The Chambers of Rhetoric are generally considered as a cultural andsocial phenomenon of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to thedominant view, both in the Northern and Southern Low Countries rhetoricianculture lost its relevance in the seventeenth century. Instead of documentingthat 'decline', this article seeks to define the changing cultural functions andsocial composition of the Chambers of Rhetoric in seventeenth-centuryFlanders and Brabant. It will be argued that the cultural model of the seventeenth-century rhetoricians differed considerably from that of their fifteenth andsixteenth-century predecessors, but that it fitted well into a new politicaland social context.
