This article presents the first diachronic overview of the economic, social and symbolic profits of ‘city poets’ (‘stadsdichters’) in the Low Countries. From the early fifteenth century onwards, there have been many (more or less) official relationships between city councils and poets. The prominence and the form of these relationships, however, diverged greatly in different periods: whereas official appointments were the standard in the fifteenth, sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries, the period in between saw a much more diverse landscape of informal appointments and relationships. After presenting a historical overview of the role of city poets throughout the centuries, this article focuses on two well-documented periods in which formal agreements were made between town governments and poets: the late Middle Ages and the start of the 21st century. We analyze political and financial agreements explicitly in relationship to the complexities surrounding the production of city poetry. City poetry, paid by public money, is bound to be controversial: in general because its status is subject to changes and political discussions, but also because this form of commissioned poetry is sometimes seen as a form of propaganda. Official city poetry seems to flourish most in societies with a stable political-religious climate (as in the Southern Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth century) and/or with a keen interest in city marketing (as in Flanders and the Netherlands in the twenty-first century).

Female authors' self-representation in the early modern period was vital. It is generally acknowledged that by writing, and especially publishing, women entered the public domain and, thus, needed to protect their reputation. 1 In current scholarship of early modern women's writing, factors that are regarded decisive for chosen strategies of self-representation are as diverse as religious, political, social, and material factors, as well as factors related to literary and intellectual contexts. 2 Considering the complexity of women's strategies when they were writing for profit it is surprising that scholarship has yet to carefully examine the fundamental importance of economic factors. 3 Women writing for profit needed to protect their honour even more as they sold themselves as authors within a literary culture that rejected earthly moneymaking and glorified social impact and eternal fame. 4 This essay examines the complex strategies of self-representation employed by two women writing in the Dutch Republic, Maria Margaretha van Akerlaecken (1605-after 1662) and Katharina Lescailje (1649Lescailje ( -1711.In the Dutch Republic, the presence of a dominant book market provided a relatively extensive freedom of publication, but few possibilities for 1 Martine van Elk, Early Modern Women's Writing: Domesticity, Privacy, and the Public Sphere in England and the Dutch Republic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

A Polyphonic Story. Authorship in the Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur Authorship is a 'trending topic' in literary studies: specialists from all periods and languages have published widely on various topics such as posture, selffashioning, and autonomy. This contribution investigates how these recent debates found their way into the new series of literary histories published on behalf of the Taalunie since 2006 (GNL). We discuss this matter along three lines. First, we show that in the different parts of the GNL there are multiple, sometimes contradicting notions of development of authorship. After that, we demonstrate that there does not seem to be a shared terminology: different scholars use words like 'broodschrijver' (hack-writer) with dissimilar meanings and connotations. Finally, it is noted that the writers of GNLvolumes do not have the same ideas about how to deal with authorial (re-) presentation in literary texts. We conclude that, although the editors aimed for a series based on shared starting points, there is not a single narrative about authorship in the GNL-series.

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This article argues that it is both important and viable to develop a diachronic perspective on the profits of literary authors in the Low Countries. Up to now, conceptual and theoretical boundaries between different subdisciplines within Dutch literary studies have resulted in a compartmentalized, fragmentary narrative of the economic, social and symbolic profits of literary authors throughout the centuries. On the basis of a survey of the theoretical frameworks dominant in the subdisciplines of medieval, early modern and modern Dutch literature, we highlight the opportunities and difficulties for a diachronic perspective on financial advancement, focusing both on practice and discourse. In addition, we propose a schematic model that tries to overcome the difficulties and enables us to profit from the opportunities. This proposal allows for a sharper focus on both the practice of and discourse on literary authors’ economic gain from a diachronic perspective.