This lively collection of essays examines the link between public opinion and the development of changing 'Netherlandish' identities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Alastair Duke has long been recognized as one of the leading scholars of the early modern Netherlands, known internationally for his important work on the impact of religious change on political events which was the focus of his Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (1990). This new volume explores the emergence of new political and religious identities in the Netherlands. These essays, together, demonstrate how dissident identities shaped and contributed to the development of the Netherlands during the early modern period.

Alastair Duke has long been recognized as one of the leading scholars of the early modern Netherlands, known internationally for his important work on the impact of religious change on political events which was the focus of his Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (1990). Bringing together an updated selection of his previously published essays - together with one entirely new chapter and two that appear in English here for the first time - this volume explores the emergence of new political and religious identities in the early modern Netherlands. Firstly it analyses the emergence of a common identity amongst the amorphous collection of states in north-western Europe that were united first under the rule of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy and later the Habsburg princes, and traces the fortunes of this notion during the political and religious conflicts that divided the Low Countries during the second half of the sixteenth century. A second group of essays considers the emergence of dissidence and opposition to the regime, and explores how this was expressed and disseminated through popular culture. Finally, the volume shows how in the age of confessionalisation and civil war, challenging issues of identity presented themselves to both dissenting groups and individuals. Taken together these essays demonstrate how these dissident identities shaped and contributed to the development of the Netherlands during the early modern period.

This book offers a detailed investigation of the influence of public opinion and national identity on the foreign policies of France, Britain and the Netherlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The quarter-century of upheaval and warfare in Europe between the outbreak of the French Revolution and fall of Napoleon saw important developments in understandings of nation, public, and popular sovereignty, which spilled over into how people viewed their governments—and how governments viewed their people. By investigating the ideas and impulses behind Dutch, French and British foreign policy in a comparative context across a range of royal, revolutionary and republican regimes, this book offers new insights into the importance of public opinion and national identities to international relations at the end of the long eighteenth century.

Printed Pandemonium is a fresh take on one of the most violent political upheavals in early modern history: the popular riots, the political murders and the brutal purifications of local governments in the Dutch Republic during the so-called ‘Year of Disaster’ 1672. Printed Pandemonium gives an insight into the relationship between political event and political communication in the early modern world. The popular revolts of 1672 were the work of ‘normal’ citizens who rioted and killed, but also politically participated by reading, writing and debating hundreds of different pamphlets and petitions that were put on the market during that momentous year. In total somewhere between one and two million pamphlets flooded the Dutch Republic in 1672. This study is the first analysis of all these pamphlets.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research. The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe – a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels. There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500–c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods – between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds – and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience. Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: ‘Definitions, disciplines, new directions’, ‘Contexts and categories’, ‘Object studies’ and ‘Material culture in action’. This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.

Bringing together contributions from art history, architectural history, historiography and history of law, this volume is the first comprehensive exploration of the manifold meanings of foundation, dedication and consecration rituals and narratives in early modern culture.