UCL Dutch

The latest issue of Dutch Crossing, the international peer-reviewed research journal on interdisciplinary Low Countries Studies, edited at UCL Dutch, has just been published (vol. 34, no. 1, March 2010). This volume of Dutch Crossing is a special issue, guest-edited by Esther Mijers from the University of Reading and showcasing some of the exciting postgraduate research that is currently being undertaken in the field of early modern Dutch history. Four of the five articles are based on papers delivered at the second annual Early Modern Studies Conference at the University of Reading; the fifth article, by Megan Lindsay Cherry, began life as a paper at the Low Countries Seminar at the Institute for Historical Research in London. While the articles are all connected chronologically to the long seventeenth century, it is clear that the research has moved on from the traditional themes of the Dutch Golden Age.

Mirella Marini’s article on female authority during the Dutch Revolt highlights the importance of noblewomen and their role in politics, religion, and society, in the lead up to the Golden Age. While the role of widows in the seventeenth century is reasonably well acknowledged, research on their (married) sixteenth century predecessors is long overdue, as Marini points out. The Dutch poet and professional author and publisher Katharina Lescailje, who was active at the end of the seventeenth century, is perhaps a good example of how far women had come by the end of the Golden Age. Unlike Marini’s noblewomen, Lescailje had to earn her own keep, while navigating an ever-changing and overwhelmingly male, political landscape, as Nina Geerdink describes.

Matthijs Wieldraaijer looks at two of the defining moments of the seventeenth century, the Year of Disaster and the Orangist Revolution of 1702, and the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688. In both events William III was heralded as dual defender of liberty and religion. Both in Lescailje’s poetry and in the sermons by the ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, which Wieldraaijer describes, William III’s actions were legitimized with the use of religious language and imagery. Wieldraaijer and Geerdink present here a fresh approach to one of the more traditional topics in Dutch history.

The final two articles largely deal with geographical areas outside the Dutch Republic.
Klaas van Gelder writes on the divided loyalties in the Southern Netherlands after the War of Spanish Succession, showing the effect of this war in the area that arguably suffered most as a result — a war which was, after all, started by William III and the city of Amsterdam to protect the seventeenth-century Dutch values and interests. Megan Lindsay Cherry also discusses a clash of ideologies inspired by but fought out outside the Dutch Republic, namely the Anglo-Dutch struggle over New Netherland (New York). As Lindsay Cherry points out, the Dutch North American presence was a thorn in the side of Restoration England’s colonial policy of centralization.

All five articles highlight the dynamism and international aspects of the early modern Netherlands and its research.

Ulrich Tiedau