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The Eighty Years’ War and the partition of the Low Countries led to the publication of numerous chorographical works on towns and regions in the Northern and Southern Netherlands. This book offers a comparison of these histories reflecting political change and promoting new identities.
After 1500, as Catholic Europe fragmented into warring sects, evidence of a pagan past came newly into view, and travelers to distant places encountered deeply unfamiliar visual cultures, it became ever more pressing to distinguish between the sacred image and its opposite, the 'idol'. Historians and philosophers have long attended to Reformation charges of idolatry - the premise for image-breaking - but only very recently have scholars begun to consider the ways that the idol occasioned the making no less than the destruction. The present book focuses on how idols and ideas about them matter for the history of early modern objects produced around the globe, especially those created in the c...
This lively collection of essays examines the link between public opinion and the development of changing 'Netherlandish' identities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In Justifying Christian Aramaism Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman explores how Christian scholars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century justify their study of the Targums, the Jewish Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible. She focuses on the four polyglot Bibles – Complutum, Antwerp, Paris, and London –, and describes these books in the scholarly world of those days. It appears that quite a few scholars, Roman-Catholic, protestant, and Anglican, edited Targumic books and translated these into Latin. The book reveals a stimulating and conflicting period of the Targum reception history and is therefore relevant for Targum scholars and historians interested in the history of Judaism, Church history, the history of the book, and the history of Jewish-Christian relationships.
This book explores the reception of foreign news during the late sixteenth-century civil wars in France and the Netherlands. Analysing a large body of French and Dutch chronicles, Rosanne Baars innovatively demonstrates that the wider public was well aware of events abroad, though interest in foreign conflicts was far from constant. She sheds new light on the connections between the Dutch Revolt and the French Wars of Religion: contemporaries were gradually more inclined to see these wars as part of an international struggle. Baars argues that these times of civil war made inhabitants of both countries more apt at distinguishing rumour from reliable reports, thus contributing to the emergence of a public of critical news consumers.
The history of the relation between religion and Enlightenment has been virtually rewritten In recent decades. The idea of a fairly unidirectional ‘rise of paganism’, or ‘secularisation’, has been replaced by a much more variegated panorama of interlocking changes—not least in the nature of both religion and rationalism. This volume explores developments in various cultural fields—from lexicology to geographical exploration, and from philosophy and history to theology, media and the arts—involved in the transformation of worldviews in the decades around 1700. The main focus is on the Dutch Republic, where discussion culture was more inclusive than in most other countries, and where people from very different walks of life joined the conversation. Contributors include: Wiep van Bunge, Frank Daudeij, Martin Gierl, Albert Gootjes, Trudelien van ‘t Hof, Jonathan Israel, Henri Krop, Fred van Lieburg, Jaap Nieuwstraten, Joke Spaans, Jetze Touber, and Arthur Weststeijn.
Over forty years after its original publication, Alastair Hamilton has revised and updated his comprehensive study of the heterodox movement known as the Family of Love. Part of the Radical Reformation, it has been a source of fascination to scholars, earning a reputation for antinomianism alongside its association with some of the greatest humanists of the late sixteenth century. They include the philosopher and philologist Justus Lipsius and the greatest typographer of his day, Christophe Plantin. Hamilton studies the careers and the thought of the two main ideologists of the movement and provides a lucid analysis of the ramifications of the Family of Love not only in the Low Countries, but also in France, Germany and England. Extensively researched, Hamilton’s detailed study was the first to connect the Family of Love in England with the movement on the continent. His book remains a definitive but readable history of a neglected yet significant moment in the history of the Radical Reformation in Europe.
Recycling is not a concept that is usually applied to the eighteenth century. “The environment” may not have existed as a notion then, yet practices of re-use and transformation obviously shaped the early-modern world. Still, this period of booming commerce and exchange was also marked by scarcity and want. This book reveals the fascinating variety and ingenuity of recycling processes that may be observed in the commerce, crafts, literature, and medicine of the eighteenth century. Recycling is used as a thought-provoking means to revisit subjects such as consumption, the new science, or novel writing, and cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are carried out in old kitchen pans.
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.
In Europe within Reach Gerrit Verhoeven traces some sweeping evolutions in the early modern travel behaviour of Dutch and Flemish elites (1585-1750), as the classical Grand Tour was slowly but surely overshadowed by other types of travelling. Leisure trips to Paris, London or Berlin, a cours pittoresque along the Rhine, domestic trips in the Low Countries and a series of other destinations gained ground, while new sorts of travellers cropped up: female and middle-class travellers, domestic servants, children, youngsters and the elderly. Verhoeven does not only trace these evolutions, but also explains why Netherlandish travellers gradually turned into art connoisseurs; why they were spellbound by sites of memory and by rugged landscapes; or why all sorts of fashionable gadgets and thingies were bought on the way.