Felix Meritis, the remarkable 'Temple of Enlightenment', adorns the Amsterdam canals since 1788. The building accommodated the most ambitious attempt in the Netherlands for the integration of activities regarding literature, music, the visual arts, commerce, and the sciences. What so far went unnoticed is that, from the very start, Felix Meritis was also equipped with an astronomical and meteorological observatory. In fact, it was the first scientific observatory in the Netherlands designed f...

Around 1600 the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands was in the middle of a war with Spain that would last for eighty years (1568-1648). Thousands of immigrants came to Amsterdam and greatly influenced the development of the Republic. Kiliaen van Rensselaer was among them. Growing up in a small eastern town on the war front he became part of the culture of this rapidly developing city, where he was trained as a jeweler and merchant by wealthy relatives. He would work together within this ...

This is the first single-volume social history of eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Town. Not only does it consider the elite inhabitants such as the 'expat' officials of the Dutch East India Company and the free burghers but it also includes members of Cape Town's underclasses: soldiers and sailors, artisans, convicts, exiles and freed slaves. At the same time the book positions the town in the wider context of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and stresses its complex connections with Europe, Asia...

This inventory provides a key to the hitherto virtually uncatalogued collection of the Catharijneconvent, a museum of Christian culture. Its manuscript holdings are particularly rich in liturgy and devotion, including dozens of Books of Hours, many with fine miniatures, as well as a number of venerable older treasures, over a thousand items in all (including fragments). This book is the vol. 1 (but the second to appear) of a series of inventories of a completely novel type, giving of each ite...

In the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period people took extensive care to safeguard their own salvation and eternal remembrance, and that of their deceased relatives. Their care for the here and the hereafter is expressed in the concept of memoria, which can be defined as the complex of liturgical and social acts connecting the living and the dead. As such, memoria is much more than a religious concept. During her career dr. Truus van Bueren has become an internationally acclaimed scholar ...

For this special issue of Queeste four prominent non-Dutch speaking medievalists have read Of Reynaert the Fox, the recently published English translation of Van den vos Reynaerde. In their essays they reflect on ways in which this Middle Dutch text could provide new insights in their own research and/or on ways in which their area of expertise might shed new light on the study of the Reynaerde. Thus, Queeste offers a fascinating journey of a German, a Canadian and two English scholars, trave...

Sir George Downing first served under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell as diplomat in the Dutch Republic. Following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 he transferred his allegiance to the new regime and was re-appointed to the post in The Hague. This period was characterized by fierce trade rivalry, which formed the background to the mid-century Anglo-Dutch wars. His defence of English commercial interests against the Dutch was crucial to his development as one of England’s leading mer...