Twee schatkisten en hun erfenis: Dimensies van gender en age in de Nederlandse vroegmoderne letterkunde

Abstract

In the first volume of Nederlandse letterkunde, two prominent literary scholars in the field of early modern Dutch literature reflected on their monumental, innovative books, which were both published the year after (1997). Piet Buijnsters, first of all, presents his Bibliografie van Nederlandse school- en kinderboeken 1700-1800 (BNK), an extensive bibliography of all known children’s and school books published in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Riet Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, secondly, refers to Met en zonder Lauwerkrans, a sizeable anthology of women’s writing in the early modern Low Countries. In this essay, I discuss the impact of the Lauwerkrans and the BNK on 25 years of scholarship on early modern Dutch literature written by women as well as books addressed to young readers. I will argue that Buijnsters’s and Schenkeveld-van der Dussen’s call for text-analytical research on women’s and children’s literature is still urgent, as the abundance of recent scholarship was dedicated to the book market and the cultural-historical context of literature. I will also suggest a new line of research, in which the generally isolated dimensions of gender and age will be analysed in their continuous interaction.