As has been pointed out many times, ‘novel’ is a problematic term, especially for this period, because many texts are quite different from what is currently regarded as a novel. They are frequently fragmented in structure, lack a coherent plot and do not offer genuine character development. Basically, they are sadly lacking, according to modern standards. This ‘uncontrolled’ element explains why the texts look rather like hybrids to us, from the point of view of the genre as we now understand it. For that matter, even more than at present, the prose of the 17th century was immensely varied. The texts are highly diverse in scope, content and form. It might therefore be better to use the umbrella term ‘prose fiction’, as is usually done in medieval and early modern studies, instead of referring to ‘the novel’, which quickly and unintentionally generates modern expectations and connotations. Nevertheless, for the sake of stylistic variety (and also, bearing in mind John Frow's observation, from his lucid exploration of Genre (2015), that ‘genres have no essence, they have historically changing use values’), I will occasionally use the word ‘novel’, alternated with other options like ‘prose’ and ‘prose texts’ that are considered as synonyms here.

Another problem, and one that makes research on music in 17th-century prose fiction rather difficult, is the fact that, to date, no surveys have been conducted on the genre in the Netherlands. This omission has already been observed in 2002 by the literary historian Inger Leemans, and little has changed since then. In other countries the study of the early modern prose fiction has moved forward substantially in recent years, both in the European and national perspectives. For the Netherlands, however, scholarly treatment of the repertoire has been limited to a number of interesting sub-studies and some articles devoted to individual texts. Scholars of Dutch literature treat the novel differently and significantly less extensively than is the case for the drama and poetry from the same period. That is the reason why there is no overarching, summary study of the repertoire.