Dutch language & literature

The Sisterbook of Master Geert’s House contains the lives of sixty-four Sisters of the Common Life who died between 1398 and 1456. Founded as an alms-house for destitute women in 1374 by the end of the fourteenth century Master Geert’s House had become a home for women desiring to live a life of humility and penitence as well as in community of goods without vows. The Sisterbook was likely written sometime between 1460 and 1470 at a time when the religious fervour that had characterized the earlier Sisters had begun to wane. It was to incite the readers and hearers of the Sisterbook which would have been read in the refectory during mealtimes to imitate the earlier Sisters who are portrayed as outstanding examples of godliness and Sisters of the Common Life. The opening sentence of the Sisterbook succinctly sums up the author’s reason for writing it: ‘Here begin some edifying points about our earlier Sisters whose lives it behoves us to have before our eyes at all times for in their ways they were truly like a candle on a candlestick’ and who by implication could still illumine the way for her own generation of Sisters. The first foundation of Sisters of the Common Life Master Geert’s House became the ‘mother’ house of numerous other houses in the Low Countries and Germany directly as well as indirectly and served as an inspiration for others.

This book provides a study of the Sisterbook and its significance in the Devotio Moderna and late medieval female religiosity while the accompanying translation introduces this important source to an English audience.

The cultural and religious history from Antiquity through the Renaissance may be read through the lens of the rise and demise of auctoritates. Throughout this long period of about two millennia many historical persons have been considered as exceptionally authoritative. Obviously this authority derived from their personal achievements. But one does not become an authority on one’s own. In many cases the way an authority’s achievements were received and disseminated by their contemporaries and later generations was the determining factor in the construction of their authority. This volume focuses on the latter aspect: what are the mechanisms and strategies by which participants in intellectual life at large have shaped the authority of historical persons? On what basis why and how were some persons singled out above their peers as exceptional auctoritates and by which processes did this continue (or discontinue) over time? What imposed geographical or other limits on the development and expansion of a person’s auctoritas? Which circumstances led to the disintegration of the authority of persons previously considered to be authoritative? The case-studies in this volume reflect the dazzling variety of trajectories concerns actors and factors that contributed over a time span of two millennia to the fashioning of the postmortem and lasting authority of historical persons.

This collection of essays by international scholars focuses on the vernacular urban culture of the Chambers of Rhetoric in the Low Countries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Reflecting social religious and economic realities at a time of fundamental change the Rhetoricians’ plays also reveal a range of poetic and theatrical conventions that make them an important source of information both on practical stagecraft and on the role of theatre in the urban community as seen in their involvement in civic processions or the organization of drama competitions. The volume sets the Rhetoricians’ drama in the cultural life of the provinces of the Low Countries during a period dominated by ruling foreign dynasties: the Burgundian dukes and then the Habsburg dynasty most prominently the Emperor Charles V and his son King Philip II of Spain. It was a time of intense religious controversy which gave rise to debates both on and off stage. These debates far from damaging Rhetorician culture actually stimulated its activities and development to such an extent that Rhetoricians became representative voices for their time. The admixture of entertainment and education offered by the Chambers to their own members - and to a wider public - was one which though originating in a medieval context soon became linked with humanist and Renaissance thinking. This volume illustrates how as a consequence the Chambers of Rhetoric contributed to the development in the Low Countries of an increasingly articulate society.