Tussen ‘rabauwen’ en ‘kloekmoedige’ heren: De representatie van geweld in de Nederlandse contemporaine geschiedschrijving uit de tijd van de Opstand

Abstract

This article raises an issue of the physical violence on the basis of several texts from the seventeenth- century Netherlands. Those texts written among others by the famous Dutch chroniclers, such as Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, Jakob van Wesembeeke or Pieter Christiaenszoon Bor, present a homogenous image of violence during the Eighty Years’ War in its different phases. The above-mentioned writers contrasted the enormous brutality of the Spanish aggressors on the one hand with a peaceful attitude of Dutch inhabitants on the other hand and thereby tried to add an important social value to their texts. They namely intended to alienate the Spanish enemy and at the same time to encourage the Dutch rebels, whose fight for freedom was widely justified in those texts, even though the rebels were resorting to violence to an equal extent as their opponents. The image of violence in the described texts becomes a part of political propaganda, which aimed to build the Dutch national identity at the end of the fight for independence of the Northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century.