ABSTRACT
The professionalization of Dutch philology after 1800 coincided with the emergence of nationalist philologies all over Europe. At the same time, it was a phase in a very long history of philological research in the Low Countries, going back to the sixteenth century. This article takes both broader evolutions into account, both the early stage of modern professionalization of Dutch philology in the 1840s, and its anchoring in the earliest vernacular philology, practised at the University of Leiden around 1600. It does so by outlining a history of scholarly editions of literary texts, and by focusing in particular on several innovations within this scholarly activity introduced by Willem J.A. Jonckbloet and Matthias de Vries, editions throughout the decades of Jacob van Maerlant’s Spiegel historiael and a chronicle by Melis Stoke, the forged chronicle by Klaas Kolijn, and epistemological statements. Thus, the history of Dutch philology before 1860 can be placed in the broader frames of, on the one hand, the history of philological criticism and antiquarianism, as discussed by Anthony Grafton, and on the other hand, literary historicism and the national cultivation of culture, as defined by Joep Leerssen.
