Twee schatkisten en hun erfenis: Dimensies van gender en age in de Nederlandse vroegmoderne letterkunde

In the first volume of Nederlandse letterkunde, two prominent literary
scholars in the field of early modern Dutch literature reflected on their
monumental, innovative books, which were both published the year after
(1997). Piet Buijnsters, first of all, presents his Bibliografie van Nederlandse
school- en kinderboeken 1700-1800 (BNK), an extensive bibliography of all
known children’s and school books published in the eighteenth-century
Dutch Republic. Riet Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, secondly, refers to Met
en zonder Lauwerkrans, a sizeable anthology of women’s writing in the
early modern Low Countries. In this essay, I discuss the impact of the
Lauwerkrans and the BNK on 25 years of scholarship on early modern Dutch
literature written by women as well as books addressed to young readers.
I will argue that Buijnsters’s and Schenkeveld-van der Dussen’s call for
text-analytical research on women’s and children’s literature is still urgent,
as the abundance of recent scholarship was dedicated to the book market
and the cultural-historical context of literature. I will also suggest a new
line of research, in which the generally isolated dimensions of gender and
age will be analysed in their continuous interaction.