Lyric Address in Dutch Literature is a notable volume within the current field of historical Dutch literature, focusing on cultural-historical questions and noncanonical text corpora: it provides an assembly of close readings of Dutch historical poems by mostly canonical authors, and aims to understand these poems as “linguistic events in their own right” (10). The volume may be read as a response to scholarship that reduces literature to an instrument that directly reflects a socio-political world. As Jürgen Pieters, one of the editors, states: “poems are not stories…. To reduce these texts to mere narrations of events is to go against their nature as poems” (127).

The ten chapters, written by senior as well as early career scholars, all start with an edition and English translation of the selected poems, to make these texts accessible to an international audience. The introduction (by editors Cornelis van der Haven and Jürgen Pieters) and the epilogue (by Frans-Willem Korsten) connect the individual close readings to Jonathan Culler's Theory of the Lyric (2015), which is the volume's starting point. Instead of a dated “social practice” or “intense expression of the subjective experience of the poet,” Culler considers lyric an indirect fictional communicative event characterized by “triangulated address”: “address to the reader by means of address to something or someone else” (Culler, 335, 349, 186). Following this communicative approach, the different chapters of Lyric Address explore how a lyrical “I” talks to its audience by addressing a “you.” But while Culler approaches poetry as a transhistorical phenomenon, he largely focuses on poetry from 1800 onward; Lyric Address wants to unravel historical characteristics of lyric address and apostrophes in medieval and early modern Dutch poetry.

One of the characteristics discussed in Lyric Address is the strong connection between poetry and song. Dieuwke van der Poel's inspiring chapter on a sixteenth-century song from the Antwerp songbook demonstrates how music, performance, and apostrophes jointly entailed a male-bonding act and created a masculine group identity among the collected singers. The relationship between lyric, song, and community is also discussed by Anikó Daróczi (reading one of the mystic Hadewijch's songs) and Cornelis van der Haven (on Bellamy's late eighteenth-century attempt to create a lyrical community of “friends”).

Several chapters are dedicated to occasional poems that address historical persons in a more explicit or complex way than Culler's lyrical model predicted. Marijn van Dijk, for example, analyzes a sonnet in which Maria Tesselschade Roemers Visscher asks P. C. Hooft to convey a message to Constantijn Huygens: a form of “lyrical correspondence” (rather than fictional poetry) that directly addresses Hooft, while considering Huygens as its ultimate addressee. Maaike Meijer also uncovers the interrelatedness of different addressees in her comprehensive reading of Betje Wolff's “To Miss Agatha Deken” against the background of early modern female praise poetry written by women. As Meijer argues, Wolff largely uses apostrophes to both allow her audience “to be present at the highly dramatic sudden death of her husband” and “establish a bond with a new lover—Deken” (159).

Lyric Address also complicates the role of the lyrical subject: Britt Grootes demonstrates how “I” turns into “you” in P. C. Hooft's famous sonnet “My Love,” while Jürgen Pieters analyzes a poem in which Six takes the role of his (dead) father to comfort his son (prosopopeia). Frans-Willem Korsten, in his ambitious epilogue, uses such examples to argue that the lyrical subject should be considered a historical construction that fundamentally changed around 1800: “might it be the case that the lyrical subject, as a self, comes to life only once poetry becomes something that instead of having to be performed turns into something to be published, printed and read?” (179).

By adopting and building on Culler's model of triangulated address, Lyric Address succeeds in offering an attractive introduction to Dutch poetry and a theorical reflection on how Dutch lyric address and apostrophes functioned to relate poems to social contexts. Remarkably invisible, however, remains the question of to what extent the historical characteristics and patterns uncovered in the selected poems could be considered “typically Dutch.” While Britt Grootes connects Hooft's sonnet to the English lyrical tradition, most authors read their poems in a uniquely Dutch sociopolitical context, and sometimes enter into debate solely with colleagues in Dutch literary scholarship. A next research project on the nature of lyric address deserves a more developed comparative approach.