From Revolt to Riches: Culture and History of the Low Countries, 1500-1700

It is a pleasure to introduce this third publication in UCL Press’s Global Dutch series. From Revolt to Riches: Culture and History of the Low Countries, 1500–1700 is a re- edition of a collection of essays that the UCL Centre for Low Countries Studies produced in the 1990s as part of the occasional series Crossways, self- published in a small edition, no longer obtainable and not widely held by university libraries.1 The very fortunate co- occurrence of the refoundation of the UCL Centre for Low Countries Studies in 2014 and the launch of UCL Press, the UK’s first Open Access university press (and one of the first worldwide) in 2015 finally enables us to make this highly respected but so far difficult to access body of scholarship available to a worldwide audience.
From Revolt to Riches investigates the culture and history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from both international and interdisciplinary perspectives. The period was one of extraordinary upheaval and change, as the combined impact of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolt resulted in the radically new conditions – political, economic and intellectual – of the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age. The emphasis of this volume is on a series of interactions and interrelations in this rich and nuanced era: between communities and their varying but often cognate languages; between different but overlapping spheres of human activity; and between culture and history. In continually crossing disciplinary, linguistic and national boundaries, while keeping the culture and history of the Low Countries in the Renaissance and Golden Age in focus, this book’s contributions open up often surprising perspectives on a region all the more intriguing for the very complexity of its entanglements. While inevitably research since the original date of publication has added further perspectives on some of the themes covered in the volume, the contributions of From Revolt to Riches as a whole have stood the test of time, making the collection a worthwhile subject for republication.