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William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Revolt and one of the most famous members of the family of Orange-Nassau, is known as a 'propagandist', producing various printed and handwritten media during the Revolt. However, besides the prestigious princes of Orange, the lineage of William of Orange also included other family, the German counts of Nassau. These less prestigious relatives, the 'lesser' Nassau, assisted their princely kin in various ways, but received little attention in the scholarship on the lineage. Therefore, this article sketches the relations between the 'lesser' Nassau and the princes of Orange, and deals with the media-politics of the 'lesser' Nassau, understood as their attempts to reproduce, present and communicate their social status to different publics in different contexts by the use of paper communication media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on the 19th biennial Interdisciplinary Conference on Netherlandic Studies. The antebellum New York Historical Society differed from educational ministers who oversaw German International Schools in the Netherlands prior to and during Nazi rule, both saw education as a central component to the development of narratives of national unity.

An introduction to papers published within the issue is presented, including one by Wouter Troost which examines the part played by Sir William Temple as Prince Williams III's point of contact and influence in England's factional politics before and during the Exclusion Crisis (1674-81), and another by Inge Broekman and Helmer Helmets which analyses the States General's three gifts to the Stuart royal family, focusing especially on the one made to King Charles II on his accession in 1660.

This paper examines the successful translation and reception of Maria Dermoût's De tienduizend dingen (1955), most particularly in the U.S. and Italy: a quite unique case of a Dutch book which has found its way to world literature. In the late Fifties, this beautifully crafted literary work about the faded world of the Dutch Molucca's prior to WWII, could reckon on sympathy, empathy and interest in different countries. In the U.S., the ongoing decolonization process found a certain support, while Italy did its best to fully erase all traces of its colonial past and only few people with colonial roots tried to keep them alive. The ambivalent, liminar status of this fascinating book, written from a distant elsewhere by a displaced Eurasian author, can explain its appeal to translators Hans Koning and Quirino Maffi – both displaced, too – and international audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basis of white innocence is a strong denial of the notion of racism by deniers, as well as a whitesplaining of the very thing whose existence is denied. The racism-is-relative discourse erases institutional racism and is blind to white privilege. It refuses to engage with history. 'Personal failings' ignores the reality of systems that have intentionally favoured a certain demographic; it suggests that everyone has equal access to these systems. It is this sort of discourse that has sustained the stereotype of certain demographics as intellectually or physically lazy, and shuts down conversations around equity, which results in more inequity. This paper explores how white innocence and black discomforts contribute to making racism thrive. To be a true ally, white non-racists must intentionally work to be anti-racist too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anton van den Wyngaerde's (c. 1490–1571) Panorama of Walcheren (after c. 1548) depicts the entire Island and the North Sea across ten metres of rolled paper. As the scene unfurls, viewers travel across Walcheren's dikes, roads, and waterways. Staffage accompanies the viewer on this mental journey, animating the topographical vision. Comparison with Jacob van Deventer's (c. 1500/5–1575) maps of Walcheren's largest cities (c. 1550) demonstrates van den Wyngaerde's pictorial style. His style's potential for cinematic absorption was suited to the panorama's intended audience and location. A version of this panorama hung in the Palacio de El Pardo of Philip II (1527–1598), King of Spain, by September 1564. That painted panorama, now lost, brought before the king's eyes an illustrated account of the Island's economic and defensive significance. Strolling the length of the gallery, Philip could envision past time spent on Walcheren and find himself immersed in the Island's cultural experiences while being reminded of its position. The viewing experience offered the king of Spain a microcosmic synecdoche of his imperial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on research into the use of Dutch forms of address (i.e. the second-person pronouns u and je/jij) among two generations in the Netherlands. Its main aim is to determine the factors behind different choices of address pronoun. It takes the model of address choice proposed by Clyne et al. in Language and Human Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and more specifically their concept of general pragmatic principles, as its theoretical inspiration. The research is based on a questionnaire in which respondents were asked which pronoun they used to address a variety of interlocutors. The questionnaire also asked respondents to reflect on their choice, especially if it was ambivalent (i.e. if they would address the same type of interlocutor sometimes with u and sometimes with je/jij). It is the qualitative analysis of these reflections that is the focus of this paper. Although there is some variation between the age groups’ evaluation of the importance of some principles, the article establishes (relative) age and familiarity as the leading principles in Dutch address choice. There is also a high level of meta-sociolinguistic awareness of the mechanisms behind address choice. The conclusion suggests a number of modest enhancements to Clyne et al.’s model of address choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the topic of artistic 'isms' in the history and historiography of modern Dutch and Flemish art in a broader European context – such as Constructivism, Neoplasticism, Elementarism, Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism etc. Exemplified by the case of the historical artistic and literary avant-garde from the Low Countries, with its polyphony of overlapping artistic 'isms', this paper aims to scrutinize various limitations and imprecisions that result from the use of 'isms' in the history and historiography of modern art, exemplified by selected avant-garde formations such as De Stijl, Het Overzicht or 7 Art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the drama Die Offerande ['The Sacrifice'] (1941) by Hester Cornelius, in which the Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism was grafted onto an Afrikaner cultural setting. To outline the context in which the play was created and performed, this contribution elaborates on the representation of Soviet socialism in the South African trade union periodical Klerewerker/Garment Worker, where the play was published. It aims to demonstrate that this propaganda play renders the socialist realist principle of narodnost (i. e. inclusion of a national folk element) by incorporating motifs characteristic of the Afrikaans farm novel, references to the historical events on which the Afrikanerdom founding myth is based, and characters representing 'typical' Afrikaners. Moreover, this article argues that the play's plot is reminiscent of the socialist realist novel master plot which illustrates the protagonist's transition from political immaturity to political awareness and his becoming the New Man. The important modification which Cornelius introduced was that she cast women in the main roles, so her play propagates the working-class New Woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the paradoxes inherent in Rembrandt's treatment of angels in his etched works where his choice of subject and medium directly addresses the fraught relation between the material and the spiritual, between reason and imagination, issues at the heart of Rembrandt's artistic enterprise and central as well to the long reformation. Rembrandt's etchings with angels draw particular attention to his craft, especially the distinction between the etching (on the plate) and the print (on paper) whereby the paper (as opposed to the plate) provides an unstable and fragile surface particularly suited to convey unsteadiness of all earthly things. Rembrandt's attention to surface and to tonal effects beyond the etching needle becomes more pronounced after 1647 when he discovered Japanese paper. Two prints - Abraham and the Angels Eating (1656) and the so-called Dr. Faustus (1653) - exemplify what this increasingly experimental attitude and play of imagination meant for the artist's understanding of Creation in general and angels in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore translation flows from Dutch into Serbian in the period between 1991 and 2015, and to identify the most important trends in the selection and production of translations in the context of core-periphery theory. In this study, a model proposed by Pięta will be used for data analysis. This model is structured around five key questions: what was translated, when was it translated, how was it translated, who translated it, and why was it translated. The first part of the paper will be focused on presenting and describing the data, followed by a discussion of the findings in the second part, where we will try to explain how various factors intertwine and influence each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gazette van Detroit was one of many immigrant newspapers started up in the United States shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. During the war, it kept the Belgian community of Detroit, wider Michigan and Southwestern Ontario (Canada) abreast of the developments in their former homeland, while also reporting on the hostilities elsewhere in Europe from a typically Belgian, and particularly Flemish perspective. It published to that end a variety of pieces under the scrutiny of the Belgian and later also the American government: (1) pieces submitted byregular contributors; (2) letters of Belgian soldiers; (3) articles gleaned from other news sources; and (4) pieces reproducing official information provided by the exiled Belgian government in Le Havre (France). Caught like most other media outlets in a powerful tide of national solidarity, much of this wartime reporting can be considered as propaganda, since it aimed to standardize public opinion by mobilizing the animosity of an entire community against a thoroughly evil enemy engaged in the victimization of an intrinsically good, heroic and unflinching opponent: the Belgian civilian population and army. To achieve this effect, the Gazette employed rhetorical strategies, such as over-lexicalisation, stereotyping and the kinship metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch-Flemish literary project De eenzame uitvaart (The lonely funeral) consists of city-based groups of poets who write poems and perform them at funerals of fellow citizens who died lonely and often anonymously. At first sight, this project could be considered as a revival of the genre of occasional poetry and, more generally, as an exponent of the 'revenge' of the lyric in the twenty-first century. This revenge, a term borrowed from Thomas Vaessens, implies that contemporary poetry no longer functions as a marginal and elitist genre but has reconquered its popular status and societal value – in short, its heteronomous function. This paper aims to question this idea of the lyric's revenge by analysing the ambitions (as expressed by the initiators of the project) and a selection of poems of De eenzame uitvaart. It contends that the project is founded on a firm belief in the potency of the lyric and its specific language but that this belief is often contradicted by the hesitant rhetoric of the actual poems. This discrepancy between great ambitions and hesitant practice is interpreted as a symptom of the contemporary status of the lyric, which takes revenge yet only reluctantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The well-known medieval Groenendaal monastery in Brabant has produced some of the finest examples of medieval Dutch literature, including Jan van Ruusbroec’s œuvre, who together with Anne Frank, remains the most frequently translated Dutch author of all time. Authorship attribution nevertheless remains a serious scholarly concern when it comes to the corpus of mystical texts from Groenendaal: because of the general proximity of the Groenendaal authors, their œuvres can be difficult to delineate. In this paper, I apply a quantitative, style-based methodology for authorship attribution to a sizable corpus of Groenendaal authors. These computational techniques are borrowed from the innovative field of stylometry in the Digital Humanities. I will discuss how the experimental results obtained are able to confirm and complement many of the authorship-related hypotheses developed in traditional Middle Dutch studies. Additionally, this work aims to demonstrate the exciting scholarly potential of ‘Distant Reading’ for the study of the rich textual heritage from the medieval Low Countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coming of the Dutch Strangers, religious refugees from the Southern Netherlands, to various cities in England – specifically London and Norwich – in the middle of the sixteenth century, is a new stage in the history of the presence of Dutch speakers in Britain; Dutch-speaking churches were founded, and printers in England became involved in printing Dutch texts. The ease with which these new communities established themselves, however, depended on a pre-existing presence of communities of Dutch speakers, and a long history of Anglo-Dutch cultural, mercantile and political interactions. This paper examines evidence for the existence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century of an Anglo-Dutch infrastructure along which people moved, and on which communities were built [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch reading culture is so international that it is fair to say foreign texts in Dutch translation are part of Dutch literature. But translation of literature 'into Dutch' is itself not without pitfalls, it proves to be an arena where Dutch diverging linguistic norms become visible. Retranslation can be a means to negotiate these complex target culture norms. In the Dutch language literary field the policy of avoiding 'Flemish' for the Dutch language book market seems to have been consistent and widespread as e.g. the case of Richard Scarry's ABC-books shows. Three consecutive translations of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books, seen from a cultural-political angle, clearly show how the unity or heterogeneity of the Dutch speaking literary field is negotiated. My paper demonstrates how retranslations can serve as negotiations between not only source and target culture but even within the target culture itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, Harry Mulisch’s novel Twee vrouwen (1975) was re-released, causing ripples in Dutch literary and social circles. A narration of both a physical and metaphorical journey, Mulisch’s text centres on the lesbian affair of his protagonist and the tragic trajectory of this relationship is revealed to take. Despite the novel’s continued critical acclaim, however, many early feminist contentions with Mulisch’s representation of lesbian sexuality continue to remain unresolved. The following paper will attempt to offer a new perspective on the significance of same-sex love within the novel, analysing the protagonist’s relationship with her female lover within a post-Jungian framework that charts the protagonist’s journey towards self-realization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the nature of an inter-racial relationship that developed between a young Dutch girl, Annie Glaser, and the daughters of the Bupati of Jepara – the sisters of Raden Ajeng Kartini – in Central Java revealed in a recently discovered cache of letters written by the Javanese women, in Dutch, between 1902 and 1915. While throwing further light on the events surrounding the ‘story of Kartini’, the paper also shines a light on the ambiguous nature of colonial friendships between women in this period. It suggests that closer reading of this ‘ordinary’ correspondence reveals the growing sense of national identity that made possible ‘real’ friendships between European and Indonesian women in colonial Java in the first decades of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the multidirectional circulation of the Trotzkopf series in the Low Countries and Germany. Emmy von Rhoden's Der Trotzkopf (1885), a classic of German children's literature, and its sequels were almost immediately translated into Dutch. However, Stijfkopje als Grootmoeder (1904) the sequel that completes the series, was written by the Dutch writer Suze la Chapelle-Roobol. Translated into German it was treated as an original part of the official series. Through a functional analysis of the text based on criteria formulated by Aleida Assmann in her essay on written folklore, this article tries to uncover the transnational mechanisms of canonization, circulation, and reception behind the series. It reveals that consecration and circulation were largely reception- and commerce-driven and not initiated by critics and literary institutions as is often the case for canonical works of adult fiction, confirming earlier findings in research on the canonization of children's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of Czech translations of Dutch-written literature during the Communist regime was subject to the norms of Socialist Realism as well as to the censorship of the Committee for Culture and Propaganda of the CC of the Communist Party, executed through the literary agency DILIA. The paper attempts to demonstrate why several works were (not) permitted to be published, focusing on historical novels being the preferred genre of that period. The analysis has been made based on archive records preserved in publishers' archives in The Hague (Literary Museum) and Prague (Memorial of National Scripture). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with how ideological factors influence the transfer of literature through translation between what translation sociology calls 'peripheral languages'. The international dissemination of the literary oeuvre of the Dutch communist writer Theun de Vries (1907–2005) in translation stands in the centre of this investigation, which focuses on three questions: 1.) How the transfer of literary products from a peripheral language into both peripheral and central languages takes place, and what specific dynamics can be shown to shape these translation flows. 2.) How ideology plays a role in shaping translation flows. 3.) How methodological tools from translation sociology can and cannot be used to investigate literary export from peripheral literatures. Through the case study of the translation of De Vries' novel Hoogverraad [High Treason] (1950) into Hungarian the details and dynamics of Cold War cultural transfer and literary manipulation are analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper discusses recent theories concerning the phenomenon of world literature and its connection with translation, the main focus of this special issue. Subsequently, the article relates the contributions to the theories discussed and indicates in which institutional framework the issue was realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of 'Indies Lives in the Netherlands' has been most extensively studied with reference to mid-twentieth century, postcolonial 'returnees' who arrived in the Netherlands in large numbers in the wake of Indonesian independence. There is, however, an important earlier history here. Throughout the late colonial period, many wealthy 'Indies' families maintained close and organic relations with the Dutch metropole. Some of these families (or branches of them), though originally Indies-based, relocated permanently to the Netherlands and established themselves among the Dutch bourgeoisie. This paper examines the history of such a family, one of mixed Scots-Javanese-Dutch ancestry, which settled in The Hague in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it demonstrates the extent to which the plethora of recently available genealogical data can be used in the reconstruction of family histories to create a picture that can exist alongside – both complementing and complicating – any trend towards discourse-based approaches to the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the representation of Western modernity's dark undercurrent, the Gothic novel has since its inception in the 1760s developed and transformed alongside that modernity. This paper looks at two contemporary Gothic novels from the Low Countries, Herman Franke's Wolfstonen (2003) and Saskia de Coster's Wat alleen wij horen (2015), which are occupied with contemporary globalisation and immigration to the Netherlands and Belgium. Both novels cast the apartment buildings that are central to their plots as Gothic spaces fraught with images of modern, globalised society, as well as widespread anxiety over societal cohesion in ethnically and culturally diverse cities. An interdisciplinary reading constituted by gothic and postcolonial reading practices brings to the fore new elements of the Dutch and Flemish cultural imaginary. It reveals the continuous renewal of the gothic itself, but also into the changes brought to the Low Countries as a result of globalisation and immigration. These have their effect on the construction of community, a process that is articulated in both the form and the content of the novels' narratives. Ultimately, I argue, the gothic is put to work in these novels as a way of dealing with the anxieties about and uncertainties of a postcolonial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to investigate the image of the Netherlands in Italy, a topic which has so far received scant attention in Dutch Studies. Drawing on the theoretical framework of imagology1 – which analyses how clichés about a country or a population appear in different communication media – this study will lie its focus on the contrast between the stereotypes on the Netherlands spread by the Italian press and the image of the Dutch that emerges from the translation of Dutch novels into Italian. An online search into the archives of the two most sold Italian newspapers2 from 1990 to 2017 and the database of Dutch novels translated into Italian in the same time span revealed that the Netherlands is portrayed in two different ways, especially when it comes to religion-related debates. The results seem to suggest that different media tend to create different images of the same country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Hendrick Avercamp was among the first Dutch painters to prioritize local landscape subjects as a source of pictorial interest. Avercamp's ice-skating scenes offer a vision of a prosperous society emerging in the Northern provinces in the midst of the Dutch Revolt against Spain. This paper argues that Avercamp's work, rather than simply celebrating a quaint pastime, invites a more political reading. Avercamp's use of nascent symbols of Dutch identity – particularly the tricolour flag – tie his paintings inextricably to the political cause of Dutch autonomy, and suggest the political consciousness of the citizens of the young Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 16th century at the latest there were strong political, cultural and literary ties between the Iberian Peninsula and the Dutch speaking regions in north western Europe. Literature in general and especially romances from the 'south' were printed, translated and adapted in Dutch. After an introduction in which the contribution presents a short overview of the translation and adaptation of Iberian romances in Dutch the focus will be on the 'Amadijs' tradition especially. For the first time the Spanish source and the 'Amadijs' are compared, including an analysis of the paratextual elements of the first Dutch edition of 'Amadijs' (1546), which clearly shows that Nuyts did not follow his source as an inspiration for the design of his edition, but copied the design of earlier Dutch editions of narratives as a marketing strategy. Part four shows that the Dutch 'Amadijs' was obviously read by everyone in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on Dutch Studies in Britain celebrating the centenary. Topics include new communities establishment depending on a pre-existing presence of communities of speakers of the language as well as on a long history of Anglo-Dutch cultural, mercantile, and political interactions; and establishing theories of multilingualism and language contact focusing on the use of pronouns expressing impersonal meaning.

Many seventeenth-century Antwerp collections contained coral, both natural and crafted. Also, coral was a pictorial motif depicted by Antwerp artists on mythological scenes, still lifes, gallery pictures, and allegories. Coral was many things at the same time: a commodity crafted into jewellery and objets d'art, a popular collectable in its natural shape, a motif for Antwerp painters, an essential commodity in the European-Indian trade network, a naturalia associated with classical mythology as well as with the Blood of Christ, and a problematic naturalia that raised questions about classification, origins and natural processes. This paper provides an itinerary of coral in early seventeenth-century Antwerp. It is argued that collecting in general and collected coral in particular were related to new understandings of matter and material transformation. Coral functioned in the collection as: first, a place of appreciation for artisanal work - or 'process appreciation'; second, as a conversation piece; and third, as a visual motif related to the understanding of matter and material transformation, the process of petrifaction in particular. Added up, this explains the value attached to this 'unusual excrescence of nature'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the use of Dutch in eighteenth-century Japan, the portrayal of Amsterdam in Jean Crosnier's L'Année Burlesque (1682) and wartime propaganda in the Gazette van Detroit during World War I.

This paper examines how the seventeenth-century discourses between the West and the Orient regarding Hamel and Joseon illustrate an antinomy whereby what is regarded as ‘true’ in one society can be defined as ‘false’ in another. Hamel who assumed that the West was superior to Joseon, encountered the antinomy in which their superior self-identity was not supported in Joseon society. However, in their Western discourse, Hamel disparaged Joseon’s people and casted them in the image of the Other who is inferior. On the other hand, Joseon considered itself as a culturally superior ‘little China’ and formed a dichotomous hierarchy with Hamel. This superior stature of Joseon was however shattered when dealing with Great Qing and Japan. In sum, the seventeenth-century discourses between the West and the Orient fall into an antinomy in which the same incident can be either true or false depending on who takes the position of the subject in the discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on cultural mobility in the interwar Europe exemplified by mutual exchange between Dutch and Polish avant-garde formations such asDe StijlorBlok. Polish and Dutch groups and magazines belonged to an international, cross-border network of avant-garde writers, artists and architects who jointly struggled for new, modern art. Within this network, magazines and artists from Poland and the Netherlands were related to each other regardless of apparent cultural and linguistic boundaries – not only via other formations (e.g. French or German), but also directly based on personal contacts between particular representatives of given groups. These relationships enabled direct, mutual and reciprocal exchange of texts and reproductions of artworks and architectural projects between Polish and Dutch magazines. Based on such tangible traces, as well as private correspondence between the artists, I describe the history and the maelstroms of cultural exchange between Dutch and Polish avant-gardes, which – being part of the transnational European avant-garde network – significantly contributed to the development of modern literary, artistic and architectural thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the topic of sexual violence in Middle Dutch literature, centring on the play 'Lanseloet van Denemerken' (c.1405). Although medieval literature is known for its gender-based violence, the topic has not received much attention from scholars of Middle Dutch. This article aims to renew the scholarly debate by analysing the Middle Dutch text from an innovative intersectional perspective, integrating the analytical categories of gender, social status and narrative space and adopting those categories for literary studies. This analysis uncovers new meanings in the play and demonstrates that gender, status and space work together in creating an unsafe situation, in which the female protagonist Sanderijn is raped by the male protagonist Lanseloet. Subsequently, this article analyses recent scholarly publications on 'Lanseloet van Denemerken' to investigate how scholars in Middle Dutch literature are handling the sensitive topic of rape. It is demonstrated that our interpretations and discussions of the medieval text run the risk of being involuntarily influenced by present-day rape myths – false beliefs and attitudes about sexual violence that prevail in our current culture. Therefore, this article calls on researchers' shared responsibility to ensure a continuous and open discussion of sensitive topics in the field of Middle Dutch literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will consider certain art objects and underlying acts of patronage in the waning days of the ancien regime in Europe, partly through a trifecta of personalities who either produced or consumed art. Michel-Paul-Joseph Dewez (1742–1804) was a Brussels goldsmith and bronze caster; James Lockhart (1727–1790) was a Scottish military officer in the Austrian service and a court official; and Prince Charles Alexandre of Lorraine (1712–1780) was the governor general of the Austrian Netherlands from 1744 until his death in 1780. The works by Dewez that form the focus of this study include a pair of silver candlesticks that he made and Lockhart bought in about 1778, a rare survival from an age that ended in chaos and catastrophe as the ancien regime fell and revolutions erupted across Europe. Dewez also produced massive quantities of gilt bronze (ormolu) ornaments for a new Audience Chamber and Grand Salon commissioned by Prince Charles Alexandre of Lorraine for his Winter Palace in Brussels. While they lasted these rooms were among the most extraordinary courtly interiors in Europe. They have not survived, and with a few exceptions their sumptuous furnishings were also consumed in the fires of the French and Brabanconne Revolutions and their aftermaths. By assembling these stories of persons, things and their interrelationships into a single narrative, it is hoped that a soupçon more of light will be cast on a tumultuous time and its art, during the twilight years of the old Europe before the advent of the modern age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the reign of Louis Bonaparte (1806–10) the Kingdom of Holland suffered three major catastrophes: the explosion in the city of Leiden (1807) and floods in the provinces of Zeeland (1808) and Gelderland (1809). This paper will illustrate the close relationship between crisis, collective identity and politics during these years and show how these crises were used as political tools by rivalling parties. On the one hand, the king took the opportunity to present himself as a caring and loving father of the Dutch people by offering them emotional and financial support. On the other hand, writers used these occurrences to express their feelings of fear and discomfort concerning the foreign regime: in their opinion the series of disasters was directly related to the loss of sovereignty and the general decline of the fatherland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 18 August 1950, two unidentified men shot the communist leader Julien Lahaut at the front door of his house in Seraing near Liege. The crime was never solved by the Belgian justice apparatus, and until recently the motives of the assassination still remained a subject of speculation. At regular intervals, the case surfaced in Belgian political discussions. In this paper, we will look at the results of new research, discuss clandestine anti-communist action and situate the murder in a broader political and Cold War context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the interrelation between the European Political Co-operation (EPC) and the Cold War, the Belgian role within the EPC, and its impact on Belgian foreign policy-making. The EPC was a response of the European Communities member states to global and Cold War challenges occurring at the end of the 1960s, such as decolonization and détente. It aimed for mutual consultation, coordination and harmonization of member state foreign policies. Belgian foreign policy actors were central in developing the political co-operation. For subsequent Belgian governments, political co-operation was seen as an important step towards political union. A relevant factor for the development of the EPC along the lines of Belgian foreign policy preferences were processes of international socialization and/or Europeanization which gradually changed foreign policy-making in the member states. The significantly intensified and accelerated information flow between the foreign ministries, as well as frequent personal encounters on various levels within EPC, were catalysts for this. Apart from clear indications of Europeanization processes, the EPC partners were not always willing or able to find common responses to political challenges in the context of the Cold War. Belgian foreign policy-making was no exception to this rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The period of the Dutch East Indies holds a special position in the colonial history of the low countries. Of the many historical sub-disciplines that study this period, the history of printing has not been reviewed adequately. Very little research has been done on the history of Chinese printing in the Dutch East Indies. This article focuses exclusively on Chinese printing in the colony and discusses 11 printers active at the time, some of which were previously unknown to the academic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses papers published within the issue, including one on a study of an aspect of the material culture of the 17th century Dutch seaborne empire and another on literary societies in early 19th century Antwerp.

In nineteenth-century New York, the collection, translation, and republication of documents related to colonial Dutch history was about more than antiquarianism or the ethno-centrism of Dutch-descended Americans. With the unprecedented support of the state of New York and U.S. ministers in Europe, the New York Historical Society (NYHS) orchestrated a much more ambitious project to reinscribe Dutch imperialism within a grander narrative of the state. This, they hoped, would situate New York at the centre of national history, and its archive as the nation's most important historical record. In doing so, the stewards of the state's archives and history worked to displace the burlesque rendition of New York's past popularized by Washington Irving, in favor of a unified, progressive, celebratory narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean Crosnier (1652-1709), a Frenchman possibly of Huguenot background, fled to the United Provinces of the Netherlands havng committed a crime in his home country. During his stay there, he published several literary works and the Mercure Burlesque, which was a monthly gazette focused on gossip and news of various nature written in verse often in a very frivolous way. The present article analyses thow Crosnier wrote about the city where he lived in and its multicultural and polireligious environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research shows that teachers and education are often represented negatively or stereotypically in popular and literary culture, both in the Dutch language area and in Anglophone contexts. Regarding contemporary Dutch literature, though, research on educational representations has until now focussed on small corpora of novels that explicitly deal with education. In this article, we explore the representations of teachers and education in a much larger and broader corpus: the 170 submissions to the bulk list of the prestigious Dutch Libris Literatuurprijs of 2013. We provide a Keyword in Context Analysis of 292 educational representations in this corpus and offer a demographic analysis of the 71 teachers who inhabit the novels under analysis. In doing so, we show that educational representations and teacher characters are relatively common in contemporary Dutch language novels. Our analysis also reveals that literary representations of teachers are predominantly negative in nature, especially regarding their behaviour towards students, their external presentation, and their pedagogical skills. Representations of education in general tend to be even more negative. In that sense, literary representations of education appear to converge with the negative public appeal of the educational sector in the contemporary Low Countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first hundred years of the Dutch presence in Japan, the Dutch language was used by Dutch, other Europeans and Japanese in a range of social domains. This article considers how Dutch functioned in Japan in the following hundred years, i.e. c. 1700–1800. After discussing who knew Dutch in Japan, it examines the use of the language not by social domain, but rather by the linguistic processes that resulted from contact between Dutch and other languages in Japan. These include the learning of Dutch by non-native speakers, bilingualism, language competition, code switching and loanword integration. Particular attention is paid to the subject of translation, for it was during this period that Japanese interpreters and scholars began to translate Dutch texts to a significant degree and the discipline known as rangaku (lit. 'Dutch studies') emerged. This article therefore aims to increase our knowledge of Dutch as an emigrant language and of the linguistic diversity and resultant language processes in early modern Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking a random selection of documents from the Norfolk Record Office's very extensive 'Designated' holdings of archives, this paper attempts to demonstrate the wealth of primary source material available in Norfolk for the study of the county's relations with the Low Countries, over a period, which spans almost a millennium. It considers the 'Strangers' who came to Norfolk from the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it also seeks to set this group within a wider chronological canvas; the arrival of the 'Strangers' into the county was an important occurrence, but it was only one episode in a long history of links stretching across the North Sea, a fact which is sometimes overlooked. Close contacts between Norfolk and its nearest continental neighbours already existed in the Middle Ages and these have continued strongly up to the present time. Such links have undoubtedly had a significant impact on the county and its people, and have helped to shape Norfolk's identity and character today. Many of the activities that stemmed from the relationships between Norfolk and the Low Countries generated records, which have survived in large numbers, and these help to tell a long and fascinating story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Belle Époque Belgium, this paper analyses the changes the advent of cycling and its new mobility engendered in the sociocultural dialectics between city and countryside. By studying the interwoven, often contradictory motivations behind and representations of bicycle use, an attempt is made to determine the factors leading to cyclists' cultural imagining of both city and countryside, how this was shaped in discourse and practice and how this evolved under the influence of the bicycle's shifting social connotations after 1900. We focus especially on organized forms of Belgian cycling such as urban cycling clubs and national cycling associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary professional football in the Netherlands has a close relationship with business and finance. This relationship is often one that is concerning to supporters of clubs who feel that they are being treated more as consumers than loyal followers of their team. This paper will represent the historic situation in Dutch football between 1910 and 1920. Particular focus will be placed on the role of advertising in the media and the illustration it gives of businesses interaction with the cultural field of football at this time. This paper will also give an overview of how businesses and individuals in the business field sometimes interacted with clubs and wider football projects. The paper suggests that the idea of football supporters as consumers is perhaps not as new as is often thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the relocation to America of an important collection of Flemish art in the mid-1790s (and its return to Antwerp some twenty years later) helped shape the owners' identity, both in Belgium and America. Henri Joseph Stier (1743–1821), a direct descendant of Rubens, fled Antwerp with his family in June 1794, to avoid having the family's priceless art collection fall into the hands of the French, who were impounding art treasures as military levy. After the family returned to Antwerp in 1803, the collection was left to the care of the Stiers' youngest daughter, Rosalie Calvert, who had married an American plantation owner and remained in Maryland until her death in 1821. In 1816, Rosalie was finally able to send the collection back to Antwerp. Interestingly, this coincided with the return from France of many other Belgian paintings; a transfer in which Henri Stier and his son played important official roles, as art collectors and connoisseurs. The return of Belgian art treasures gave rise to a growing consciousness on the part of the Belgian people of their national culture and tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1638, Caspar Barlaeus penned the Medicea hospes, a description of Amsterdam’s festive reception of French Queen Marie de Médicis in September of that year. The first of its kind in the Dutch Republic, the sumptuously illustrated volume featured seventeen etchings, including seven views of the celebrations that took place within the city. This essay examines the illustrations in the Medicea hospes with respect to Barlaeus’s prose. I suggest that the images depart from the pictorial conventions of European ceremonial books and instead engage native artistic and literary traditions to evoke peace and prosperity in a Dutch idiom. I situate the visual and textual aggrandisement of Amsterdam within the context of urban rivalries and the political framework of the 1630s, a time when the vroedschap attempted to influence foreign policy in favor of a truce with Spain, and assert the city’s economic and cultural preeminence at home and abroad. The Medicea hospes, I argue, affirmed a positive image of Amsterdam and served as a political vehicle for the vroedschap’s peace efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writers’ translations of other writers’ literary work can be incorporated into poetry research from an institutional perspective. Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory suggests the concept of ‘strategic repertory’: literary agents (e.g. writers) translate texts from literary systems, not just because they feel poetic or aesthetic affinity towards them, but also and especially because they enable them to stress and/or legitimize their own artistic production and positioning in the literary field. The Flemish poet Herman de Coninck, for instance, produced a ‘free, and respectively very free’ adaptation of sonnets by the unconventional and popular American bohemian writer Edna St. Vincent Millay. After his neo-realist poetry debut at the end of the sixties, which was highly acclaimed, De Coninck’s poetics shifted towards a more ‘parlante’ romantic-expressive concept of literature. Volumes likeZolang er sneeuw ligt(As Long as there is Snow,1975) andMet een klank van hobo(With an Oboe Sound, 1980) can be considered examples of neo-romantic poetry. It is in this period that he adapted poems of St. Vincent Millay. First, De Coninck published reworded poems in the Dutch neo-romantic periodicalTirade. Other adaptations are also included in the volume of essaysOver de troost van pessimisme(1983). The whole series (33 poems in all),Ter ere van de goedertieren maan(Pity me not the Waning of the Moon), ultimately appeared in the anthologyOnbegonnen werk. Gedichten 1964–1982(Hopeless Task. Poems from 1964 to 1982, 1984). In the posthumous edition of De Coninck’s collected poetry, the St. Vincent Millay poems are incorporated into the primary creative work of De Coninck, as part of the emotionally expressive volumesAs Long as Snow is LyingandWith an Oboe Sound, not in a separate section devoted to translated poetry. In discussing this specific case and other cases like Hugo Claus’s ‘creative’ translations of non-Dutch poems, I intend to demonstrate in what way some writers appropriate the work of foreign authors and put it to strategic use to affirm their own position in a literary system. Not just what is being translated, or how and when a text is being translated, but also the manner in which the adaptation of the foreign source texts function in the individual body of work, are of importance for poetical/poetics research. Translations may have programmatic l value for the development of authorship (or an author’s poetics). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I set out to introduce the Garment Workers Union (GWU) prose as a neglected part of Afrikaans-language literature. I offer an overview of texts written or translated by the GWU members and published in the official trade union organ Die Klerewerker/The Garment Worker. The presented workers' reading list is divided into original Afrikaans writings and translations from English into Afrikaans. All these texts offered the newly created white working class a new identification, manoeuvring between belonging to the national imagined community of Afrikaners based on the concept of nation and whiteness, and to a transnational workers' community based on the category of class. Looking at the impact of the Dutch and English language traditions in South Africa, I propose that the way in which European conventions made their way to Afrikaans literature, was class-based. Textsrecognized as artistic, incorporated in the Afrikaans literary canon, drew heavily on Dutch tradition. The English language turned out to be the medium that also circulated a less elitist thought. Therefore, it was English that enabled the movement of texts from Europe and the United States to South Africa that shaped the South African white working-class, including its Afrikaner part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]