This volume explores the relationship between politics and pamphleteering in the Dutch Republic. By analyzing the political role of pamphlets and their interplay with other media in public debates, the articles provide a new understanding of Dutch political culture.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch Republic was one of the main centers of media in Europe. These media included newspapers, pamphlets, news digests, and engravings. Early Modern Media and the News in Europe brings together fifteen articles dealing with this early news industry in relation to politics and society, written by Joop W. Koopmans in recent decades. They demonstrate the important Dutch position within early modern news networks in Europe. Moreover, they address a variety of related themes, such as the supply of news during wars and disasters, the speed of early modern news reports, the layout of early newspapers and the news value of their advertisements, and censorship of books and news media.
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.
For this bilingual (English-French) anthology of early modern fictitious catalogues, selections were made from a multitude of texts, from the genre’s beginnings (Rabelais’s satirical catalogue of the Library of St.-Victor (1532)) to its French and Dutch specimens from around 1700. In thirteen chapters, written by specialists in the field, diverse texts containing fictitious booklists are presented and contextualized. Several of these texts are well known (by authors such as Fischart, Doni, and Le Noble), others – undeservedly – are less known, or even unrecorded. The anthology is preceded by a literary historical and theoretical introduction addressing the parodic and satirical aspects of the genre, and its relationship to other genres: theatre, novel, and pamphlet. Contributors: Helwi Blom, Tobias Bulang, Raphaël Cappellen, Ronnie Ferguson, Dirk Geirnaert, Jelle Koopmans, Marijke Meijer Drees, Claudine Nédelec, Patrizia Pellizzari, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Paul J. Smith, and Dirk Werle.
This book resulted from a desire to understand the role of pamphlets in the political life of that most curious early modern state, the Dutch Republic. The virtues of abundance and occasional liveliness have made "little blue books," as they were called, a favorite historical source-that is why I came to study them in the first place. I But the more I dug into pamphlets for this fact or that, the more questions I had about their 2 contemporary purpose and role. Who wrote pamphlets and why? For whom were they intended? How and by whom were pamphlets brought to press and distributed, and what does this reveal? Why did their number increase so greatly? Who read them? How were pamphlets different from other media? In short, I began to view pamphlets not as repositories of historical facts but as a historical phenomenon in their own right. 3 I have looked for answers to these questions in governmental and church records, private letters, publishing records and related materials about printers, booksellers, and pamphleteers, and of course in pam phlets themselves. Like so many other students of the early press and its products, I discovered only scattered, incomplete images of actual con ditions, such as the readership or popularity of pamphlets. On the other hand, I found much material which reflected what people believed about "little books.
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 untold story of how the Dutch conquered the European book market and became the world's greatest bibliophiles--"an instant classic on Dutch book history" (BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review) "[An] excellent contribution to book history."--Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books The Dutch Golden Age has long been seen as the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, whose paintings captured the public imagination and came to represent the marvel that was the Dutch Republic. Yet there is another, largely overlooked marvel in the Dutch world of the seventeenth century: books. In this fascinating account, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen show how the Dutch produced many more books than pictures and bought and owned more books per capita than any other part of Europe. Key innovations in marketing, book auctions, and newspaper advertising brought stability to a market where elsewhere publishers faced bankruptcy, and created a population uniquely well-informed and politically engaged. This book tells for the first time the remarkable story of the Dutch conquest of the European book world and shows the true extent to which these pious, prosperous, quarrelsome, and generous people were shaped by what they read.
The tumultuous relations between Britain and the United Provinces in the seventeenth century provide the backdrop to this book, striking new ground as its transnational framework permits an overview of their intertwined culture, politics, trade, intellectual exchange, and religious debate. How the English and Dutch understood each other is coloured by these factors, and revealed through an imagological method, charting the myriad uses of stereotypes in different genres and contexts. The discussion is anchored in a specific context through the lives and works of John Milton and Andrew Marvell, whose complex connections with Dutch people and society are investigated. As well as turning overdue attention to neglected Dutch writers of the period, the book creates new possibilities for reading Milton and Marvell as not merely English, but European poets.