This book resulted from a desire to understand the role of pamphlets in the political life of that most curious early modern state, the Dutch Republic. The virtues of abundance and occasional liveliness have made "little blue books," as they were called, a favorite historical source-that is why I came to study them in the first place. I But the more I dug into pamphlets for this fact or that, the more questions I had about their 2 contemporary purpose and role. Who wrote pamphlets and why? For whom were they intended? How and by whom were pamphlets brought to press and distributed, and what does this reveal? Why did their number increase so greatly? Who read them? How were pamphlets different from other media? In short, I began to view pamphlets not as repositories of historical facts but as a historical phenomenon in their own right. 3 I have looked for answers to these questions in governmental and church records, private letters, publishing records and related materials about printers, booksellers, and pamphleteers, and of course in pam phlets themselves. Like so many other students of the early press and its products, I discovered only scattered, incomplete images of actual con ditions, such as the readership or popularity of pamphlets. On the other hand, I found much material which reflected what people believed about "little books.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic
Authors: Craig E. Harline
Series Title: International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3601-0
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht 1987
Hardcover ISBN: 978-90-247-3511-2Due: 30 April 1987
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-010-8111-5Published: 30 September 2011
eBook ISBN: 978-94-009-3601-0Published: 06 December 2012
Series ISSN: 0066-6610
Series E-ISSN: 2215-0307
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: 332
Topics: History, general

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Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

Front Matter

Prologue

Prologue

The Appeal of Pamphlets

Front Matter

In Search of an Audience

Jan Everyman and the Problem of Readership

Political Interest and the Book Trade

Pamphlets and Political Life

Front Matter

Libelli Non Grati: Pamphlets and the Political Culture of Control

Preachers in the Middle

Pamphlets and the Culture of Opposition

Pamphlets up Close

Front Matter

Canalboats, Taverns, and Dutch Politics

Epilogue

Epilogue

Back Matter

Keywords

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Bibliographic Information

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