Establishing and Registering Identity in the Dutch Republic1

Author(s):  
Henk Looijesteijn ◽  
Marco H. D. Van Leeuwen

The Dutch Republic had a broad range of means to establish an individual's identity, and a rudimentary ‘system’ of identity registration, essentially established at the local levels of town and parish. This chapter seeks to provide a description of the ways in which the Dutch established an individual's identity. The various registration methods covered almost the entire population of the Dutch Republic at some stage in their life, and it is argued that on balance identity registration in the Dutch Republic was fairly successful. The chapter contends that the degree to which identity was registered and monitored in the early modern era in the Netherlands, while certainly not wholly effective, is remarkable given the absence of a centralized state and the lack of a large bureaucracy.

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-624
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Friedrichs

The public execution of criminals was a familiar ritual of early modern European society. This article, however, examines the less frequent practice of ordering that a criminal’s house be ritually demolished following the execution. In many cases, the destroyed house was then replaced by a monument which was intended to simultaneously obliterate and perpetuate the criminal’s memory. Rare as it was, ritual house-destruction was a surprisingly widespread practice, undertaken at various times between 1520 and 1760 in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands. Though punitive house-destructions had been undertaken in medieval Europe, the practice acquired new overtones in the early modern era. This article examines how and when this striking form of punishment was applied in early modern Europe and considers why authorities would order the destruction of property in order to enshrine the memory of particularly serious crimes.


2001 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-178
Author(s):  
Brennan Pursell

When the Parliament of 1621 convened, it had been seven years since the dissolution of the so-called ‘Addled Parliament’ of 1614, which had foundered on a fundamental disagreement between King James I and the House of Commons about the legality of impositions. The Parliament of 1621 faced more than unresolved domestic issues; it met under the shadow of the gravest international crisis of the early modern era. The defenestration of Prague in 1618 had marked the beginning of the Bohemian rebellion and the Thirty Years' War, and in the following summer James's son-in-law, Elector Palatine Friedrich V, accepted the Bohemian crown from the rebels, who had just deposed their Habsburg monarch, Ferdinand of Styria. Two days later Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor, and he was determined to retake the Bohemian dirone from the new Palatine occupant. In the autumn of 1620, the emperor's Spanish cousins aided his cause by dispatching a large portion of the Spanish Army of the Netherlands to invade the Lower Palatinate, Friedrich's rich patrimonial estates on the Rhine.


Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.


Author(s):  
James Kennedy ◽  
Ronald Kroeze

This chapter takes as its starting point the contemporary idea that the Netherlands is one of the least corrupt countries in the world; an idea that it dates back to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this chapter, the authors explain how corruption was controlled in the Netherlands against the background of the rise and fall of the Dutch Republic, modern statebuilding and liberal politics. However, the Dutch case also presents some complexities: first, the decrease in some forms of corruption was due not to early democratization or bureaucratization, but was rather a side-effect of elite patronage-politics; second, although some early modern forms of corruption disappeared around this period, new forms have emerged in more recent times.


Endeavour ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 147-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos

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