A.Th. van Deursen (1931 - 2011) was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Amsterdam. He was unrivaled among Dutch historians in his grasp of seventeenth-century Dutch society. In 1991, he published his Mensen van klein vermogen (Plain Lives in a Golden Age) and in 1994 his highly successful Een dorp in de polder. Graft in de zeventiende eeuw (A Village in the Polder). Maurice of Nassau was longlisted for the prestiguous AKO-prize for literature.
(Bert Bakker, 1991, 455 pages)
One of the leading Dutch historians of the seventeenth century, Arie van Deursen describes how the common people of the Netherlands lived between 1572 and 1648, a period that includes Holland’s Golden Age. He explores what ordinary folk did for a living, how they spent their leisure time, and their relationships with their government, their God and their church.
(Bert Bakker, 1994, 387 pages)
Anyone familiar with the Dutch Golden Age knows something about senior civic dignitaries: municipal regents, clergymen, stadtholders, army commanders and admirals. But what about the lives of ordinary people not in the top echelons, not in charge of municipal government, not army commanders or authors of important books? The answer to that question has been given by the historian A.Th. van Deursen in Een dorp in de polder. In this fascinating history of a village, he draws on an astonishing quantity of archival material to bring to life the people of Graft, a village in the Dutch countryside some twelve miles north of Amsterdam.
(Bert Bakker, 2000, 332 pages)
Prince Maurice of Nassau is not a favourite of Dutch historians. In 1619, he had Van Oldenbarneveld, Grand Pensionary of the States of Holland, beheaded for allegedly plotting with Spain, a country with which the Netherlands had been locked in a long struggle for freedom. The image of the old state prosecutor on the scaffold was to enter history as a lasting indictment of the unrelenting Maurice.
