Studies in Early Modernity in The Netherlands – serie

Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. This book explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the medieval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.

At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Block is best described as a cultural producer. A member of an influential network in her lifetime, today she remains a largely obscure figure. The socioeconomic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with a male-dominated tradition in art history, have meant that too few stories of women’s roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. This book seeks to write Block and her contributions into the art and cultural history of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, highlighting the need for and advantages of a multifaceted approach to research on early modern women. Examining Block’s achievements, relationships, and objects reveals a woman who was independent, knowledgeable, self-aware, and not above self-promotion. Though her gender brought few opportunities and many barriers, Agnes Block succeeded in fashioning herself as Flora Batava, a liefhebber at the intersection of art and science.

Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. This book explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the medieval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.

How did objects move between places and people, and how did they reshape the Republic’s arts, cultures and sciences? ‘Objects’ were vitally significant for the early modern Dutch Republic, which is known as an early consumer society, a place famous for its exhaustive production of books, visual arts and scientific instruments. What happens when we push these objects and their materiality to the centre of our research? How do they invite us to develop new perspectives on the early modern Dutch Republic? And how do they contest the boundaries of the academic disciplines that have traditionally organized our scholarship? In Objects, Commodities and Material Cultures, the interdisciplinary community of specialists around the Amsterdam Centre for the Study of Early Modernity innovatively explores the diverse early modern world of objects. Its contributors take a single object or commodity as a point of departure to study and discuss various aspects of early modern art, culture and history: from natural objects to consumer goods, from knowledge instruments to artistic materials. The volume aims to unravel how objects have moved through regions, cultures and ages, and how objects impacted people who lived and worked in the Dutch Republic.

This book studies the position of four translators in these debates (on science, theology, medicine, and political theory) on the ‘New Philosophy’: Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker, Pieter Balling, Abraham van Berkel, and Stephan Blankaart.

Painters’ Playbooks introduces an innovative socio-spatial approach, shedding light on the artistic development in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. By synthesizing various historical sources digitally, this book delves into artists’ collective behaviours discernible in their location choices, social relations, and use of house interiors.