Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture

Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture
Author: Jane Fenoulhet
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2016-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1910634972

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.

History of the Low Countries

History of the Low Countries
Author: J. C. H. Blom
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 531
Release: 2006-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1845452720

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 Literary History of the Low Countries

A Literary History of the Low Countries
Author: Theo Hermans
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 743
Release: 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1571132937

An authoritative volume that is the first literary history of the Netherlands and Flanders in English since the 1970s

From Revolt to Riches

From Revolt to Riches
Author: Theo Hermans
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2017-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1910634875

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
Total Pages: 748
Release: 2021-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789543452

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.

Women's Writing from the Low Countries 1200-1875

Women's Writing from the Low Countries 1200-1875
Author: Lia van Gemert
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9089641297

This book provides a welcome English translation of a marvelous anthology of women's religious and secular writing, stretching from the visions of the late medieval mystics through the prison testaments of sixteenth-century Anabaptist martyrs to the pamphleteers and novelists of the growing urban bourgeoisie. The translations and introductions demonstrate the ways that women in the Low Countries shaped the intellectual and cultural developments of their eras.

Francophone Literature in the Low Countries (1200-1600)

Francophone Literature in the Low Countries (1200-1600)
Author: Alisa van de Haar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2021-11-22
Genre:
ISBN: 9789463721080

In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted in local soil. The five contributions collected in this volume demonstrate that while in general issues of 'otherness' were resolved without difficulty, at other times (linguistic) differences were perceived as a heartfelt reality. Texts and books in French, Latin, and Dutch were as interrelated and mobile as their authors. As awareness of the francophone literature of the medieval and early modern Low Countries continues to grow, texts in all three languages will be ever more firmly connected in an intricate and multilingual weave.

The Postcolonial Low Countries

The Postcolonial Low Countries
Author: Elleke Boehmer
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0739164287

The Postcolonial Low Countries is the first book to bring together critical and comparative approaches to the emergent field of neerlandophone postcolonial studies. The collection of essays ranges across the cultures and literatures of the Netherlands and Belgium and establishes an encounter between postcolonial theoretical discourses from both within and without the region. Each one of the contributions puts under pressure the definitive concepts of postcolonial studies in its more conventional anglophone or francophone formation, as well as perceptions of the Low Countries, Belgium and the Netherlands, as lying outside or to the side of the postcolonial domain. In the Low Countries, local and regional issues concerning multiculturalism and colonial belatedness have raised important questions about the possible grounds on which postcolonial critical concepts might be not only translated but also generated afresh, to suit these paradoxically new contexts. As The Postcolonial Low Countries incisively demonstrates, the Low Countries demand a careful rearticulation of such postcolonial 'readymades' as hybridity, accommodation and creolization. Gathering together contributions from both internationally renowned scholars and newly established researchers in the field, The Postcolonial Low Countries maps previously underexplored national and transnational literary critical trajectories. The book challenges in boundary shifting ways current readings of the so-described multicultural and postcolonial Netherlands and Belgium.

Doing Double Dutch

Doing Double Dutch
Author: Elke Brems
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9462700974

The importance of a minor language in the field of world literature Dutch literature is increasingly understood as a network of texts and poetics connected to other languages and literatures through translations and adaptations. In this book, a team of international researchers explores how Dutch literary texts cross linguistic, historical, geophysical, political, religious, and disciplinary borders, and reflects on a wide range of methods for studying these myriad border crossings. As a result, this volume provides insight into the international dissemination of Dutch literature and the position of a smaller, less-translated language within the field of world literature. The title Doing Double Dutch evokes a popular rope-skipping game in which two people turn two long jump ropes in opposite directions while a third person jumps them. A fitting metaphor for how literature circulates internationally: two dynamic spheres, the source culture and the target culture, engage one another in a complex pattern of movement resulting in a new literary work, translation, or adaptation formed somewhere in the middle. Contributors: Chiara Beltrami Gottmer (American International School of Rotterdam), Peter Boot (Huygens ING), Pieter Boulogne (KU Leuven), Elke Brems (KU Leuven), Michel De Dobbeleer (University of Ghent), Caroline de Westenholz (Louis Couperus Museum), Gillis Dorleijn (University of Groningen), Wilken Engelbrecht (Palacký University Olomouc), Veerle Fraeters (University of Antwerp), Maud Gonne (KU Leuven), Christine Hermann (University of Vienna), Peter Kegel (Huygens ING), Tessa Lobbes (Utrecht University), Marijke Meijer Drees (University of Groningen), Reine Meylaerts (KU Leuven), Marco Prandoni (University of Bologna), Marion Prinse (Utrecht University), Orsolya Réthelyi (Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Huygens ING), Diana Sanz Roig (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Rita Schlusemann (Utrecht University), Matthieu Sergier (Université Saint Louis Brussels), Natalia Stachura (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan), Janek Urbaniak (University of Wrocław), Stéphanie Vanasten (UCL Louvain-la-Neuve), Ton van Kalmthout (Huygens ING), Suzanne van Putten-Brons, Herbert Van Uffelen (University of Vienna), Marc van Zoggel (Huygens ING), Nico Wilterdink (University of Amsterdam).