State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age - Hardcover

by Arthur Der Weduwen (Author)

State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age describes the political communication practices of the authorities in the early modern Netherlands. Der Weduwen provides an in-depth study of early modern state communication: the manner in which government sought to inform its citizens, publicise its laws, and engage publicly in quarrels with political opponents. These communication strategies, including proclamations, the use of town criers, and the printing and affixing of hundreds of thousands of edicts, underpinned the political stability of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Based on systematic research in thirty-two Dutch archives, this book demonstrates for the first time how the wealthiest, most literate, and most politically participatory state of early modern Europe was shaped by the communication of political information. It makes a decisive case for the importance of communication to the relationship between rulers and ruled, and the extent to which early modern authorities relied on the active consent of their subjects to legitimise their government.

Author Biography

Arthur der Weduwen is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue project. He specialises in the history of communication, printing and the book trade, early modern politics, and the history of the Netherlands. He is the author of Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., Brill, 2017), The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (with Andrew Pettegree, Yale UP, 2019), and The Library, A Fragile History (with Andrew Pettegree, Profile, 2021), a Sunday Times Book of the Year.