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In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted in local soil. The five contributions collected in this volume demonstrate that while in general issues of ‘otherness’ were resolved without difficulty, at other times (linguistic) differences were perceived as a heartfelt reality. Texts and books in French, Latin, and Dutch were as interrelated and mobile as their authors. As awareness of the francophone literature of the medieval and early modern Low Countries continues to grow, texts in all three languages will be ever more strongly connected in an intricate and multilingual weave.

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4 In the dedicatory epistle to the city council of Amsterdam quoted here, it is strongly implied that the Dutch vernacular had received hardly any attention from the learned men that spoke it. Dutch was far behind other languages of Europe because it had not been treated as an object of study. However, this was about to change, as De Eglantier initiated its scheme for a set of trivium treatises especially for the Dutch language, starting with the Twe-spraack, a grammar, and followed by works on dialectic and rhetoric.The members of De Eglantier clearly wished to present their Twe-spraack as being innovative for the Dutch vernacular. Rather than following in the footsteps of earlier rhetoricians, they wished to associate themselves with the 'scholarly habitus', in which language had become an important topic of enquiry in Research for this article was undertaken as part of a doctoral research project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).1 Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst, ofte uant spellen ende eyghenscap des Nederduitschen taals (Leiden:Christoffel Plantyn, 1584), fol. A2r. 2 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 3 In this period, no standardised form of Dutch existed. It was made up of a variety of different dialects that were part of the Low German language continuum. In this article, the term Dutch will be used to refer to the variants that were spoken in the whole of the Seventeen Provinces. 4 Geert Dibbets, Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst (1584) (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985), 23-5.