Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries

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.

Contents: By way of introduction; The elusive Netherlands: the question of national identity in the early modern Low Countries on the eve of the Revolt; In defence of the common fatherland: patriotism and liberty in the Low countries, 1555-1576; Moulded by repression: the early Netherlands Reformation, 1520-55; The 'inquisition' and the repression of religious dissent in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1521-1566; A legend in the making: news of the 'Spanish Inquisition' in the Low Countries in German evangelical pamphlets, 1546-1550; Dissident propaganda and political organisation at the outbreak of the Revolt of the Netherlands; Posters, pamphlets and prints: the ways and means of disseminating dissident opinions on the eve of the Dutch Revolt; Calvinists and 'papist idolatry': the mentality of the image-breakers in 1566; Martyrs with a difference: Dutch Anabaptist victims of Elizabethan persecution; The search for religious identity in a confessional age: the conversions of Jean Haren (c.1545-c.1613); Calvinist loyalism. Jean Haren, Chimay and the demise of the Calvinist republic of Bruges; Bibliography; Index.

Dr Alastair Duke was formerly Reader in History at the University of Southampton and is the author of Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (1990). Judith Pollmann is Professor of the History and Culture of the Dutch Republic at Leiden University. Andrew Spicer is Professor of Early Modern European History; he is also Director of the AHRC, The Early Modern Parish Church Religious Landscape Project and Head of History and History of Art at Oxford Brookes University.