This article introduces a painting that has recently come to light after having remained in private ownership for centuries. It depicts a meeting of the States General in the Statenzaal at the Binnenhof in The Hague. This is of historical significance because, until now, no detailed representations of the interior of the assembly hall of the highest governing body of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century were known. Moreover, on the basis of the identification of the figures portrayed – among them stadholder and military commander Maurice of Nassau and all members of the delegation representing the United Provinces at the peace negotiations that would culminate in the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621) – it can be established that the painting depicts a specific moment recorded in the resolutions of the States General. During the session of 4 February 1608, the assembly received news that the Spanish-Habsburg negotiators, led by Ambrogio Spinola, were willing to present themselves before the assembly. This visit, which took place the following day, could be interpreted as a performative confirmation of the Spanish-Habsburg recognition of Dutch sovereignty. The communicative event immortalised by an unidentified painter thus symbolised the emergence of the Netherlands as a sovereign state.
The aim of this article is to describe, for the first time, the general character and function of the town crier in the Dutch Republic, between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century. The stadsroeper belongs to a cast of early modern urban professionals that has been largely ignored as an object of study. This article seeks to reconstruct the world of the crier, based on extensive research in Dutch archives. Our analysis covers a discussion of the general distribution across the Republic of the town crier; a comparative examination of the services and duties of the crier; a reconstruction of the appearance and performance of the crier and their relation to the crier’s function; and a reflection on the remuneration, ancillary activities and general status of the crier in society. Overall, this article argues that the town crier was a figure central to civic society in the Dutch Republic, across villages, towns and cities, functioning as a vital communicative mediator of news and announcements of official, commercial, and private natures.
This essay examines how growing numbers of displaced men and women in the early modern Low Countries were incorporated into contemporary visual culture. It argues that evolving representations of the refugee were built on biblical and classical tropes, and shaped by the interests of stakeholders, notably religious minorities. Mapping this visual landscape, it proposes a typology of five, partly overlapping refugee types. Each drew on pictorial models and confessional scripts aligned with the sensibilities of target audiences. The iconographic development of the early modern refugee would have dramatic consequences for displaced groups who did not fit into such categories.
This article analyses two thus far unstudied Latin poems by the prominent humanist scholar Caspar Barlaeus (1584-1648): Argo Batava (1629), which celebrates the Dutch capture of the Spanish treasure fleet in 1628; and Triumphus super capta Olinda (1630), on the conquest of the Portuguese settlement Olinda in Brazil in 1630. These two poems, we argue, give significant clues regarding the ambivalence that characterised Barlaeus’s views regarding the Dutch pursuit of empire. By discussing these poems together within the contexts of the early modern reception of the classics and the development of Dutch empire in the Atlantic world, we show how Barlaeus’s baroque poetry mixed triumphalism with pessimism and celebrated as well as criticised Dutch colonialism as a project of laudable yet dangerous ambition. In creatively appropriating the classical narratives of the Argonauts, Aeneas’s arrival on Italian soil, and the imperial contest between Rome and Carthage, Barlaeus hinted that the Dutch Republic could succeed in outdoing the Spanish monarchy and in establishing settlements overseas but, blinded by the lust for gold and profit, would not be able to escape the perils of living in an Iron Age.
This article presents a computational approach to the relationship between gender and character speech in early modern Dutch drama. It evaluates the possibility of automatically classifying gender based on the speeches of 1141 characters and character groups from 98 early modern Dutch plays (1613-1786). The experiment combines three approaches to gender classification: lexical, semantic, and stylistic. The results show that each approach fails to reliably capture distinctions between male and female speech in early modern Dutch drama, in contrast to similar studies of gender distinctions in other literary corpora. The inability to measure a gender binary in Dutch dramatic discourse indicates that gender generally was not performed through the vocabularies of Dutch male and female characters. The absence of clear gender distinctions in character speech is read as a product of the persistent tradition of cross-dressing in the Dutch Republic, creating fictional realities in which gender became fluid and complex.
