Abstract
In the first half of the 16th century, extensive collections of songs were compiled in various cities in the Netherlands. The Antwerp Songbook of 1544, which was published in print, is the best known and most comprehensive. This suggests that the focus of song culture was to be found in Antwerp. However, the Zutphen Songbook (Weimar, HAAB, Cod. Oct. 146) and the Venlo-Geldrische Hausbuch (Brussels, KBR, II 144) show that there was also a rich song culture in the eastern regions. This raises questions about the centers of Netherlandish song culture at the beginning of the 16th century, about the interaction between the different territories and about the motives of the various collectors.
Antwerp was one of the most important centres of book production in Europe in the 16th century.1 In this city several iconic and comprehensive song collections were printed. The Antwerps Liedboek (Antwerp Songbook) of 1544 is the best known and most sizeable of these. This easily suggests that the centre of song culture in the Low Countries can be situated in the western regions. This impression is reinforced because many of the later printed collections of songs go back to the Antwerps Liedboek. This collection thus acquired the status of the iconic anthology of Dutch love song. But the survival of manuscripts such as the Zutphen Songbook (Weimar, HAAB, Cod. Oct. 146) and the Venlo-Geldrische Hausbuch (Brussels, KBR, II 144) clearly shows that a diverse song culture also existed in the eastern regions of the Low Countries. It is precisely the comparison of the situation in Antwerp with that in the region of Meuse, Rhine and IJssel that raises questions about the centres of production and transmission of Dutch song in the 16th century, the interaction between these regions, the relationship between printed collections and handwritten sources, and the strategies and motives of the individual compilators and collectors. But before I look in more detail at the sources central to this article, I first briefly sketch the significance of the Lower Rhine region as a Kulturlandschaft [Cultural landscape] and the early song tradition in this region.
1 Songs between Meuse and Rhine
The borders of the Dutch-speaking regions are less sharply drawn in the Middle Ages than in our time. The demarcation with the area where the French language was spoken seems fairly clear (although it is not without complications either) but establishing the boundaries between the Dutch- and German-speaking areas is almost impossible. The eastern variants of Dutch, Low German and the Middle Franconian variants of German cannot be sharply delineated. There is a gradual change, a language continuum that extended over a large area, from the North Sea and the Baltic in the North to the Alps in the South. In the very same region of the big rivers Rhine, Meuse and IJssel, there was also considerable cultural and political continuity. Helmut Tervooren has convincingly shown in several publications, most emphatically in Van der Masen tot op den Rijn, that the Meuse-Rhine area was a coherent Kulturlandschaft, which was also very cohesive politically and territorially.2 For this reason, the study of Netherlandish song of the Middle Ages and the 16th century has for decades had an eye for the tradition in the Lower Rhine region.3 It was already clear from earlier research by Frank Willaert and others that in the thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, song in this region had quite a character of its own and was influential far beyond the Lower Rhine region.4 Around 1400, the picture is determined by several sizeable collections, all of which testify to the great susceptibility to German Minnesang and Spruchdichtung.5 The Niederrheinische Liederhandschrift (Leipzig, UB, Rep. II. 70a), which dates from shortly before 1400, contains 56 separate stanzas without musical notation.6 Several of them are by well-known courtly poets such as Frauenlob, Konrad von Würzburg, Reinmar von Zweter, Walter von der Vogelweide. This collection shows that the High German courtly lyric spread as far as the Lower Rhine and finds, as Tervooren writes: “noch einmal ein Sammelbecken”7 [flow together once again]. The Haagse Liederenhandschrift (The Hague Song Manuscript; The Hague, KB, 128 E 2), also from around 1400, likewise includes texts from many different places. In addition to songs and poems that must have been written in the Lower Rhine region, it contains texts from western regions, as well as works by Walter von der Vogelweide, Freidank, Reinmar and Frauenlob.8 Very noteworthy are Bruder Hansens Marienlieder, a collection of Marian poems written around 1400 by Brother Hans.9 They are basically seven prayers to Mary in which the believer asks her for intercession before God. The poems have attracted attention mainly because of the richness of language and imagery. The poet, possibly a Lower Rhenish merchant who later in life had entered a monastery, is a true virtuoso. In his poems, he mentions and quotes Wolfram von Eschenbach, Neidhart von Reuenthal, Rennewart, Meister Boppe and Frauenlob, and further drew on the works of Rumzland and Konrad von Würzburg, among others. They are written in the language of the Lower Rhine, but with strong High-German influences, not because his audience is to be found in the south but to emphasize the connection to the tradition of Middle High German lyric poetry. That receptive Lower Rhine area, meanwhile, was also influential far beyond its own region. In the mid-14th century, Heinrich der Teichner, active in what is now Austria, sighed:
‘The old song (meant the courtly Minnesang) has been totally forgotten, even though they were so beautiful and carefully crafted, both the melody and the words. The whole world has become Rhenish and unsteady, and lives in disorder.’
He must be referring to the music and especially the poetic forms – refrain songs like the virelai-ballad – from the north-west of the German language and culture that became popular in southern regions. The diverse and prolific song culture in the Lower Rhine region did not end after 1400. Even in the mid-fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth century, song tradition is rich in this region and a clear coherence can be observed on both sides of the present-day national borders. It is a coherence that did not arise because of the existence of influential printed collections, or because of the dominant position of an urban center (as Antwerp was). Rather, it is the shared culture and intense social contacts between communities where songs were created and sung that contributed to that cohesion.
In the 15th century, the tradition of religious songs dominates. Here, the influence of the Devotia Moderna and other religious reform movements is evident.11 For a long time, devotional songs were studied within national philologies, but it is now clear that we have important song sources on both sides of today’s national borders that draw from a very same reservoir.12 Important collections studied for more than 100 years are from the Prince-Bishopric Utrecht (Berlin SBB-PK mgo 190)13, from Zwolle (Berlin SBB-PK mgo 185)14, and from Brabant (Vienna ÖNB SN 12875).15 Related collections from the German side of the border are songbooks from Werden, the Münsterland (Hs Tirs), and the Lower Rhine (Anna von Köln; Songbook by Kathryn van Hatzfelt).16 The repertoire in these collections is largely concordant. In the Werden manuscript, only three of the 23 songs are unique; in the Zwolle manuscript, only four of the 94 songs have survived only in this source. Franz-Joseph Holznagel rightly speaks of “eine Gruppe locker miteinander verbundener Corpora aus dem Rhein-Maas-Gebiet und aus Niederdeutschland”17 [a group of loosely connected corpora from the Rhine-Meuse region and from Lower Germany].
Many of these songs were published in print in the sixteenth century. The Devoot ende profitelick Boecxken published in Antwerp in 1539 is one of the most comprehensive and best-known collections. It contains 259 songs brought together by the printer or people commissioned by him from different parts of the Dutch-speaking world. That it was printed in Antwerp may give the impression that its repertoire comes exclusively from the western part of the Low Countries. This is, as outlined above, certainly not the case.18
The relevance of this songbook is not only related to the large collection of devotional songs it contains. Moreover, together with the Souterliedekens, a psalm translation published in 1540,19 it is the main resource on the melodies of many secular songs. Both songbooks feature musical notation. Since many of the devotional songs and psalm settings are actually contrafacts, i.e. new songs written to known melodies, we find in this volume the melodies to which not only those new devotional songs can be sung, but which originally correspond to the secular songs handed down in the Antwerp songbook, and in several other manuscript song collections.20
Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the transmission of secular songs expands. Initially primarily in a small number of manuscripts with polyphonic compositions, but increasingly also in songbooks:
kleinere Kollektionen der spätmittealterlichen Liedkunst, die (mit oder ohne Melodien) als selbstständige Handschriften (zumeist eher kleineren Formates) oder als klar abgegrenzte Teilabschnitte von Sammelhandschriften angelegt werden und in der Regel keinen Verfassernamen tradieren.21
‘Smaller collections of late medieval song, which (with or without melodies) are created as independent manuscripts (usually of smaller format) or as clearly delineated sections of composite manuscripts and generally do not bear the name of an author.’
An early example is the fragmentarily preserved Manuscript Borgloon, to be dated in the last quarter of the 15th century and originating from the area around Borgloon in Belgian Limburg, some thirty kilometres west of Maastricht.22 It contains thirteen (fragments of) songs. Often this manuscript provides the earliest source from which a song is known, and some of them are called “Neuwe liet” or “Carmen nova.” Others have been handed down earlier in German and Dutch sources, such as “Hoe lude sanc die leeraer opder sinnen.”23 One of the songs, “Trueren ghij sijt […]”, has no heading. It also appears in the 1544 Antwerp songbook and is referred to there as “Nieu Liedeken.”24
2 Een schoon Liedekens boeck, an Iconic Collection from Antwerp
The Antwerps Liedboek [Antwerp Songbook] is without doubt the most important Netherlandish source of secular songs from the first half of the sixteenth century. It is a small booklet, in oblong format. The first edition must have been printed around 1538 but has not been preserved. The only surviving copy the third edition printed in 1544 by Jan Roulans in Antwerp, is kept in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. It contains 221 songs, not provided with musical notation or tune indications.25 The full title of the 1544 edition reads: Een schoon Liedekens boeck in den welcken ghy in vinden sult Veelderhande liedekens, oude ende nyeuwe, om droefheyt ende melancolie te verdrijuen. Item hier sijn noch toeghedaen meer dan veertichderhande nyeuwe liedekens die in gheen ander liedekensboecken en staen. Hier achteraen vervolghende26 [A lovely Songbook in which you will find many songs, old and new, to banish sadness and melancholy. There are added more than forty new songs that are not in any other songbook. They follow hereafter]. As can be seen from this title, the 1544 reprint was provided with new songs added at the end of the book with the express purpose to keep the reprinted book up-to-date. This must also have been the case in the earlier reprints. The more than forty songs added relate remarkably often about recent historical events and erotic scenes, subjects which the publisher apparently assumed would attract a new audience.27
Love songs predominate in this collection, and they often reflect modern notions of relationships between lovers requiring mutual consent.28 But the volume also contains foolish songs and a sizeable group of history songs. Most of the songs have headings. Sometimes these indicate what they are about, such as “Een liedeken van sint Jacob”, “Een amoreus liedeken”, or: “Van Thijsken vanden schilde.”29 But a significant group of songs have less specific, quasi meaningless captions such as “An old song” or “A new song.” Research by Kees Vellekoop has shown that these captions nevertheless are meaningful. They fairly accurate indicate the age of the songs: old songs were written before about 1520, new songs thereafter.30 Among the new songs, there are many with characteristics indicating an origin from circles of rederijkers (rhetoricians), a literary movement dominant in Dutch literature between 1450 and 1550, and especially in the western and central Low Countries: Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Zeeland.31 In the eastern part of the Low Countries, rederijkers and their influence are virtually absent.
In the Antwerp Songbook, seemingly dominated by songs from the western part of the Dutch-speaking region, the eastern Low Countries also play a clear role. The songbook contains numerous songs that can be linked to the Lower Rhine region and the German-speaking areas by origin or subject matter. These include a notable group of ballads that were widely distributed in the late Middle Ages and especially in the German-speaking areas. “Vanden Leeraer opter tinnen”, a dialogue between a teacher and a young man, already appears in German sources in the early fifteenth century,32 and “Van heer Danielken” goes back to the centuries old stories about Tannhäuser and has German examples from the fifteenth century.33 The song “Vanden ouden Hillebrant” has by far the earliest antecedents and is a distant descendant of the ninth-century Old German Hildebrandslied.34
While the ballads do have German roots but are completely rendered into the Dutch language, there are also songs whose very language shows a German origin. Song 60, “Een oudt liedeken”, begins with the verses: “Het worp een knaep so heimelike dingen / als voor eens borgers camerlijn.”35 In Dutch, it seems to say that a young man threw away secret things (“worp” is a form of “werpen” meaning to throw), but anyone who is aware that “worp” has a German origin and comes from “werben” knows that the boy was trying to seduce a girl. Interestingly, this song also contains a reference to the area from which it presumably originated. The last stanza is about the person who first sang this song – “Die dit liedekin eerstwerf heft gesonghen” – about whom it is reported: “Uut Nederlant is hi gecomen.” This “Nederlant” refers not to the current national state but to “das Niderlant”, the Lower Rhine region.36 Many songs that were current between Rhine and Meuse were well known in Antwerp. It is therefore no coincidence that the Rhine is by far the most frequently mentioned river in this songbook, not the Scheldt on which Antwerp is located.37
The Lower Rhine is also present in the songbook in another way. It includes nine songs dealing with Guelders (Gelre) and Juliers (Jülich), territories with which the Habsburgs were involved in a protracted struggle.38 In 1543, Guelders and Juliers were finally defeated by the armies of Charles V, but not long before, the Guelders troops led by Maarten van Rossum had raided Brabant and besieged Antwerp.39 In Antwerp the sentiments against the troops and people from Guelders were strong, and just that 1544 edition of the Antwerp Songbook contains numerous songs recalling the fierce battle, and sharply ridiculing the opponents from Guelders and Juliers. The region from which several very popular songs originated was at the same time its archenemy. Vicious mockery songs ridiculed the language of its inhabitants and characterised the inhabitants themselves as obtuse and overbearing braggarts.
3 Collections from the East
The Antwerp Songbook, together with the Devoot ende profitelick boexcken of 1539, strongly determined the modern perception of Dutch song of the first half of the sixteenth century. These printed little books found wide distribution, were reprinted, and were followed as examples by later printers in the 16th and 17th centuries.40 Both songbooks attracted the attention of researchers early on and were documented and studied as early as the nineteenth century,41 and text editions of these medieval songbooks appeared in 1855 and 1889, respectively.42 They gained the status of iconic anthologies and have thus to a large extent influenced the direction of Dutch song research. Yet these printed works were not the only songbooks circulating in the sixteenth century. On the contrary. While the printed book gradually gained in importance, handwritten sources still played a dominant role in textual transmission until the middle of the sixteenth century. If we want to get a good impression of the repertoire at that time, and if we want to know how the song culture functioned, the manuscripts are of great significance.43 We find extensive collections of religious songs almost everywhere in the Dutch-speaking area.44 Manuscripts with secular songs are often limited in size in the western territories of Flanders, Holland and Brabant while their number is relatively small. Instead, several important and extensive sources can be found in the eastern part of the Low Countries, located around the current border with Germany. In what follows, I focus on those secular songs from the region of Meuse, Rhine and IJssel. To begin with, I briefly introduce two of these collections, and subsequently look at how the repertoire in these collections relates to the repertoire in the Antwerp songbook.
The Zutphen Songbook, a small book written on paper shortly after 1537, contains 48 songs and dozens of proverbs.45 It originates, as its name indicates, from Zutphen, a prosperous mercantile town situated on the river IJssel in the Duchy of Guelders. The collection includes songs of various origins. Some of them also appear in the Antwerp Songbook, but the repertoire from the Lower Rhine and eastern regions is dominant. Nineteen songs have survived only in this source. Like in the Antwerp Songbook love songs set the tone: songs of sorrow and despair, of desire and hubris, and sometimes songs in which love is sung rather harmoniously. In one, the lover sees himself as an owl who has had to leave his branch – place of rest offered by the beloved:
‘Me poor little owl, my thoughts go in all different ways. At night I fly alone and miserable through the forest.’
The self-mockery makes the song remarkably frivolous among the lamentations of love, and the little owl seems ultimately reconciled to his fate, if only things go well with his lost lover: “Gott mott den nost behuden” [May God protect the branch].
How any such song functioned is open to question. Based on ownership notes, it can be situated within the upper middle class at Zutphen. Did the owner read it silently in his residence or was it perhaps sung, assuming the melody was known? In fact, it was not noted, while tune indications are absent. The last 16 songs in this manuscript offer more clues to its performance. “Hup Reykenns lieder” is written above the lyrics: they are dance songs to accompany a round dance. They must have been intended for a festive context.
Another little book, also on paper, is different in character and larger in size. This book, in a recent edition named Handschrift Serrure [Serrure Manuscript], was compiled around 1550, and expanded later, probably around 1600.47 Language and content point to a town in the most southern part of Guelders (Overkwartier). Presumably it was made in Venlo or Geldern, although it could also have come from Roermond. The frequent use of Latin shows that the owner of this manuscript mastered that language. It could have been a student or (former) pupil of a Latin school. The content is much more varied than in the manuscript from Zutphen. It contains proverbs, recipes, foolish texts, calendar poems, mockery texts and more than sixty songs, from pious prayers to sad laments of love, from a praise to Mary to foolish and obscene songs. There is the song of a young man who meets a girl in Venlo: “Te Venloe all in dye goyde statt Ontmoet ick eyn jonfrouwe schoen”48 [In the pleasant town of Venlo I met a beautiful girl]. She asks him to play her lute, and after several unsuccessful attempts, he succeeds and the girl is satisfied; she does not want to let him go. The double entendre of this song fits into the atmosphere of jest and inversion from student circles and Shrovetide societies. Most obviously carnivalesque is the Narratio de terra suaviter viventium [Story of the land of the sweetly living], a poem about the land of Cockaigne, where food is abundant and no one has to work.49 But though the foolish texts in this collection have attracted much attention in recent research, they certainly do not alone characterise this collection. The content of this manuscript is too diverse to qualify it as a repertoire manuscript of a Shrovetide society.
Whether these texts were also performed publicly is unknown though quite a few are well suited to this. The great variety of texts means there is a song or a poem for nearly every occasion. But more likely we are dealing with a personal collection of someone who wrote down whatever was available to him. Helmut Tervooren called it Venloer-Geldrisches Hausbuch and thus emphasised the personal and private character of this collection.50
4 Exchange and Border Traffic
The two collections just discussed date from the years in which the Antwerp Songbook was printed and during which the songs from that popular book must have spread rapidly. Several of those songs also appear in both manuscript songbooks. In the Zutphen Songbook these are ten, in the Venloer-Geldrisches Hausbuch twelve.
Of the ten songs the Zutphen manuscript has in common with the Antwerp Songbook, five are referred to there as “nieuw liedeken” [new song]. In those cases, it is conceivable that the Zutphen compiler used the Antwerp Songbook as a source, obviously not the third edition from 1544, but perhaps an earlier edition. The first edition of the songbook must be dated after 1537: one of the songs, “Vanden storm van Munster”, recounts the Anabaptist revolt in the Westphalian city of Münster that took place in 1534 and the printer, Jan Roulans, was registered as a burgher of Antwerp on 20 October 1537.51 Since the Zutphen manuscript was compiled in 1537–1538, texts from the Antwerp Songbook may therefore have been used. But anyone comparing the five texts in the manuscript with the parallel texts in the printed book will see clear differences. As an example, I give here the first and last stanza of song 21 from the Zutphen songbook, followed by the version of this same song in the Antwerp songbook:
The two versions are clearly different and the language in both texts reflects the local tongue of respectively Zutphen and Antwerp. Moreover, we can establish that there are several variants in the words used. Especially the last word in both versions deserves a closer look. In the Zutphen Songbook, there is mention of water from a spring, exactly as in the Niederrheinische Liederhandschrift von 1574, another manuscript from the Lower Rhine region.54 In the Antwerp songbook, the text mentions water from the “donnen.” A reference, it seems, to a river. The Danube has been thought of, although the editors of the Antwerp songbook suspected it to be the Donge, a small river that has its source not very far from Antwerp.55 Which of the two versions is original is difficult to determine, but surely the version in the Zutphen Songbook is more in line with a regional Lower Rhine tradition than the text in the Antwerp Songbook.
We see a similar pattern for the other songs found in both songbooks: here, too, the Zutphen versions differ markedly from those from Antwerp. In any case, the Zutphen compiler did not copy his texts directly from the printed booklet. Rather, the variants point to a process of oral tradition. It is important to note that the Zutphen versions do resemble versions of the same songs in manuscripts circulating in the eastern regions.56
The Zutphen compiler used songs that circulated in the region where he lived. Among the last seventeen songs in his collection, there are no less than thirteen that appear only in this collection, including the aforementioned dance songs. It is not inconceivable that these had a much smaller distribution and originated in the compiler’s immediate neighbourhood.
The Venloer-Geldrisches Hausbuch is more varied in content than the Zutphen Songbook and it contains many more texts. Among its more than 200 entries, there are 62 songs.57 And here, too, there are songs with very different origin. The number of parallels with the Antwerp Songbook is smaller in the Hausbuch than in the Zutphen Songbook, and only two of those twelve songs belong to the “new songs” in the Antwerp Songbook. They appear in the last section of the Hausbuch, the part that dates from the late 16th century.
The manuscript opens with a section with a series of ten songs, all known from the major collections of devotional songs (already discussed above). This is followed by a section with 33 songs, of which 19 only appear here. The other 14 in this part of the manuscript have often only few parallels, sometimes with the Antwerp Songbook (“oude liedekens”), slightly more often with Lower Rhenish sources. A third section holds 11 songs that draw heavily on the Lower Rhenish repertoire. The same is the case for the songs in the last section which must have been added half a century later. No fewer than six of these eight songs are also in the Zutphen Songbook, while another four have parallels with the Darfelder Liederhandschrift, a manuscript that will be discussed below.
The two song collections discussed here are strongly rooted in their own region. They are distinctly private in character and contain unique repertoire that may have been known locally in Zutphen and Venlo or Geldern but found little further distribution. In addition, they contain numerous songs that frequently appear in manuscripts from the Rhine, Maas and IJssel region. Some of these also occur outside the Lower Rhine region, but altogether these sources testify to a powerful song culture in “Das Niderlant”, the region on both sides of the present day Dutch-German border.
5 Women’s Alba
The Darfelder Liederhandschrift does not originate from an urban and bourgeois milieu, but from noble circles.58 It is a women’s album, a manuscript type akin to the album amicorum that noble men carried with them and took with them on their travels.59 Women’s alba are collections in which noble ladies, who travelled less frequent than their male relatives, collected contributions from friends and relatives who came to visit them. The books contained adages, poems, drawings, riddles and songs, often accompanied by a personal wish and the date the contribution was noted. The owner of the album herself also added texts, sometimes before others wrote in it, and remarkably often these were songs. We refer to this as a women’s album with a songbook character. The Darfelder Liederhandschrift is an early example: it probably originated from Empel, a little village north of the Rhine, 20 kilometres east of Emmerich. It contains contributions written down between 1546 and 1565. Among those, there are 102 songs.
Women’s alba are common among the nobility in the eastern Netherlands, especially in Guelders and Overijssel. In Holland and Zeeland, however, they are much rarer. Because many women’s alba contain songs, they offer a good glimpse of the song culture to which this contribution focuses. These women’s alba, like the collections discussed above, are of a particularly private nature.
The first to give a good overview of women’s alba and their potential for research was Marie-Ange Delen in the 1989 article “Frauenalben als Quelle. Frauen und Adelskultur im 16. Jahrhundert.”60 In the following years, women’s alba were increasingly recognized as subjects of research. In the Repertorium van het Nederlandse Lied tot 1600,61 the alba have been fully utilized as a source of songs. And in 2017, Sophie Reinders published her comprehensive dissertation De mug en de kaars. Vriendenboekjes van adellijke vrouwen, 1575–1640 on women’s alba from the Low Countries and the noble culture within which they functioned.62 Yet they differ fundamentally from the songbooks discussed earlier. Not the owner of an album determined what was included in her book, but friends and relatives did: they wrote their contributions into the book of a noble lady themselves. In this way, the texts came from the intimate sphere of close acquaintances, giving the album a very personal character. The unwritten rules about who could and could not contribute were very strict. They are well mapped out in the dissertation by Sophie Reinders.63 Family members contributed even if they only came to visit rarely, but the personnel that surrounded the noblewomen were absent. The very tight network of family and close relatives apparent in these alba offers a glimpse into the personal relationships that guided the dissemination of these songs and other entries. The songs and other lyrics written down in the book formed, as it were, the identity assigned to the noble lady by the network that surrounded her.64
The Darfeld manuscript is rich in songs, which is also true of several other women’s alba, and many of these texts are to be found in other Lower Rhenish manuscripts as well.65 Among these are several songs that also appear in the Antwerp Songbook, but many of them represent quite different versions, as I showed earlier. As in the Zutphen Songbook, the question arises: if the songs were borrowed from that printed volume, as has been suggested, why do they differ so much from those versions? Was there indeed a direct influence from west to east?
6 Conclusion: East and West
In the first half of the sixteenth century, a rich song culture existed in the Low Countries with striking regional differences. The printed songbooks that appeared in printing metropolis Antwerp received for a long time the most attention. As a result, they have shaped the dominant narrative in literary history. But as I have shown above, the song culture in the east of the Dutch-speaking area is at least as rich and varied: it stands in the centuries-long tradition of the Lower Rhine Kulturlandschaft, is linked to German song culture and at the same time displays a powerful local cultural awareness. The numerous songs that appear only in manuscripts from the Lower Rhine region highlight this. Meanwhile, east and west are not separate systems: they were connected, and in saying that it is a question how these worlds met and not whether they did. I have published about it before and although I do not have a definitive answer, it is clear there was no one-way traffic, with the dominant Antwerp merely giving. Two examples, the first already discussed, show this clearly.
“Ich red ain maill inn ainen bosche dael”, song 21 in the Zutphen Songbook, came up for discussion earlier in this contribution. It is a ballad closely related to many older songs considering (narrative) structure and motifs used. A slightly different version can be found in the Antwerp Songbook and is marked there as a “nieu liedeken.” This might lead to the conclusion that an Antwerp poet made a new song modelled after the example of an old ballad, and that this new text in old style ended up in Zutphen. But isn’t it equally plausible that the ballad had been around longer in the Lower Rhine region, that an Antwerp collector got hold of it and reworked it to present it as a new song in the Antwerp Songbook? After all, hardly anyone in Antwerp was familiar with the popularity of this ballad in the Lower Rhine region.
At least that is how it must have gone with “Aůch manne, nv̊v̊ laett v schinnen stann”, song 11 in the Zutphen Songbook. The Antwerp Songbook contains a song that is clearly related to it, but in which the differences are also immediately apparent. In terms of content, the differences are minor: both are dawn songs in which the erotic togetherness of two lovers is disturbed by the watchman’s signal that the new day has arrived. The lover leaves his beloved. Moreover, there are several passages in which the two versions of this song are almost identical. But right from the first stanza, the two texts differ markedly from each other:
In the following stanzas, the differences stand out more than the similarities (see Appendix). The 2004 edition of the Antwerp Songbook states that the text of “Confoort confoort sonder verdrach” shows variants that originated by oral transmission. The authors also rightly note that in two eastern manuscripts a song has been preserved that shows similarities with this song.68 How these similarities can be explained and in what direction the influence must have taken place is not clear from the annotations in the text edition. There is every reason to believe that the eastern variant of this text is the original one. It’s the most coherent version and the song fits in very well with the German tradition of dawn songs. If there is any direct relationship between the two songs, it is quite possible that someone in the circles around the Antwerp printer knew the song “Aůch manne, nůů laett u schinnen stann” and adapted it so that it became a new song for the Antwerp audience. This case testifies therefore not of Antwerp influence in the Lower Rhine area, but rather shows how songs from the east, sometimes after thorough rewriting, found their place in the Antwerp repertoire in the sixteenth century.
These examples show that there was no one-way traffic and make a reasonable case for a more complex interaction between west and east than often thought. The area around Meuse, Rhine and IJssel was not merely the receiving side but often the giving one. The fact that we see this precisely in the Antwerp Songbook should not be surprising. Jan Roulans, the printer, was presumably actively involved in bringing together as many songs as possible. And he could have sent out agents, like the Antwerp printer Symon Cock did. He compiled the Devoot ende profitelick boecxken in the same years. In an extensive preface to his songbook Symon Cock writes that he collected many songs, “diemen tot deser tijt toe heeft connen ghevinden in prente oft in ghescrifte: uut diversche steden ende plaetsen bi een vergadert ende bi malcanderen ghevoecht”69 [which one has hitherto been able to find in print or in manuscript from various cities and places gathered and joined together].
Jan Roulans had commercial motives in publishing his songbook and he tried to find unknown songs for each new edition. In doing so, he could present existing songs as new because, after all, they were still unknown to the Antwerp public. His working method obviously differed from the compilers from Zutphen, Venlo, Geldern and Empel. They had different motives and they had another audience in mind. Therefore, they recorded what was circulating and being sung in their circles, what they valued and wanted to preserve, but also what was made new by themselves or by people in their surroundings. The song culture represented in the Lower Rhine sources is thus highly productive and much less receptive towards sources from Brabant and Flanders than the occurrence of Antwerp songs in eastern sources might suggest.
In the sixteenth century Low Countries, we encounter a diverse and prolific song culture. The differences between the tradition in the west, where the role of printers is manifest, and the tradition in the east, where there is a very distinct tradition apparent in a variety of very different manuscripts, adds to the diversity of song culture in the Low Countries and still raises plenty of questions for further research.
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Appendix
Citation: Daphnis 52, 3-4 (2024) ; 10.1163/18796583-05203006
Adam, 2014.
Tervooren, 2005: 15–26; Oosterman, 2007.
The deliberate choice to include the Meuse-Rhine region in the Repertorium van het Nederlandse lied tot 1600 is of considerable importance here: De Bruin/Oosterman, 2001.
See Willaert, 1989; Willaert, 1997a.
For example Willaert, 1997b; Tervooren, 2005: 130–133.
Tervooren, 2005: 143–145; Kornrumpf, 1987 (VL).
Tervooren, 2005: 144: “Offenbar ist die ‘Niederrheinische Handschrift’ eine Handschrift ‘op de grens’, wo die mittel- und oberdeutschen Sangspruchstöne […] noch einmal ein Sammelbecken finden.”
Willaert, 2021: 341–372.
Dreesen, 1981 (VL); Batts, 1963; Oosterman, 2007: 16–25.
Willaert, 1989; Willaert, 2021: 278–280.
A recent general introduction provides De Morrée, 2017: 18–28.
Van der Poel, 2011: 69.
Edition: Mertens/Van der Poel, 2013.
De Morrée, 2013. This collection until recently was considered to be of Deventer origin (and thus named ‘Deventer Songbook’) but De Morrée convincingly showed that the manuscript originated in Zwolle.
See Tervooren, 2005: 161–162. Edition: Bruning/Veldhuyzen/Wagenaar-Nolthenius, 1963.
For an overview, see Van der Poel, 2011: 68–71.
Holznagel, 2006: 365.
Van Dongen, 2011: 198–215. Edition: Scheurleer, 1889.
Grijp, 2001.
Grijp, 1991: 75–78; Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 41–45.
Holznagel, 2006: 364.
Biemans/Kienhorst, 2000.
Biemans/Kienhorst, 2000: 67–68.
Biemans/Kienhorst, 2000: 66.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 27–28.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 1: 5; vol. 2: 48–49.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 31.
De Morrée in press.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 1: 9 (Een amorous liedeken; song 1, but there are many other with this heading), 46 (Een liedeken van sint Jacob; song 9), 137 (Van Thijsken vanden schilde’; song 59).
Vellekoop, 1985.
Good introduction on rederijkers and their various roles in: Blondé/Boone/Van Bruaene, 2018.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 14 and 147–148.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 14 and 363–365.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 14 and 213–215.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 1: 140–141; vol. 2: 156–158.
Oosterman, 2007, 5; Tervooren, 2000.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 24.
Songs 177, 181, 182 (= 186), 190, 195, 197, 200, 211, 219.
Van Wissing, 1993.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 31–36.
Kalff, 1883: 644–646; Knuttel, 1906: 70–73.
Antwerpener Liederbuch vom Jahre 1544 (ed. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, 1855), Een devoot ende profitelijck boecxken (ed. Scheurleer, 1889).
Strijbosch, 2011; see also for an overview of the German situation, Holznagel, 2016.
Van der Poel, 2011.
Tervooren, 2005: 147–148; Houtsma, 2012. Edition: Leloux, 1985.
Leloux, 1985: 64–65; Houtsma, 2012: 271–280.
Langbroek/Roeleveld, 2023.
Langbroek/Roeleveld, 2023: fol. 82r–83r.
Pleij, 1997: 46–53, 69–73.
Tervooren, 2005: 149–150, 187–188.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 25.
Leloux, 1985: 108.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 1: 197.
Hs. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz: germ. Qu, 612; fol. 97r.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 216.
Oosterman, 2003: 51.
Most of the entries are songs and poems but some of them include a series of proverbs, aphorisms etc. See the introduction of Langbroek/Roeleveld, 2023; with an overview of the texts: https://serrure.mvn.huygens.knaw.nl/inleiding/4-overzicht-van-de-inhoud/.
Brednich, 1976; Oosterman, 2003: 41–42; Tervooren, 2005: 150–152.
Oosterman, 2004; Reinders, 2017.
Delen 1989.
De Bruin/Oosterman, 2001.
Reinders, 2017.
Reinders, 2017: 54–58; see also Reinders, 2016.
Strijbosch, 2016: 181–184.
Strijbosch, 2011: 83–86; Oosterman, 2004.
Leloux, 1985: 80–81.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 1: 34–35.
Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 74.
Scheurleer, 1889: 5–6; See for what is known about the way Jan Roulans brought the songs together: Van der Poel/Geirnaert/Joldersma/Oosterman/Grijp, 2004, vol. 2: 23–24.
