‘Dees kennisse zuldy te kope vinnen’. Liedcultuur en de waarde van ‘know how’ in de vroegmoderne Republiek

Abstract

This article investigates the vast corpus of approximately 100,000 songs produced in the Low Countries between 1500-1800 from a new angle, taking knowledge production as its point of departure. Can the seemingly endless representations of scenes of daily life we find in these songs be regarded as stimuli for the development of 'know how' (expertise), and what were the dynamics between the book market, songs, and the production of knowledge? This last question is addressed using the approximately 44,000 songs for the young as a case study.