scholarly journals The Linguistic Coping Strategies of Three Netherlanders in England

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-215
Author(s):  
Alisa Van de Haar

Thousands of migrants left the Low Countries in the second half of the sixteenth century for religious, political, or economic reasons. They faced many difficulties as they attempted to rebuild their lives abroad, including linguistic obstacles. Many of them moved to England, but proficiency in English was rare among the Netherlandish community. Nevertheless, as this article argues, the language differences did not only pose problems, they also offered opportunities, especially to members of the higher echelons of the Dutch diasporic community. The inhabitants of the Low Countries were widely reputed to have excellent knowledge of languages, and for good reason. This article concentrates on the linguistic strategies of three multilingual individuals who moved across the North Sea: the nobleman Jan van der Noot, the painter Lucas d’Heere, and the merchant Johannes Radermacher. It studies the ways in which they used their proficiency in multiple languages as starting capital to build new social and professional lives for themselves. For example, they used their linguistic skills to appeal to the local aristocracy in order to ensure patronage, to expand social and professional networks by frequenting particular religious language communities, and to offer language instruction. This article therefore contributes to our understanding of linguistic encounters in the everyday lives and struggles of migrants in the sixteenth century.

1979 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 155-168
Author(s):  
E. H. Kossmann

As in relation to many other countries in sixteenth-century Europe, it is difficult to apply modern conceptions of nationhood to the situation in the Low Countries. If the difficulty seems more awkward in this area than elsewhere, it is perhaps merely because the sixteenth-century Netherlands, as we all know, developed into two distinct nations, the northern Netherlands and Belgium. It is clearly impossible to give a convincing answer to the question whether, in politically more propitious circumstances, the northern and the southern Netherlands might have grown into a single nation state with one common culture. All we know is that in the north a new state was created which, in the seventeenth century, undoubtedly possessed a culture idiosyncratic enough to be described as properly Dutch. We may well call this a national culture. On the other hand, if we bear in mind, asmany seventeenth-century commentators did, that the Dutch Republic was no more than a part of what had been the real Netherlands, both north and south, it would not be totally incongruous to define Dutch culture, that is the northern culture, as regional rather than national. However, if we do so, we must conclude that the national culture uniting the southern and the northern Netherlands, and somehow enclosing the regional cultures of Flanders and Brabant, of Holland and Zeeland, never came into existence.


2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Maarten J. M. Christenhusz

ABSTRACT: A sixteenth century Dutch hortus siccus of Brabantian origin has been rediscovered and is described here. The plants preserved in it are identified and most of its history is revealed.


2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Rorke

This paper uses customs figures to show that herring exports from the east and west coast lowlands expanded significantly in the last six decades of the sixteenth century. The paper argues that the rise was primarily due to the north-west Highland fisheries being opened up and exploited by east and west coast burghs. These ventures required greater capital supplies and more complex organisation than their local inshore fisheries and they were often interrupted by political hostilities. However, the costs were a fraction of those required to establish a deepwater buss fleet, enabling Scotland to expand production and take advantage of European demand for fish while minimising additional capital costs.


Author(s):  
Dries Tys

The origin, rise, and dynamics of coastal trade and landing places in the North Sea area between the sixth and eighth centuries must be understood in relation to how coastal regions and seascapes acted as arenas of contact, dialogue, and transition. Although the free coastal societies of the early medieval period were involved in regional to interregional or long-distance trade networks, their economic agency must be understood from a bottom-up perspective. That is, their reproduction strategies must be studied in their own right, independent from any teleological construction about the development of trade, markets, or towns for that matter. This means that the early medieval coastal networks of exchange were much more complex and diverse than advocated by the simple emporium network model, which connected the major archaeological sites along the North Sea coast. Instead, coastal and riverine dwellers often possessed some form of free status and large degrees of autonomy, in part due to the specific environmental conditions of the landscapes in which they dwelled. The wide estuarine region of the Low Countries, between coastal Flanders in the south and Friesland in the north, a region with vast hinterlands and a central position in northwestern Europe, makes these developments particularly clear. This chapter thus pushes back against longstanding assumptions in scholarly research, which include overemphasis of the influence of large landowners over peasant economies, and on the prioritization of easily retrievable luxuries over less visible indicators of bulk trade (such as wood, wool, and more), gift exchange, and market trade. The approach used here demonstrates that well-known emporia or larger ports of trade were embedded in the economic activities and networks of their respective hinterlands. Early medieval coastal societies and their dynamics are thus better understood from the perspective of integrated governance and economy (“new institutional economics”) in a regional setting.


2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-367
Author(s):  
Jennifer Birch ◽  
John P. Hart

We employ social network analysis of collar decoration on Iroquoian vessels to conduct a multiscalar analysis of signaling practices among ancestral Huron-Wendat communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our analysis focuses on the microscale of the West Duffins Creek community relocation sequence as well as the mesoscale, incorporating several populations to the west. The data demonstrate that network ties were stronger among populations in adjacent drainages as opposed to within drainage-specific sequences, providing evidence for west-to-east population movement, especially as conflict between Wendat and Haudenosaunee populations escalated in the sixteenth century. These results suggest that although coalescence may have initially involved the incorporation of peoples from microscale (local) networks, populations originating among wider mesoscale (subregional) networks contributed to later coalescent communities. These findings challenge previous models of village relocation and settlement aggregation that oversimplified these processes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kumar Jha

The making of the imperial subjects is as much a matter of historical process as the emergence of the empire. In the case of the Mughal state, this process started much before its actual establishment in the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century in North India was a period of unusual cultural ferment. The emergence of the Mughal imperial formation in the next century was intimately related to the fast congealing tendency of the north Indian society towards greater disciplining of itself. This tendency is evident in the multilingual literary cultures and diverse knowledge formations of the long fifteenth century.


2018 ◽  

During the Late Middle Ages a unique type of ‘mixed media’ recycled and remnant art arose in houses of religious women in the Low Countries: enclosed gardens. They date from the time of Emperor Charles V and are unique examples of ‘anonymous’ female art, devotion and spirituality. A hortus conclusus (or enclosed garden) represents an ideal, paradisiacal world. Enclosed Gardens are retables, sometimes with painted side panels, the central section filled not only with narrative sculpture, but also with all sorts of trinkets and hand-worked textiles.Adornments include relics, wax medallions, gemstones set in silver, pilgrimage souvenirs, parchment banderoles, flowers made from textiles with silk thread, semi-precious stones, pearls and quilling (a decorative technique using rolled paper). The ensemble is an impressive and one-of-a-kind display and presents as an intoxicating garden. The sixteenth-century horti conclusi of the Mechelen Hospital sisters are recognized Masterpieces and are extremely rare, not alone at a Belgian but even at a global level. They are of international significance as they provide evidence of devotion and spirituality in convent communities in the Southern Netherlands in the sixteenth century. They are an extraordinary tangible expression of a devotional tradition. The highly individual visual language of the enclosed gardens contributes to our understanding of what life was like in cloistered communities. They testify to a cultural identity closely linked with mystical traditions allowing us to enter a lost world very much part of the culture of the Southern Netherlands. This book is the first full survey of the enclosed gardens and is the result of year-long academic research.


1889 ◽  
Vol 6 (9) ◽  
pp. 425-427
Author(s):  
Alexander Somervail

On De La Beche's Geological Survey Map of Cornwall are three colours representing the associated rocks at, and on each side of the Manacle Point. The Point itself and for a considerable distance south of it is represented as a greenstone. Partially encased in the greenstone and to the south of it is gabbro, which forms the main mass of this rock in the Lizard district. On the north side of the greenstone which forms the extreme south wall of Porthonstock Cove is hornblende-schist, which with some serpentine and other rocks terminates against the killas, or slates near Porthalla.Several observers with seeming good reason have drawn attention to the fact that the greenstone as represented on the map is made to cover much too large an area to the south, and that any one walking from this direction, or the reverse, finds gabbro where the former rock was expected to occur.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Brownlee

This article analyses the use of grave goods in burials across early medieval Europe and how that use changed over the course of the 6th to 8th centuries CE with the widespread transition to unfurnished burial. It uses data gathered from published cemetery excavation reports from England, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The grave good use in these cemeteries was analysed using GIS methods to visualise regional differences, as well as statistical methods to analyse how grave good use evolved over time in those regions. This analysis revealed clear regional distinctions in grave good use, with England and Alamannia appearing similar, with relatively high levels of grave good use. Meanwhile, parts of Frankia and of Burgundy had considerably lower levels of grave good use. Distributions of individual artefact types tended to match those of overall numbers, but there were a few key exceptions, such as vessels, which followed a quite different pattern, being found in high numbers along the Frankish coast, but in much lower numbers elsewhere. Despite these overall trends, there was still considerable intra-regional and intra-cemetery variation that suggests communities and individuals had the ability to make highly individual choices about the way to bury their dead, along with the ability to subvert local norms. It also revealed that while there was a general decline in the use of grave goods across this period, and everywhere eventually reached the point of almost completely unfurnished burial, this decline occurred at different rates. In particular, there was a zone around the North Sea, including Kent, western Frankia, and the Low Countries, where there was little change in grave good use until it was suddenly abandoned in the early 8th century. Different types of objects declined at different rates across different regions, with few clear trends, suggesting that only personal accessories held a common significance across Europe; the meanings of all other object types were negotiated on a local basis.


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