PhD candidate André Looijenga (Fryske Akademy / University of Amsterdam) will speak on 8 July at the 15th biennial conference of the Association for Low Countries Studies (ALCS), organised at the University of Sheffield (UK).

The theme of this ALCS Conference is 'Correcting & (re)Collecting Texts, Stories, Languages, Time'. There, Looijenga will deliver a lecture on the four texts that Simon Abbes Gabbema and his friends Isaac de Schepper and Adriaan Tymens added as an introduction to the second edition of the collected works of Gysbert Japix. These texts by Gabbema cum suis have received little attention in Frisian literature so far.

Gabbema, De Schepper and Tymens give a very distinct picture of Gysbert Japix and of the Frisian language and history. For them, the poet Gysbert is above all the connoisseur and researcher of the (old) Frisian language. The introductory texts show a good knowledge of the study of the older Germanic languages at the time.

Abstract

Ancient Language, Ancestral Freedom: Metalinguistic Representations of Frisian in the 1681 Re-edition of Gysbert Japix’s Friesche Rymlerye

Gysbert Japix’s (1603-1666) Friesche Rymlerye from 1668 was the first book printed in Frisian. In 1681, Simon Abbes Gabbema (1628-1688), state historiographer of the Province of Friesland, published an enlarged second edition of this book, adding not only hitherto unpublished Frisian texts by Gysbert Japix, but also new introductory paratexts in Dutch and two anonymous grammatical treatises in Latin.

How did Gabbema show the relevance of this collection of poetry and prose in a non-dominant regional language like Frisian, to an Early Modern audience in the Dutch Republic?

In my paper I will examine the ways in which Gabbema, with his friends Isaac de Schepper and Adriaan Tymens, represented the Frisian language and the poet Gysbert Japix in the additions to the 1681 edition. Their metalinguistic remarks offer insights in the place of Frisian in its Early Modern multilingual context. They present Frisian as an ancient language, ‘gray’ and ‘noble-old’, that has been unduly neglected and even lost its freedom under the ‘slavery of foreign languages’. Gabbema shows the dignity of Frisian by giving an overview of the emergent Early Modern philology of Old Germanic languages. Furthermore, the defense of this low prestige language is connected to contemporary ideas on linguistic purism and with the defense of Dutch independence.

This paper is part of my PhD research on the cultural, linguistic and social contexts of Early Modern Frisian literary texts.

Conference programme

You can read the conference programme here.