Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, vol. 42, no. 3 (November 2018)

7 November 2018

DUTCH CROSSING : JOURNAL OF LOW COUNTRIES STUDIES

Volume 42, Number 3, November 2018

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ydtc20/42/3?nav=tocList

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial
Ulrich Tiedau

Stylometric Authorship Attribution for the Middle Dutch Mystical Tradition from Groenendaal
Mike Kestemont

The Re-education of Conversos in 17th Century Amsterdam
Tzvi Aryeh Benoff

‘Don’t Whine’: Sexuality, Adultery and Emancipation in Annie M. G. Schmidt and Harry Bannink’s Musical Heerlijk Duurt het Langst (1965)
Sanne Thierens

Conceptuality and Pragmatic Variation in Eighteenth-Century Dutch: The Distribution of the Genitive Case and its Competitors
Alan K. Scott

Address Choice in Dutch 2: Pragmatic Principles of Address Choice in Dutch
Roel Vismans

ABSTRACTS

Stylometric Authorship Attribution for the Middle Dutch Mystical Tradition from Groenendaal

Mike Kestemont

The well-known medieval Groenendaal monastery in Brabant has produced some of the finest examples of medieval Dutch literature, including Jan van Ruusbroec’s œuvre, who together with Anne Frank, remains the most frequently translated Dutch author of all time. Authorship attribution nevertheless remains a serious scholarly concern when it comes to the corpus of mystical texts from Groenendaal: because of the general proximity of the Groenendaal authors, their œuvres can be difficult to delineate. In this paper, I apply a quantitative, style-based methodology for authorship attribution to a sizable corpus of Groenendaal authors. These computational techniques are borrowed from the innovative field of stylometry in the Digital Humanities. I will discuss how the experimental results obtained are able to confirm and complement many of the authorship-related hypotheses developed in traditional Middle Dutch studies. Additionally, this work aims to demonstrate the exciting scholarly potential of ‘Distant Reading’ for the study of the rich textual heritage from the medieval Low Countries.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03096564.2016.1252077

The Re-education of Conversos in 17th Century Amsterdam

Tzvi Aryeh Benoff

During the early 17th Century, the Jewish community in Amsterdam had already developed a complex social infrastructure. As such, when Conversos from Spanish-Portuguese controlled territories moved into the community, their reintegration into a religious, Jewish society was shaped by the efforts of the various facets of the community: the Mahamad (ruling council), social organizations, and the rabbinate. Evidence of the activities of these bodies indicates that the Jewish community of Amsterdam did not conceptualize the re-education process as a specific issue or goal. As such, no special groups were formed to address the challenge as a unified whole. Instead, each of the aforementioned bodies merely focused on the repercussions of the need for education that fell under their respective sphere of influence. One of the results of this phenomenon was that certain issues, such as the practical observance of certain areas of Jewish law, were minimally addressed, if at all.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03096564.2017.1381389

‘Don’t Whine’: Sexuality, Adultery and Emancipation in Annie M. G. Schmidt and Harry Bannink’s Musical Heerlijk Duurt het Langst (1965)

Sanne Thierens

Annie M. G. Schmidt (1911–1995) and Harry Bannink (1929–1999) are regarded as the founders of the original Dutch musical, having started their tradition with the 1965 production Heerlijk Duurt Het Langst ('Lovely Lasts The Longest'; official English title: Pleasure Pays Off). With its simple story about a bored married couple with the husband cheating on his wife with his secretary, Heerlijk became a hit. The musical reveals an important expression of uncommonly liberal and progressive values in its treatment of topics such as emancipation, feminism, adultery and sexuality. This essay shows how Heerlijk illustrates the changing dynamics of the position of women and their relationship to sex in the light of the dawning sexual revolution, revealing the gaps between the characters of Marian, the contemporary housewife, Emma, the sexually liberated mistress, and Ido, the cheating patriarch. By placing Heerlijk’s plot and characters into its socio-political historical context, this essay offers an insight into the progressive sensibility of the Netherlands during the early 1960s, as the country prepared for the second feminist wave to arrive.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03096564.2018.1475046

Conceptuality and Pragmatic Variation in Eighteenth-Century Dutch: The Distribution of the Genitive Case and its Competitors

Alan K. Scott

This article explores the influence of conceptuality on the distribution of four semantically equivalent possession-marking constructions in eighteenth-century Dutch: the prestigious genitive case (which was promoted in the prescribed norm but was decreasing in productivity at the time), as well as the (relatively) novel van-construction, possessive -s and periphrastic possessive. Comparing the division of labour between these constructions in private ego-documents and texts that were produced for publication, and viewing the findings in the context of contemporary language users’ everyday lives, the article reveals and analyses a complex picture of pragmatic variation. Even in the most norm-accordant texts, the prescribed genitive is never dominant. The ego-documents, which did not adhere strictly to the norm, display not only a productive use of the genitive, but also a noticeable rarity of the conceptually oral periphrastic possessive construction. This is attributed to the writers’ schooling and their familiarity with the written norm. It is concluded that conceptuality alone was not decisive in eighteenth-century language use, but also the mediality of the communication.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03096564.2015.1136119

Address Choice in Dutch 2: Pragmatic Principles of Address Choice in Dutch

Roel Vismans

This paper reports on research into the use of Dutch forms of address (i.e. the second-person pronouns u and je/jij) among two generations in the Netherlands. Its main aim is to determine the factors behind different choices of address pronoun. It takes the model of address choice proposed by Clyne et al. in Language and Human Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and more specifically their concept of general pragmatic principles, as its theoretical inspiration. The research is based on a questionnaire in which respondents were asked which pronoun they used to address a variety of interlocutors. The questionnaire also asked respondents to reflect on their choice, especially if it was ambivalent (i.e. if they would address the same type of interlocutor sometimes with u and sometimes with je/jij). It is the qualitative analysis of these reflections that is the focus of this paper. Although there is some variation between the age groups’ evaluation of the importance of some principles, the article establishes (relative) age and familiarity as the leading principles in Dutch address choice. There is also a high level of meta-sociolinguistic awareness of the mechanisms behind address choice. The conclusion suggests a number of modest enhancements to Clyne et al.’s model of address choice.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03096564.2015.1136122