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The Dutch Case: a National or a Regional Culture? The Prothero Lecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

E. H. Kossmann
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Extract

As in relation to many other countries in sixteenth-century Europe, it is difficult to apply modern conceptions of nationhood to the situation in the Low Countries. If the difficulty seems more awkward in this area than elsewhere, it is perhaps merely because the sixteenth-century Netherlands, as we all know, developed into two distinct nations, the northern Netherlands and Belgium. It is clearly impossible to give a convincing answer to the question whether, in politically more propitious circumstances, the northern and the southern Netherlands might have grown into a single nation state with one common culture. All we know is that in the north a new state was created which, in the seventeenth century, undoubtedly possessed a culture idiosyncratic enough to be described as properly Dutch. We may well call this a national culture. On the other hand, if we bear in mind, asmany seventeenth-century commentators did, that the Dutch Republic was no more than a part of what had been the real Netherlands, both north and south, it would not be totally incongruous to define Dutch culture, that is the northern culture, as regional rather than national. However, if we do so, we must conclude that the national culture uniting the southern and the northern Netherlands, and somehow enclosing the regional cultures of Flanders and Brabant, of Holland and Zeeland, never came into existence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 29 , December 1979 , pp. 155 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1979

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References

1 Waterbolk, E. H., ‘Aspects of the Frisian Contribution to the Culture of the Low Countries in the Early Modern Period’, Britain and the Netherlands, IV, ed. Bromley, J. S. and Kossmann, E. H. (The Hague, 1971), pp. 113CrossRefGoogle Scholar ff.

2 E. H. Kossmann, ‘The Crisis of the Dutch State, 1780–1813’, ibidem, pp. 156 ff. See also Schama, S., Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

3 Weevers, Theodoor, Poetry of the Netherlands in its European Context, 1170–1930 (London, 1960), p. 74Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., pp. 108 ff.

5 Ibid., p. 112.

6 Schöffer, I., ‘The Batavian Myth during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Britain and the Netherlands, V, ed. Bromley, J. S. and Kossmann, E. H. (The Hague, 1975), PP. 78–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Weevers, , Poetry of the Netherlands, p. 114Google Scholar.

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10 Ibid., p. 4.

11 Ibid., p. 289.

12 Groenhuis, G., De Predikanten. De sociale positie van de gereformeerde predikanten in de Republiekder Verenigde Nederlanden voor ± 1700 (Groningen, 1977), pp. 90–1Google Scholar. Following Smitskamp's, H.Calvinistisch nationaal besef in Nederland voor het midden der 17e eeuw (The Hague, 1947)Google Scholar, I stated in my lecture In Praise of the Dutch Republic: some seventeenth-century attitudes (London, 1963, p. 12)Google Scholar that in the seventeenth century Dutch Calvinists did not look upon the Republic as the new Israel. Thanks to more careful research, DrGroenhuis, proves that this is not correct. He quotes various passages in which such an identification of the Republic and Israel is evident (De Predikanten, pp. 81ff.)Google Scholar.

13 Groenhuis, , De Predikanten, pp. 112–13Google Scholar.

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17 Ibid., pp. 14–15.

18 Huizinga, , Nederlands beschaving, II, 499Google Scholar.