Introduction
In 1596, the first French-German dictionary was published in Nuremberg, not by a German or a Frenchman but by a migrant from Ghent whose native language was Dutch: Levinus Hulsius (1546–1606).Footnote 1 Hulsius acted as linguistic mediator between his second and third vernacular languages; he had learned French in the bilingual Low Countries and likely acquired German after seeking refuge in Germany. In the dedication to his dictionary, Hulsius justifies his role as a mediator between French and German: “Experience proves that no nation adopts the French language more than the Netherlanders.”Footnote 2
Importantly, Hulsius was not the only Netherlandish migrant who acted as a broker for French in a German-speaking context. Historical linguists have identified other cases where migrants from the southern Low Countries, who had left their homes during the Dutch Revolt and settled in Germany (temporarily or permanently) in the second half of the sixteenth century, played a significant role in the dissemination of the French language there. The Ghent schoolmaster Gerard de Vivre (d. before 1597) was responsible for the first printed German grammar book of French.Footnote 3 Together with fellow migrants, among them most prominently the Antwerp-born Peeter Heyns (1537–98), De Vivre created a considerable corpus of schoolbooks designed to teach French to native speakers of German.Footnote 4 Moreover, in their language manuals, these men presented novel French literary forms such as the sonnet to a German audience.
Until now, historians of the French and German languages have mostly examined the works by Hulsius, De Vivre, and Heyns individually, focusing on their relation to earlier grammars and dictionaries of French, their explanations of particular linguistic phenomena, or their reflection of contemporary language usage.Footnote 5 However, how these men benefited from their linguistic and literary skills as migrants in a new linguistic, cultural, religious, and social environment has remained unexplored. Their grammars and dictionaries provide a unique insight into early modern migrant writers and their ability to turn linguistic capital into financial and social gain.
There is a growing body of scholarly literature on early modern migration that moves beyond sociohistorical analyses on the size and makeup of migrant movements and potential push and pull factors to focus on migrant experiences and coping strategies. The role of language in migration, however, is still studied from a somewhat one-sided point of view, focusing on overcoming language barriers between migrants and the local population. Historical linguistics and sociolinguistics have examined, for instance, the impact of migrants’ languages on the language of their host country, or the transmission of their mother tongue to later generations.Footnote 6 Moving beyond these linguistic phenomena, historians like John Gallagher and Emilie Murphy have explored the linguistic experiences of early modern migrants and travelers, examining how moving to a linguistically different environment affected their daily lives.Footnote 7 Still, exactly how migrants could use their language proficiency and literary knowledge as a commodity remains unclear. As this article contends, multilingualism was (and is) an asset for migrants that they, under the right circumstances, can exploit. This study includes historical, linguistic, and literary considerations to map these circumstances and the ways in which migrants could leverage their language skills and have a positive impact on the linguistic and literary environment in their new home country.
Peter Burke has undertaken foundational work to bridge the gap between migration history and historical sociolinguistics. He describes early modern migrants as go-betweens who facilitated connections between languages and cultures.Footnote 8 Notably, Burke observes that many migrants secured employment in the language sector, acting as translators or language instructors. One well-known example is that of the many Huguenots who found work as French teachers.Footnote 9 Burke aptly characterizes these individuals as “skilled negotiators between languages and between cultures” who, through their knowledge of languages, “were trying to make a career out of their displacement.”Footnote 10 Using a term from applied linguistics, these migrants could be described as “linguistic entrepreneurs” who monetized their language proficiency.Footnote 11 Burke’s groundwork merits further exploration, as it touches upon a crucial aspect of the early modern migrant experience. While language differences are often seen as barriers to integration into the host society, they also presented opportunities for migrants to acquire professional and social advantages, granting them a form of agency in situations where they were not always fully in control.Footnote 12
Further scholarly effort is required to integrate literary history into the framework of (migration) history and linguistics: historians, historical sociolinguists, and literary historians often investigate closely related cases of historical language contact and multilingualism but rarely transcend disciplinary boundaries to connect related literary, historical, and linguistic phenomena or evolutions. When combined, these perspectives illuminate the pivotal but so far largely overlooked role played by Netherlandish migrants in disseminating both the French language and state-of-the-art French literature in Germany. Both, it follows, are fundamentally connected.
The case of the Netherlandish migrant community in Germany adds an important new perspective on literary and linguistic mediation, as these migrants did not negotiate between their native tongue and the local language. Instead, they capitalized on their proficiency in their second vernacular, French. In the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu, these migrants were aware of the linguistic market of their host country and, recognizing the demand for French language skills, they exploited their linguistic capital.Footnote 13 Hulsius’s remark that Netherlanders were excellent masters of French justified the fact that he taught a vernacular that was not his mother tongue. Burke’s characterization of migrant translators as go-betweens does not fully capture the particular use of multilingualism by Netherlandish migrants. The go-between, as defined by Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels, is a liminal figure, but these language-savvy migrants used their skills to create and assert a more central position for themselves: they showed off the fact that they brought new linguistic and literary knowledge to the host society.Footnote 14 The term broker, originally coined by anthropologists in the 1960s to describe individuals who take on active negotiating and mediating roles, seems more fitting.Footnote 15 Hulsius, De Vivre, and Heyns sold their knowledge of the French language and literature to the local population. Rather than merely occupying a middle ground between their home and host societies, these migrants acted as linguistic brokers.Footnote 16
This article concentrates on Hulsius, De Vivre, and Heyns in order to analyze the mediating role adopted by migrants from the southern Low Countries who introduced their German neighbors to the French language as well as French textual culture. By examining the paratexts of the works they published in Germany related to the French tongue, this study illustrates how migrants identified linguistic and cultural needs or niches in their new environment and capitalized on them. This article considers paratextual materials in light of their linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical context to uncover the strategies employed by these linguistic brokers. A comprehensive picture thus emerges of the crucial role played by Netherlandish migrants in disseminating the French language and literature in early modern Germany. Migrants from the Low Countries were responsible for creating the first French grammars and dictionaries for a German audience, pioneering the introduction of French Renaissance poetry in Germany, and facilitating the spread of French news and textual culture in a German-speaking context. Importantly, these linguistic skills were not offered freely, as they offered migrants financial, social, and potentially even political benefits. Linguistic capital proved to be a valuable source of agency for these early modern migrants. Many of the strategies employed by Hulsius, De Vivre, and Heyns were also accessible to other migrant communities. By identifying their brokering mechanisms, this article paves the way for further research into the use of linguistic capital by early modern migrants.
Linguistic encounters
During the 1560s, many migrants moved from the southern Low Countries to Germany as the persecution of Reformed practices intensified and the political and economic situation became fraught. De Vivre, for instance, moved from Ghent to Cologne in the early 1560s. He was probably able to bring or sell most of his possessions, but when he left, only a very small migrant community was present at Cologne. Subsequent waves of migration occurred in the 1580s, particularly after Antwerp, which had served as a stronghold for Protestants, was retaken by royal forces. Thousands of migrants moved east, mostly toward cities that maintained trade connections with the Low Countries, such as Frankfurt and Cologne, and where Netherlandish communities had been established over the previous decades.Footnote 17 Hulsius belonged to this second wave, arriving in Germany around 1585. He left most of his possessions behind in Ghent, where they were confiscated by Spanish forces.Footnote 18 He moved via Middelburg and Bremen to the small, new, largely Dutch-speaking migrant settlement of Frankenthal, where Hulsius had some personal connections. He later moved to the city of Nuremberg, which had a migrant community of moderate size and a reasonably lively cultural atmosphere, although less vibrant than Frankfurt or Cologne.Footnote 19 The migrant experiences of De Vivre and Hulsius were thus very different. The linguistic landscape encountered by Netherlandish migrants who settled in Germany during the second half of the sixteenth century differed significantly from that of their places of origin. This difference contributed to their acquisition of linguistic capital upon migrating.
A linguistic continuum existed between Dutch, Low German, and High German, facilitating communication between the migrant community and local German society.Footnote 20 Despite this shared Germanic foundation, considerable linguistic differences persisted depending on the region. For example, the local Low German dialects in Emden and Aachen, cities that maintained commercial ties with cities in the Low Countries and therefore attracted many migrants, were relatively close to Dutch dialects.Footnote 21 Nonetheless, a considerable portion of Netherlandish migrants chose destinations that were more remote and where the local High German dialect differed greatly from Dutch. An important example is Cologne, which had strong trade connections with Antwerp and a lively intellectual and cultural life.Footnote 22 Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam van Veen, who study the social realities and religious life of Netherlandish migrants in Germany, have observed that in cities where the linguistic differences between the migrants and their German neighbors were greater, migrant communities lived closer together in a specific part of town.Footnote 23 The language situation thus greatly impacted migrants’ lives and could be very different from one city to another.
Most migrants appear to have acquired some degree of German proficiency within a short matter of time, both passively and, in some cases, actively. A case in point is Passchier Goessens (d. after 1605), a French language teacher from Brussels. Around 1588, he settled in the free imperial city of Hamburg, where a dialect of Low German was spoken that would have been more familiar to a Dutch speaker than High German. By 1594, Goessens had authored a schoolbook on bookkeeping in German. Georg Schuppener, in a 2014 study, praised the quality of Goessens’s German.Footnote 24 The schoolmaster himself, however, repeated the modesty topos several times, asking for forgiveness in case he had “sometimes erred in the language,”Footnote 25 explaining “because it is my first work” and referring to his displaced state: “I was born a Netherlander,” now residing “here in exile.”Footnote 26 While Goessens might have received help from an editor or corrector for his German, what is clear is that he, within six years of arriving in Germany, seems to have felt confident enough in the language to publish a schoolbook.
In the southern Low Countries, covering roughly present-day Belgium and parts of Luxembourg and Northern France, French held an important role as a local, vernacular language alongside Dutch, and many native speakers of Dutch had some proficiency in French. Especially among middle- and higher-class individuals, irrespective of gender, who were active in mercantile or administrative milieux, knowledge of French was relatively common.Footnote 27 In Germany, knowledge of French was much less common, but no less valuable or appreciated. As argued by Irene Kelz, French served as a Bildungssprache, mostly restricted to the German aristocracy and the upper echelons of society.Footnote 28 Although commercial exchanges between French- and German-speaking cities had existed since the Middle Ages, formal opportunities to learn French were limited. Meanwhile, French was gaining importance throughout Europe as a lingua franca for trade and a cultural prestige language. The French language skills of the Netherlandish migrants, which had been so common in their homeland, were an important source of linguistic capital in Germany.
Of course, the extent to which migrants could capitalize on their language skills depended on their language proficiency and degree of literacy, as well as on their social and professional standing. Hulsius was, apparently, able to overcome the loss of most of his possessions by becoming a true language professional. Languages could, however, also provide opportunities for other professional groups, although these are difficult to assess due to a lack of written records. Around 7 percent of the Netherlandish migrant community of Cologne consisted of servants, many of whom probably worked for better-off migrant families.Footnote 29 It is difficult to gauge to what extent they were, for instance, tasked with cross-language negotiations on the market, or with language education for younger children in the household. Furthermore, many migrants were manual laborers who were, for the most part, active in the textile industry. The linguistic realities of early modern workshops remain obscure but could be very diverse.Footnote 30 Lastly, the migrant community counted many merchants who definitely benefited from any multilingual skills they had. A good knowledge of French gave them an advantage over German merchants who were likely less fluent in the language.
Multilingualism was one asset migrants from the Low Countries could use to carve out a place for themselves in their German host cities, and it could be combined with other strategies. The level of and paths to integration depended largely on the particular religious, social, and political situation in each of these cities. In cities that were more open toward Protestantism or religious diversity, such as Wesel and the free imperial cities of Nuremberg and Frankfurt, they often had slightly more opportunities to obtain citizenship, join local guilds, or operate outside of the existing guild structures than in a Catholic city such as Cologne.Footnote 31 Not all migrants wished to take these steps, however, as many hoped to return home at some point. Moreover, in their religious practices they remained somewhat segregated from local communities. It is therefore not surprising that very few of the first generation of migrants married a local, and that they maintained close ties with their brethren elsewhere in the diaspora by means of correspondence.Footnote 32 It is likely that some migrants did not see the need to learn the local dialect if they operated mainly within the migrant community. If they wanted to capitalize on their multilingualism, however, learning the local language was an important first step. To become a teacher of French, one first had to become a student of German.
French language lessons
The role of native speakers of Dutch in the education of French in Germany seems to differ from their role in England, which was also an important destination for Netherlandish migrants. In England, relatively few French language manuals were published by teachers from the Low Countries; there, Huguenot teachers, who were native speakers of French, seem to have held a stronger monopoly on French language instruction. A likely reason for the success of Netherlandish migrants in becoming French teachers in Germany resides in the ease with which they picked up the local German language, allowing them to teach local children as well as migrant children. Statements made by the migrant schoolmasters themselves suggest they welcomed a mix of pupils from the Netherlandish migrant community and local German children.Footnote 33 As has been mentioned, the High German dialect of Cologne differed considerably from De Vivre’s native Flemish, but the language difference would have been even greater for Hulsius when he moved to Nuremberg, located much further to the east. Apparently, De Vivre and Hulsius had picked up sufficient High German to be able to become linguistic intermediaries in their new towns. If they wanted to attract German children to their schools, however, they had to be very conscious about the way they presented themselves.
Netherlandish teachers of French in Germany seem to have been keenly aware of their special intermediary position and proudly highlighted the novelty of the linguistic services they offered to the German community. Claims of innovation were commonplace in the early modern period, but in this case they reflected reality. Netherlandish instructors of French had a clear view of the local market for French language education and observed a vacuum that they could fill. On the title page of his French-German dictionary, Hulsius explicitly and rightfully emphasized its innovative character: “Never before seen nor printed.”Footnote 34 Gerard de Vivre founded a school in Cologne around 1563, and claimed to be “the first who has shown the French language to the Germans.”Footnote 35 This hyperbolic statement needs some nuance. The Cologne city archives show that his fellow countryman Peter von Gent had beaten him to it some years prior, although his school did not last very long.Footnote 36 In Frankfurt, moreover, a Netherlander had opened a French school as early as 1554.Footnote 37 These Netherlandish migrants were among the first to offer French lessons within an institutional context in Germany, and De Vivre was the first to maintain a school in Cologne for an extended period of time.Footnote 38
Migrant teachers continued to survey the linguistic market during the length of their stay in Germany, and noticed shifts in the linguistic outlook and interests of the German population. De Vivre thus observed, in a French-German work from 1569:
This French language…before my arrival in this country, was so strange and unknown to the inhabitants, who saw virtually no use for it. Some were even so foolhardy as to disdain and vilify it. But as time brings change, they have started to understand the great usefulness that one or multiple languages, appropriately taught to the youth, can bring to a Republic.Footnote 39
Two decades later, in 1588, Peeter Heyns published a schoolbook containing sample dialogues in French and German in which he made a similar remark. Heyns had already fled to Cologne temporarily in 1568, where he kept in close contact with his colleague De Vivre.Footnote 40 He left his hometown of Antwerp definitively in 1585, and moved to Frankfurt. A few years after arriving in Germany, he noted a similar trend toward the appreciation of multilingualism, specifically focusing on French, as he explains in the dedication to his dialogue book:
Having for the last two years by experience learned, noble and very prudent Lords, that many in the German nation, and even some of you Lords, just as much as those in the Low Countries, start to take pleasure in having the French language taught to their children (without crossing the borders of their fatherland), the perfection of which they cannot well achieve without having some useful books.Footnote 41
Heyns’s observation is more specific than De Vivre’s, stating that there was a new trend of providing French lessons to the children of the upper classes. And none better to deliver this instruction and the accompanying textbooks than the Netherlanders, who were already so experienced in bridging the Romance-Germanic divide. Two decades later, Hulsius observed that the French language was becoming fully integrated, asserting that it was “lately very much used in these German lands.”Footnote 42
In addition to frequently invoking the novelty of the services they offered, the Netherlandish migrants also emphasized that teaching French to German native speakers was a difficult task because of the substantial differences between the two. De Vivre seems to have initiated this tradition, boasting about his success in running a French school in Germany, which before had seemed “a difficult thing, or even wholly impossible in this country.”Footnote 43 He later blames the linguistic disparities between the Germanic and Romance languages for this difficulty in the dedication to a 1574 dialogue book: “In my opinion, there is not a nation in all of Europe, to whom it is more difficult to teach this language, because of the great differences that exist between German and French.”Footnote 44 Hulsius echoes this sentiment, but focuses specifically on the phonetic aspects of the two tongues, writing in his dictionary: “the pronunciation of French [is], among all nations, the hardest for Germans.”Footnote 45
While the migrant language teachers thus presented French as difficult to Germans, Netherlanders were not thought to face the same problems. In early modern Europe, native speakers of Dutch were renowned not only for their ability to speak French but also for their reputation for easily learning other languages. Their multilingual skills were even the subject of proverbs: it was said that if you carried a Flemish man through Italy and France in a bag, he would have learned both languages upon returning.Footnote 46 According to a variant of this saying, a Fleming who had sailed down the Rhine a few times would be able to speak German.Footnote 47 Humanists with an interest in the Dutch language, such as Abraham Mylius (1563–1637) and Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519–73), further reflected on this multilingual reputation. Mylius likened those who spoke Dutch as their first language to “language sponges.”Footnote 48 Goropius Becanus posited a theory explaining these allegedly exceptional language abilities, suggesting that the Dutch tongue did not exhibit any extremes. It was the “golden mean of languages,” serving as a perfect linguistic middle ground between all other tongues.Footnote 49 The language-related activities of the Netherlandish migrant community in Germany thus provide a window into the supposed intermediary positioning of the Dutch language and the linguistic reputation of its native speakers.
De Vivre was acutely aware of his position as a migrant teaching a vernacular language that was not his mother tongue, and actively defended himself. In the dedication of his 1574 dialogue book, he directly addresses those who might question why “one who is not French, but a Fleming both of tongue and of birth, would dare to undertake creating colloquia and other things in the French language.”Footnote 50 He justifies his linguistic position as follows:
I know well, and do not doubt, that native Frenchmen and those of good judgment, will not take what I have done until now badly. Because I have not written anything on which natural Frenchmen and learned men would spend their time, as it only concerns material serving learners and children or young people. To them I have tried to give a desire and spark of love, that will incite and induce them to read books and authors that write more learnedly, and from which they can access the complete perfection of this French language.… I do not search for anything else but to recommend their language and make it blossom among people from foreign nations.Footnote 51
In this passage, De Vivre assumes a humble role as servant of the French tongue, aiming only to provide children with a basic understanding of the language so they could then explore more advanced French authors on their own. However, in the dedication to a schoolbook printed six years earlier, in 1568, De Vivre had adopted a more boastful tone, claiming that “those who have the patience to continue for only one year, and attend my school, have benefited more than some of those who, to the great expense of their parents, have spent two or three years in France or elsewhere for this same purpose.”Footnote 52 Where he later states that his aim is simply to teach the basics of French to German children, De Vivre had first claimed that he was able to achieve better results than an immersive language experience among native speakers. This shift in tone might have been due to negative remarks from French critics of his work.
Indeed, while De Vivre expressed confidence about his qualities as a linguistic intermediary and hoped that native French speakers would not take offense, reality proved different. Henri II Estienne (1528–98), member of a renowned family of linguistic scholars, criticized De Vivre’s knowledge of French in his 1582 treatise titled Hypomneses de Gallica Lingua (Notes on the French language):Footnote 53
For he himself teaches some things about French which are clearly pseudo-French, and indeed at the very threshold, or rather in the foundations [fundamentis] which are the threshold, he stumbles. Because he entitles one of his booklets Les fondamens de la langue françoise, even though the true common Frenchmen would not say Fondamens but Fondemens.Footnote 54
Attacking a spelling error in the title of De Vivre’s Fondaments de la langue francoise (Foundations of the French language, 1574), Estienne openly and directly points out De Vivre’s shortcomings, but without mentioning the name of the schoolmaster. He proceeded to list further mistakes made by De Vivre in this work, concluding with a warning: “Based on these [errors], let the Germans and the other peoples I mentioned learn that they should not easily trust anyone who claims to be a teacher of the French language. I do not think I need to give more examples to confirm this.”Footnote 55 Clearly, the linguistic mediation of Netherlandish migrant language instructors was not appreciated by all native speakers. Nevertheless, despite their evident shortcomings, their works continued to be reprinted and remained useful to the German nation. In De Vivre’s defense, it should be noted that just before Estienne’s critique of the Fondaments, he listed mistakes made by other grammarians, including Jean Garnier (d. 1574), Jean Pillot (ca. 1515–92), and Antoine Cauchie (ca. 1535–ca. 1600).Footnote 56 They all remain unnamed—it seems that Estienne did not want to attack them ad hominem. In any case, his critical eye did not spare native speakers either.
For Netherlandish migrants, publishing in and on the French language provided a welcome additional source of income in sometimes precarious financial situations, and publications also served as promotional material for their French schools. French-German printed works could convince German families to send their children to a migrant-run school. De Vivre, for instance, is presented as a “French schoolmaster” on the title pages of his works, and, in some cases, even the exact location of his school is given. His 1566 grammar introduces him as “Gerard du Vivier from Ghent, master of a French school in this city of Cologne, in front of the Franciscans”—that is, near the local Franciscan monastery.Footnote 57 Hulsius, whose first publication was not a French schoolbook but a work on geometry, presented himself as a “teacher of the French language in Nuremberg, imperial notary, lover of mathematics” on its title page.Footnote 58 The exact nature of his role as imperial notary remains unclear, but Hulsius consistently included the reference “not. imp.” until 1597.Footnote 59 Being a language teacher, a book seller, a translator, a lexicographer, and an imperial notary all in one, Hulsius is a clear example of a linguistic entrepreneur who exploited his language skills professionally. By emphasizing his multiple language activities on the title pages of his books, he consciously engages in a form of what Paul Cohen has termed linguistic self-fashioning—ascribing a certain status to himself by emphasizing his knowledge of languages.Footnote 60
De Vivre and Hulsius also frequently mention the Flemish city of Ghent, their shared place of origin, in their printed works. Hulsius, in his first book, signs his dedicatory epistle as “Levinus Hulsius, Flander.”Footnote 61 From 1596, he further specified his background as “von Gendt” or “Gandensem.” De Vivre’s printed books also often refer to him as “Gantois.” De Vivre and Hulsius did not conceal their roots, openly acknowledging their origins from a Dutch-speaking region rather than a French-speaking one. Mentioning Flanders and Ghent in the context of schoolbooks, particularly those designed for language education, could actually be a selling point. The educational system in the Low Countries had an excellent reputation, especially for language instruction, and language instructors from the Low Countries were highly esteemed.Footnote 62 By explicitly highlighting their Ghent origins, these schoolmasters effectively benefited from the good reputation of their city.
Mediating textual culture
Netherlandish migrants not only produced French educational texts, as previously discussed, but also edited, printed, and translated French texts authored by others. Scholars such as Michiel van Groesen and Johannes Müller have noted how, in the second half of the sixteenth century, various migrant printers from the Low Countries, including the prominent Theodor de Bry (1528–98), quickly assumed key positions in the German market by capitalizing on their language skills.Footnote 63 For instance, De Bry and others published French works in a German context, consciously considering the particular audience they reached through each language.Footnote 64
In a more general sense, the multilingual impact of migrants from the southern Low Countries on textual culture in early modern Germany is reflected in the proliferation of Dutch and French prints that started to appear after their arrival. This trend was particularly notable in the city of Cologne. A survey based on data from the Universal Short Title Catalogue reveals a substantial surge in printed works in both French and Dutch, as well as English, during the decade from 1560 to 1570 (see table 1 in appendix). This spike coincided with the arrival of the Duke of Alba (1507–82) in the Low Countries, which prompted many Netherlandish individuals to seek refuge in German territories. The arrival of French and English on the Cologne market went hand in hand with the influx of Netherlandish migrants, even though most of them spoke Dutch as their native language. The presence of French publications can be attributed to their bilingual background and to the local interest for French news and culture. Additionally, the documented increase of English prints can be traced partly to the fact that some Netherlandish migrants reached Germany via England. Furthermore, those who settled in Germany maintained close ties with fellow expatriates in England and occasionally printed clandestine English works to send back.Footnote 65
Cologne had already been an important printing center before the arrival of Netherlandish migrants, and this might have attracted some of them. For the local residents of Cologne, the influx of Netherlandish migrants ushered in a linguistic diversification of their everyday lives. A similar movement can be observed in Frankfurt, a reputable printing center and home of the famous Buchmesse. In the 1580s, when many Netherlandish migrants moved to the city, the number of French prints produced in Frankfurt increased considerably. In a city such as Wesel, which also welcomed many Netherlandish migrants, this effect is not visible: no French texts were published there between 1540 and 1620. It seems that the nature of cultural life in each German host city beckoned a certain type of migrant and influenced their professional developments. In culturally vibrant cities such as Cologne or Frankfurt, the arrival of Netherlandish migrants gave a multilingual boost, while cities with less cultural or intellectual activity benefited less from their presence in this arena.
Cornel Zwierlein has suggested that Netherlandish migrants might have been responsible for transmitting and disseminating French news through German printing centers, possibly via intermediaries in Antwerp.Footnote 66 He observed that, with the arrival of migrants from the southern Low Countries, there was a sudden increase in ephemeral publications recounting recent events in the kingdom of France. Many of these publications were direct translations of French prints. Among the thousands of Netherlandish migrants who were proficient in French, printers would have easily found individuals willing to work as freelance translators to earn extra income.
Despite the contemporaneous arrival of Netherlandish migrants and the emergence of French news prints in Germany, verifying the activities of freelancers remains challenging due to the scarcity of source materials explicitly identifying those responsible for translating such news prints. Yet, the career of Peeter Heyns provides a compelling clue in favor of the Netherlandish migrant community as a hub of French news translation. In 1588, the Frankfurt bookseller Paul Brachfeld (d. after 1601) began his career as a publisher by releasing a French-German schoolbook featuring model dialogues by Heyns.Footnote 67 The following year, Brachfeld and Heyns collaborated again, on a bilingual work explaining French conjugations to a German audience.Footnote 68 Soon after, Brachfeld shifted his attention away from educational works: he became known as a “current-events printer” with a particular focus on the French Wars of Religion.Footnote 69 Among the prints Brachfeld issued were several German translations of French news pamphlets.Footnote 70 As his first steps in book production were taken in collaboration with Heyns, who had previously worked as a freelance translator for Christophe Plantin (ca. 1520–89) in Antwerp before fleeing to Germany, it appears highly probable that Brachfeld enlisted a translator from the migrant community. In any case, he maintained connections with bilingual migrants, as he later published a work for Hulsius.Footnote 71
Entrepreneur Hulsius deserves further mention for astutely using his multilingual abilities to enhance the appeal of the works he published. In the prefaces and dedications of his German and Latin books on mathematics and geography, he insists very explicitly on his thorough understanding of the state-of-the-art knowledge in their respective fields. He presents lists of authors whose works he consulted in order to ensure the accuracy of the information he provides, and uses typographic techniques to make them stand out, such as highlighting his sources in the margins.Footnote 72 Some of his title pages even claim that the contents of these books have been “collated based on many trustworthy authors.”Footnote 73 Among the consulted texts are works in Latin and various vernacular languages, including French.Footnote 74 By collating and validating these sources in multiple languages for his Latin- or German-reading audiences, Hulsius acted as a textual and linguistic intermediary. Such explicit self-representation suggests that Hulsius utilized his mediating role as a selling point.
Literary interventions
Hulsius, De Vivre, and Heyns also acted as brokers of French literary culture, as they were among the first to introduce new French poetic trends in Germany. Led by poets of the literary circle known as the Pléiade and their central figure Pierre de Ronsard (ca. 1524–85), sixteenth-century French poetic culture underwent significant innovation. The sonnet swiftly became a cornerstone of French poetry and isosyllabic verse, in which each line counts the same number of syllables, evolved into a staple of poetic expression throughout early modern Western Europe. Nonetheless, German literary culture was famously late in embracing these forms. The traditional form of the Knittelvers, which does not contain an equal number of syllables per verse but instead counts the number of stressed syllables (usually four), remained popular for a relatively long time. The impact of new developments in German literary culture is well documented for the seventeenth century, when Martin Opitz (1597–1639) and the circles around the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, partially influenced by Dutch intermediaries such as Daniel Heinsius, started experimenting with sonnets in German.Footnote 75 However, little is known about the earlier reception of the Pléiade in Germany. Throughout the sixteenth century, no editions of Ronsard’s French poems were printed in Germany and translations were rare, restricted mainly to a single poem translated by Johann Fischart (ca. 1545–91).Footnote 76
However, a closer survey of the corpus of works produced by the Netherlandish migrant community reveals that they were, again, brokering pioneers in the transmission of French poetic trends. In 1924, Ferdinand Gohin announced that, “to his great surprise,” he found the earliest known reference to Ronsard in a German context in a work by none other than De Vivre.Footnote 77 In his 1569 Synonymes, he made mention of Ronsard as source for certain French expressions, such as sourcer (to source, translated by De Vivre as Anszspringen), in the margins.Footnote 78 Ronsard is the only French author whose name is used in this manner to add authority to the work, and his first name is not given, indicating that De Vivre assumed his readers were familiar with the French poet. It is plausible that he integrated sonnets by the prince of poets in his educational practice, thereby making Ronsard known to his own pupils.Footnote 79
While Gohin describes that De Vivre thus mentions Ronsard’s name in his educational works, he was not aware that De Vivre’s literary mediation extended further. In his 1574 Les fondaments de la langue francoise, he actually included a short poem by the leader of the Pléiade:
Quatrin de P. de Ronsard
Un list ce livre pour apprendre,
L’autre le list comme envieux.
Il est bien aisé de reprendre.
Mais malaisé de faire mieux.Footnote 80
Quatrain of P. de Ronsard
One reads this book to learn,
Another reads it enviously.
It is easy to criticize.
But difficult to do better.
The poem, printed on the verso of the title page of De Vivre’s grammar book, served multiple purposes. On a micro level, it bestows authority upon the schoolbook by referring to the most renowned French author of the time, while simultaneously adhering to the contemporary convention of preempting criticism by calling out potential envious critics.Footnote 81 On a macro level, De Vivre once again assumes the role of a broker, presenting the works of the great French poet to a German audience. It is worth noting that this quatrain, one of the earliest poems of Ronsard printed in Germany, was not extracted from his well-known poetry collections but (with a minor modification in the third verse) from the much lesser-known epistle to the reader of the unfinished epic La Franciade (1572).Footnote 82 Within two years of its publication in France, De Vivre reprinted it in a German educational context.
De Vivre’s colleague Hulsius took his role as a mediator even further. In his 1596 French-German dictionary, he reproduced the same quatrain, possibly taken from De Vivre, as it also featured an adapted third verse (though it differs from De Vivre’s adaptation).Footnote 83 Going beyond De Vivre’s mediation of Ronsard’s text itself, Hulsius adds a German translation:
Etliche lesen disz Buch ausz lust zu lehren,
Andere, ob nichts darinn zu tadlen sey.
Zu straffen ist leicht, der sich daran will kehren,
Aber ein ding zu bessern, stehet nicht jedem frey.Footnote 84
These two Netherlandish migrants were thus not only responsible for one of the first printed poems of Ronsard in a German context but also for one of the earliest German translations of the French author.
De Vivre and Hulsius brokering Ronsard’s poetry is not an isolated case of members of the Netherlandish migrant community introducing new poetic trends in Germany; in effect, they disseminated the new sonnet form. The first known sonnet in German was part of a translation of an Italian treatise by Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), which appeared in 1556. As literary historian Philip McNair argues, Christoph Wirsung (ca. 1500–71) translated the sonnet as part of this treatise, but without knowledge of this particular poetic form and its rules.Footnote 85 Between this first accidental German sonnet and the sonnet coming into vogue in Germany in the seventeenth century, various Netherlandish migrants published French sonnets in their host country. One of the earliest instances of a French sonnet being presented in a German context can be found in Peeter Heyns’s French-German dialogue book, which includes a sonnet about the four seasons by one Y.R.S., taken from Philibert Guide’s (1535–95) work La Colombière (The dovecote [the name of the estate of the poet], 1583).Footnote 86
It is well attested that another migrant from the Low Countries, the aristocrat and bilingual poet Jan van der Noot (1539–95), played a pivotal role in introducing some of the first deliberate German sonnets.Footnote 87 Van der Noot first moved from Antwerp to London in the 1560s. There, he published the Theatre, a collection of poetry that included sonnets by himself and by Joachim du Bellay as well as epigrams by Petrarch. It appeared in Dutch, French, and English versions. Edmund Spenser executed some of the translation for the English text. Van der Noot then moved on to the Rhineland, where, in 1572, his poetry collection was translated by a certain Balthasar Froe, presenting both Van der Noot’s own poetry and that of Du Bellay and Petrarch in German.Footnote 88 The poems are followed by a commentary explaining, for instance, Petrach’s love for Laure and Du Bellay’s symbolism. This translation thus actively presented these poets to a German audience. Van der Noot also recognized the different context in which the German translation would circulate, or perhaps his own thoughts had shifted. Whereas the original prose preface of the French, Dutch, and English Theatre took on a Protestant stance, his new host city, Cologne, was officially Catholic. It is therefore not surprising that the preface of the German translation was strongly adapted to remove any overt Protestant viewpoints.Footnote 89
In Germany, Van der Noot also produced original work, such as the epic Das Buch Extasis (The book of ecstasy), the first German version of which was published in 1573. It is unknown who translated the text, a long poem in decasyllables interspersed with several sonnets, into German. Nonetheless, Elisabeth Rothmund, who studies the early sonnet tradition in German, has argued that the German sonnets in Das Buch Extasis are of a higher quality than those made by Froe, who stayed relatively close to Van der Noot’s Dutch.Footnote 90 The epic text is preceded by a German preface written by Hermannus Grenerus, who reflects on the images presented in the work and on Van der Noot’s poetic style. Grenerus mentions Van der Noot’s main source of inspiration for his epic work—namely, Ronsard’s La Franciade—and he praises the newly fashionable poetic forms: sonnets, odes, elegies, and epigrams.Footnote 91
Van der Noot was clearly familiar with Petrarch’s poetry and probably knew his sonnets, but modeled his own poetic output on contemporary French authors such as Ronsard and Du Bellay. He thus used the vers commun (ten syllables per verse) and the alexandrine (twelve syllables per verse). One important reason why he and various other Netherlandish migrants decided to promote French literary forms in a German context was undoubtedly their profound familiarity with the French language, which trumped their knowledge of other languages in which sonnets had been produced, such as Italian. A second reason for Van der Noot’s penchant for the French sonnet might be the larger program of the Pléiade, which used the sonnet and other poetic forms to showcase the aptness of their mother tongue to act as a literary language. Van der Noot followed their example by producing his own sonnets in French, which he then translated or had translated into Dutch, English, and German, implying that those vernaculars were just as suitable as French to become full-fledged literary languages, able to follow the latest trends.
Additionally, the Netherlandish migrant community produced their own modest literary works in French, which they distributed in their host country. Heyns, for instance, composed a French quatrain for his dialogue book, while De Vivre and Heyns drafted French school plays that they had their students perform in Germany.Footnote 92 A final example is De Vivre’s Lettres missives, a schoolbook containing model letters, which Zwierlein considers to be a hybrid epistolary novel.Footnote 93
Negotiating a place of one’s own
As migrants facing precarious circumstances, De Vivre, Hulsius, and Heyns used their linguistic capital and literary awareness as assets to not only secure an income but also attain social standing. Their primary means of achieving this was dedicating their language works to individuals whose social capital would reflect positively upon their own. While these dedicatory epistles may have resulted in financial rewards, they also served to expand the social network of these migrant authors. In itself, the practice of dedicating books to highly placed individuals was a very common strategy that was applied by authors throughout the early modern period to further their social, cultural, or intellectual position. For these migrants, however, the choice of language played an important role in their dedicatory strategies. For example, Heyns, in his 1588 schoolbook containing model dialogues, included a dedication in French to the mayors of his new place of residence, Cologne, thus effectively presenting himself to the higher circles of municipal government by using the culturally and commercially important French language.Footnote 94 Hulsius chose to dedicate his French-German dictionary to an aristocrat, John Frederick (1582–1628), who was the son of the Duke of Württemberg and would later become duke himself. Aristocratic support was useful in general, but it appears that Hulsius made a deliberate choice for this particular individual: the Dukes of Württemberg also ruled over French-speaking Montbéliard, which was John Frederick’s birthplace. French was an important aristocratic language in itself, but for Hulsius’s dedicatee, French-German bilingualism was crucial.
De Vivre combined Heyns’s and Hulsius’s strategies: he dedicated his works to elite members of both the German bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. His Briefve Institution was addressed in French to the municipal government of Cologne. This is interesting because Cologne was a Catholic imperial city in which the Reformed migrant community sustained itself by laying low and attracting little attention from city officials, who often, as Spohnholz and Van Veen have argued, turned “a blind eye.”Footnote 95 De Vivre chose Hugo Ingenhoff, a local commander of the—mainly Catholic—Teutonic order, as the dedicatee of his Fondaments.Footnote 96 In the French epistle, De Vivre emphasizes his personal connection with this prominent military figure. Furthermore, the Synonymes was dedicated in French to Charles Frederick (1555–75), Catholic prince of the United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg and the counties of Mark and Ravensberg.Footnote 97 Lastly, De Vivre made a clever decision for his grammar book, dedicating it to the “very noble and very ingenious adolescent Sir Arnoldt de Segen.”Footnote 98 Arnold von Siegen belonged to a prominent family from Cologne that supported the Catholic governance of the city, and he is likely the same Arnold who would later become its mayor.Footnote 99 As De Vivre proclaims clearly in his French dedication, Von Siegen had attended French classes at his school. De Vivre thus did not establish a new connection through this dedication; instead, he exploited an existing contact to promote his school. It seems that through his consistent French dedications, De Vivre showed off his connections with Catholic civic officials and aristocrats.
In their paratexts, Netherlandish migrants presented their efforts to spread knowledge of the French tongue in Germany as a way of repaying their host country for welcoming them. Hulsius framed his dictionary as a form of remuneration, writing in the dedication: “When Germany took in and on me, a foreigner, from the moment that I voluntarily left Flanders (the land of my birth) because of the ongoing war there, I acknowledged myself in debt toward those of, so to speak, my other fatherland, so I wish to show myself grateful.”Footnote 100 Topically, he presented his dictionary as a means of settling his debt to his new fatherland. De Vivre, too, asserted his willingness to support his host country through his language-related activities, doing everything he could “in favor of the German Nation: because it is for her that I labor, it is for her that I collect, it is for her that I cannot rest well, night or day, nonetheless never growing tired of serving her.”Footnote 101
At the same time, these expressions of gratitude for welcoming the Netherlandish migrant community, together with references to their cities of origin in the paratexts of their publications, underscored the social and political status of this group of migrants in Germany. They had left the Low Countries, at least in part, for their Reformed faith, which was certainly not universally accepted in Germany either. Heyns thanked the mayors of Frankfurt for taking him in, promising to pray to God to “pay back in double the warm welcome that the faithful stranger has at all times received from your noble lordships.”Footnote 102 This statement not only expressed Heyns’s gratitude but also consciously presented himself and his fellow migrants as “faithful strangers,” implying that they did not arrive in Germany as fortune seekers but as religious refugees who were willing to forsake all earthly possessions and ties for their faith. This is a relevant remark in the Frankfurt context, a free imperial city that had a more Lutheran character and was wary of Calvinist migrants from the Low Countries, although it harbored many of them. Heyns’s colleague, the schoolmaster Passchier Goessens, made a similar declaration in his dedication to the municipality of Hamburg, also a Lutheran stronghold, but in stronger terms: he had, “for the sake of the profession of the clear truth of God’s word, left [his] fatherland and must wander around here in exile.”Footnote 103
On the one hand, such statements negotiated the place of these individuals in their host country: they made clear that they did not come to Germany for financial gain but were driven by their religious conscience—although in reality it was often a combination of religious, financial, and political reasons. On the other hand, they emphasized the challenging position of the Netherlandish migrant community, caught between fatherland and host country, the “other fatherland,” as Hulsius wrote. Johannes Müller has aptly described the predicament of the Netherlandish migrants as one of a double rootedness, belonging “both here and there.”Footnote 104 They were trying to build a new life in Germany, all the while closely watching events at home, potentially nurturing the hope to return one day. Peeter Heyns, for example, held on to some of his properties in Antwerp and only sold the last building he owned there seven years after leaving the city.Footnote 105 The migrants’ mentions of the hardships faced by inhabitants of the Low Countries also served as a political wake-up call not to make the same mistakes, or even to support the Netherlandish cause. It is relevant in this context that De Vivre dedicated one of his texts to a military commander of the Teutonic Order.
De Vivre expressed the feelings of loss experienced by the migrant community in even stronger terms in the dedication of one of his bilingual works:
Without a doubt, the aforesaid decline of my fatherland and others has caused various other peoples, nations, and cities to participate in the good sciences, arts, and commerce, that they had never known or understood before, and some of them have even enriched themselves through its remains.Footnote 106
While the Netherlandish migrant community should thus be lamented for having to leave their homeland and witness their fatherland decline, the German community ought to rejoice that they decided to bring their skills and linguistic capital eastward:
Many merchants, mechanics, and those who teach diverse languages, among whom some good masters and teachers of the French language, have moved to this renowned city of Cologne and to the lands of your Excellence.Footnote 107
Cologne not only benefited commercially from the influx of Netherlandish migrants; it also benefited from the French language they brought with them. Perhaps De Vivre mainly selected Catholic dedicatees in order to convince them to adopt a more positive stance toward the Netherlandish migrant community. These migrants should be welcomed and esteemed by German society; they had positively changed the linguistic landscape of their host country and deserved recognition and social acceptance for it. Through these paratextual materials in their French-German schoolbooks, these Netherlandish schoolmasters strategically negotiated a place for themselves and their fellow migrants in their new places of residence.
Conclusion
De Vivre, Hulsius, and Heyns cleverly fashioned themselves as ideal mediators of a language of which knowledge in Germany was lacking. By adopting a broad perspective that incorporated the linguistic, literary, social, and political context of their French language publications, the full extent of their activities as brokers could be gauged. On a linguistic level, they were instrumental in making a wide range of tools for French language education available to the German public. Their schools made institutionalized language instruction possible, while the numerous language manuals they published encouraged self-study. From a literary standpoint, their seemingly scattered and minor references to contemporary French literature actually marked some of the first steps in introducing these new poetic trends in Germany. These references were likely just the tip of the iceberg, considering the full potential of literary transmission through the French schools established by Netherlandish migrants.
The paratextual materials accompanying the French language manuals produced by the Netherlandish migrant community bear witness to the various strategies they employed to transform linguistic capital into social capital. They carefully selected their dedicatees, ranging from municipal authorities to members of the aristocracy with whom they had personal connections. Furthermore, they capitalized on their origins in the southern Low Countries and their status as religious exiles, presenting themselves as faithful and steadfast, as well as valuable assets to German society. The way in which they exploited the contemporary reputation of the Low Countries as a center for language education showcases their strategies of linguistic brokerage. French was not their native language, but their origins in the Romance-Germanic contact zone gave them the authority to become engaged in the language sector.
The individuals studied here represent only a fraction of the thousands of migrants who moved from the southern Low Countries to Germany in the sixteenth century. As their connections to the printing trade left behind a clear trail, it is possible to map their linguistic strategies relatively well. It can be assumed, however, that for a much larger part of the Netherlandish migrant community, knowledge of languages was an advantage in their host country, where knowledge of French was scarce. The majority of the individuals discussed in this article benefited from their multilingualism very directly, by making money as language teachers and producers of schoolbooks. But for clerks, merchants, or even domestic servants, knowledge of multiple languages could be a considerable advantage when seeking employment or building a new social network abroad. Language skills could provide early modern migrants with a precious form of agency that, when applied strategically, could be pivotal in rebuilding their lives in exile.
APPENDIX
Alisa van de Haar is Assistant Professor in Historical French Literature at Leiden University. She is the author of The Golden Mean of Languages: Forging Dutch and French in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1540–1620 (Brill, 2019). She is currently conducting the research project “Languages as Lifelines: The Multilingual Coping Strategies of Refugees from the Early Modern Low Countries” (2022–26), funded by the Dutch Research Council’s Veni scheme.
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