Historians and art historians provide a critique of existing methodologies and an interdisciplinary inquiry into seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture.

This collection investigates the culture and history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from both international and interdisciplinary perspectives. The period was one of extraordinary upheaval and change, as the combined impact of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolt resulted in the radically new conditions – political, economic and intellectual – of the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age. While many aspects of this rich and nuanced era have been studied before, the emphasis of this volume is on a series of interactions and interrelations: between communities and their varying but often cognate languages; between different but overlapping spheres of human activity; between culture and history. The chapters are written by historians, linguists, bibliographers, art historians and literary scholars based in the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States. In continually crossing disciplinary, linguistic and national boundaries, while keeping the culture and history of the Low Countries in the Renaissance and Golden Age in focus, this book opens up new and often surprising perspectives on a region all the more intriguing for the very complexity of its entanglements.

In this book I have aimed at completeness in the sense that all publications known to me, which are wholly or partly devoted to Malay and Bahasa Indonesia (B.I.), or are important for the study of these languages, have been included. Popular publications in non-professional periodicals have been included only exceptionally. All the publications mentioned in the text are incorporated in the Bibliography (p. 91-157). The countless articles in four post-war, semi-professional periodicals in :'1alaya and Indonesia, Dewan Bahasa, Pembina Bahasa Indonesia. 11:1 edan Bahasa, Bahasa dan Budaja, are not mentioned separately in the Bibliography, but sections 33 to 36 contain a survey, as complete and systematic as possible, of the contents of these periodicals in so far as they pertain to the Malay language; nor have I discussed in the text or incorporated in the Bibliography several hundreds of titles of practical textbooks or school-books of Malay or B.I. which are of no importance to the scientific study of these language. These titles have been entered in a separate Appendix (p. 158--171). The fact that completeness was aimed at certainly does not mean that it has been achieved. Especially various recent writings from Indonesia and Malaya may have escaped my attention. Experience has also proved that publications on Malay sometimes appear in the most unexpected places. The qualification above: "publications ... devoted to ... , or impor tant for the study of" Malay and B.I. has been taken in a wide sense.