| By engaging with the vast body of pamphlet literature, rarely seen engravings and images, personal and official correspondence between leading figures, edicts and proclamations, visual renderings and written accounts of public ceremonials, and songs, poems, and placards published between 1550 and 1598, this dissertation creates a comprehensive analysis of the religio-political relations and social change in the Low Countries. My work draws upon the premises that appeared most consistently in the literature and images circulated during the Dutch Revolt: strategy and communication, sovereignty and constitutionalism, freedom of conscience, political theory in the Low Countries, rites of power, and the creation of popular mythology. Whether within the borders of the individual provinces or the vaderland of the Low Countries at large, the conscious creation of Protestant identity and authority demonstrated how communication between the Low Countries' subjects, their representative institutions, and their sovereign came to define the development of the Dutch Revolt. |
