilversum, the Netherlands, 2008), 399–400, 408–9, 425–28. 52. Ibid., 427. 53. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 29. 54. Ezell, Social Authorship, 34. 55. Barbara Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 6. 56. Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 19; Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 146, 168; Adam Smyth, “Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682: ‘store-house[s] of wit,’” Criticism 42 (2000), 15–84 at 154. 57. Thoen, Strategic Affection?, 28, 33. two early modern dutch readers 485 de Koning from Antwerp, and the immigrant teacher David Beck from Emmerich fill the larger part of David de Moor’s manuscript. Professional connections with other merchants might have been important channels for procuring texts. That he cherishes these contacts as well as the texts they supply is shown by the care and attention he pays to his transcriptions and attributions. This care might be explained in terms of his profession as an accountant. Instead of financial capital, though, he is keeping a strict record of his cultural and social capital. There are many similarities between Jacob’s and David’s collections. Both compilers have a clear taste for religious, reform-minded literature in the vernacular, but neither eschews a witty or amorous poem or song, or an occasional text in Latin or French. Where Jacob includes a text by the learned Scaliger, David copies texts by Scaliger’s pupil Heinsius. Both collections contain many rhetoricians’ texts, and it is very likely that both father and son had connections with a local chamber of rhetoric. Both collections reflect the local, social, and professional connections of their compilers— connections that were often tied to their family roots. Yet, there are striking differences too. The first thing that catches the eye when looking at the two volumes is the difference in size, format, and binding. The father used a small notebook in vellum, while the son had his collection bound in a large volume of gilt leather. The outward appearance of each volume indicates how it would be read: a small, versatile volume for the itinerant father to carry in his pocket; a sizeable, impressive volume that the son could display in his office in the heart of wealthy Amsterdam. David’s collection is not only much larger than his father’s, but it is also much more varied. He includes drama, texts by female authors, printed works, and fashionable Renaissance genres like the emblem and sonnet. Perhaps the most revealing difference between these compilers is how each treats sources. Jacob’s attitude toward the original texts is completely different from David’s: he actively rewrites other texts and hardly ever refers to the authors and sources he uses, whereas he displays his own identity on various occasions. David, while remaining completely anonymous himself, strictly preserves the integrity of the original texts and gives full references—at least when he deals with printed sources and texts copied from objects and buildings. He seems to attach a different value to printed and manuscript originals, as his separate indexes suggest. David’s accuracy in mentioning his sources may fit into a more humanist, philological approach to sources in the Renaissance, but it may also be related to David’s profession as an accountant and a merchant. An Anglo-Dutch Comparison In his study on the manuscript circulation of texts, H. R. Woudhuysen suggests that a comparative approach “might well provide clues for the student of English manuscripts.”58 Comparative research, however, is not without difficulties. A fundamental 58. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 7. 486 nelleke moser problem mentioned by Woudhuysen is the fact that the results of a comparison “would always be subject to doubts about how similar were authorial, scribal, or commercial habits in one country compared to another.”59 This issue of comparability is also mentioned by Margaret Ezell when discussing authorship, print culture, and copyright in early modern England. She rightly notes that because of the differences in book trade and copyright law, “a European model does not necessarily mesh well with the conditions of authorship in Britain.”60 British models of manuscript culture, then, may not apply to the conditions of readership and manuscript transmission on the Continent. Different literary backgrounds, different historical circumstances, and different social and institutional structures might have affected how people read and collected texts in manuscript in different countries. Instead of considering these factors as an impediment, however, I would rather see them as the object of research. In this section, I will make a first attempt at comparing these different conditions and the manuscript miscellanies that resulted from them, in order to take away at least some of the doubts about how similar or different the habits in various countries were. I thus hope to sharpen the view on specific characteristics of manuscript culture in both countries as they are shaped by different social and institutional contexts. Before embarking on a comparison of the two cultures on the basis of the de Moor notebooks, we must first ask: are these texts representative of Dutch manuscript miscellanies of the period? That is itself not an easy question to answer. As Woudhuysen has remarked of English collections, “it is hard to generalize about the verse miscellanies produced between about 1570 and 1640, because each one bears the marks of its individual compiler or compilers and because so many must have been lost.”61 The same goes for Dutch miscellanies. It is even harder to give a general outline because the study of early modern manuscript culture in the Low Countries is just beginning to develop. I have consulted a couple dozen manuscript miscellanies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it seems from what we know so far that Jacob’s appropriative attitude toward texts is more common than David’s. Like Jacob, most compilers tend to mention their own names, as the owners of their collections, rather than the names of the authors of the texts they transcribe; and there are many examples of compilers who rewrote original texts. I am aware of no scribe who is as scrupulous as David in mentioning his sources and reproducing his original accurately. I know of only one other example of a scribe who, like David, deliberately reproduced readings he knew to be incorrect: the anonymous compiler who gave a separate, correct reading of an entire refrain after noting, following the wrong version, “this is incorrect, but the correct version follows.”62 David’s accuracy is not necessarily a sign of a new era, for later in the seventeenth century, readers still left out the names of the authors when copying texts (for example, Margareta Mels in 1669; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 79 L 15). Although the collections of individual readers mostly contain lyri- 59. Ibid. 60. Ezell, Social Authorship, 15. 61. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 157. 62. British Library, MS Sloane 1174, fols. 69v, 115v–117r. two early modern dutch readers 487 cal verse, David is not the only amateur who copied entire plays: Adriaen Wils from Antwerp did so, too, between 1599 and 1630.63 The main conclusion that can be drawn from the available information is that many manuscript miscellanies indeed originated from rhetoricians’ circles, and that many of those active in these circles were, like the de Moors, immigrants from the southern Netherlands. This close relationship between Dutch manuscript culture and the middle-class chambers of rhetoric, which the de Moor manuscripts reflect, provides the strongest contrast with the English situation. Comparing the features of the de Moor collections to those of manuscript miscellanies that were put together in England, it turns out that the main difference lies not so much in how compilers collected, treated, and presented the texts, or in the social status of the compilers, but instead in the institutional circumstances in which the manuscripts were created and which is reflected in the contents of the manuscripts. The two national traditions do share many features. Different members of the same family sometimes compiled and owned manuscript miscellanies in England, as in the Netherlands. In England, manuscript collections like these were often handed from father to son (or daughter), just as libraries were inherited through paternal lineage.64 Sometimes more than one generation contributed to such a collection, charting changing tastes and poetic developments within one manuscript over time, as is the case with the Arundel Harington manuscript (ca. 1540–1600).65 Sometimes a child would begin a new miscellany, like Sir Henry Rainsford (1599–1641), who was born around the same time as David de Moor and who compiled his own manuscript miscellany in the 1630s, just like his father had done before him.66 The sizes and dates of the two Dutch miscellanies fit in perfectly with contemporary fashion in England as well. The smaller pocket-size notebooks, such as the one Jacob de Moor used, are usually linked to travelers, scholars, and students.67 Larger, more attractive notebooks were introduced in the seventeenth century, when manuscript miscellanies in general flourished (the 1620s and 1630s are commonly regarded as “the golden age” of manuscript verse compilation in England).68 According to Arthur Marotti, the volumes in quarto and folio “would have made handsome presents and served the needs of more deliberate and serious collectors of texts.”69 They were not meant to be carried around but to be read in a study.70 The difference between father and son in citing their 63. F. Puts, “De codex Adriaen Wils,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 108 (1992): 223–55. 64. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 31, 40–48, 50, 69; Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 172; Ezell, Social Authorship, 27. 65. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 163–64; Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 62–63. 66. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 172. It would be worthwhile to compare these two miscellanies on another occasion. 67. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 25; Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 16. 68. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 32, 61, 68–69 (with a reference to Peter Beal, who first spoke of “the golden age of MS verse compilation”); Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 8, 157–58, 165–67; Ezell, Social Authorship, 23; Smyth, “Printed Miscellanies,” 174. 69. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 16. 70. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 9. 488 nelleke moser sources is also in line with developments in authorial ascriptions in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in England. According to Marotti, “the earlier manuscript collections, especially those compiled before the 1630s, were less likely to ascribe lyrics to specific poets, and even when authorship was cited, it was usually by means of initials.”71 There is, however, an “increase in authorial ascriptions in manuscript anthologizing from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries.” Marotti suggests that this is “a reaction to the foregrounding of authorship in print culture.”72 When it comes to how compilers handle the texts they copy, Jacob seems to be more in line than David with what was customary among English readers and compilers. Scribes like David, who clearly wished to preserve the integrity of the original text, are rare in England as well as the Netherlands.73 A single example of a notation comparable to David de Moor’s comes from a printed anthology to which a reader added alternative sequences of stanza numbers in the margins and even an explanation for doing so, noting that “The written order is confused.”74 The tendency to freely alter and recombine texts, as in Jacob’s manuscript, on the other hand, is a common feature of English manuscript literary culture. In her study on social authorship, Margaret Ezell has pointed out that “a reader in a manuscript culture, with a fluid text constantly being subject to change, is responsible for participating in literary production as well as consumption; it is interesting to note here, too, how often the role of the reader of manuscript text becomes conflated with the roles of editing, correcting, or copying the text and extending its circulation of readers.”75 The same textual fluidity and the overlapping roles of reader, scribe, editor, and author in the person of the reader is mentioned by other scholars of the English context.76 When texts were copied in manuscript, lines or stanzas could be added, or “different poems were conflated in whole or in part to create new poetic units.”77 It might be tempting to conclude that the primary contrast between the traditions was one of class: that the upper-middle-class circuit of the rhetoricians was the Dutch alternative to an elite culture associated with English manuscript culture. Much influential scholarship on England has in fact focused on the elite worlds of court and aristocratic households, the Inns of Court, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and upper-class country families.78 Printed verse anthologies borrowed this highbrow 71. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 329, and see also 14–15, 46–48, 52; Smyth, “Printed Miscellanies,” 156. 72. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 329. It has also been suggested that the name of a famous author might lend prestige to the collection (Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 160; Smyth, “Printed Miscellanies,” 169–70). 73. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 163; Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 4. 74. Smyth, “Printed Miscellanies,” 159. 75. Ezell, Social Authorship, 40. 76. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 135–36, 207; Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 15–16; Smyth, “Printed Miscellanies,” 153, 159, 172–73, 176. 77. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 141–42. 78. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 30–48, 63, 149, 176, 179, 181–82; Arthur F. Marotti, “The Cultural and Textual Importance of Folger MS V.a.89,” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 11 (2002): 70–92 at 71; Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 157, 163–64, 167, 171; Elizabeth Heale, “Songs, Sonnets and Auto- two early modern dutch readers 489 image of exclusivity to present themselves as a means by which readers could gain access to that elite world.79 Marotti admits that some members of the middle class kept manuscript miscellanies, noting among them a pharmacist or the son of a naturalized Dutch merchant in London, but he sees this as a sign of “the downward reach of this cultural practice.” He considers a “decidedly middle-class florilegium” as “the bourgeois counterpart of the poetical anthologies of the upper class” and concludes by saying that “the compiler’s tastes reflect the religious, moral, and utilitarian biases of his class, but the practice of this grocer-florilegist is one borrowed from his social superiors.”80 There is, however, growing evidence for strong manuscript traditions at various levels of English society. Julia Boffey has demonstrated that the practice of compiling a manuscript miscellany was widespread as early as the late middle ages and early sixteenth century. She concludes that the middle-class Londoners, mainly merchants, who compiled these miscellanies were “a much more literate and educated section of society than has often been supposed.”81 Margaret Ezell too has criticized the view of the manuscript transmission of texts as a strictly aristocratic activity; instead, she demonstrates that authors of all kinds would continue to publish in manuscript until well into the eighteenth century.82 So in class terms, English manuscript compilers were not necessarily that different from their Dutch counterparts. On both sides of the North Sea, merchants and grocers, physicians and pharmacists compiled manuscript miscellanies. An important feature of English manuscript studies is the view that reading and writing manuscript texts were “acts of textual sociability” or “social textuality.”83 This implies that readers (and authors) were exchanging, collecting, and copying texts in manuscript in order to be part of a community, to create social bonds.84 We have seen that Jacob and David de Moor might have used their manuscripts for the same reasons—to connect with their family history as well as with their new social circles. What does seem to be completely different, though, is the institutional context in which readers in the two countries were copying texts and compiling manuscript miscellanies. biography: Self-Representation in Sixteenth-Century Verse Miscellanies,” Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (New York, 2000), 59–75 at 60. Spanish manuscripts too have long been considered part of a sociabilidad cerrada, a closed social circuit (see Fernando Bouza, Corre manuscrito: Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro [Madrid, 2001], 21, 48–56). 79. Randall Louis Anderson, “‘The Merit of a Manuscript Poem’: The Case for Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poet. 85,” Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. A. F. Marotti and M. D. Bristol (Columbus, Ohio, 2000), 127–71 at 127; Heale, “Songs, Sonnets and Autobiography,” 61; Smyth, “Printed Miscellanies,” 152, 154. 80. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 31, 42–44. 81. Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, U.K., 1985), 125; quoted in Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 42. 82. Ezell, Social Authorship, 9–11, 17, 40, 42. 83. Ibid., 40; Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 135–208. 84. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), 5; Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 30; Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 157; Ezell, Social Authorship, 42. 490 nelleke moser As we have seen, Jacob and David de Moor were typical of the circle that patronized the chambers of rhetoric and dominated Dutch manuscript culture: Jacob as a migrant, David as a merchant. The participation of migrants and merchants in manuscript culture is, as noted above, not solely a Dutch phenomenon but can be found in England as well. Middle-class institutions parallel to the chambers of rhetoric appear, however, to be absent from English manuscript culture. Both de Moors frequented the local chambers of rhetoric to meet other lovers of literature and to exchange texts. The chambers of rhetoric served as institutions that cherished and stimulated the transmission of texts in manuscript, thus offering an ideal environment for textual sociability. They bridged the gap between medieval manuscript culture and early modern manuscript culture. What can be gleaned from this comparison between early modern reading and copying in the Low Countries and in England, and how can this give clues that might be useful to students of Dutch and English manuscript culture? The case of Jacob and David de Moor highlights a number of characteristics attached to upper-middle-class readers and their manuscript miscellanies in the Dutch Republic. Many of these are quite similar to what we know of their English counterparts, who shared their appropriative attitude toward texts and used commonplace books in similar ways, as means of establishing and maintaining cultural status and social networks. But much of the English scholarship has focused on elite readers and institutions, leaving our picture of middle-class manuscript culture in England, and the institutions that supported it, less well developed. To extend the comparison started here, and to understand more fully the effect that the chambers of rhetoric had on shaping Dutch manuscript culture, we need to focus further on similar readers in England. This essay was written as part of the research project The Dynamics of Poetics: Socio-Cultural Dimensions of Early Modern Manuscript Miscellanies and Printed Anthologies (VU University Amsterdam / Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, http://www.nwo.nl/ projecten.nsf/pages/losearch). nelleke moser teaches at VU University Amsterdam and specializes in early modern Dutch literature. She has published on late medieval and early modern poetic theory, women writers, and the reception of Portuguese and Spanish literature in the Netherlands. Her current postdoctoral research focuses on literary collections in manuscript and print.