Urban Literary Patronage in the Early Modern Low Countries: Public Festive Culture and Individual Authorship

• Published in: Renaissance quarterly Vol. 64; no. 1; pp. 50 - 78
• Main Author: Mareel, Samuel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge The Renaissance Society of America 01-03-2011; Cambridge University Press
• Subjects: Authorship; Cities; City councils; Cultural background; Festivals; Literary rhetoric; Literature; Oratory; Pension plans; Poetry; Poetry festivals; Printing presses; Studies; Tableaux; Theater; Urban areas; Writers
• ISSN: 0034-4338; 1935-0236
• DOI: 10.1086/660368

This essay deals with the nature, background, and consequences of urban patronage for individual rhetoricians in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries. Although this phenomenon is most likely rooted in courtly practice, it is mainly because of the usefulness of rhetoricians in the context of urban public festivals that some of them received financial rewards from city authorities. My analysis shows how in the Low Countries urban festive culture and the oral dissemination of literary texts played an important, and heretofore largely neglected, role in the professionalization and individualization of authorship during the early modern period.