In themselves, dictionaries like the Naembouck would seem to restrict rather than encourage searches for unseen treasures and new knowledge. Their alphabetical order suggested and determined a beginning and an end to what was known at the time. However, as scholars such as John Considine have argued, dictionaries also disseminated new knowledge, teaching their readers new words and concepts.12 Dictionaries were based on the humanistic ideal of a distribution of comprehensive, encyclopaedic knowledge, encompassing ‘the whole range of the written word’, as Erasmus put it.13 They also, however, actively enhanced the language by introducing new words. For instance, the Dutch language was enriched with vocabularies for trade, law, science, medicine, architecture, warfare, theology, and government by the recording of words in Johan Hofman’s Nederlandtsche woorden-schat (1650).14 Dictionaries thus also invited readers to think about language’s productivity – its ability to generate new words. Within the restrictive framework of rules, lexicographical and philological interests were often combined in searches for new knowledge, as Dirk van Miert and others have concluded in their examination of the work of the Dutch scholar Hadrianus Junius.15

Moreover, as Considine among others has argued, these dictionaries – ‘lexical objects’, in his terminology – helped to establish new communities because they transferred cultural knowledge. These books allowed readers to visit the linguistic and cultural past as well as the present. An oft-cited example of transfer of cultural knowledge is found in the work of the eighteenth-century English lexicographer and writer Samuel Johnson, who defined ‘oats’ as ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’. As Peter Burke has argued, the interest for this type of knowledge prompted the creation of new ‘speech communities’ and new transregional or super-regional loyalties.16

Multilingual dictionaries such as Lambrecht’s Naembouck were soon followed by other linguistic textbooks that produced even more new linguistic knowledge. They reveal how the exploration of linguistic structure became an important goal.17 Robert and Henri Estienne’s Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum, printed in Paris in 1531, was one of the first attempts to observe and analyse hitherto unseen grammatical features of language, with the emancipatory aim of defending and elevating the vernacular languages. Estienne, for instance, attempted to grasp the grammatical principles of French in his Traicté de la grammaire française (Treatise on the French grammar, 1557).18 His example was soon followed in other European countries, as evinced by, for instance, Hendrik Laurensz. Spiegel’s Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst (Dialogue on the Dutch grammar, 1584).19 Together, they formed an interconnected, transnational body of knowledge. In all European grammars (especially the Dutch grammars), Latin rules were followed. But they no longer excluded the pupils’ native tongues that were actively used to learn the Latin grammar via translation exercises or through exercises organised according to a new comparative principle: comparing and noting the language known to the pupils with the language they aimed to acquire became one of the most trained skills.20 The 1485 Latin grammar Exercitium puerorum grammaticale (Grammar practice for children), published anonymously in Antwerp, for instance, was grounded in many of the conventions of the Latin medieval grammars, but pupils were instructed to compare the word order in Latin and German languages.21

Dutch youth were seen as the target audience of such publications, as is the case in Lambrecht’s Naembouck. The book’s second edition, published in 1562, articulated this idea even more strongly, as Lambrecht noted that it had been produced ‘for the benefit of the youth’.22 Christoffel Plantijn’s four-language dictionary Dictionarium Tetraglotton, also published in 1562, was even dedicated to Dutch (Belgica) youth.23 In this article, I focus on the publications with similar dedications, and label them as ‘youth textbooks’. This label does not apply to dictionaries for adults that drew on material from youth textbooks, such as Hendrik Laurensz. Spiegel’s Twe-spraack, for which Spiegel used cases from the Exercitium puerorum grammaticale. It does also not apply to books written by authors who presented themselves as schoolmaster and the dictionary or treatise as the result of their teaching practices, as did Anthoni Smyters in the preface to his Epitheta, dat zijn bynamen oft toenamen (Epitheta, that is, adverbs or nicknames, 1620).24 Perhaps young readers were also the main audience of these publications. The copy of Smyters’s dictionary kept in the library of Utrecht University demonstrates how one of his readers, the Dutch minister Pieter Poeraet, added a handwritten poem that affirms the idea. In this poem, Poeraet urges the Dutch youth to take notice of Smyters’s excellent work: ‘Oh youth, with time on your hands to write poetry’ (fig. 2).25 Because reports that these books were employed by young readers are merely anecdotal, however, I have chosen not to include them in my corpus.

Linguistic textbooks intended for Dutch youngsters could have a societal impact on Dutch knowledge culture for a number of reasons. First, they were produced in large numbers, given the tendency towards the use of the vernacular in the Dutch Republic educational system. Pleas for the use of the vernacular in universities were made relatively early. Amsterdam tried to persuade the University of Leiden – the first university in the Dutch Republic, founded in 1575 – to use Dutch as its official language from the very start. When these attempts failed, in 1617 Amsterdam established its own Nederduitsche Academie (Dutch Academy), with Dutch as its official language.26 Their argument was not only that it would serve to bolster the status of the vernacular, but also that it would serve to made education more efficient. For instance, in the preface to Spiegel’s Twespraack, the philosopher Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert explains how much time would be saved if Dutch rather than Latin were part of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric – the lower division of the seven liberal arts). This change would particularly benefit ‘eight-year-old boys’, because ‘their minds would be just as well equipped for all branches of science as the minds of fourteen-year-old boys that have been steadily tortured at the rack of the Latin grammar’.27 This argument continued to be made for several decades. The Dutch physician and author Lodewijk Meyer would repeat it in the 1658 preface to the third edition of his Nederlandsche woorden-schat:

Second, not only boys but also girls were included in these sorts of initiatives, and this also counted towards the number of textbooks produced. A 1599 publication by the female schoolmaster Magdaleine Valery – designed to both enlarge the vocabulary and hone the rhetorical skills of young female pupils – shows how sometimes textbooks were produced that explicitly targeted girls as their audience (fig. 3).29

Based on how many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch linguistic textbooks were produced with the intention of using them at schools where Dutch was the language of instruction, as well as the number of children and young adults who attended schools and learned how to read, one can surmise that a relatively large group of children and young adults was affected by vernacular linguistics textbooks.30 The textbooks dedicated to Dutch youngsters offered knowledge about orthography, prosody and phonetics (the patterns of stress and intonation in a language), etymology and semantics, and syntax.31 They also constitute a significant part of the overall book production in the Dutch Republic.32 The Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (stcn) and the Short-Title Catalogue Vlaanderen (stcv) together list 135 titles of textbooks aimed at Dutch youth printed between 1527 and 1750. Out of these 135, 86 are dedicated to linguistic education (whether dictionaries, linguistic treatises, or grammars).33

The scope of this article is very broad, dealing with sources from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. I will therefore focus on trends rather than on specific titles. The Nederduydsche spellinge (1612) by Jacob van der Schuere, for instance, will not be discussed, although the case supports my argument: the book presented a new spelling system that required young readers to explore their own use of language because it was based on the idea ‘that one writes all words, as much as possible, as one pronounces them’.34 Yet his case yields no new insights into the innovation disclosed by my discussion of Lambrecht’s Naembouck. Rather than exploring multiple similar cases, then, this article focuses on wider trends that developed over time. The first key development was that once a frontrunner like Lambrecht had put a system in place and had developed didactics (be it for orthography, phonetics, or grammar), subsequent textbooks revolted against ‘the existing, crippled system’ established by previous textbooks, as Van der Schuere put it.35 This would suggest that Dutch textbooks continued to be experimental in nature, requiring young readers to use their empirical observations. The second key development, however, was that the more descriptive approach to language prevalent in the first textbooks on orthography, phonetics, and grammar – and which left ample room for the young reader’s empirical observations – were slowly being replaced by an increasingly prescriptive approach to the writing and speaking of Dutch. Yet even this prescriptive approach still had the exploratory young reader in mind: the object of study (language) required young readers to observe their own use of language in order to make progress.

In this article, I approach the massive amounts of linguistic textbooks, and the intergenerational and intersectional dynamics they entailed, as products of a ‘trading zone’ – a concept developed for the study of modern history of science by Peter Galison, and made applicable to the history of early modern science by Pamela Long.36 They have defined trading zones as arenas in which substantive and reciprocal communication occurred between artisans with hands-on training on the one hand and university-trained individuals on the other, which resulted in the creation of new knowledge. As Long has argued, ‘the mid-sixteenth century was an era before the development of modern professionalism and its hyperspecialization. It is precisely this preprofessionalism, the lack of standard training, educational, and licensing requirements for, say, architects and engineers (who were often also called architects) that contributed to the development of trading zones.’37 Even though the professionals who crafted the textbooks were not artisans, I would argue they helped to create a trading zone as well – a linguistic trading zone, to be precise. Lambrecht was a prototypical exponent of the type of individuals Galison and Long have in mind as creators of a trading zone: in addition to being a printer, typecutter, and engraver, he was also a schoolmaster and linguist.38 Van der Schuere also operated in the worlds of academic knowledge, of painting (he was a good friend of the painter Carel van Mander), and of printing and mediated between them. The commixture of artisans and professionals led to the creation of new knowledge: teaching linguistic knowledge to Dutch youth implied the production of new linguistic fault-lines for the vernacular languages.

As seen in the preface of Lambrecht’s Naembouck, attempts to unify Dutch spelling lay at the root of the first linguistic textbooks. In the preface to the second volume of the Nederlandsche spellijnghe (1550), this unificatory urge did not imply that language variation would be minimized. Lambrecht explained how he aimed to offer a uniform, phonetic spelling system for all the variants of Dutch spoken at the time: in principle, all similar sounds should be signified by similar spelling, ‘so as to ensure that from now on, all youngsters are taught the same in schools where Dutch is the official language’.39 Lambrecht’s aim was not to unify Dutch as a language, because he regarded all variants of Dutch to be of equal value. Rather, he wanted the same sounds in all variants to be spelled the same way. To achieve his ideal of ‘one letter for one sound’, he introduced new characters and letter combinations such as ‘e¸’ and ‘e/’ into the Dutch alphabet.40 In this way, he hoped to create a system in which everyone might be able to write down and transcribe any sounds he produces when speaking their mother tongue.41 His manual is set up as a dialogue between a pupil and a master – modelled after a number of existing orthographies on other languages.42 This didactic format leaves room for clarifications, questions, and objections that allow pupils to grasp the essentials of their study object. It becomes obvious through the roles of pupil and master that acquiring knowledge about the spelling of one’s own dialect or variant according to a uniform spelling system for the Dutch language as a whole can be achieved only through the exploration and scanning of one’s own use of language.

Lambrecht’s ideological and didactic approach asserted that young readers could use the textbook regardless of their dialect: he addressed their ability to observe their own language use. What Lambrecht offered was not a fixed and prescriptive normative spelling system. Since his starting point was not – and could not be, at that point in time – a standardized Dutch language, he presented a relatively open, descriptive system. The application of this system required previous (prescriptive) knowledge about vowels, consonants, pitch, tone, intonation, timbre, and parts of speech. Although the system itself was non-prescriptive, it required prescriptive knowledge to inspect one’s own language. For instance, one should be able to distinguish ‘i’ and ‘j’: the ‘j’ had to be spelled as an underlined ‘i’.43 To do so, one should be aware that the ‘i’ could stand for a vowel as well as a consonant, and one should also be able to distinguish between letters that you can hear and letters that have no audible sound:

As he did in the Naembouck, Lambrecht suggested that a comparison with vowels in other languages might help the analytical process, for instance in gaining an understanding of diphthongs, two adjacent vowels: ‘the Greek call those syllables “diphthongs”. In our language these are the sounds constituted by two vowels. We, the Dutch, however, do not only use diphthongs, but also sounds made up of three or four vowels.’45 Not only do the sounds one produces need inspection to apply Lambrecht’s system correctly. Certain words can be spelled correctly only if the author can make an analysis of parts of speech:

This is in fact a rare case in which Lambrecht is prescriptive, when he limits the choice of an interjected part of speech to the five vowels he lists. In all other instances, choices in the use of words are left to the reader.

Such openness is also found in the first textbook on phonetics: intellectual and experimental effort was needed when the object of linguistic study was new, not only to the reader but also to the author. In 1635, Petrus Montanus published his Bericht van een niewe konst, genaemt de spreeckonst (Message regarding a new art, called the art of speech, 1635), the first textbook on the phonetical exploration of the Dutch language.47 Being a minister, Montanus indented this textbook to be used by school masters at Duitse schoolen (schools where Dutch was the official language).48 As the illustrated title page (fig. 4) and accompanying poem demonstrate, knowledge of the language will bring humans closer to God: ‘Just as parrots appear to become more human, you will be more adorned and become closer to God’s image.’49

From the fruits of the palm tree sprout consonants and vowels, depicted on two boards that resemble stone tablets, in what is possibly an allusion to Luke 6:44: ‘For every tree is known by his own fruit.’50 The spade suggests that Montanus’s book can uncover the roots of that tree. Below the spade is the coat of arms of Delft, Montanus’s birthplace – which makes him a Delver (researcher, litt.: digger).51 The textbook is intended for ‘the right and timely education of youth’.52 As Montanus wrote, ‘whoever is eager to learn about God through the study of what He created, and to find His praise and honour in what He created, should pay attention to the true nature of language’.53 In the textbook, pupils could find Ramist-like schedules and schemes that would help them decipher the phonetics of the Dutch language.54 Montanus hoped that these tools would speed up the process of learning how to read and write, and thus allow more time for biblical and spiritual education.55

In the preface to his textbook, Montanus announces that he has mapped a new domain of knowledge. Not grammar, rhetoric, or poetics, but a domain that we now call phonology or phonetics:

Montanus argues that his research had yielded new linguistic knowledge, but often when stumbling on dilemmas he had to settle for the most probable solutions: ‘In short, I just want to explain that I did not make up anything, but every issue caused a lot of deliberations. I doubted the outcomes of these deliberations long enough to be sure that, in the end, I was able to grasp the truth.’57

He then explains why knowledge of phonetics is valuable: it not only allows one to become acquinted with God (for all language was created by Him), but also improves one’s use of language and aids in the acquisition of any (foreign) language. In addition, poets profit, as do physicians, for they now understand how sound is produced.58 Finally, Montanus explains how the knowledge he wants to convey can best be taught:

Petrus Montanus’s Bericht van een niewe konst thus makes apparent that his linguistic textbooks required an inquisitive attitude. Acquiring knowledge of Dutch phonetics was deemed impossible without the study of one’s own use of the Dutch language.

Such an attitude became less of a prerequisite once a system for Dutch spelling or phonetics was in place. A few decades after Lambrecht had done his pioneering work, the author and canon Pontus de Heuiter published his Nederduitse orthographie (Dutch orthography, 1581), which was based on the principle of a koine, a standardized form of Dutch based on the most excellent elements found in the dialects of Holland, Brabant, and Flanders.60 In the preface, Pontus’s half-brother Jason urges the (young) reader to acquire the skill of spelling properly:

In this orthography, the sounds of vowels and consonants are presented as miracles that ‘high, middle, and low pitches’ are able to capture and so facilitate the transfer of thoughts and ideas.62 Language thus materializes what would otherwise be non-tradeable and abstract. This ideology turns spelling into a heartfelt, intellectual exercise that would leave ample room for young readers’ individual exploration of their use of language. Rather than analysing the sounds they produce or reflecting upon the meaning they attribute to the words chosen, however, readers of De Heuiter’s orthography should simply follow the instructions for correct pronunciation provided in this treatise. De Heuiter’s ideology thus allows for individual exploration, but the didactic techniques he applies required mere memorisation.

This turn to a more normative rather than explorative approach is indicative of other linguistic textbooks published in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, such as the Neder-duytsche letter-konst (1588) by the schoolmaster Pieter de Berd.63 Similar textbooks include the aforementioned Nederduydsche spellinge (1612) by Jacob van der Schuere, De Nederduytsche grammatica ofte spraec-konst (1625) by Christiaen van Heule, the Grammatica ofte leez-leerlings steunsel naar de Onder-wyzinghe des fondaments der Neder-duytscher orthographie (1627) by Richard Dafforne, and the Oprecht onderwijs van de letter-konst (1639) by Cornelis Dircksz. van Niervaert.64 In the Letterkonst, sijnde het eerste deel van de Neederlandse spraakkonst (Orthography, or, the first part of the Dutch grammar, 1683) by Wigardus à Winschooten, the first section is devoted to ‘the exploration of the features of letters in our alphabet’.65 This exploration, however, occurs under Winschooten’s strict guidance: exploration is a way of discovering something already known rather than as a mode of knowledge production. For instance, regarding the ‘i’, he writes:

The purpose of Winschooten’s textbook is no longer exploration, such as was the case with Lambrecht, but to eliminate all possible causes of confusion:

Memorization rather than exploration is advised to tackle the problem of insecurity among students. In his textbook, Van Niervaert included a school prayer for daily recitation by pupils, training them to ask ‘O Lord! […] Affirm our memory with Your strong Hand./ So that we may remember what is planted in us.’68 The best way to teach, Van Niervaert explains, is to have the pupils recite in couplets: ‘When the prayer is done, the reciting should begin.’69 If we compare these seventeenth-century textbooks with Lambrecht’s Néderlandsche spellijnghe from 1550, it becomes obvious that the tendency is to minimize the pupil’s own, active search for the correct spelling of Dutch words.

The acquisition of the linguistic knowledge of spelling, though represented no longer as an inquisitive but rather as a normative process, is still presented as a stepping-stone to the empirical acquisition of knowledge, first and foremost because Dutch was – like any language at the time – to a certain degree unruly. In practice, even though there was a prescriptive aim and ideology of unification, for instance in textbooks on orthography, pupils had to reflect on their own use of language to spell and write correctly, especially if using a dialect not integrated into the slow development of standardized Dutch. And some of the reader’s attention was still focused on the production of sound, as is evident from the preface to Van Niervaert’s Oprecht onderwijs van de letter-konst:

Linguistic knowledge enables children to read, and thus learn about explorations others have made as well as the knowledge that resulted from these explorations as conveyed in printed texts. This argument is made on Dafforne’s engraved title page (fig. 5) through a quotation from Spiegel’s Hartspiegel (Mirror of the Heart): ‘Take notice: A child who has poor knowledge of the letters, or skips the lessons about spelling correctly, will read poorly for the rest of his life.’71 Being able to read well allows one to acquire any knowledge, to be acquired at one’s own effort and according to one’s own interest. As Van Heule puts it in his preface: ‘The benefit the reader will get from this book is, in the end, a thorough knowledge of all words and sentences that open up the way or the door to all sciences.’72 Van Niervaert made a similar argument in his Oprecht onderwijs van de letter-konst: ‘Learn how to read and write when you are young, spare no money or effort, for the unlearned have to succumb to the learned.’73 Acquiring a properly spelled vocabulary of one’s own was thus presented as an investment that would allow one to succeed in life.

For this reason, too, the corpus of linguistic textbooks can also be considered a trading zone: schoolmasters in particular created an intermediate sphere between the reader’s own daily use of the language and the world of (new) knowledge that could be explored once the key to the printed word was mastered. This intermediary role of linguistic textbooks is exemplified by David van Hoogstraten’s Aenmerkingen over de geslachten der zelfstandige naemwoorden (Notes on the Genera of Nouns, 1700) which at first sight appears to be one of most normative linguistic textbooks printed in the Dutch Republic: it offers a strict organisation of a restricted selection of nouns in a list, and as such provides a typical example of the trend towards prescription rather than exploration.74 It was the most popular eighteenth-century Dutch dictionary and school grammar, as evidenced by the number of reprints and the references to the book by eighteenth-century Dutch authors and schoolmasters.75 As we learn from its preface, the book was written in service of ‘eagerly learning’ Dutch youth:

Van Hoogstraten wished to transfer his passion for and knowledge of the Dutch language to future generations, before their appetite would be spoiled by inexperienced teachers. The gaining of semantic knowledge was a matter of responding to but also controlling one’s cravings: his readers must fully accept the guidance and authority Van Hoogstraten claims to offer, and the trait de liaison he promises to be. As De Bont and Dibbets have argued, his authority was grounded in the work of the exemplary authors Joost van den Vondel and Pieter Cornelisz. Hooft. Van Hoogstraten has simply followed their lead in the attribution of gender to the nouns he lists.77

For Van Hoogstraten, knowledge of a lexicon was knowledge of an organized system – hence the presentation of this knowledge as a list. It could be explored by the young ‘curious reader’ thanks to this strict organization: ‘I found the usual way of presenting the most important and most used words as in an index, in alphabetic order, very useful: when in need, the curious reader can see in the blink of an eye how to use any given word.’78 While exploring the language and learning how to apply it, confusion is to be avoided at all costs. When an issue related to a word’s grammatical case arises and cannot be solved, one should relinquish using the particular case or search for an alternative.79

The indexes of the sort of semantic knowledge Van Hoogstraten provides are fixed, as is his instruction, but he offers another means of acquiring semantic knowledge that opens up the possibility of explorations by the Dutch youth. Young readers should read literary works by excellent authors and record any word or use of a word that sparks their interest. Van Hoogstraten advises them to have blank sheets bound into their copies of his books, so that, based on their own reading, they can take notes about words he missed: ‘Adding words is facilitated if you have blank pages bound into the copy of this book, so you can accumulate and use this list based on your own experience.’80 A copy of Van Hoogstraten’s book kept in the Royal Library of The Hague (fig. 6) indeed has such blank pages bound in with the printed sheets. The blank pages in this particular copy show no signs of handwriting, but underline the relationship between inquisitiveness, youth, language, and knowledge Van Hoogstraten envisions.

Writing in one’s textbook, as was suggested by Van Hoogstraten, had in fact been forbidden as an abuse of paper in the school order of 1602. As Van Niervaert repeated in 1639:

Van Hoogstraten’s Aenmerkingen over de geslachten der zelfstandige naemwoorden diverts from that ruling, and reveals the idea that knowledge derives from one’s appropriating the system represented by language. Writing down one’s ondervindinge (observations), based on one’s own reading and an exploration of language used by others, is an inherent part of the acquisition of linguistic knowledge: the implication is that everyone should acquire a vocabulary of one’s own, based on individual observations that complement the standard list provided by Van Hoogstraten. Fallardus Kok’s Ont-werp der Neder-duitsche letter-konst (Design of the Dutch syntax, 1649), already suggested the value of such an approach, as is obvious from the volume’s subtitle: ‘Gathered from the nature of the Dutch language, the common use of this language, as well as the use of the Dutch language by exemplary authors.’82 Kok envisioned that the cutting edge of understanding about the Dutch language and the use of that language by good writers would form the best syntactic training ground for young pupils. His principal advice was the study of examples provided by authors who had mastered the Dutch language, akin to what Van Hoogstraten would propose in 1700. However, Kok overwhelmed his young readers with his own examples, writing for instance that ‘I will give yet another example of the use of auxiliary verbs, for those who want to become knowledgeable’.83 Van Hoogstraten transfers the responsibility for finding these examples to the young reader.

Linguistic knowledge was systematically and persistently offered to the youth in the Dutch Republic from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards. Around 1550, the knowledge proffered was restricted to orthography, but by 1650 a more diverse corpus of phonological, syntactical, and semantic knowledge was introduced. As more books on a certain knowledge domain were published (as with textbooks on orthography), they became more normative in nature. An experimental and empirical approach, however, can be found even in the more normative textbooks. Because language is not simply just a set of fixed rules, it cannot be studied without observing variants and irregularities – and these can only be found and processed through empirical observations of one’s own production of language and sound. Pupils were encouraged to inspect their own use of the Dutch language in order to best understand linguistic mechanisms and derivations. Since these textbooks were geared towards sparking an interest in the observation of language, it can be assumed that they exerted a substantial societal impact and thus made possible changes in the knowledge culture of the Dutch Republic.

The tendency to present language as a trading zone was at the heart of this knowledge acquisition. Lambrecht, Van der Schuere, and others created a zone filled with professionals – ministers, schoolmasters, and canons – that received philological training at the universities and schools they attended, and used their knowledge of the book industry to disseminate this knowledge to a wider, young audience. They attempted to materialize this zone in the textual format they chose, be it a list (Van Hoogstraten) or a dialogue (Lambrechts). Also, visual metaphors urged users of these book to look upon language as an object: as a tree loaded with knowledge, waiting to be plucked by the delver ((Montanus); as the pathway to every knowledge domain (Van Niervaert); or as an object without outer limit that could be supplemented with one’s own observations (Van Hoogstraten). Since the acquisition of linguistic knowledge was partly based on an individualized and empirically based search, there must have been discussions in classroom settings. These books taught young readers about the intersubjectivity of their own observations, but also showed them a gateway to new knowledge. Didactic techniques urged young readers to contemplate their own role in the acquisition of knowledge and were made aware of the role guides like Lambrecht, Montanus, and Van Hoogstraten played in the augmentation and distribution of knowledge.

Given that many children and young adults were enrolled in the school system of the Dutch Republic at the time, it can be assumed that introducing the Dutch language as an object of empirical and intellectual study affected the knowledge culture in general. The large numbers of books on the subject of language that were printed in the Dutch Republic certainly suggests that linguistic knowledge formed more than a lot of classroom hot air, but had a certain physical presence. Approaching the linguistic textbooks as stimuli for empirical observation and acknowledging the trading zone these textbooks created, perhaps implies a rewriting of the perspective on how sixteenth-century pedagogical views – as in, for instance, Erasmus’s De pueris instituendis (On a liberal education for children, 1529) – affected and dominated youth textbooks up to the Enlightenment. As sixteenth-century pedagogical views were based on the assumption that children were sinful at birth, and thus in need of the correction given to them by the church, their parents, their teachers, and the books they were to read, textbooks used in schools were disciplining instruments. They imparted their specific forms of knowledge in a strict and set order. Scholars have often assumed that from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, textbooks as well as children’s literature changed – from being a disciplining instrument and a pre-processed body of knowledge to a type of literature that actively promoted curiosity and inquisitiveness, in line with the emerging Enlightenment ideology that regarded the child as a tabula rasa.84 Parallel to this development, new educational ideals and models were adopted.85 The main character of The Family Instructor (1715) for instance, an educational treatise by Daniel Defoe – the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719), initially an adult novel that became one of the most successful children’s novels ever written – is a young boy who excels in asking his parents every thinkable question. Similar trends have been observed in children’s books.86 Penny Brown has highlighted how eighteenth-century French children’s books used dialogues to intrigue and stimulate the minds of young female readers. Émilie, the protagonist of Louise d’Epinay’s Les Conversations d’Émilie, is ‘bright and chirpy, self-confident and often funny, endlessly curious and of course eager to learn’.87 Émilie’s curiosity is obvious in her lengthy dialogues with adults, whose praise of her inquisitive behaviour sent a strong message to young readers. Nina Christensen has described how fictive letters in eighteenth-century Danish children’s books also sought to spark curiosity, as evident from prefaces whose authors declare that they anticipated their young audience to be naturally curious about the topics they have chosen to address.88

Long before these eighteenth-century developments, Dutch sixteenth-century linguistic textbooks intended to spur empirical observation by young readers, by presenting the Dutch language as an object that could be empirically explored and thus obtained. A more detailed analysis of the protagonists involved in the creation of the linguistic trading zone is needed to conclude whether the impact of their potential to profoundly influence early modern knowledge culture justifies the acknowledgement of a linguistic trading zone as an important breeding ground for the welcoming or even encouragement of empirical observations by Dutch youth.