Mytho-Poetics at Work

Spare a thought for poor Philip de Montmorency, Count of Horn. Very few people have. Horn had been one of the early leaders of the Dutch Revolt. Infamously executed by the Duke of Alba alongside Lamoral, Count of Egmont, on 5 June 1568, he is little remembered today. By contrast, Egmont, as the book reviewed here shows, became the stuff of legend. In the late 1780s, on the eve of the French Revolution, Egmont became the subject of a tragedy composed by the young Goethe and a biography by Schiller, two of the exponents of Weimar Classicism. In the Austrian Netherlands, Egmont became a rallying cry for opposition to Joseph II’s absolutist reforms. To slightly paraphrase the author, Rengenier C. Rittersma, a halo came to encircle the count’s decapitated head. Rittersma’s book explores the process of mythogenesis that lifted Egmont, as an iconic freedom-fighter, out of the world of historical particulars and into the realm of transcended persons and events that shape patterns of general human experience. (The gradual disappearance of Horn, Rittersma argues, was part of this myth-making process.)

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