Mareel-2018-Renaissance_Studies.pdf


Urban space and the literary exploration of self –
A rhetorician makes a mental tour through his city

Samuel Mareel

Between 14 May 1561 and the beginning of the following year, Eduard de
Dene, a poet and legal clerk from the Flemish city of Bruges, copied out 465
folios of his own poems and songs in what he called his Testament Rhetoricael
[‘Rhetorical Testament’ or ‘Testament in verse’]. Probably because it was so
extensive, the collection was never printed. The autograph did, however, come
down to us and constitutes one of the generically most varied and aesthetically
most attractive collections of sixteenth-century Dutch poetry and song
known today.1

Of particular value in the Testament Rhetoricael are not only its diversity and lit-
erary quality but also its outspoken autobiographical nature. The major part of
De Dene’s poetical compositions conforms in both form and content to the lit-
erary conventions of the art of the rhetoricians. The collection contains refreinen
[refrains], ballades, songs, rondeaux, and chronograms that praise the Virgin
Mary, Charles V, the Holy Sacrament, fellow rhetoricians, and the art of rheto-
ric; they also abuse the French, heretics, liars, and the haughty, and mock
misers and henpecked husbands. What sets De Dene’s manuscript apart from
most other Dutch lyrical collections from the period, however, is the integra-
tion of the poems and songs in a kind of meta-narrative. This framework evokes
the author’s persona drawing up his last will and testament. Most of his
bequests are literary compositions of his own making. The majority of the bene-
ficiaries can be situated in mid-sixteenth-century Bruges, the time and place in
which De Dene lived, worked, and wrote. Because of the wealth of information
it provides in its testamentary framework, the Testament Rhetoricael constitutes a
unique testimonial to the biography, ideas, opinions, and social world of a
middle-class author in a mid-sixteenth-century urban environment.

1 Eduard de Dene, Testament rhetoricael, ed. Werner Waterschoot and Dirk Coigneau, 3 vols. (Ghent: Konin-
klijke Soevereine Hoofdkamer van Retorica ‘De Fonteine’, 1976–1980) [Jaarboek ‘De Fonteine’, 26, 28, and 30
(1976–1980)]. Unfortunately De Dene’s verse is not (yet) available in English translation. Readers with some
knowledge of Dutch can consult a generous selection of poems and songs from the Testament rhetoricael, with
translation in modern Dutch, in Gerrit Komrij, De Nederlandse po€ezie van de 12de tot en met de 16de eeuw in 1000 en
enige bladzijden (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1994), 908–57. On De Dene and his Testament rhetoricael, see also the
essay by Alisa van de Haar elsewhere in this issue.

VC 2018 The Society for Renaissance Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Renaissance Studies Vol. 32 No. 1 DOI: 10.1111/rest.12377



A second remarkable feature of the Testament is the fact that De Dene’s repre-
sentation of self is prominently linked to that of Bruges’ urban space. The
author’s autobiographical utterances are generally part of an evocation of
buildings and locations. When he says something about himself he tends to do
this as part of a description of a place or a building. This is most obvious in the
first half of the Testament, in which De Dene’s persona evokes a number of
Bruges churches, monasteries, and official buildings. While doing so he
bequeaths poems and, to a lesser extent, objects, both concrete and imaginary,
and abstract intentions. These are addressed to a large and diverse array of ben-
eficiaries that are in some way related to these institutions. At the church of
Our Lady, for example, he bequeaths a Lof [Praise] to the Holy Sacrament to
the chapel of the guild of the Holy Sacrament,2 and a refereyn on Mary Magda-
lene, Saint Catherine, and Saint Barbara to the altar of the chamber of rhetoric
of De Drie Santinnen [The Three Female Saints], which was located in the same
chapel.3 The clerk of De Drie Santinnen, who is responsible for the maintenance
of the chapel, receives another refrain on the same subject.4 For the impover-
ished ‘Ian drooghkele’ [John with the dry throat], a ‘groot mout docteur’
[great doctor in the science of the malts], De Dene wishes that he may possess a
room, a kitchen, a bar, a happy wife, and a job in a brewery. As we learn from
the same poem ‘Ian drooghkele’ was a drinking buddy of the author but also a
valuable artist who plays the organ of the church when he is not in prison.5

While making his bequests the poet reminisces about his personal relationship
to these places and buildings and to the people he used to know there. At the
Bruges church of the Holy Cross, for example, he tells us that he once lived in
that parish, and at the city hall that he was married there.6

The converging force between self and space in the Testament Rhetoricael is
memory. It is unclear if and to what extent De Dene was actually familiar with
classical writings on the ars memorativa.7 Places do have a strongly mnemonic
function in his text; they remind the author’s persona of people and events
from his past and trigger him to say something about himself. The medium in
which these things are expressed is the literary text, the literary character in this
case consisting of the use of verse and, frequently, of fiction.

This essay analyses Eduard de Dene’s Testament Rhetoricael and the ways it
brings together three domains of knowledge that were the object of increasing
interest and study during the sixteenth century – of the individual self, of urban
space, and of memory. It does this from the vantage point of what Elisabeth
Hodges called ‘urban poetics’, and defined as ‘the way the city functioned in

2 Ibid., I, 101.
3 Ibid., I, 103.
4 Ibid., I, 105.
5 Ibid., I, 107.
6 Ibid., II, 205, 171.
7 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Mary Carruthers, The

Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Urban space and the literary exploration of self 107



early modern texts as [. . .] a means by which authors expressed the self as a phe-
nomenon related to location’.8 Hodges’s study of ‘urban poetics’ builds on the
work of Tom Conley, most notably his The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in
Early Modern France, in which Conley analysed how developments in cartogra-
phy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought about an increased
identification between self and space.9

An analysis of the ‘urban poetics’ of De Dene’s Testament Rhetoricael can, as I
hope to show, considerably advance our understanding of how the relationship
between self and space was experienced and expressed in an early modern
urban context. More generally, it can help us to read early modern literary texts
as explorations of urban spatiality. The reason for this lies not only in De Dene’s
text being a little-known literary work but also in the extent to and detail in
which it explores the link between the auctorial self and urban space. Its 465
folios contain such an amount of material that the collection could serve as the
basis for both a topographical description of sixteenth-century Bruges and a
modest biography of Eduard de Dene. In the pages that follow I look at De
Dene’s Testament through the lens of three early modern phenomena that can,
I believe, give us a better insight into both the ‘urban poetics’ of De Dene’s Tes-
tament Rhetoricael and, on a more theoretical level, the literary exploration of
the relationship between knowledge of the early modern self and of early mod-
ern space: the genre of the literary testament, the emergence of cartography in
an urban context, and the increasing use of literary texts in urban space for
memorial purposes.

THE LITERARY TESTAMENT

As both the structuring principle and the author’s own denomination indi-
cate,10 De Dene considered his collection as a literary testament. This genre
dates back to antiquity and was widely practised during the Middle Ages and
the early modern period, both in Latin and in the vernacular.11 Literary testa-
ments could vary widely in form, content, and tone. What mainly holds this

8 Elisabeth Hodges, Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 2–3.
9 Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1996). On the link between identity and early modern urban space, see also the research
that has been done on Italy, especially Venice and Florence, in, for example, Dennis Romano, ‘Gender and
the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice’, Journal of Social History, 23 (1989), 339–53, and Lauro Martines,
Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003).

10 See, for example, De Dene, Testament, I, 32: ‘Myn Rhetoricael testamentken cleene’ [My modest rhetori-
cal testament].

11 On the genre of the literary testament, see, for example, Winthrop Huntington Rice, The European Ances-
try of Villon’s Satirical Testaments (New York: The Corporate Press, 1941); Vladimir R. Rossman, Francois Villon:
Les Concepts Medievaux Du Testament (Paris: Jean-Pierre Delarge, 1976); Ulrich Bach, Kommentierte Bibliographie
englischer literarischer Testamente vom 14. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: C. Winter Universit€atsverlag,
1982); Julia Boffey, ‘Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament’, Modern Language Quarterly, 53 (1992),
41–56; and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, L’"ecriture testamentaire #a la fin du Moyen Age: Identit"e, dispersion, trace
(Oxford: Legenda, 1999).

108 Samuel Mareel



heterogeneous group of writings together is some form of playing around with
the conventions of the legal will and testament. Literary testaments could thus
invoke the disposition of goods by a testator, such as in the late antique (prob-
ably fourth century) Testamentum Porcelli [Little Pig’s Will],12 or the making of a
final confession, such as in the Testament of John Lydgate.13 They could call up
the act of taking leave, for example, in the cong"es of the thirteenth-century
jongleur Jean Bodel,14 or the giving of advice to the surviving next of kin, such as
in the Uutersten Wille [Last Will] (1563), which the Piemontese businessman
Lowys Porquin, who was based in the small town of Bergen op Zoom in North
Brabant, addressed to his children.15

Some of the more interesting – and often longer and more complex – literary
testaments combine several of these characteristics. The most famous and influ-
ential examples are François Villon’s Le Lais (c. 1456), and especially his Grand
Testament (1461), a 20001 line virtuoso parody on the genres of both the legal
and the literary testament.16 Although De Dene does not mention Villon as
such, it seems, as Dirk Coigneau has convincingly argued, that the Lais and/or
the Grand Testament have functioned as models for the Testament Rhetoricael.17

About a decade younger than the Testament Rhetoricael is the ‘Wyll and
Testament’ (1573) by the English female poet Isabella Whitney.18 Any direct
links between the Whitney and De Dene texts are highly unlikely. Yet, because
of its comparable Villonesque mix-up of conventions and its obvious urban set-
ting, in this case the city of London, the ‘Wyll and Testament’ provides interest-
ing points of comparison to situate the Bruges text within a broader European
context.

The borrowing of the conventions of the legal will and testament in literary
texts often brought about a focus on the individual self. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-
Toulet pointed out the link between an emergence of the individual in the Mid-
dle Ages and a renaissance of the testament. ‘Dans le domaine du droit’, she
argues, ‘le testament est un champ d’affirmation de l’individu; en litt"erature, il
est le lieu de construction d’une fiction de soi’ [In the legal domain, the testa-
ment constitutes a field for the affirmation of the individual; in literature, it is a
domain for the construction of a fiction of oneself].19

The late medieval and early modern association of the testament with the
individual self resulted both from its being the medium through which the

12 Edward Champlin, ‘The Testament of the Piglet’, Phoenix, 41 (1987), 174–83.
13 Boffey, ‘Lydgate’.
14 Huntington Rice, European Ancestry, 158–63.
15 Myriam Greilsammer, Een pand voor het paradijs: Leven en zelfbeeld van Lowys Porquin, Pi€emontees zakenman

in de zestiende-eeuwse Nederlanden (Tielt: Lannoo, 1989).
16 François Villon, Po"e sies, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
17 Dirk Coigneau, ‘Een Brugse Villon of Rabelais?: Eduard de Dene en zijn Testament Rhetoricael’, in Bart

Ramakers (ed.), Conformisten en rebellen: Rederijkerscultuur in de Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 198–211.

18 Isabella Whitney, ‘Wyll and Testament’, in Renaissance Women Poets, ed. Danielle Clarke (London:
Penguin Books, 2000), 18–28.

19 Cerquiglini-Toulet, L’"ecriture testamentaire, 5.

Urban space and the literary exploration of self 109



individual disposed of his/her personal belongings and from the fact that the
making of the last will was often combined with a final confession. This second
characteristic brought about that wills increasingly contained passages of moral
introspection.20 Both aspects are clearly present in De Dene’s Testament. At the
outset of the collection, for example, the poet evokes how, waking up hungry
and broke one morning, he stumbles upon a note which he had previously
written: ‘memorare novissima [tua]’ [be mindful of your last end].21 This bibli-
cal quotation (Ecclesiasticus 7:40), often used in ars moriendi writings of the
time, makes him reflect upon his numerous friends who have passed away and
upon his own end. As a result he decides to draw up his testament, in which he
will remember his deceased friends and bequeath all of his goods.

As Cerquiglini-Toulet indicated, the individual self-evoked in the literary tes-
tament was often a fiction, ‘un ph"enomène de structure’ [a structural phenom-
enon], as she called it.22 Like the genre as a whole, the testator was, to a certain
extent, the result of literary convention, of fictionalisation, more a persona
then an actual person. For example, a common characteristic in numerous lit-
erary testaments is that of the testator actually being too poor to bequeath any-
thing. In the Grand Testament François Villon famously presents himself as a
‘povre petit escollier’ (1886);23 in her ‘Wyll and Testament’ Isabella Whitney
points to her being ‘whole in body, and in minde,/but very weake in Purse’
(2).24 Likewise, De Dene’s persona states from the outset that ‘ken hebbe niet
om gheuen huut kiste of schryne van ghelde of ander testamentelicke iuwee-
len’ [I have no money or other testamentary jewellery in a chest or safe that I
could give].25

As a result of their impecuniosity the authors decide to make immaterial or
mock bequests instead. In the Lais, Villon leaves rather futile things, such as
‘Mes brayes’ [my trousers] (101), ‘plain pot de Saine’ [water from the Seine]
(228) and his ‘chassiz tissus d’arigniee’ [bed frame made of cobweb] (234).26

Whitney bequeaths things she does not actually possess: existing streets and
buildings to the city of London, plasters to the surgeons (101–2), and her
friends’ intention to buy books from her printer (197–200);27 De Dene leaves
the tail of a fox and three brooms to the Bruges Augustinians, so they can sweep
their library, and a series of books in the ‘filosofollie’ [‘philosofolly’] with non-
sensical titles to the fool of the local archer’s guild.28 The overall majority of his

20 Huntington Rice, European Ancestry, 15; Boffey, ‘Lydgate’, 45.
21 De Dene, Testament, I, 42.
22 Cerquiglini-Toulet, L’ecriture testamentaire, 6–7.
23 Villon, Po"e sies, 152.
24 Clarke, Renaissance Women Poets, 19.
25 De Dene, Testament, II, 7.
26 Villon, Po"e sies, 43, 48, 49.
27 Clarke, Renaissance Women Poets, 22, 25.
28 De Dene, Testament, I, 58, 231. The bequest of books with nonsensical titles has been interpreted as a ref-

erence to the Librairie de St. Victor in Chapter 7 of François Rabelais’s Pantagruel. Dirk Geirnaert, ‘Imitating
Rabelais in 16th Century Flanders: The Case of Eduard de Dene’, in Paul Smith [ed.], "E diter et traduire Rabelais
#a travers les âges [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997], 73–91.

110 Samuel Mareel



bequests, however, are his own poems and songs: ‘maer van Rhetorica conste al
wast my Pine elck tzyne//By desen testamente zou deelen’ [but examples of
the art of rhetoric, even if I find it difficult, through this testament I will
share].29

Villon scholars have often justly warned against too autobiographical a read-
ing of his Testament.30 Adrian Armstrong called Villon’s testator ‘an unstable
persona, who adopts a series of roles rather than a consistent stance’.31 We do,
however, have to be careful not to let our understanding of a genre as a whole
be dominated by the characteristics of its most famous example. As for the
majority of authors from the time, biographical details about Eduard de Dene
are scarce. Extra-literary sources about him do largely seem to conform to his
persona in the Testament Rhetoricael, however. Most of the fellow rhetoricians he
mentioned can be identified; his activities as a rhetorician and as a legal clerk
are confirmed by other sources. The Bruges city archives possess an extensive
court sentence from 1548 in which, because of Eduard de Dene’s excessive
drinking and gambling and the resulting neglect of his family, the full responsi-
bility of the finances and possessions of the De Dene household is transferred
to his wife. Three years earlier, as the archives also tell us, the author had
already been briefly imprisoned for the same reasons.32

The existence of links between the Testament and historical sources should,
of course, by no means imply that we can reduce a long and complex literary
composition to a simple autobiographical utterance. It does suggest, however,
that this literary testament is far more autobiographical then the two texts by
Villon by which it was probably inspired. It also shows that by the middle of the
sixteenth century, the genre of the literary testament had come to be able to
function as a medium for genuine autobiographical writing.

CARTOGRAPHY

It was customary in medieval and early modern testaments to make donations
to local religious and charitable institutions. In return, these entities would
pray for the soul of the deceased.33 This type of bequest was also adopted in cer-
tain literary testaments, such as those by François Villon, Isabella Whitney, and
Eduard de Dene. The fact that convents, hospitals, churches, and schools were

29 De Dene, Testament, II, 7.
30 Jane H. M. Taylor, The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2001), 33–57; Adrian Armstrong, ‘The Testament of François Villon’, in Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 65–76.

31 Armstrong, ‘The Testament’, 64.
32 Gilbert Degroote, ‘Eduard de Dene (1505–61578)’, Leuvensche bij dragen op het gebied van de Germaansche

philologie en in ’t bij zonder van de Nederlandsche dialectkunde, 34 (1942), 126–41; Albert Schouteet, ‘De Brugse
rederijker Eduard de Dene’, West-Vlaanderen, 12 (1963), 213–9.

33 Philippe Ariès, Het uur van onze dood: Duizend jaar sterven, begraven, rouwen en gedenken (Amsterdam:
Elsevier, 1987), 190; Henk De Smaele, Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk te Brugge: Kunst en geschiedenis (Bruges: Jong Kris-
ten Onthaal voor Toerisme, 1997), 118.

Urban space and the literary exploration of self 111



based at a specific location introduced a locational aspect in the texts. Institu-
tions often simply became synonymous with their location. Thus Villon, in the
Grand Testament, wonders what he could give ‘#a l’Hôtel Dieu’ (1644–5),34 the
hospital next to Notre-Dame on the Ile de la Cit"e. He leaves Mount Valerian, a
pilgrim site outside of Paris, and a quarter of an indulgence he earned in Rome
‘au mont de Montmartre’ (1551–8),35 the famous hill in Paris where a female
convent was based in Villon’s day. Isabella Whitney also seems to refer to this
custom when she leaves ‘people [. . .] that out of tune doo talke’ to ‘Bedlam’
(225–6), or St. Mary Bethlehem, formerly a priory and in Whitney’s day already
a hospital for the mentally ill then located near Bishopsgate in London.36

De Dene goes significantly further then both Villon and Whitney in making
bequests to religious institutions. Of the 465 folios of his literary testament, 128
consist entirely of donations of this kind. He starts out with the four mendicant
orders established in Bruges (Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Car-
melites), whom he wants to ‘zyn ghedachtich’ [remember].37 He then contin-
ues with the eight parish churches that ‘dienen oock verschoont’ [also have to
be endowed with something], since, as the author’s persona remarks, ‘diese wel
doet/zal blyfuen niet ongheloont’ [he who does them good will not remain
without reward].38 Then come a large number of smaller religious and charita-
ble institutions, both inside and outside the city walls, such as Eekhout Abbey,
the school of the Bruges Beghards, the Ten Wijngaerde B"eguinage, or the
chapel of the boatsmen. Most of the bequests that are mentioned in the collec-
tion can be related to these places in Bruges’ urban space.

De Dene’s bequests to churches, monasteries, chapels, schools, or hospitals
are not only greater in number than those of Villon or of Whitney, his presenta-
tion of these religious and charitable institutions is also significantly more mate-
rial and spatial in nature. When De Dene’s persona mentions one, he seems to
be thinking primarily of an actual building rather than of a more general loca-
tion, an abstract community, or an administrative entity – what we today would
call a ‘legal personality’. This is apparent from, for example, the fact that the
poet not only makes bequests to the institutions as a whole but also to parts of
the buildings in which they are housed, such as a chapel, an altar, or a porch. At
the monastery of the Carmelites, for example, he not only donates a Holy Vir-
gin Lof to the Carmelite brothers but also a series of Holy Trinity refreinen to the
chapel of the chamber of rhetoric De Heilige Geest [The Holy Ghost], of which
he was a member.39 He also remembers people who were attached to or lived
near a building. For the principal bell-ringer of Saint-Donatian, for example,
De Dene wishes that he may be attributed an assistant bell-ringer for when he

34 Villon, Po"e sies, 138.
35 Ibid., 134.
36 Clarke, Renaissance Women Poets, 294.
37 De Dene, Testament, I, 55.
38 Ibid., I, 90.
39 Ibid., I, 74–5, 75–85.

112 Samuel Mareel



has been drinking. Nietken ‘de naeysterghe’ [the seamstress], ‘by sint donaes
wuenende in een cleen wynckelken’ [who lived near Saint-Donatian in a small
shop] receives ‘diueersch moy duerbroddelt naeysel’ [diverse kinds of nicely
messed-up needlework].40

The outspokenly material and spatial presentation of monasteries and
churches in the Testament Rhetoricael is also apparent from the fact that the
order in which buildings are mentioned seems to have been determined pri-
marily by their spatial proximity to one another. This cannot only be observed
in the evocation of the institutions themselves but also in that of buildings that
were located in their vicinity. While speaking of the church of Our Lady, for
example, the poet’s persona also mentions nearby Saint John’s hospital, as well
as Eekhout Abbey.41

The principle of vicinity is essential to the autobiographical nature of the Tes-
tament Rhetoricael. It is also a characteristic that sets the collection apart from Vil-
lon’s Lais and Grand Testament. As we have seen above, individual places to
which bequests are made trigger loose memories and opinions in the mind of
De Dene’s persona. It is in the mental wandering along these places, however,
that the autobiographical narrative takes shape. Specific individuals, groups,
events, opinions, or character traits of the author are referred to in connection
to distinct places, which allows the reader to make connections and distil the
autobiographical narrative. The author’s life is presented not chronologically,
as in most modern writings about the self, but chorographically, on the basis of
how aspects of the author’s self can be linked to a specific circuit of places. His
Testament thus reveals a sense of space and a capacity to imagine and evoke
space that Villon, an earlier practitioner of the genre of the literary testament,
either did not have or did not think interesting or relevant enough to express
in his writings. In the French poet’s Lais and Grand Testament, the few spaces
that are mentioned remain loose dots, while the autobiographical nature of De
Dene’s Testament lies precisely in the connections between the dots.

It is tempting to link De Dene’s chorographical self-writing to the genre of
the urban chorography, or textual description of cities.42 Like the Testament
Rhetoricael, urban chorographies link people and events from a city’s past to
spaces and places from its present. The possibility cannot be excluded that De
Dene might have been familiar with early vernacular examples of the urban
chorography, such as La Fleur des antiquitez (1532) and Les Antiquitez, chroniques,
et singularitez de Paris by Gilles Corrozet (1550).43 However, most urban chorog-
raphies and the earliest descriptions of this kind of cities in the Low Countries,

40 Ibid., I, 90–1.
41 Ibid., I, 108.
42 On the genre of the chorography, see, for example, Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabe-

than Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Eddy Verbaan, De woonplaats van de faam:
Grondslagen van de stadsbeschrijving in de zeventiende-eeuwse Republiek (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011); and Raingard
Esser, The Politics of Memory: The Writing of Partition in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

43 Cynthia Skenazi, Le poète architecte en France: Constructions d’un imaginaire monarchique (Paris: Champion,
2003), 117–43.

Urban space and the literary exploration of self 113



such as Lodovico Guicciardini’s Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (first Italian edi-
tion: 1567; first translation into Dutch: 1612) and Jan Orlers’ Beschrijvinge der
stad Leyden (1614), are younger than the Testament.44

A second possible source of inspiration for De Dene’s chorographic self-
writing comprises religious processions and joyous entries of princes. These
parades followed specific routes through the city, linking important places for
the cities’ past or present, or symbolically demarcating a specific zone.45 As in
the Testament, their movement through urban space can thus be read as an
expression of identity. De Dene was actively involved in the organisation of pro-
cessions and joyous entries. In his Testament he included several texts, mostly
songs, written for performance during the city’s yearly procession of the Holy
Blood.46 In 1549 he and the painter Pieter Pourbus conceived the decorations
organised by the Franc of Bruges for the Joyous Entry into the city of Charles V
and his son, the future Philip II.47

Religious processions and especially princely entries into cities were com-
monly recorded in writing, both in chronicles and in separate booklets.48 In
1515, for example, the Bruges rhetorician Jan de Scheerere, a friend of De
Dene who is commemorated in his Testament,49 composed a detailed evocation
in verse of the joyous entry of Charles V into the city in that same year.50 These
descriptions of processions and joyous entries are among the earliest written
evocations of a movement through urban space.

The significance of the differences and correspondences between proces-
sions and princely entries on the one hand and De Dene’s chorographic auto-
biography on the other can perhaps best be understood through Michel de
Certeau’s exceptionally rich and stimulating theoretical reflection on the
meaning of space in ‘Pratiques d’espace’, the third part of his L’invention du
quotidien. 1. arts de faire.51 De Certeau opens his essay with an evocation of the
view on Manhattan from the 110th floor of the (former) World Trade Center

44 Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1567); Jan Orlers, Beschrij-
vinge der stad Leyden (Leiden: H. Haestens, J. Orlers ende J. Maire, 1614). Some chronicles from before 1562
do contain chorographic passages, however, such as the chronicle of Zeeland by Jan Reygersberch (Antwerp:
vid. Heyndrick Peetersen van Middelburch, 1551).

45 Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, La ville des c"e r"e monies: Essai sur la communication politique dans les anciens Pays-
Bas bourguignons (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).

46 De Dene, Testament, I, 117–20.
47 Katarina De Fruyt, Blijde intredes van vorsten in Brugge 1497 –1549 (MA thesis, Ghent University, 1998),

129–31; Luc Devliegher, ‘De blijde intrede van prins Filips in 1549’, Handelingen van het genootschap voor geschie-
denis te Brugge, 136 (1999), 124–5.

48 Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘The Early Modern Festival Book: Function and Form’, in J. R. Mulryne, Helen
Watanabe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern
Europe, 2 vols. (Aldershot: MHRA, 2004), I, 3–17.

49 De Dene, Testament, II, 7–10.
50 [Jan de Scheerere,] De triumphe ghedaen te brugghe binnen Ter intreye van caerle (Antwerp: Adriaen van Ber-

ghen, 1515). Modern edition in Samuel Mareel, ‘Jan de Scheereres Triumphe ghedaen te brugghe ter intreye
van caerle: Teksteditie met inleiding en aantekeningen’, Jaarboek ‘De Fonteine’, 55 (2005), 79–143.

51 De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 137–91.

114 Samuel Mareel



in New York City. Most of the essay consists of an analysis of the differences
between the perception of the city from such a height and that of someone
who finds himself on the actual streets below. The primary difference, accord-
ing to De Certeau, lies in the act through which the city is experienced. In the
first case it is through looking, more precisely through ‘l’oeil totalisant’ [the
totalising eye] that takes in the entire cityscape;52 in the second it is through a
more physical activity, namely walking. It is by walking through the city, through
individual streets and along individual buildings – what De Certeau calls ‘une
rh"etorique de la marche’53 [a rhetoric of walking] – that people ‘en bas’ [down
below] give meaning to the city.

The element of walking is essential to capture the difference between proces-
sions and princely entries and their evocations in writing on the one hand and
De Dene’s Testament on the other. Walking is central to the procession; it is
what binds together both its participants and the places they pass by. Although,
as we have seen, De Dene’s evocation of churches and monasteries is guided by
spatial proximity, walking is entirely absent from his Testament. At several points
in the text he emphatically evokes himself sitting in his bedroom, thinking and
writing his testament.54 He does not experience the city like De Certeau’s
twentieth-century Manhattan pedestrians or like his sixteenth-century contem-
poraries participating in a procession or joyous entry; rather, he overlooks it
through his ‘totalising’ mental eye. His Testament is primarily a report of a men-
tal activity, while evocations in writing of processions or joyous entries are
reports of physical activities.

De Certeau explicitly relates the view from the 110th floor of the World
Trade Center to medieval and Renaissance paintings half a millennium earlier
that already offered a comparable perspective on cities. ‘The desire to see the
city’, he writes, ‘preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance
painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet
enjoyed’.55 This link between the totalising but immobile eye and late medieval
and early modern city panoramas and cartography is highly relevant for De
Dene’s Testament. From about the same time as when De Dene composed his
collection, several visual works of art have come down to us that show a compa-
rable ‘totalising eye’ on the city of Bruges. They are part of a larger explosion of
cartographic interest in the Low Countries around the middle of the sixteenth
century. An artificial panorama, dated about 1560 and attributed to the painter
Pieter Claeissens the Elder, shows, from an elevated viewpoint, the seven most

52 Ibid., 141.
53 Ibid., 149.
54 De Dene, Testament, I, 48; cf. Ibid., II, 242, where he made a rat jump up when he moved about at his

desk [‘My verRoerende deed ick een Ratte versprynghen’].
55 ‘La volont"e de voir la ville a pr"ec"ed"e les moyens de la satisfaire. Les peintres m"edi"evales ou renaissantes

figuraient la cit"e par un oeil qui pourtant n’avait encore jamais exist"e. De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien,
140. The English translation is borrowed from Simon During, The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge,
1993), 157.

Urban space and the literary exploration of self 115



important buildings in Bruges.56 From the 1540s and 1560s, three important
maps of Bruges have come down to us: an anonymous one painted on canvas
and dated shortly after 1546, one from the famous cartographer Jacob van
Deventer from the 1560s, and a third one, dated 1562, by the Bruges painter
and printmaker Marcus Gerards the Elder. The cityscape by Claeissens, the
anonymously painted map, and the Gerards map were probably made to pro-
mote the city of Bruges, which was being increasingly confronted with eco-
nomic difficulties; the Van Deventer map is part of a systematic cartography of
all the cities of the Netherlands that was commissioned by Philip II in 1559.57

The most significant link between these visual works of art and Eduard de
Dene is the map of Marcus Gerards. This painter, engraver, and cartographer
made his map by commission of the city administrators between the summers
of 1561 and 1562, so during exactly the same period when Eduard de Dene
wrote down his literary testament. Although De Dene does not refer explicitly
to the map in his collection, it is certain that the two artists knew each other. In
1567, the Bruges printer Pieter de Clerck published De Warachtighe fabulen der
dieren, a collection of animal fables by Eduard de Dene accompanying a series
of copper engravings by the same Marcus Gerards.58 The two artists seem to
have been closely acquainted. In 1577, almost ten years after Gerards had fled
to England because of his Reformed sympathies, De Dene intervened on his
behalf before the Bruges magistrate in a conflict over payment for work that
Gerards had done in 1566 in the church of Our Lady.59

Over the last few decades a number of studies, notably by Tom Conley, have
analysed the far-ranging influence of cartography on early modern literature. It
seems highly likely that the Testament Rhetoricael has received what Conley, in
The Self-Made Map, called a ‘cartographic impulse’.60 It is possible to actually fol-
low the series of buildings and locations evoked in the Testament Rhetoricael on
the map of Marcus Gerards. It is an attractive thought that the poet and the
engraver might have been in touch with each other while working on their liter-
ary testament and map, and that there has been some form of cross-
fertilisation. The strongly material and spatial evocation of the Bruges churches
and monasteries in the Testament could be explained by De Dene’s acquaint-
ance with Gerards’ map of Bruges, which not only shows these buildings in

56 Eva Tahon, ‘117. Les sept merveilles de Bruges’, in Maximiliaan P.J. Martens (ed.), Bruges et la Renais-
sance: De Memling #a Pourbus. Vol. II: Notices (Bruges: Stichting Kunstboek, 1998), 148.

57 Marc Ryckaert, ‘152. Plan de Bruges’, in Martens (ed.), Bruges et la Renaissance, 173–4; Eva Tahon, ‘154.
Plan de Bruges’, in Martens (ed.), Bruges et la Renaissance, 175–6. Van Deventer already made an earlier series
in 1545: http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id50000015403 (accessed April 2016).

58 Dirk Geirnaert and Paul J. Smith, ‘The Sources of the Emblematic Fable Book De warachtighe fabulen der
dieren (1567)’, in John Manning, Karel Porteman, and Marc van Vaeck (eds.), The Emblem Tradition and the Low
Countries: Selected Papers of the Leuven International Emblem Conference, 18 –23 August 1996 (Turnhout: Brepols,
1999), 23–38.

59 Albert Schouteet, De zestiende-eeuwsche schilder en graveur Marcus Gerards (Bruges: Gidsenbond, 1941),
29–30, 63–4.

60 Conley, The Self-Made Map, 2.

116 Samuel Mareel



their geographical relation to each other but, through their pictorial represen-
tation, also in their materiality.

However, the Gerards map might have shaped De Dene’s thinking on a
more abstract level as well. Several scholars, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein, have
argued that the development of cartography has stimulated the development
of national identities during the early modern period.61 By being able to take
in the whole of a country visually, people could identify more easily with the
concrete stretch of land that corresponded to this abstract political entity.
Eduard de Dene probably did not need a map of Bruges to feel attached to this
city but it might have given his Bruges identity the kind of spatial, geographical
component that is apparent from the Testament Rhetoricael, and it might have
stimulated him to give his literary testament such a spatial and material aspect.

URBAN SPACE, MEMORY, MONUMENT

As we have seen above, the main link in the Testament Rhetoricael between place
and self lies in the association by the author of contemporary places with events
or people that were important to him in the past. This link is generally trig-
gered by memory: seeing or mentioning a specific place reminds De Dene’s
persona of people or events. The churches, chapels, and monasteries men-
tioned thus constitute a material link between the author’s individual present
and his individual past. They are what Michel de Certeau, in the essay on space
already quoted above, called ‘lieux v"ecus’ [lived spaces] and further defined as
‘des pr"esences d’absences’ [presences of absences].62

The memory process that I have just evoked is essentially a personal and ran-
dom one: different people will remember different things at different places.
Had a contemporary of De Dene written a comparable literary testament in
which he passed by the same Bruges churches, monasteries, chapels, schools,
and hospitals, he would most probably have come up with a significantly dissim-
ilar narrative.

The association of current places with past people or events is not necessarily
personal and random, however. It can also be brought about externally and
intentionally. While mentally wandering from one place to another, De Dene’s
persona bequeaths his poems and songs. In some cases he states explicitly that
a text is to be posted in a specific location. Some of these are prayers to be read
in a certain part of a church or chapel, or in the vicinity of a relic or an altar
dedicated to a specific saint or to the Holy Sacrament. Other texts, however,
have a less devotional but more outspoken commemorative function. For
example, in his Testament De Dene included a series of epitaphs that he wrote
for deceased friends and fellow rhetoricians, such as the playwright Cornelis

61 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 144.

62 De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 162.

Urban space and the literary exploration of self 117



Everaert and the painter Lancelot Blondeel.63 At the end of the Testament the
author also included two epitaphs for himself.64 Deictic references to an actual
tomb and direct addresses to the reader suggest that at least some of De Dene’s
epitaphs might have adorned actual places of burial.65 Tombs from early mod-
ern Bruges with rhetoricians’ poems on them have also come down to us. The
Saint-John’s hospital museum, for example, houses a commemorative plaque
for the Bruges town councillor Pieter van Muelenbeke (died in 1480). It is
engraved with a 23-verse Dutch poem, which includes an acrostic and a chrono-
gram, two characteristics that are typical of rhetoricians’ poetry.66

Several of De Dene’s epitaphs contain an outspoken appeal to remember
somebody at a specific location. For example, the author’s persona indicates
that he bequeaths these poems to his deceased friends ‘vpdatmen hemlieden/
mach zyn ghedynckende’ [so that they may be commemorated].67 In the intro-
ductions to the two epitaphs he wrote for himself he notes that he hopes his
widow will have the longer epitaph of the two placed somewhere ‘Teender
memorie’ [as a commemoration].68 ‘[W]aere dit te lanck of te groote cost’ [If
this proves to be too expensive or the epitaph is too long], he also provides a
shorter one and adds: ‘Doet tnaeruolghende naglen/An muer of post’ [have it
nailed to a wall or a pole].69

In the epitaphs that De Dene wrote for posting in a public space, his Testa-
ment Rhetoricael is not only a product of memory, it also reports on the active
process of the creation of memory. De Dene wrote the epitaphs so that not just
he might remember the deceased, but others too who pass by the objects to
which these verses have been attached. These texts bear witness to a transition
from individual living memory to a more artificial cultural memory. In Cultural
Memory and Western Civilization Aleida Assmann defined cultural memory as a
form of memory ‘that is underpinned by media – by material carriers such as
memorials, monuments, museums, and archives’. It is a form of memory that is
‘reconstructed within a transgenerational framework, and on an institutional
level, within a deliberate policy of remembering or forgetting’.70 These poems
are such a kind of material carrier in which individual memory is transformed
into a public memorial.

De Dene’s epitaphs can be situated within a longstanding memorial tradition
in Netherlandish rhetoricians’ culture. An important part of the religious prac-
tices of the rhetoricians consisted in the organisation of commemorative

63 De Dene, Testament, II, 7–22.
64 Ibid., III, 219–20.
65 Samuel Mareel, ‘Inscription et Performance dans le Testament Rhetoricael d’Eduard de Dene (Bruges,

1562)’, Le Moyen Age, 122 (2016), 327–39.
66 Valentin Vermeersch, Grafmonumenten te Brugge voor 1578, 3 vols. (Bruges: Raaklijn, 1976), II, 287–9.
67 De Dene, Testament, II, 7.
68 Ibid., III, 219.
69 Ibid.
70 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2011), 6.

118 Samuel Mareel



services for deceased members. Famous fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century
rhetoricians, such as Anthonis de Roovere and Matthijs de Castelein, comme-
morated deceased princes as well as fellow rhetoricians in their poems.71 From
the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, however, this memorial tradition
seems to have increasingly invaded urban public space. In the process, it also
became more material and monumental. Inscriptions on the walls of public
buildings were not new, of course. Traditions of inscriptions from antiquity
spread throughout Christian Europe during the Middle Ages and enjoyed a
renewed interest in the sixteenth century because of the influence of human-
ism. This is almost uniquely a Latin tradition, however. In texts such as De
Dene’s Testament Rhetoricael, we are witnessing the increased use of the vernacu-
lar for inscriptional poetry in urban public space.

The growing interest in poetry in urban space as a medium for the creation
and reception of cultural memory is apparent not only from the increasing
number of poems of this kind that seem to have been produced, but also from
a renewed antiquarian interest in these kinds of texts. Many inscriptions were
copied out in the chorographic descriptions of cities that became increasingly
popular across Europe from the late sixteenth century onwards, such as the
already mentioned Beschrijvinge der stad Leyden (1614) by the Leiden author,
and later mayor, Jan Orlers, or John Stowe’s 1598 Survay of London. Most of the
texts mentioned in these chorographies disappeared with the architectural
structures that they adorned. Some of them did come down to us, however. In
his Beschrijvinge der stad Leyden Jan Orlers included a long chronogram com-
posed by his uncle Jan van Hout on the 1574 siege of Leiden. The text can still
be seen on Leiden’s city hall today.

CONCLUSION

Few tourists visiting present-day Bruges venture beyond Saint-John’s Hospital
and the Church of Our Lady just across the Katelijnestraat. Those who do con-
tinue on this street, however, are rewarded by the discovery of the charming
Bruges Academy of Fine Arts, a complex of buildings dating from the sixteenth
to the nineteenth centuries. Centrally located in the Academy is the Bogarden-
kapel. This small structure is a reminder of the original function of the institu-
tion as a school for orphans and abandoned children run by the Bruges
bogarden [beghards], a kind of male Beguine. Above the entry to the chapel is
a stone slab with a chronogram that has been identified as having been

71 On the commemorative practices of the Dutch rhetoricians, see Samuel Mareel, ‘In the Book of Life:
Manuscript, Memoria, and Community in Eduard de Dene’s Testament Rhetoricael (Bruges, 1562)’, The Sixteenth
Century Journal, 43 (2012), 1013–35. On the creation of cultural memory by the rhetoricians, see also Arjan
van Dixhoorn, ‘Monumentalizering van een festival: Het Antwerpse landjuweel van 1561 als historische
gebeurtenis’, in Jeroen Vandommele and Ruud Ryckaert (eds.), Menich constich gheest: Het Antwerpse landjuweel
van 1561 anders bekeken (Ghent: Koninklijke Soevereine Hoofdkamer van Retorica ‘De Fonteine’, 2014), 15–42
[Jaarboek ‘De Fonteine’, 53–4 (2011–2012)].

Urban space and the literary exploration of self 119



composed by Eduard de Dene to commemorate a lottery organised in 1549 to
help finance the restoration of the buildings.72

It is a small miracle that the slab and its chronogram came down to us. De
Dene did not include the poem in his Testament Rhetoricael, nor has it been
found in any other written or printed source. Presumably he did not think it
sufficiently accomplished or important. Moreover, the chapel on which it has
been attached is significantly younger than the slab itself. It was built in 1676 on
the location of the original chapel for which De Dene wrote his chronogram.
Apparently the slab was conserved and reintegrated in the facade of the new
building. That De Dene’s chronogram for the Bruges Beghards should have
survived, however, as a textual object in its original location, is a fitting tribute
to an author for whom – as I have tried to show in this essay – literature, identity,
and location were so intimately intertwined.

The slab functions as a sort of complement to Elisabeth Hodges’s notion of
‘urban poetics’ that stood at the outset of this essay. It can also be seen as its ulti-
mate realisation. De Dene’s chronogram above the entry door of the chapel of
the Bruges Academy of Fine Arts does not attest to ‘the way the city functioned
in early modern texts as [. . .] a means by which authors expressed the self as a
phenomenon related to location’, but rather to the way early modern texts
functioned in the city as a means by which authors expressed the self as a phe-
nomenon related to location. Rarely in the history of Dutch literature has the
boundary between text and city been more porous.

Museum Hof van Busleyden/Ghent University

72 Dirk Geirnaert, ‘Restauratie met rekenfout: Eduard de Denes chronogram voor de Bogardenschool’, Bie-
korf, 111 (2011), 186–91. The text reads: ‘Met pennynghen, ghegadert ter loterie / Bij die vander boghaerde
vry vpghestelt, / Was dit werck beghonnen, zoot elck anzie. / Leist de roode letteren: tjaer ghij telt.’ [With
pennies, brought together during the lottery, that was organised by the beghards, this work has been initiated,
as anyone can see. Read the red letters: you will count the year.]

120 Samuel Mareel