History of the Low Countries
History of the Low Countries

Author: J. C. H. Blom

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2006-06

Total Pages: 531

ISBN-13: 1845452720

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The history of the smaller European countries is rather neglected in the teaching of European history at university level. We are therefore pleased to announce the publication of the first comprehensive history of the Low Countries - in English - from Roman Times to the present. Remaining politically and culturally fragmented, with its inhabitants speaking Dutch, French, Frisian, and German, the Low Countries offer a fascinating picture of European history en miniature. For historical reasons, parts of northern France and western Germany also have to be included in the "Low Countries," a term that must remain both broad and fluid, a convenient label for a region which has seldom, if ever, composed a unified whole. In earlier ages it as even more difficult to the region set parameters, again reflecting Europe as a whole, when tribes and kingdoms stretched across expanses not limited to the present states of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Nevertheless, its parts did demonstrate many common traits and similar developments that differentiated them from surrounding countries and lent them a distinct character. Internationally, the region often served both as a mediator for and a buffer to the surrounding great powers, France, Britain, and Germany; an important role still played today as Belgium and the Netherlands have increasingly become involved in the broader process of European integration, in which they often share the same interest and follow parallel policies. This highly illustrated volume serves as an ideal introduction to the rich history of the Low Countries for students and the generally interested reader alike.

A History of the Low Countries
A History of the Low Countries

Author: Paul Arblaster

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2005-12-23

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9781403948274

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the first full historical survey of the Benelux area (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) to be written in English. Paul Arblaster describes the whole sweep of the history of the Low Countries, from Roman frontier provinces, through medieval principalities, to the establishment of the three constitutional monarchies of the present day. This readable overview highlights the international importance of the social, economic , spiritual, and cultural movements that have marked the region.

Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture
Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture

Author: Jane Fenoulhet

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2016-11-07

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1910634972

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

From Revolt to Riches
From Revolt to Riches

Author: Theo Hermans

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2017-03-28

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1910634875

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

The Burgundians
The Burgundians

Author: Bart Van Loo

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-10-28

Total Pages: 748

ISBN-13: 1789543452

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A masterful history of the great dynasty of the Netherlands' Middle Ages. 'A sumptuous feast of a book' The Times, Books of the Year 'Thrillingly colourful and entertaining' Sunday Times 'A thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy' Simon Sebag Montefiore 5 stars! Daily Telegraph 'A masterpiece' De Morgen 'A history book that reads like a thriller' Le Soir At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. This is the story of a thousand years, a compulsively readable narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury and madness. It is about the decline of knightly ideals and the awakening of individualism and of cities, the struggle for dominance in the heart of northern Europe, bloody military campaigns and fatally bad marriages. It is also a remarkable cultural history, of great art and architecture and music emerging despite the violence and the chaos of the tension between rival dynasties.

Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500-1620
Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500-1620

Author: Christine Kooi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-06-09

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1009075403

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This accessible general history of the Reformation in the Netherlands traces the key developments in the process of reformation – both Protestant and Catholic – across the whole of the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. Synthesizing fifty years' worth of scholarly literature, Christine Kooi focuses particularly on the political context of the era: how religious change took place against the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Special attention is given to the Reformation's role in both fomenting and fuelling the Revolt against the Habsburg regime in the later sixteenth century, as well as how it contributed to the formation of the region's two successor states, the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands. Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500-1620 is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern European history, bringing together specialized, contemporary research on the Low Countries in one volume.

A History of the Low Countries
A History of the Low Countries

Author: Paul Arblaster

Publisher: Red Globe Press

Published: 2018-10-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1137611863

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The contribution of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg to Europe's heritage has been immense. Their histories cannot be written in isolation from one another, or even from those of their neighbors. To examine the history of the Low Countries is to encounter the narrative of a region that, for centuries, has been at the crossroads of Western Europe. This introductory overview of the Low Countries' history traces their social, cultural and political development from Roman rule to the present day. Through the rise of the merchant classes, the Renaissance, the Golden Age, the era of revolutions, and two world wars, this fully updated third edition considers political developments since 2011, including an expanded final chapter with new material on terrorism; includes extended coverages of global history, with further detail on the European Union; and features an annotated bibliography as well as new and revised maps.