Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
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.
I wish to express my gratitude to Jeroen Dewulf of UC Berkeley's Dutch Studies department and to Jane Newman of the Group for the Study of Early Cultures at UC Irvine for providing me with occasions to present the ideas developed in this article to an English-speaking audience. Most of the essay was written during a research stay at the University of Groningen supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). A very special thanks to Cynthia J. Brown, Dirk Coigneau, Timothy Hampton, Bart Ramakers, and the two anonymous readers at Renaissance Quarterly for their valuable comments on earlier versions of my text. All translations are my own, except where otherwise noted.