ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century and the Revolt in particular once stood in the forefront of historical interest in both Belgium and the Netherlands, but since at least the 1930s, it has lost its iconic status. Questions that once stirred impassioned debates about the role of religion or the supposedly ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ character of the Revolt seem utterly remote to generations whose historical priorities have been reconfigured by the Holocaust and the Occupation and who have experienced the collapse of Dutch confessional identities, secularisation, globalisation and the onrush of multi-culturalism. Yet, for the past half century or so, a quiet revolution in the historiography of the sixteenth-century Low Countries has rejuvenated the subject: new types of sources have been tapped, new approaches developed and new questions asked. The predecessor of the current collection, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries, which appeared in 1990, focused above all on the diffuse and eclectic character of the early Reformation process, and on the unexpected outcomes of religious and political activism in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. The essays in the current volume approach these processes from a different angle as they concentrate above all on the formation and spread of what I have loosely called ‘dissident identities’.
