Creaturen van de macht: patronage bij Willem Frederik van Nassau (1613-1664)

For a long time the image of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century was that of a predominantly bourgeois, egalitarian and, above all, tolerant society. This book highlights the role of one of its principal representatives, William Frederick of Nassau (1613-1664), to reveal a different image of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’. William Frederick’s extensive yet little researched diaries in particular offer a unique opportunity to examine the meaning and practical implications of patronage in political, religious and other social settings. In doing so, this book identifies distinctive patronage roles, appropriate to different social spheres, thus reconsidering the way patronage influenced early modern politics, determined religious divisions and shaped social identities. This is the first in-depth study of patronage in the Dutch Republic in English, offering a fundamentally new image of a society, which, in all its precarious complexity, generated one of the most splendid ‘Golden Ages’ in European history.