This book provides a thorough revision of the image of the public church under the Dutch Republic after the Peace of Westphalia and before the onset of the ‘high Enlightenment’. Traditional church history considers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a period of decline. Yet this was the high tide of Dutch expansion when Dutch society was extremely rich. In its five universities and its highly literate population internationally acknowledged scholarship, arts and sciences flowered. D...

In the ‘Anatomy lessons’ that were painted for the Surgeons’ Guild in Amsterdam, the surgeons portrayed, their teachers, the corpse and the dissection are described and discussed.

When the Allied Forces arrived in the Netherlands after Operation Market Garden, the country’s long-awaited liberation from National Socialist occupation finally came in the summer of 1945. With freedom reclaimed, a wave of joy and hope swept through the nation, finding its most powerful expression in the stirring liberation songs that resonated across the land. These songs, an evocative transatlantic soundtrack of freedom, captured the spirit of the time through music, lyrics, and dance, c...

The identification of ceramic imports within prehistoric and historic assemblages has long been the primary indicator for identifying connections between different sites and regions. Yet this has fostered a presence/absence diagnosis for contact between different communities. Approaches such as post-colonial perspectives and network analysis, which focus on the nature of the connections, are now beginning to offer more meaningful ways of considering past interactions. These approaches can bri...