The contribution of the Dutch craftsman and scholar Isaac Beeckman to early modern scientific thought has never been properly acknowledged. Surprisingly free from the constraints of traditional natural philosophy, he developed a view of the world in which everything, from the motion of the heavens to musical harmonies, is explained by reducing it to matter in motion. His ideas deeply influenced Descartes and Gassendi. Klaas van Berkel has succeeded in unearthing and explicating Beeckman's scientific notebooks, allowing us to follow how he developed his new philosophy, almost day by day. Beeckman was almost forgotten until the discovery of his notebooks in the early twentieth century. "Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion" is the first full-length study of the ideas and motives of this remarkable figure. Van Berkel's important study first relates Beeckman's life, placing him in the religious, intellectual, educational, and social context of the Dutch Republic in its golden age. Van Berkel then analyzes the notebooks themselves and the nature and development of Beeckman's "mechanical philosophy". He demonstrates how Beeckman's artisanal background and religious convictions shaped his natural philosophy, even as the decisive influence stems from the educational philosophy of the sixteenth-century French philosopher Peter Ramus. Historians of science and the philosophy of science will find the substance of Beeckman's thought and the unraveling of its growth and development highly interesting. Van Berkel's account provides a new and comprehensive interpretation of the origins of the mechanical philosophy of nature, the philosophy that culminated in the work of Isaac Newton.

This book is the first full-scale analysis of the social and political transformation of the nobility of Holland during the revolt against Spain. In the late medieval county of Holland the nobility played a significant role, but in the seventeenth century it appears to have been obliterated by bourgeois merchants and urban regents. The author argues that this 'decline' needs re-examination and bases his study on three key aspects: the demographic evidence for the decline of the nobility; the economic vicissitudes of the sixteenth century, which gave rise to the myth of its impoverishment; and finally the political and administrative powers of the nobility in the reigns of Charles V and Phillip II during the Dutch Revolt in the Republic. The conclusions are surprising. The nobility of Holland was extremely successful in maintaining its position in a bourgeois republic. In conjunction with the urban regents, the nobles formed the country's administrative, political and economic elite and from a social point of view, they maintained a strict apartheid by marrying exclusively within their group. Widely acclaimed in the Dutch edition of 1984, this is an important contribution to the history of the Netherlands as well as to the more general study of European elites.

This book is the first full-scale analysis of the social and political transformation of the nobility of Holland during the revolt against Spain. In the late medieval county of Holland the nobility played a significant role, but in the seventeenth century it appears to have been obliterated by bourgeois merchants and urban regents. The author argues that this 'decline' needs re-examination and bases his study on three key aspects: the demographic evidence for the decline of the nobility; the economic vicissitudes of the sixteenth century, which gave rise to the myth of its impoverishment; and finally the political and administrative powers of the nobility in the reigns of Charles V and Phillip II during the Dutch Revolt in the Republic. The conclusions are surprising. The nobility of Holland was extremely successful in maintaining its position in a bourgeois republic. In conjunction with the urban regents, the nobles formed the country's administrative, political and economic elite and from a social point of view, they maintained a strict apartheid by marrying exclusively within their group. Widely acclaimed in the Dutch edition of 1984, this is an important contribution to the history of the Netherlands as well as to the more general study of European elites.

This is an account of the ordinary working people of Holland in the seventeenth-century, the so-called ‘golden age’. Professor van Deursen is the most outstanding and gifted scholar at present working on this period of Dutch history. His history ‘from below’ is based on a mass of contemporary documentary evidence and the text is enlivened by contemporary illustrations. Ranging over a broad spectrum of everyday conditions, sex, marriage, leisure, religion and popular culture, this is the most comprehensive study yet published of the plain lives of a ‘golden age’.