Introduction

Matthijs Siegenbeek (1774-1854), who was inaugurated as an extraordinary professor of Dutch rhetoric at the University of Leiden in 1797, has long had the reputation of being the very first professor of Dutch. When his old acquaintance Johan Hendrik van der Palm passed away in 1840, Siegenbeek published a eulogy in which he introduced himself as the ‘oldest, that is, the first professor of Dutch language and literature in our fatherland’. Noordegraaf, however, shows that already in 1790 Everwinus Wassenbergh, who had been appointed professor of Greek at the University of Franeker in 1771, was granted the right to teach Dutch language and literature by the Franeker board of curators. It is unclear whether Wassenbergh actually taught these subjects in the following years, but he certainly did from 1797 onward, when the study of Dutch was officially added to his job responsibilities. When Wassenbergh passed away in 1826, he too was honoured by Siegenbeek in a brief biography, in which Siegenbeek commemorates the fact that Wassenbergh had combined the teaching of Greek language and literature with Dutch linguistics over the past 25 years, so only from 1801 onward. As discussed in the introduction to this volume, even before 1790 several academic professors were involved in the teaching of Dutch at universities across the Netherlands. Vis argues that Siegenbeek was still the first to hold a chair solely devoted to Dutch.