Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic

2018 ◽  
pp. 351-360
Author(s):  
Frederick Naerebout
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Contemporary Poetics

This chapter deals with the writing, publishing, and staging of epic drama in the Dutch Republic. In the flourishing cultural climate of the Republic epic poetry was much loved, but ‘epic drama’, as such, is not a category recognized in either modern or contemporary poetics, and thus it is necessary to establish what would have counted as ‘epic’ at this time. The subset constructed here consists of drama based on what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources consider epic poetry, classical and newly composed, but also drama that takes other subject matter (biblical or historical) and dramatizes this in an ‘epic’ manner. This is illustrated by an analysis of the play Gysbreght van Aemstel (1638) by Joost van den Vondel, which treats subject matter taken from Amsterdam’s medieval history in a Virgilian manner: a new epic drama befitting the Dutch Republic’s new Rome.

Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Sundberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Management Strategies ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Dutch Golden Age ◽  
Scale Of Response ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Dutch Experience

By the early eighteenth century, the economic primacy, cultural efflorescence, and geopolitical power of the Dutch Republic appeared to be waning. The end of this Golden Age was also an era of natural disasters. Between the late seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch communities weathered numerous calamities, including river and coastal floods, cattle plagues, and an outbreak of strange mollusks that threatened the literal foundations of the Republic. Adam Sundberg demonstrates that these disasters emerged out of longstanding changes in environment and society. They were also fundamental to the Dutch experience and understanding of eighteenth-century decline. Disasters provoked widespread suffering, but they also opened opportunities to retool management strategies, expand the scale of response, and to reconsider the ultimate meaning of catastrophe. This book reveals a dynamic and often resilient picture of a society coping with calamity at odds with historical assessments of eighteenth-century stagnation.

Contraction

2018 ◽  
pp. 224-249
Author(s):  
Wim Klooster ◽  
Gert Oostindie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
The Republic ◽  
At Home

In the decades on either side of 1800, the geopolitical weakness of the Dutch Republic was exposed, resulting in its collapse at home and significant contraction of its empire. This long and at times revolutionary intermezzo led to the dissolution of the WIC the loss of the Dutch broker function, and – imposed by Britain – the abolition of the slave trade. Antislavery thought had been conspicuously weak in the Republic since the early days of colonization, and virtually absent in its colonies, and publications on the Dutch colonies served to initiate its European readership in the ways money could be and was being made there. At the end of the Napoleonic period, Britain did not return the Guiana colonies it had occupied (Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo), completing a de facto takeover that had begun in the second half of the eighteenth century by British planters and merchants.

Economic decline and the urban elite in eighteenth-century Dutch towns: a review essay

Urban History ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 78-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herman Diederiks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Urban Hierarchy ◽  
Leading Position ◽  
Urban Elite ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Clay Pipe ◽  
Dramatic Fall

Dutch urban history has finally accorded the eighteenth century the attention it deserves in a number of recent publications. That century was characterized by the economic and political decline of the Dutch Republic generally, and certain towns in particular. The ‘Zuiderzee’ towns witnessed a dramatic fall in population, reflecting their economic decline, and in the southern part of the province of Holland urban life also stagnated. In contrast to the ports, inland towns derived status in the urban hierarchy from their industrial interests, but due to foreign competition in the eighteenth century, they too declined; most notably, the cloth industry of Leiden, the clay pipe industry of Gouda, and the breweries and potteries of Delft each lost the leading position established in the seventeenth century. Leiden was the largest of the towns with more than 70,000 inhabitants in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and after Amsterdam, was the most populous town of the Republic. Leiden however could not maintain that position, and lost almost 50 per cent of its inhabitants during the first half of the eighteenth century, declining further to under 30,000 residents by 1800. Gouda numbered about 20,000 in 1732, but declined to 12,000 in 1795; Hoorn with 12,000 inhabitants diminished to only 9,500 in 1795 and the population of Delft, too, fell from around 24,000 in 1680 to 14,000 in 1795.

Reflections

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-576
Author(s):  
Laura Engel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual History ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Contemporary artists Elizabeth Colomba and Fabiola Jean-Louis employ eighteenth-century subject matter, iconography, and media to reimagine the visual history of Black women. Putting Colomba’s and Jean-Louis’s work in dialogue with my own, I return to the premises of my book Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist (2019), to re-examine, interrogate, and acknowledge my position as a white scholar.

scholarly journals Making things new: Invention privileges and the configuration of priority

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Marius Buning
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Modern System ◽  
Web Of Knowledge ◽  
The Law

It was because of the early modern system of invention privileges that questions concerning inventorship became a recurrent subject matter of legal dispute. This essay focuses mainly on the details of one such dispute, namely the 1597 case litigated in the Dutch Republic between Jacob Floris van Langren (ca. 1525–1610) and Jodocus Hondius Sr. (1563–1612). The essay assesses how the law shaped, challenged, and constrained claims to innovation, pushing the argument that it was because of the privilege system that the borders between imitation and novelty became ever more clearly defined. The case study thus illustrates how the law functioned as a technology ordering a complex web of knowledge and status claims.

The Opium Wars

Jazz in China ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Eugene Marlow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Unrestricted Access ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Many ◽  
Opium Wars

In the late 1910s, 1920s, and even into the 1930s, “jazz” was the music of the age in the Republic of China, especially and primarily in Shanghai on China's east coast. It was enjoyed equally by sophisticated Chinese gentry and upper-class people in the many dance halls dotting various parts of Shanghai, and by the many Europeans, Russians, and Americans living and working in the so-called “Paris of the East.” These same foreigners also owned pieces of Shanghai, literally. This chapter asks how several foreign nations came to own sections of Shanghai, and have unrestricted access to numerous key ports throughout China's eastern coast? The answer to these questions can be found in a conflict initially between the British (and ultimately the French, Russians, and Americans) and the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century: the Opium Wars, two wars that had roots in late eighteenth-century China.

A Dangerous Idea

2021 ◽  
pp. 222-233
Author(s):  
Edward J. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Republic

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the claims that many European powers made to the Roman legacy led to a shift in what Rome’s decline meant. Starting in the fifteenth century but continuing through Edward Gibbon’s famous eighteenth-century book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, people embraced the idea that Rome’s story has ended. Figures like Leonardo Bruni and Montesquieu placed Roman decline at the end of the Republic. It was only with Gibbon that Rome’s peak moved to the Antonine Age. As this idea became more prominent, Roman decline no longer was something that inspired restoration. Instead it became a story that allows people to point to current conditions and criticize them by invoking Roman parallels. One great exception to this story was the tendency of Italian politicians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to push for a resuscitation of the ancient Roman state, with the ideas of Mazzini and Mussolini particularly notable in this regard.

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