chambers of rhetoric

Amateur literary societies in the Netherlands and France during the 15th and 16th centuries. The members were mainly middle-class townspeople who formed associations similar to guilds in order to promote their love of poetry and drama. The chambers of rhetoric often organized public celebrations.

They were usually very traditional in their literary interests, but in the Netherlands (where they were called rederijkers) they did play an important role in the development of secular drama and then poetry. The leading Dutch writers to emerge from the rederijker tradition were Dirck Coornheert and Henrick Spiegel.

The chambers of rhetoric were the literary equivalent of Meistergesang guilds in Germany. They were not usually innovative in their literary enterprises or particularly quick to respond to Renaissance ideas. In the Netherlands, they did, however, encourage the development of an increasingly self-conscious and ambitious national literature. An example is the play Elckerlijk (c. 1495), the probable source for the English morality play Everyman. (See also Duytsche Academie.)

Significant Dutch writers associated with the rederijker tradition include: Cornelis Everaert (c. 1480–1556), playwright and member of De Drie Santinnen chamber in Bruges; Matthijs de Castelein (1485–1550), author of the first Dutch treatise on poetry, De Const van Rhetoriken (1548); Colijn van Rijssele, the 15th-century author of the middle-class drama cycle De Spiegel der Minnen/The Mirror of Love; and Anna Bijns (1493–1575), a schoolmistress in Antwerp.