:High Germans in the Low Countries: German Merchants and Commerce in Golden Age Antwerp.(The Northern World, number 14.)

Abstract

It is a rubenesque world, judging from museum exhibits and the art market, in which the art of Peter Paul Rubens seems ubiquitous. And yet Rubens has become detached from his historical context, due to the pronounced neglect of the history of his native city, Antwerp, especially during its so-called Golden Age, ca. 1485–1585. Apart from the magisterial doctoral thesis of Herman van der Wee published in 1963, very little scholarship has appeared about the city's history in any language. Only recently has a cadre of young historians on both sides of the Atlantic begun to renew the historical study of early modern Antwerp. Donald J. Harreld belongs firmly to this modernist group, and he devotes this book to a straightforward question: what role did German trade in general, and that with interior Germany in particular, play in making sixteenth-century Antwerp Europe's great commercial entrepôt? That Germans played a significant role in Antwerp's rise and dominance has long been known; they formed one of the crucial trade groups, bringing metals, cheap textiles, and other products to Antwerp and exchanging them for products of the New World. But there has not been a monographic study of the community of German merchants in the city, with an analysis of the specifics of their trade, either in composition or geographical reach.