THE HISTORY OF LITERARY WRITING IN THE LOW COUNTRIES spans at least a thousand years. It presents a rich and diverse picture, very much part of the European patchwork but with unique features resulting from the area's particular complexion and development, from the splendor of its medieval court culture and the bustle of its early modern cities to the seaborne power of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and the nineteenth- century Flemish cultural revival. There is much to be discovered here. While the visual artists of the Low Countries gained international fame and Bosch, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Van Gogh are now household names, the written culture that sustained their work has remained beyond the reach of those unfamiliar with the language. This is changing, as more literature written in Dutch is being translated than ever before. The present volume offers a historical narrative of that literature.

An account of the literary history of the Dutch-language area has to contend with a terminological issue. To speak of “Dutch literature” would be unsatisfactory: by no means all the literature in question is in Dutch, and in an international context “Dutch” tends to refer to the Netherlands only and thus to exclude Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Terms like “Netherlandish” or “Netherlandic” do not help. The former, little used except among art historians, is normally restricted to the early modern period; the latter reeks of academic neologism. “Literature of the Dutch-language area” does not trip off the tongue, and has history against it, as some areas that were once Dutch-speaking have since adopted other tongues.