Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics of Particularism. byJ. L. PriceReview by: James D. TracyThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 193-194Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2544299 .

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Book Reviews 193

Annotated Catalogue of Early Editions of Erasmus at the Centre for Ref- ormation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto. Jacqueline Glomski and Erika Rummel, eds.Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1994. 153 pp. $20.00.

This useful little book is a complete descriptive catalog of the early editions of the works of Erasmus in the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, located inVictoria Col- lege, Toronto, one of the most comprehensive collections in North America. The collection includes, for example, copies of all five editions of the Greek New Testament published during Erasmus' lifetime, among them a near-perfect copy of the 1516 Novunl InstrulIleritu,11; more than forty copies of the Adages, including the Aldine edition of 1508; copies of over fifty editions of the Colloquia; and some forty copies of TVe Praise of Folly, the earliest dating from 1515. Most of the items in the collection were a bequest toVictoria University in 1932 by the late Professor Andrew Bell, longtime professor of Latin and Comparative Literature at Victoria College and the University ofToronto.There are almost 10,000 items in the collec- tion.The introduction to the book contains an affectionate description of Professor Bell by Douglas Bush, originally published in Caiadian Forumti.

The collection is presented in alphabetical order and includes a brief section of Biogra- phies of Erasmus and an appendix of additional holdings in the University ofToronto librar- ies, updated from an earlier list in Erasimtus in Englislh 14 (1985-86). Users may find it conve- nient to use the index to the book since Latin titles are often confusing and deceptively similar.The work was done by two working Erasmus scholars,Jacqueline Glomski and Erika Rummel.

J. K. Sowards ........ Wichita State University

Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Poli- tics of Particularism. J. L. Price. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994. 312 pp. $52.00.

This book is not a history of the Dutch Republic in its prime, and readers not familiar with the events of the seventeenth century may wish to glance first through one of the older standard treatments. Instead, Price offers a thoughtful assessment of recent historiography, and a persuasive critique of political theories past and present that have not been able to explain the relative success of the United Provinces during this era except as a kind of anom- aly. The central argument is indeed what he professes it will be: that the Dutch political system worked reasonably well in practice, "and that it did so not despite its extreme decen- tralization of effective power but because of it."

That the Republic was decentralized has always been acknowledged. But Price draws the proper organizational corollary by arranging his treatment of its component political unities from the bottom up, and discussing first the towns of the crucial province of Holland, then the province itself, and finally relations between Holland and the six other provinces repre- sented in the States General.The first section is mainly concerned with patterns of cohesion and conflict among the "regents," the more or less hereditary ruling families of the eighteen towns that had voting rights in the States of Holland.There are a number of shrewd assess- ments of controverted points; for example, the fact regents ousted from power did not have their tax levies changed suggests that the system of assessment was "fair by the standards of the time." Occasionally one could wish for a glimpse of the author's knowledge of primary sources, as in the statement, without explanation, that in city council minutes the phrase "by

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194 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVII / 1 (1996)

unanimous vote" seems to imply a serious disagreement that was then covered up by a formal show of unity. He is surely right to insist that the family-based "factions" that recent scholars have discerned among urban magistrates do not exclude the importance, in times of crisis, of religious or political "parties" that could in fact build on local factions. But the fact that many families were known for having a stable political or religious identity may also afford a clue, not explored here, as to why some wealthy families aspired to office and others did not.

The section on provincial institutions examines the conflict of overlapping interests in Holland. The regents, most of whom (it seems) would have preferred an established church more subservient to state authority, had in fact less direct control of their clergy than urban magistrates elsewhere in Europe, and the Dutch Reformed dominies could at times head up a formidable opposition, despite the fact that the Republic's Catholic population was never less than about a third. At critical moments Calvinists would align themselves with strong members of the house of Orange, bent on clipping the wings of Holland's regents, and it may be significant that some of the towns that had the most continuous traditions of Orangist politics (Haarlem and Leiden) were also textile centers whose more traditional economies lagged behind the rapid commercial development evident in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Amsterdam in fact dwarfed the others, and its wishes could really be thwarted only when divisions among its regents afforded Orangists and Calvinists an opening, as with the down- fall and judicial murder ofJohan van Oldenbarnevelt in 1618/1619, when Holland's regents suffered perhaps their worst defeat of the century.

At the generality level there were conflicts of still other kinds, pitting Holland, which insisted on making its economic (mainly commercial) interests a matter of state policy, against landward provinces that were dominated by the aristocracy, and also more exposed to invasion, and hence more amenable to warlike policies sometimes favored by the prince of Orange and his Calvinist supporters. Here again, Price is correct to argue that only a loosely structured federalism could have harnessed these divergent energies to a single state, permit- ting Holland to pursue its interests, while affording stagnant inland economies protection from domination by Holland's merchants. One may also concur with the theoretical conclu- sion he draws, namely, that it makes little sense to evaluate this polity in terms of notions of state sovereignty that were emerging just about the time the Dutch launched their revolt against Spain. Rather, "the Dutch Republic is perhaps better understood in the light of older conceptions which regarded the political community as a collection of individuals and groups, each with their proper rights and duties." If the Dutch polity has so often been tested and found wanting according to ill-fitting standards of sovereignty, it is because older schools of Dutch historiography bear the nationalist imprint of the nineteenth century, or of the Calvinist understanding of the Republic as having a religious foundation, while modern left- wing historiography has not been sympathetic to the "threadbare republican tradition" and the "arrogant and absolutist regent class that once sustained it."This book does not rehearse all the problems of seventeenth-century Dutch history, much less solve them, but it does afford a sensible framework for further study.

James D. Tracy ........... University of Minnesota

The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578-1653. Bernard Capp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 211 pp. $39.95.

A waterman with loud pretensions to learning, a taphouse poet proud of his connections at court, a spokesman for order and tradition who admired economic innovation, a staunch

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