1 Schoenaers, D., ‘‘Frenchified’: A Contact-based Approach to Transculturation and Linguistic Change in Holland-Zeeland (1428/1433-c. 1500)’, in: A. Armstrong & E. Strietman, eds. The Multilingual Muse: Transcultural Poetics in the Burgundian Netherlands (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 12-41 The Lexicon Balatronicum or A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence defines ‘frenchified’ as ‘infected with the venereal disease’. 1 A few lines up the page, the example for ‘French Disease’ (‘He suffered by a blow over the snout with a French faggot stick; i.e. he lost his nose by the pox’ ) identifies this imported affliction as syphilis. 2 Today, ‘to frenchify’ could be paraphrased more generally as ‘to make something more French(-sounding)’. Nonetheless, the slang meaning gives a clear insight into the popular appreciation of French origins in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the same time, this vulgar sense of ‘to frenchify’ also applies to the largely negative scholarly evaluation of French lexical influences on official and literary texts written in the Dutch- speaking part of the Low Countries during the later Middle Ages. 3 In previous centuries, literary scholars and linguists have claimed that the tumultuous liaison between francophone and Dutch culture in that period – absolutely smitten in the thirteenth century, seemingly less passionate in the fourteenth century, and eventually rekindled in the fifteenth century – left the written vernacular with a burning itch. 4 However, more recently it has become increasingly clear that this obsession with unsullied language is entrenched in nationalistic ideology and sustains the purist discourse of homogenizing and prescriptive early-modern grammars, rather than properly reflecting the complexity of late medieval linguistic reality. 5 Moreover, the tendency to 1 The research for this article was carried out in the context of the AHRC-funded project ‘Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France’ <http://www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk>, which ran between 2011-2015 at King’s College London, the University of Cambridge and University College London. 2 Francis Grose, Lexicon Balatronicum or A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (London: C. Chappel, 1811), no pagination. 3 ‘French’ and ‘francophone’ are used here as hypernyms and refer to a group of Romance dialects including Parisian French and Picard. Likewise, the term ‘(Middle) Dutch’ collectively refers to the regional variants spoken in Flanders, Holland, and Brabant. 4 For the changing attitude towards French literature in the fourteenth century, particularly in Brabant and Flanders, see Remco Sleiderink, ‘From Francophile to Francophobe: The Changing Attitude of Medieval Dutch Authors towards French Literatur e’, in Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone World and Its Neighbours, ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz and Keith Busby (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 127-43. 5 For instance, Gijsbert Rutten, ‘“Ghelyck wy zien dat de Fransóyzen doen”: Dialoog en dialogisme in de Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst’, Yang, 40 (2004), 477-85, illuminatingly discusses H. J. Spiegel’s Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst (1584). See also Pierre Michault, Doctrinael des Tijts, ed. by W. J. Schuijt (Wageningen: Veenman, 1946), p. 80; Willem Frijhoff, ‘Verfransing? Franse taal en Nederlandse cultuur tot in de