Incredible as it may sound, in such a well-belaboured field, this book offers a novel view on the Dutch Revolt. Following up on his earlier Realms of ritual, Arnade analyses the course of the revolt during the years from 1566 to 1585 through the lens of its political culture.The well-known history of noble and popular protest against Habsburg centralisation, tax regimes and religious policies is traced not through diplomacy and military encounters, but by carefully looking at the ‘iconic high moments of the Dutch Revolt’ – at how people behaved, at the cultural scripts that they followed and the representation of these events in contemporary media. Arnade shows how Burgundian self-presentation, in coronation ceremonies, the chapter meetings of the Knights of the Golden Fleece and joyous entries, was explicitly modelled on religious ceremony to imbue it with a ‘sacral’ legitimacy. The protests against Habsburg rule in their turn found expression in an inversion, even perversion, of the same ritual repertoires. The iconoclasm of the Wonder Year 1566, minutely dissected, was but the violent climax of a long line of flamboyant protest manifestations, all of which closely followed the interlocked ceremonial repertoires of the Catholic Church and the Burgundian court. The new regime in the rebellious northern provinces had to devise forms of self-representation equal to the task of challenging the legitimacy of the king of Spain and the Church of Rome in favour of a Protestant and republican commonwealth. Central to this new image was the martyrdom of the besieged cities and the person of William of Orange as founder and protector of the new Fatherland. Beggars, iconoclasts and civic patriots is a joy to read. It dazzles its readers with a lavish use of contemporary images and the recreation of the visual effects of the displays of established power and patriotic protest around. It succeeds in its stated aim ‘to capture the political dramas and cultural conceits around which people rallied, found political voice, and forged a rebellion’. Yet for many readers the first impression will be one of superficiality. Again and again Arnade provides perfect cases that fit the more theoretical work of, for example, Edward Muir's Ritual in early modern Europe. The author, however, has chosen to recount a cultural history of the revolt without explicit recourse to recent work on ritual or in media and communication studies. Nothing of this body of literature even made it into the footnotes or bibliography. This disregard for more ‘theoretical’ approaches seriously detracts from the real value of the book.