Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries – By Alastair Duke

Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries . By Alastair Duke . Edited by Judith Pollmann and Andrew Spicer . Ashgate . 2009 . xiv + 320 pp. £65.00 . This volume brings together a collection of essays by one of the leading specialists of the political and religious history of the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of which had previously been published between 1996 and 2009 except for two articles that appear in print in this book for the first time. The central themes are the Revolt of the Netherlands, the spread of the Reformation, and the formation of an alleged national identity in the Burgundian-Habsburg principalities. As always, in such cases, finding an all-encompassing title for such a book is a somewhat hazardous enterprise. Indeed, although at first sight the notion of ‘dissident identities’ might have a clear and commonsensical meaning, the question whether this is a fruitful concept for further empirical research remains a doubtful one. This is only a minor reproach, however, because there is a genuine coherence and unity of methodological approach in the separate essays collected here, that of the identification of the inhabitants of these prosperous and urbanized regions with different forms of communities in an era of great social, political and religious turmoil. Though this is not explicitly stated, in Duke's approach ‘identity’ should then be understood as a process rather than as a static concept. The articles all excel in the eloquence of their narratives, in the abundance of the sources listed in the scholarly footnotes, and in the rigorous reading of the primary material, in many cases making the results of many years of research published in Dutch accessible to an international audience as well as situating them within a wider European perspective. The most fascinating question that this book brings to the forefront is whether there really was such a thing as a common identity in the early modern Low Countries, be it as a whole before the division of the North and the South after 1585, or within these two separate political units, the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, after that date. The author seems to leave that question somewhat open, and this might well be the most prudent way of handling this problem given the actual state of the historical research, though on some pages he seems to suggest that such a ‘Netherlandish’ national consciousness really did exist and the inhabitants of Flanders, Holland, Brabant, Hainaut, Zeeland, Utrecht etc. did not just identify with their own principality. On page 14 he refers to the ‘scepticism’ of some Dutch historians as far as such precocious national consciousness is concerned. The undersigned reviewer is also one of these sceptics and the many interesting sources quoted by Alastair Duke that might advance the contrary viewpoint remain unconvincing to the degree that they are in the great majority of cases based on printed sources written by the elites and the amount of archival sources that might reflect the opinions of the lower strata and local communities is rather small. True enough, so-called ‘ideas of nationhood’ have historically been established by exactly these political, economic and cultural elites so studying them in detail is a very legitimate endeavour. And indeed, this collection of essays does so in a very convincing manner

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