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.

Professor Jozef IJsewijn’s most relevant essays collected in one volume Jozef IJsewijn. Humanism in the Low Countries contains twenty-one essays written by the late Professor Jozef IJsewijn during the period 1966-1996. All essays were selected by his pupil Professor Gilbert Tournoy, who collaborated with him since the foundation of the Seminarium Philologiae Humanisticae in 1966 until his untimely death in 1998. They are now published in one volume in homage to the most brilliant scholar in the field of Neo-Latin Studies of the twentieth century. A number of contributions focus on the life and/or work of a single humanist from the Netherlands, others have a more general nature and deal with the very beginning and the later blossoming of Neo-Latin literature in the Low Countries or with the relationship between humanism in the Low Countries and in other European countries. Hidden in a less-known journal or a Festschrift for a colleague, these studies are nowadays not always easy to find. This volume brings the most relevant essays of IJsewijn together and aims to contribute to the research and study of humanism and Neo-Latin literature in the Low Countries.