Mirrors, Windows, Reflections
Luc Devoldere | Chief Editor
In June 1667 the Dutch Admiral de Ruyter mounted a devastating raid on the English fleet moored at Chatham in the Thames estuary. At that time Holland was referred to in Britain as ‘that indigested vomit of the sea’ and an official propagandist wrote a pamphlet in which he derived belgia from belregia, Beelzebub's realm. By Belgia the author meant... the Dutch Republic. What's in a name? And what's in an image?
What do we see in the mirrors we look into and the mirrors others hold up to us? What do we see when we look at things through windows, and so through frames?
To form the theme of this edition we have put together a collection of images: images of Flanders and the Netherlands to be found in other countries and images that the Flemish and Dutch have of themselves. How does a Scotsman who fled Thatcher's England in 1979 and eventually landed up in Brussels regard the Low Countries? What does an American historian who teaches in Amsterdam think of a Dutch state that within the space of a single decade seems to have done a complete about-face? What do the antitheses ‘Protestant-Catholic’ and ‘Calvinist-Burgundian’ say about the Low Countries? What responses are evoked by Orange, the colour, the rallying-cry and the dynasty? And what do such emblematic books as Turks fruit, La Légende d'Ulenspiegel and Het Verdriet van België and Max Havelaar tell us about Flanders and the Netherlands?
And then of course there are the actual images: photos which in one way or another put across the image and the self-image of Flanders and the Netherlands.
All these images ultimately produce some sense of identity. And in the end identity is the never-ending debate about identity.
In the general section of the yearbook you will encounter the usual mixture of articles. We explore the royal houses of the Netherlands and Belgium, writers such as the Fleming Maurice Maeterlinck who wrote in French and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 and Gerard Reve who once tried writing in English, painters like the sixteenth-century Lucas van Leyden and the contemporary Koen van den Broek. The belfries of the Southern Netherlands, proud guardians of civic independence, have been proclaimed Unesco World Heritage sites. Five hundred years ago Erasmus' In Praise of Folly was published: a divertimento that became a cult book. Graphic novels, music festivals and uninhabited islands in the Wadden Sea will parade before you.
Look in mirrors, through windows. Let everything be reflected back. There are more things in the heaven and earth of the Low Countries than are dreamt of in the vomit of a British pamphleteer.
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