History in Dutch Studies re-considers the central role of history within the discipline of Dutch Studies as viewed from a range of specializations within the field. Contributions by scholars of Dutch history, art history, literature and linguistics all illustrate how the past, and one's theories and views of history, affect the practice of each part of the discipline. One reflection of the history of the Low Countries in "Dutch Studies" is the range of the field: it is interpreted broadly in this volume to include studies of Afrikaans as well as Dutch literature- poetry as well as prose- in light of their histories, the history of Flanders and that of the Netherlands, approaches within Dutch linguistics as well as a history of language contact and its influence on Dutch. This breadth continues in the range of institutions and nationalities that are represented. The volume presents work from major scholars from the Netherlands, Belgium, and South Africa as well as from the United States of America. These articles therefore provide a good cross-section of ongoing research in the Netherlandic Studies the world over.

The conviction that Nature was God's second revelation played a crucial role in early modern Dutch culture. This book offers a fascinating account on how Dutch intellectuals contemplated, investigated, represented and collected natural objects, and how the notion of the 'Book of Nature' was transformed.

This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.

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

Innocence Abroad explores the encounter between the Netherlands and the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Arabic is the only living language to have been taught in Dutch higher education for more than four centuries. Practical usefulness, however, has been a prerequisite from the start. Knowledge of Arabic was to promote Dutch interests in the Muslim world, or to help refute Islam. As a cognate of Classical Hebrew, the study of Arabic served as an ancillary science to Biblical studies. Nevertheless, many Arabists such as Thomas Erpenius and Jacobus Golius rose to international distinction. With more than 110 colour illustrations from the Leiden Oriental collections, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands. A Short History in Portraits, 1580-1950 by Arnoud Vrolijk and Richard van Leeuwen will help the reader to gain insight into a fascinating aspect of Dutch intellectual history.