Overview

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French has been studied mainly from monolingual perspectives tracing the development towards modern Dutch or French. Van de Haar shows that the discussions on these languages were rooted in multilingual environments, in particular in French schools, Calvinist churches, printing houses, and chambers of rhetoric. The proposals that were formulated there to forge Dutch and French into useful forms were not directed solely at uniformization but were much more diverse.

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Van de Haar's thorough analysis of a variety of texts, ranging from educational writings to psalm translations, and her illustrative excursions to other (northern) language debaters leads to fruitful findings that contribute to our understanding of the literary culture in the sixteenth-century Low Countries. Cora van de Poppe, Universiteit Utrecht. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Summer 2021), pp. 631-633.

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Alisa van de Haar (Ph.D. Groningen 2018) is Assistant Professor of French Literature and Culture at Leiden University.

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