Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Eerder verschenen, 2020

Around 1520, a group of settlers from the Low Countries arrived on the Danish island of Amager and quickly became one of the most successful agricultural communities in the country. Since the nineteenth century, the exact origin of these settlers has been the object of scholarly dispute with two positions: one that the settlers originated from Flanders and the other that they originated from Holland. This article outlines arguments for both positions. It then attempts to resolve the dispute by conducting a morphological and lexical analysis of the names of the first settlers. This analysis provides onomastic evidence that excludes the possibility that the settlers originated from Flanders and demonstrates that they most likely originated from the Holland region of West Frisia. This evidence thus supports the hypothesis, based on information in a sixteenth-century Hoorn city chronical, that the settlers originated from the municipality of Hoorn in West Frisia.

Making use of ideas and concepts from Barbara Cassin’s philosophy of translations and of l’histoire croisée, this essay explores the shared cultures of religious reading between the Dutch and French languages in the late medieval period. While religious literature disseminated in both Dutch and German has received a fair amount of attention in recent scholarship, religious and devotional texts that were available to readers in both Dutch and French have remained understudied. By providing an overview of the most important religious literature that was translated from French into Dutch and the other way around, and of texts originally composed in Latin in the Low Countries and translated into both vernacular languages, we argue that textual mobility between the two languages was frequent and reciprocal. Casestudies of two texts – Pierre Michault’s La Danse aux aveugles and Gerrit van der Goude’s Boexken vander Missen – further indicate that changes – or the lack thereof – in texts that moved between the two languages point to shared cultures of religious reading on equal terms.

In the preface to his neoclassical tragedy Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf (1774), Nicolaas Simon van Winter advocates for the gradual abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. He declares that he wrote this play in reaction to the brutal executions of African rebels after the nearly successful slave revolt in the Dutch colony of Berbice. The plot, however, centers around the enslavement of the Mexicans by Hernán Cortés in the early sixteenth century. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of ‘silencing’ the past (1995), this article explores the absence of the Dutch Atlantic in Monzongo. Van Winter’s choice to present enslaved Amerindians under a Spanish yoke, I will argue, is strongly connected to late-eighteenth-century ideas about suppression, the legitimacy of revolt, and ‘race’ in the Dutch Republic.

The so-called refugee crisis has triggered manifold responses in the field of European art and literature. This paper discusses two works by the Dutch writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer as examples of Dutch ‘refugee crisis literature’: his highly acclaimed novel La Superba (2013) and the short-story ‘Fatou yo’ that was published in the text-collection Gelukszoekers (2015), but that is actually also a fragment from the aforementioned novel. I start my comparative discussion of these two texts by exploring the challenges and pitfalls in representing refugees in literature more in general, focusing on the seemingly inescapable trope of refugee victimhood and the humanitarian and empathic mindset that ‘refugee crisis literature’ mostly requires from its reader. Then I embark on an analysis of the two texts and of the way in which, as I will demonstrate, the texts position and, ultimately, manipulate their empathic reader. I will argue that the discomfort that results from this manipulation is considerably more effective within the frame-work of La Superba than within the Gelukszoekers-collection, despite the latter’s explicitly activist agenda.

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