This volume offers a valuable account of the role of the memory of the sixteenth-century Dutch revolt in the construction of national identities, both in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and in those southern parts of the Low Countries that continued under Habsburg rule. Spanning the period from the outbreak of the revolt, to the years around 1700, it demonstrates how incidents from the original rebellion against the Spanish king were selected to produce two contrasting narratives. In the north, the revolt was remembered as a heroic resistance to tyranny. In the south the story was of loyalty to both the legitimate dynastic rulers and to the Catholic faith: the people of lands around Brussels re-imagined the rebellion as a brief period of instability stirred by misguided troublemakers. Having shown how these narratives were fashioned, Jasper van der Steen then demonstrates how they developed. They were promoted by particular stakeholders (in particular, the northern version was disseminated by supporters of a House of Orange that posed as the natural leader of a battle for freedom that had first been inspired by William i); but they were also adapted to fit new circumstances (for example, the Dutch account was remodelled as a fight against all tyranny, rather than just the Habsburg version, when Louis xiv emerged as a threat); and they could become points of contention within each half of the old Burgundian realm (as, for instance, during the tensions in the south around 1632; or the battle between Remonstrants and strict Calvinists within the Dutch Church). The evidence used ranges widely in genre – from formal histories and ephemeral political pamphlets, to the visual propaganda of paintings and tombs, and on to ritual – particularly the joyous entries by Habsburg rulers to stress their unbroken service to the cities that they still governed.

For readers of this Journal, the most interesting feature will be the roles played by religion in these constructed memories. These include the programme deployed by Habsburg governors to advertise their support for the Catholic faith as part of an attempt to present the revolt as a brief and unfortunate interlude. The Belgian Counter-Reformation was very rapidly successful, and could serve as a model for the re-solidification of Catholicism in other parts of Europe, so there is great value in van der Steen's coverage of the series of endowments, re-foundations, and conspicuous displays of piety on the part of rulers, that helped bring it about. There is also a lot of interesting material on the use of history in the dispute between Remonstrants and their high Calvinist opponents in the Dutch republic. In this battle, the two sides debated the religious principle (Calvinist truth, or religious liberty?) behind the original revolt, and questioned which party William i would have supported; and they also depicted each other as disciples of the duke of Alba – the Spanish general of the 1560s, who by this stage has been cast as the wicked and unrelenting oppressor of all things good and true. Again, a thought-provoking contrast is made between the northern and southern provinces. Whilst the southern narrative was heavily religious (casting the rebels’ Protestantism as the reason for their delusion, and fidelity as the cause for which patriotic Belgians had fought), in the north, greater religious variety within the nation prevented the promotion of such an overtly confessional story, and forced more attention on secular ideals of liberty.

If there are weaknesses in the work, they relate to evidence, and the conceptual framework of memory and chronological studies. The source base, though varied, sometimes seems thin. Some quite broad generalisations are founded on a limited number of texts or incidents, which in the later chapters become quite scattered through time. The reader is thus left wondering how representative of a wider culture the (albeit deeply-analysed) examples are. On theory, the author name-checks a lot of work done in memory studies over the past few decades, and is able to deploy some of its insights to deepen understanding of his topic. However, his conclusions lack the subtlety, or reference to wider cultural change, that this other work has suggested. For example, quite a number of scholars have posited a shift in temporal awareness in western Europe in exactly the decades covered by this work. This includes the emergence of a sense of ‘absolute’ time, and the rudiments of an idea of ‘progress’: but most relevantly here, a weakening of typological chronology has been posited, particularly by Daniel Woolf. If this is correct, it was becoming harder to draw direct lessons from the past, or use it as a source of immediately relevant inspiration, because people were increasingly convinced that historical contexts changed over time. As a result, simple appeal to the bygone ages became anachronistic. None of the examples covered in this book demonstrate this new sense (the Revolt was simply mined for morals by all the competing parties): yet there is no comment on what this means for the suggested change in temporal sensibilities. Similarly most memory studies stress a deeply ambiguous character to recounting and recall, that is not systematically acknowledged here. The act of suppressing some memories and exalting others tends to leave paradoxes and contradictions that mean that the meaning of the past cannot be as straightforward as this work often tends to suggest. To take examples from the southern provinces: van der Steen claims a success for the Belgian Counter-Reformation in establishing continuity with an unchanged Catholicism, but he says too little about how the very act of insisting on continuity in fact changed the nature and meaning of the faith. Again, the author admits that the Habsburgs sometimes needed to engage with the events of the revolt as part of a wider strategy of asking their subjects to forget those very events: but he needs to reflect more on the inevitability of this paradox, and the cultural tensions that it produced. For an example from the northern provinces, one could point to the coverage of the various Protestant uses of the past. Historical thought within the Reformation was always ambiguous, since reformers insisted simultaneously on the newness and ancientness of their creed. More thought about this would have enriched the account of appeals to relatively recent events in the construction of different reformed identities. In the end, though, these conceptual criticisms come from a reviewer hoping for deeper insights into human understanding of time (his current interest). For those wanting insights into the use of the Dutch revolt in the century after it occurred, this is an important contribution.