I must declare a personal interest at the outset: I first met Alastair Duke forty years ago and we have been friends ever since; furthermore, most of the contributors to this volume are also my long-time friends. I therefore wondered whether I should serve as reviewer, but concluded that since the field of early modern Netherlands history is so congenial, and since Alastair Duke is so prominent in it, disqualifying all his friends would disqualify almost all potential reviewers. So I persevered.

The present collection includes fourteen essays: half by historians of the Low Countries teaching in British or American universities (four of them students of Alastair Duke) and half by historians teaching in the Low Countries. The volume takes its title from five chapters that engage with Jürgen Habermas's contention that a public sphere only emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment: they present convincing evidence that prints, plays, propaganda, maps and historical writing helped to create both a collective identity and a ‘public sphere’ in the early modern Netherlands. Other chapters deal with related subjects: the writings of François Richardot and Justus Lipsius, two loyalist critics of Philip ii's policies in the Netherlands; the reluctance of Netherlands magistrates to enforce the Habsburgs' heresy placards in the 1550s; the installation of huge stained glass windows in the principal Calvinist church of Gouda; Pierre Bayle and his Dutch contemporaries; the publications of Rouen printers who specialised in producing chapbooks so ephemeral that only one copy of each survives (the only essay not about the Low Countries). The volume also boasts an excellent index.

Although all the essays sparkle with new insights, perhaps the most striking is Hugh Dunthorne's opening survey – ‘Dramatizing the Dutch Revolt: romantic history and its sixteenth-century antecedents’ – which emphasises the combined impact of Schiller's Don Carlos (first performed in Hamburg in 1787) and Goethe's Egmont (which premiered at Mainz two years later) in reviving public interest in the Dutch Revolt. Both works inspired a host of Romantic composers (above all Verdi in the case of Don Carlo and Beethoven in the case of Egmont) as well as painters, playwrights and historians. This impact is all the more surprising because, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, ‘the history of the Dutch Revolt, if not ignored altogether, was at any rate pushed into the shadows by matters of more immediate concern’.

Of course, down to the 1640s the Dutch Revolt had inspired many writers, artists and playwrights, and Dunthorne duly notes the histories of Henricpetri from Switzerland, Dinoth from France, von Aitzing from Austria and Strada and Bentivoglio from Italy as well as those by Bor, van Meteren and Le Petit from the Netherlands; but his list includes no Spaniards. This is both surprising and regrettable because many Spanish writers – as well as notable Spanish painters and playwrights – included the Netherlands in their repertory. Likewise, several other essays in this volume fail to incorporate relevant Spanish material. Perhaps we should not be entirely surprised because Dutch historical writing, and especially on the Dutch Revolt, has traditionally ignored Spanish material – to appreciate the impact of this distortion, imagine a history of colonial North America, and especially of the Revolutionary War, that ignored British material – but it is regrettable that this asymmetry has survived into the twenty-first century. In every other respect, however, this is a well-conceived and well-edited collection that everyone interested in the early modern Netherlands can read with pleasure and profit.