This volume deals with the study of Old Germanic languages in the Low Countries, in the seventeenth century. The work of the philologist and lawyer Jan van Vliet (1622-1666) has been taken as a starting point for a discussion of the intellectual background and philological methodology of seventeenth-century investigations into the earliest recorded forms of the Germanic languages.

Van Vliet's activities provide an extraordinary example of the earliest attempts to approach Old Germanic languages from a comparative point of view. The cosmopolitan tradition of philological studies in the Dutch Republic as well as Van Vliet’s great admiration of Francis Junius (1590–1677), the founding-father of Germanic philology, formed the basis for his ideas about vernacular languages. His work allows us a unique insight in the pioneering seventeenth-century studies in Germanic philology.