Preface
The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to material which although
not easily accessible ought to be more widely known. Most of the texts published
in the following pages were written in Dutch and it was evident from the start
that they should appear in translation. We were less certain about the French
and Latin texts. When we decided to translate these too we did not underrate the
erudition of those who will use this book but merely hoped to achieve a greater
measure of uniformity. As we have only in twelve cases thought it necessary to
print documents in full (Documents 3, 4, 7, 8, 15, 23, 24, 28, 29, 37, 49, 66),
specialists may want to know more than we can offer and thus in any case have to
turn to the originals.
The series in which our collection appears is devoted to the history and theory
of politics. This obliged us to touch upon the religious issues which played, we
think, a decisive part in the Revolt of the Netherlands only in their political
form, that is, only insofar as they caused the problem of toleration to be
discussed. It obliged us, in the second place, to concentrate on theoretical
aspects and to reduce to a minimum the factual and narrative elements that make
the history of the Revolt so absorbing an epic.
Obviously the selection of fragments remains somewhat arbitrary. W.P.C. Knuttel's
catalogue of pamphlets in the Royal Library at The Hague shows how overwhelming
the quantity of available material is. There are hundreds of catalogued
pamphlets covering the years 1565 to 1588, many of them rare, some unique. We
have read a large number of them and tried to select only those fragments that
pertained to the subject matter of the series. If the reader feels nevertheless
that he has to struggle through a mass of facts and dates he must not accuse us
too hastily of an insufficiently developed power of abstraction. It was not
always easy and sometimes impossible to separate narrative and theory for
contemporaries did not distinguish these categories as neatly as we do.
The first draft of most of the translations was prepared by Mrs A.C. Mellink. We
have tried to translate into readable English texts which are sometimes
complicated and long-winded. The reader who finds himself stumbling over some
English passages may take comfort in the fact that in the original the going is
harder. We are grateful for the help of our friend and colleague Mrs Alice C.
Carter of the London School of Economics,
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