Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 122, Issue 3, 2009

This article briefly explores the ways in which literate members of the Dutch Republic deployed depictions of sexual violence in order to stimulate specific forms of Dutch national, religious, and social identification during the first half of the seventeenth century. Understanding the centrality of the discourse of rape in the nascent Dutch Republic reveals the ways in which power was expressed in bodily terms. By means of their d Read More

In the first half of the sixteenth century the prosecution of ‘heretics’ was one of the main tasks of the officers of the prince in The Hague in Holland. Some officers have been unfairly branded as zealous prosecutors, while others are considered to have been lenient and unwilling to follow orders received from above. In this article the role of the officers is analysed by means of three different questions: What did the officers do? W Read More

This article reassesses the motivations of noblemen during the Dutch Revolt by means of a case study of the so-called Treason of Rennenberg. According to the conventional view, on 3 March 1580, Georges of Lalaing, Count of Rennenberg, betrayed his nation by surrendering the city of Groningen to Philip II. He did so because he was a Catholic and an egotistical opportunist, seeking money and offices from the King. This Read More

The introduction of philological method and its contribution to the creation of modern historiography is associated most commonly with Leopold von Ranke. The ‘Dutch Ranke’ , Robert Fruin, was trained in classical philology, like his German counterpart. But it was Reinier Cornelis Bakhuizen van den Brink (1810-65) who first introduced the methods of critical philology into Dutch historiography. As a young scholar, he used the Read More

In the interwar period New Guinea served for a number of groups in the Netherlands and the Dutch Indies as an opportunity to escape from contemporary society. Socio-economic suppression of Eurasians in Indonesia, increasing unemployment, and fear of overpopulation in Holland resulted in plans for the colonization of New Guinea. The thinly populated, second largest island in the world seemed to provide an outst Read More

This article argues that German Unification did not cause a break in the memory-politics of the Federal Republic. Instead, more fundamental changes in German historical culture seem to have taken place in the early 1980s, and then again in the late 1990s. The argument begins from the observation that many of the historical symbols of the ‘New Berlin’ are deeply rooted in the ‘old’ West Berlin or in Bonn. Here, the shift i Read More

The growing interest in the past manifests itself in the success of television series about the history of the Netherlands and Europe. In 2008 the TV series Verleden van Nederland and De geschiedenis van Nederland in twaalf moorden were also published as books. Is television a suitable medium to transfer knowledge to an interested of audience of non-specialists? And what do historians think of it? Media historians Chris Vos and Read More