Public opinion and changing identities in the early modern Netherlands. Essays in honour of Alastair Duke

The volume takes its title from five chapters that engage with Jürgen Habermas's contention that a public sphere only emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment: they present convincing evidence that prints, plays, propaganda, maps and historical writing helped to create both a collective identity and a 'public sphere' in the early modern Netherlands. Other chapters deal with related subjects: the writings of François Richardot and Justus Lipsius, two loyalist critics of Philip ii's policies in the Netherlands; the reluctance of Netherlands magistrates to enforce the Habsburgs' heresy placards in the 1550s; the installation of huge stained glass windows in the principal Calvinist church of Gouda; Pierre Bayle and his Dutch contemporaries; the publications of Rouen printers who specialised in producing chapbooks so ephemeral that only one copy of each survives (the only essay not about the Low Countries). Perhaps we should not be entirely surprised because Dutch historical writing, and especially on the Dutch Revolt, has traditionally ignored Spanish material - to appreciate the impact of this distortion, imagine a history of colonial North America, and especially of the Revolutionary War, that ignored British material - but it is regrettable that this asymmetry has survived into the twenty-first century.