The Eighty Yearsâ War and the establishment of two states in the Low Countries inaugurated the publication of numerous texts to support a distinct Northern and Southern identity. This study analyses urban and regional chorographies written both in the North and in the South in the seventeenth century. It examines different strategies that chorographers developed to make sense of the recent and more remote past. It also looks at the development of different historiographical traditions in the Protestant North and the Catholic South and thus contributes to the current research interest in the history of historiography, cultures of memory and identity formation.
Raingard Esser, Ph.D. (1994) in Medieval and Modern History, University of Cologne, is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Groningen. She has published extensively on early modern urban and regional identity including Frontiers, Regions and Identities in Europe (Pisa University Press, 2009).
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Introduction. Partition - Continuity and Change: Urban and Regional Cultures of Memory in the Low Countries in the Seventeenth Century
PART I: THE NORTH
1 The Jewel in the Crown: Amsterdam and her Historians
2 Tot Lof van Haarlem: Memories in Competition
3 Nijmegen â City of the Batavians
PART II: THE SOUTH
4 Antverpiae Antiquitatum
5 Faded Glory: Leuven
6 Crusader Kings and Warrior Saints: Geraardsbergen
PART III: REGIONAL HISTORIES, REGIONAL VARIATIONS
7I Centre and Peripheries: Holland, Zeeland, Gelderland, Drenthe and Overijssel and Flanders
8I On the Border: Brabantia Sacra or Der Staten Brabant
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
All those interested in the history of historiography, the history of identity formation, memory studies, as well as the history of the early modern Low Countries.