Alisa van de Haar's The Golden Mean of Languages is an excellent example of the increasing interdisciplinarity between the fields of literary studies, cultural history, and (socio)linguistics. In her monograph, part of Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, Van de Haar discusses the story of language debates in the sixteenth-century Low Countries from a literary-historical perspective. The volume's greatest achievement lies in its nuancing of the monolingual perspective that has dominated much of the previous studies on this century of language fascination by focusing on the multilingual context in which sixteenth-century reflections on language were discussed and new ideas on grammar, spelling, and word use were applied.

The Golden Mean of Languages is divided into two parts. The first part provides background information, with an introduction to the multilingual situation in the Low Countries (chapter 2) and an overview of the trending topics in the European-wide language debates (chapter 3). In the second part, Van de Haar adopts a spatial approach, by investigating the language debates and actual language use in particular sites or lieux: French schools (chapter 4), Calvinist churches (chapter 5), printing houses (chapter 6), and chambers of rhetoric (chapter 7). However, because of the further narrowing-down of the research scope to particular individuals, this spatial approach (as introduced in chapter 1) threatens to fade into the background. This is especially unfortunate because the focus on the schoolmaster and rhetorician Peeter Heyns (chapters 4 and 7), the Calvinist leader and psalm translator Philips of Marnix (chapter 5), and the printer Christophe Plantin (chapter 6) raises the question to what extent the case studies have larger validity for the lieux they represent. Moreover, this also results in a predominantly southern-oriented research scope.

Still, Van de Haar's thorough analysis of a variety of texts, ranging from educational writings to psalm translations, and her illustrative excursions to other (northern) language debaters leads to fruitful findings that contribute to our understanding of the literary culture in the sixteenth-century Low Countries. An important finding on that terrain includes, for example, the author's nuance on the monolingual reputation of the first printed grammar of Dutch, the 1584 Twe-spraack (Dialogue). Moreover, the discussion of the major supposed causes of the sixteenth-century language debate (i.e., Renaissance, humanism, Reformation, patriotism) in relation to the various lieux and individuals leads to a richer perspective on how these abstract notions, and that of patriotism in particular, did not stand in the way of the study and practical use of languages other than the Dutch mother tongue.

Taken together, Van de Haar's investigation of various language debaters and their language use adjusts the well-established image of the sixteenth century as the age of glorification, purification, and construction of the vernacular. The well-documented examples illustrate the ubiquitous fascination for languages other than Dutch, as well as how this fascination influenced the debates concerning the mother tongue in various and often contradicting ways. In short, by looking at other languages, “everyone was trying to find a golden mean, but there was no consensus about what these perfect middle forms of Dutch and French, respectively, were” (332). The work, however, also raises new questions: due to the study's focus on lieux and individuals, it remains unclear whether the found variety of opinions was determined by other sociolinguistic factors, such as geographic boundaries, regional identities, or social status.

Van de Haar's conclusions, importantly, not only pertain to the sixteenth-century Low Countries but also touch upon the broader European context. The author's observations on, for example, the parallels with English and German debaters on loanwords or the continuing importance of Latin in Renaissance Europe, as well as her literary-historical methodology and multilingual approach, deserve readership from those outside the field of Dutch and French literary studies. The Golden Mean of Languages shows that both literary scholars and historians could benefit from a better understanding of the multilingual situation in early modern Europe.