Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age Literature - Rhetoricians

Rhetoricians

In the middle of the 16th century, a group of rhetoricians (see Medieval Dutch literature) in Brabant and Flanders attempted to put new life into the stereotyped forms of the preceding age by introducing in original composition the new-found branches of Latin and Greek poetry. The leader of these men was Johan Baptista Houwaert (1533–1599), a personage of considerable political influence in his generation. Houwaert held the title of Counsellor and Master in Ordinary of the Exchequer to the Duchy of Brabant. He considered himself a devout disciple of Matthijs de Casteleyn, but his great characteristic was his unbounded love of classical and mythological fancy. His didactic poems are composed in a rococo style; of all his writings, Pegasides Pleyn ("The Palace of Maidens"), a didactic poem in sixteen books dedicated to a discussion of the variety of earthly love, is the most remarkable. Houwaert's contemporaries nicknamed him the "Homer of Brabant"; later criticism has preferred to see in him an important link in the chain of didactic Dutch which ends in Cats.