ABSTRACT
In the sixteenth century, the Netherlands became a province in the vast empire controlled by Spain. In his pamphlet The Spoyle of Antwerpe, George Gascoigne describes the brutal treatment meted out by the Spanish troops against the citizens of Antwerp. Freed from Spanish control, the Dutch quickly became an important maritime and commercial power. Jacob Cats, one of the most widely read Dutch authors, applied his talents simultaneously to the practice of law and to the composition of poetry. Cats's famous work, Moral Emblems, illustrates a form of literature that was popular in the seventeenth century. The penetrating observation of everyday life surfaces in the art of the Dutch painter Frans Hals. The immediacy of his portraiture is exemplified by his depiction of a drunken women in a tavern, Malle Babbe, painted approximately 1650. Two of the most influential philosophers of the modern age, René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza lived in the Dutch republic.
