Antipodean Early Modern: European Art in Australian Collections, c. 1200–1600. Anne Dunlop, ed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 294 pp. €89.
nacular chronicle but reshaped it to legitimize the rule of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, who was the current duke. In so doing, he radically reoriented Brabant’s history away from France while, at the same time, throwing his weight behind the imperial condemnation of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521). By contrast, the civil servant Peter van Dyeve (Petrus Divaeus) used the humanist training he had received at Louvain to make a case for Brabant’s constitutional independence as rooted in its archive of medieval charters and privileges. His history, published ca. 1563, was then used to legitimize the Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs, a movement in which van Dyeve was closely involved from 1568 to his death, in 1581. The final two case studies delve into the verse and prose histories of Holland written by the aristocrat Janus Dousa, with the assistance of his son, Janus the younger (who predeceased his father, at the age of twenty-five). These were histories commissioned by the University of Leiden and both, in their different ways, argued for the importance of Holland’s medieval origins and cast the foreign rule of the Habsburgs as a violation of the Batavian ius genitium, or right to self-governance. In a final chapter, Maas discusses the relationship between Latin and vernacular history writing in the Low Countries during this formative era. The brief conclusion is followed by several appendixes. I have only two points of criticism. The first regards the book’s length, which could have been shortened to make the author’s interventions sharper, without sacrificing its wealth of detail. The second concerns the twenty-four handsome black-and-white plates—engraved portraits, manuscript pages, printed frontispieces—that punctuate the text, but whose relationship to it is never explained. They seem to serve as mere illustrations, rather than as vehicles for furthering the argument. That said, both of these flaws also testify to the book’s extraordinary intellectual generosity, which is very much to be praised.