Nederlantsche Antiquiteyten: Between language and religion

The Nederlantsche Antiquiteyten (“Netherlandish Antiquities with the conversion of part of the same lands to the Christian faith, by St Willibrord, apostle of Holland, [...] and Flanders”), published in 1613, were evidently conceived of for a Netherlandish-speaking public. As the title itself explicitly declares, the 112 pages of this booklet mainly focus on an area roughly corresponding with that part of the coast of France which faces the Channel and with today’s Belgium and Netherlands the Low Countries, in the period between the fifth and the eighth centuries. The work, as Verstegan himself admits in his dedicatory preface , is a Netherlandish adaptation of some parts and certain themes of the Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, which had been published eight years before. The aim of the article is to illustrate the contents of the Antiquiteyten – with special attention given to the field of Germanic studies – in order to better identify their place within Verstegan’s corpus of linguistic/polemical writings.