Recreating man's cunning virtues – The philosophical project of Netherlandish arts culture

Using a few texts produced in Dutch in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries as key witnesses, this essay argues that the performative literary culture of the Dutch rhetoricians was an epistemic culture of a particular kind. Rhetoricians established their literary culture as the core of a culture of consten (i.e. a culture of the liberal arts). Consten ‐culture, this essay argues, was a culture of personal virtue, and the primary fruits of exercising the arts were considered as spiritual (i.e. in the human mind); material results (i.e. creating external content or material effects) would be secondary. Material results in the world of practice were believed to follow the sharpening of wits and the shaping of personal cunning (in the early modern sense of the readiness and shrewdness needed in action). Using literary exercises for spiritual effect, the chambers of rhetoric became the institutionalised expression of the first truly philosophical school in the Dutch vernacular, until their pedagogical ideals were undermined fundamentally, and in the course of the seventeenth century, a new knowledge culture took shape.