© DVN, een project van Huygens ING en OGC (UU). Bronvermelding: Herman Pleij, en, in: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. URL: https://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/en [20/02/2014]
BIJNS, ANNA (born Antwerp, 5 March 1493 – buried Antwerp, 10 April 1575), poet. Daughter of Jan Bijns Lambertsz, tailor, and Lijsbeth Voochs. Anna Bijns never married.
Family Life
The family in which Anna Bijns grew up and to which she long maintained close ties, whether through choice or necessity, must have inspired her to write poetry. In addition to living and working in the tailor’s shop called ‘De Cleyne Wolvinne’ on Antwerp’s Grote Markt, her father also frequented rhetoricians’ circles, for he is known to have written at least one ballade. He must have stimulated Anna’s interest in this new verse form, for which she demonstrated a great talent. She may well have entered competitions run by the Chamber of Rhetoricians. Women often participated in such predominantly male literary circles, but always anonymously and on the fringe. Could Anna have been the fifteen-year-old girl from Antwerp who won a prize at a poetry festival in 1512 with her songs of praise to the Virgin Mary? Unfortunately, Anna’s age rules her out, as she was nineteen years old in that year, but an adolescent ‘maiden’ is an apt description of a girl, still unmarried and unsettled, who was allowed to join the gentlemen in their literary pastime.
After Anna, two more children followed, her sister Margriete and her brother Maarten. In 1517, a year after her father died, her sister married and demanded her share of the inheritance, forcing their widowed mother, Lijsbeth Voochs, to sell the house and the shop’s entire stock. The other members of the family then went to live in ‘De Patiencie’, a house in Keizerstraat. It was there that her brother Maarten started a school in which Anna became involved. After their mother’s death in 1530, Maarten and Anna continued to live together in the house. When Maarten finally married in 1536, Anna was forced to move to a smaller house, ‘Het Roosterken’, across the street from her old address. There, at the age of 43, she started up her own school, and enrolled in the teachers’ guild.
Ingenious maiden
In 1528 a striking collection of ballades appeared in Antwerp titled Dit is een schoon ende suverlick boecxken inhoudende veel scoone constige refereinen (This is a beautiful and pure book containing many delightful and inventive ballades) by the ‘respectable and ingenious maiden, Anna Bijns’. The title page announced that the book was sound in doctrine and contained beautiful, sensitive texts: full of ballades skilfully composed in the current literary fashion. This was all the more surprising if one considers that women could not become official members of the Rhetoricians’ Chambers that provided the basis for this typically urban literary movement, which developed a literary language and experimented with new types of texts. And it was Anna Bijns, of all people, a woman officially barred from their ranks, who mastered the art of rhetoric as none other.
This opinion dates from her own era, for Anna Bijns’s first volume of verse was reprinted at least five times during her lifetime. Moreover, the Latin translation of her work –rare for vernacular literature – which appeared as early as 1529, brought her European fame. New collections of her work appeared in 1548 and 1567, and these, too, were reprinted. It was entirely justifiable, then, to describe her in 1528 as ingenious and possessed of a talent inspired by the Holy Spirit, despite the fact that she was a woman.
Anna’s book begins with a dedicatory verse that immediately acknowledges her readers as her equals: ‘Artful spirits, who hold ingenuity dear’: connoisseurs, therefore, thirsting for the literary art. She did not write these texts out of vanity, but as a faithful daughter of the Mother Church. The form of her verses might be slightly defective, but one must ‘bear in mind it is but the work of a woman’. After all, women were intellectually inferior to men. Science had proved this, and Anna, for one, did not doubt it. Nor was this irony on her part, even though she was wont to deploy that weapon at other times. This demonstration of humility is misleading, however; the text on the title page that testifies to her ingenuity seems more accurately to reflect her opinions. One did not have to be an expert to conclude that her ballades were far superior to anything previously heard or read in that genre.
Apart from the three printed collections, two bulky manuscripts of Anna Bijns’s work have also been preserved. These were started somewhere between 1540 and 1550 by the Antwerp Friar Minor Engelbrecht van der Donck. Ballades by Bijns also appear in fifteen manuscripts containing rhetoricians’ work and in a single printed volume. All in all, the dissemination of her work in manuscripts is an indication of the great popularity of her writing in rhetoricians’ circles, where such manuscripts circulated as repertoire. The preserved work consists almost entirely of ballades, in total 222 separate texts, the shortest comprising 52 lines and the longest running to hundreds of lines. This genre seems to have been invented with her in mind. Modelled on the French ballade, a poem like this had at least four stanzas, and at the end of each stanza a set line (stokregel) encapsulating the theme. The stanzas, with identical but complicated rhyme schemes, provided the framework for a discussion of various topics and emotions, which invariably ended on the same note, resounding in the stokregel, which made it the ideal form to persuade and provoke.
Abuse, Mockery, Resignation
Her unprecedented command of the idiom and her virtuoso use of language enabled Anna Bijns to turn the ballade into a vehicle capable of expressing in a natural-sounding way the greatest indignation and the most deeply felt sentiments. The first collection from 1528 consists almost exclusively of vehement attacks against Protestant heresy, which she invariably linked to Martin Luther. The Lutherans were sneeringly reviled and blamed for all the misery on earth. There is little argumentation, since Anna lacked the necessary intellectual baggage. She did possess great knowledge of the Bible, though, but only at the level needed for the type of instruction she gave. She simply repeated the traditional beliefs of the Mother Church, but in the bizarre context of the new word craft and in the quasi-realistic language of the street. Thus Bijns dismissed the Protestant creed as the proud populism of conceited laymen, who were convinced they could save themselves: ‘Scripture is now being read in the tavern, / With the Gospel in one hand, and a tankard in the other’. Even women thought they could teach the gospel to scholars – what ‘daft fools’ they were! No doubt they were urging the world towards a new Flood, since ‘God’s own People are wallowing in malevolence like pigs in the mire’. This attitude was toned down somewhat in the second volume, to make room for moralising, repentance and meditation. In the third volume the militancy has entirely faded and resignation prevails, along with praise for the Creator and the Holy Family.
Bijns strikes an entirely different chord in her verses on worldly love, marriage and the family – which exist only in manuscript form. These are both serious and sarcastic. As aggressive as she is mocking, Anna calls into question everything to do with worldly love. Lovers are faithless, marriage leads straight to slavery and creates viragos and hen-pecked husbands, leaving families in disarray. These tirades constitute variations on a literary theme that was all but compulsory in rhetoricians’ circles and therefore cannot be seen as very personal. Nevertheless, Anna’s choice of subject matter is indeed significant. Her siblings’ marriages upset her personal life. Though she never married, she was still very much part of the world, which at least suggests that she did not want to rule out marriage entirely.
Friars Minor
Much of Anna Bijns’s work must have been done at the instigation of the Antwerp Friars Minor, several of whom were her personal friends. They must also have been responsible for contacts with printers. In particular, Brother Matthias Weijnssen seems to have stimulated and guided her in her writing. The Friars Minor, known as the fiercest opponents of the Reformation, were waging a propaganda war through literature in the vernacular in order to reach as many people as possible. It seems most likely that from the very start they used Anna Bijns’s work as a weapon, especially if one considers the origins of the two manuscripts. Her themes were completely in keeping with their ambitions, which included combating heresy, mocking marriage, and providing monastery entertainment in the form of comic verse featuring dozens of names for the anus and a farting competition between beguines. Thus one tended to combat melancholy – a dreaded affliction that could even lead to suicide – with the crudest of scatological humour.
Bijns’s best-known verse asks, tongue-in-cheek, which of the two Martins was preferable, Martin Luther or Martin van Rossem. This question was prompted by Van Rossem’s abortive attempt to capture Antwerp in 1542. Bijns uses his violent behaviour to demonstrate how much more damaging Luther’s attacks were. Van Rossem tortured bodies, but Luther destroyed souls. Death at the hand of the robber baron guaranteed one a passport to heaven, whereas selling one’s soul to Luther meant eternal damnation. Thus Van Rossem was the lesser of two evils.
Anna Bijns was the first Dutch author to owe her success largely to the printing press. Her talents were fully recognized, put to use and, above all, exploited. The fact that she excelled at a literary genre which, as a woman, she was not officially allowed to practise within the Chamber of Rhetoricians makes it all the more remarkable that in the eyes of her contemporaries she far surpassed her male colleagues.
Until 1573 – when she was 80 years old – Anna Bijns’s continued to give lessons at home in reading, writing, arithmetic and religion. In that year she entered into an agreement with a Mr and Mrs Stollaert-Boots, whom she paid to care for her as a member of their household. Anna Bijns died two years later. On 10 April 1575 she was buried, after a beggarly funeral service that was certainly not in the spirit of the contract she had entered into with this greedy couple, who had already profited from her early demise.
In the course of the seventeenth century, Anna Bijns faded into oblivion, only to be rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time her orthodox Catholicism stood in the way of wider reception. True recognition as a great author of Dutch literature did not come until the twentieth century, in the modern, post-war period.
Reference work(s)
Basse; Biographie nationale; Foppens; Frederiks/Van den Branden; Witsen Geysbeek; Jöcher; Kobus/De Rivecourt; Kok; Lauwerkrans; Leopold; Paquot; Pauwels de Vis; Piron; Wendelen; Witsen.
Publications
- Dit is een schoon ende suverlick boecxken inhoudende veel scoone constige refereinen (Antwerp 1528).
- Refereinen, A. Bogaers et al. ed. (Rotterdam 1875).
- Nieuwe refereinen, W.J.A. Jonckbloet et al. ed. (Gent 1886).
- ‘Onuitgegeven gedichten’, A. Soens, ed. Leuvensche Bijdragen 4 (1902) 199-368.
- Schoon ende suverlijc boecxken, L. Roose ed. 2 volumes (Leuven 1987) [facsimile edition].
- ’t Is al vrouwenwerk. Refreinen, H. Pleij ed. (Amsterdam 1987).
Bibliography
- L. Roose, Anna Bijns, een rederijkster uit de hervormingstijd (Gent 1963).
- H. Pleij, ‘1512: Antwerpse maagd wint aanmoedigingsprijs op Brussels rederijkersfeest – De grootste rederijker is een vrouw, Anna Bijns’, in: M.A. Schenkeveld-Van der Dussen et al. ed., Nederlandse literatuur. Een geschiedenis (Groningen 1993) 126-130.
- J. Oosterman, ‘Literatuur in Antwerpen omstreeks 1493. De bakermat van Anna Bijns’, Literatuur 13 (1996) 155-160.
- H. Pleij, ‘Jonckbloets romantische versie van Anna Bijns’, in: K.D. Beekman et al. ed., De as van de romantiek (Amsterdam 1999) 189-199.
- J. Oosterman, ‘Jenneken Verelst en Anna Bijns. Nieuws over handschrift Leiden, UB, BPL 1289 en zijn inhoud’, Spiegel der Letteren 42 (2000) 49-57.
- H. Pleij, ‘Nieuws bij Anna Bijns’, in: B. Besamusca et al. ed., Hoort wonder! Opstellen voor W.P. Gerritsen bij zijn emeritaat (Hilversum 2000) 121-126.
- H. Pleij, ‘Anna Bijns als pamflettiste? Het refrein over de beide Maartens’, Spiegel der Letteren 42 (2000) 187-225.
Illustration
Title page of Bijns's first volume of ballads, Dit is een schoon ende suverlick boecxken,1528 (UB Amsterdam).
Author: Herman Pleij
last updated: 20/02/2014