Crooked justice. Corruption, inequality and civic rights in the early modern Netherlands

With the help of several case studies from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, this article focuses on two key questions. How did ordinary Dutch citizens protect themselves against corruption and misuse of power by law enforcement agents, public prosecutors and the courts? And, whose interests were actually being served by the early modern criminal justice system? Or, put another way: whose order was being maintained and who was excluded from it? Its is argued that the weakness of a critical traditional in Dutch -and possibly even more widely, in Continental European- historiography concerning these issues fits in with the Continental perspective in which the rights of the state are emphasized rather than the rights of the individual. In England (perhaps even in the wider Anglosaxon context) the opposite seems to be the case: a critical historiographical tradition juxtapo-sed to a past in which civil rights rather than state privilieges were emphasized, together with resistance to the state and other bastions of power

Aldrovandi, truthfully drawing naturalia, and local context

This essay focuses on the 16th -century Bolognese naturalist and collector Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) and his enormous image collection of naturalia. Do these images present a specifically Bolognese form of visual natural science, and was his visual format of truthfulness new at the time? Did Local visual culture leave clear marks on Aldrovandi's image collection?   On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585.Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021

Depicting fish in early-modern Venice and Antwerp

This short essay discusses sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century representations of aquatic creatures made in two of the most important port cities of Europe at the time: Venice and Antwerp. We look at the diversity of visual material and representative genres (drawings, illuminations, frescoes, prints, oil paintings), at their connections with aquatilia as objects, and at the links of both objects and images to collections in these two cities. In comparing the material from these two port cities and cultural centres we are especially interested in three questions: periodisation; materiality; and innovation in visual formats, including its possible connection with the role of both Venice and Antwerp as European centres of printing

In bad company. Organized crime in the Dutch countryside during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Anthropologist ussually thank the subjects of their books, their 'informants', the people with whom they have spent a lot of time, have occasionally become friends, and who have formed one of their principal interests during their period of research. It seems unfair that I can't do the same ... Zie: Preface