7.4.1 Text资料文件与下载

7.4 Dutch Golden Age

1. Dutch is a beautiful country famous for its windmills and tulips. Today’s Kingdom of the Netherlands commonly known as the Netherlands is a sovereign state and constitutional monarchy with the large majority of its territory in Western Europe and with several small island territories in the Caribbean Sea. Netherlands means lower countries, referring to its low and flat topography, topography is the physical features of an area. 50% of the land of the Netherlands is only 1 meter above sea level and 17%below sea level.

2. The capital of the Netherlands is Amsterdam; other large cities are Rotterdam, the largest port of Europe, The Hague, home city of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and Utrecht, famous for universities.

And this is the capital Amsterdam, and the Hague, and Rotterdam, and Utrecht.

This country is often informally called Holland; actually Holland is a region including two provinces North Holland and South Holland. The Netherlands is located within the region called Low Countries or the Low Lands, historically also the Netherlands. It is a coastal lowland region in northwestern Europe, forming the lower basin of the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers, divided in the Middle Ages into numerous semi-independent principalities that consolidated in the countries of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, as well as today's French Flanders.

Dutch people or the Dutch are a Germanic ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language.

3. Burgundian Netherland. Most of the Low Countries in what is now the Netherlands and Belgium were united in a personal union by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy in 1433. In 1477 the Burgundy was defeated by the Swiss army. The last duke of Burgundy Charles the bold was killed. France annexed most of the land of Burgundy. The only child of Charles the bold Mary the Rich inherited the Low Counties and she married Maximilian of Austrian Habsburgs, the future Holy Roman Emperor.

Spanish Netherland. After Mary and Maximilian the Low Countries was taken by the Spanish Habsburgs. We had talked about Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain from 1568 to 1609. Netherlands was the richest region in Europe, an international leader in manufacturing, banking and commerce. After the Protestant Reformation, Catholics and some protestant denominations peacefully coexisted there. Catholic Spain couldn’t accept the existence of Protestants in their territory.

4. Independent Netherland. After the terrible war in 1609 Spain and Netherlands signed the Twelve Years Truce which tacitly recognized the existence of Dutch Republic or United Provinces in the north of the Netherland. It was the predecessor state of the modern Netherlands and the first nation state of the Dutch people. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia recognized the independence of the Dutch Republic, Swiss Republic and the Kingdom of Portugal. This new independent country soon became a great power in the 17th century. The Southern Netherlands was still controlled by Spain until it was annexed by France at the end of 18^th century, in 1830 it became an independent Kingdom of Belgium.

5. The Dutch Golden Age. The Dutch Golden Age was a period in the history of the Netherlands, roughly spanning the 17th century, in which Dutch trade, science, military, and art were the best in the world. During this time Netherlands became the foremost maritime and economic power in the world. This Dutch Golden Age has been called the "Dutch Miracle" by Dutch-American historian K. W. Swart (1916–1992).

After the war the Dutch Republic welcomed many Protestants migrated from the southern Netherlands, Portugal and France because they were suffered from religious persecution. The Pilgrim Fathers also spent time there before their voyage to the New World. Many of those people were skilled craftsmen and rich merchants and most of them settled in Amsterdam, transforming what was a small port into one of the most important ports and commercial centers in the world by 1630. Due to its climate of intellectual tolerance, the Dutch Republic attracted scientists and other thinkers from all over Europe.

6. Trade

Dutch dominated the international trade in the17th century, a position previously occupied by the Portuguese and Spanish. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company, the first multinational corporation was founded. It soon became the world's largest commercial enterprise. It was financed by shares that established the first modern stock exchange. The Company received a Dutch monopoly on Asian trade, and kept it for two centuries. Spices were imported in bulk and brought huge profits to the country. To finance the growing trade, the Bank of Amsterdam was established in 1609. It is the first central bank in the world.

7. Netherland had the best location for the trade within Europe. Geographically it is on the halfway between the Bay of Biscay and the Baltic Sea (the Bay of Biscay is the sea between France and Spain). This location enables the Netherlands to provide profitable intermediation, carrying salt, wine, cloth and later silver, spices, and colonial products eastward while bringing Baltic grains, fish, and naval stores to the west.

8. Society

In the Dutch Republic the national leader was stadtholder, it was the replacement of the duke or earl of a province during the Burgundian and Habsburg period. Social status was largely determined by income. Bankers and merchants were the backbone of the republic. The landed nobility had relatively little importance; it was the urban merchant class that dominated Dutch society. After bankers, merchants and nobles were the middleclass including Protestant ministers, lawyers, physicians, small merchants, industrialists and clerks of large state institutions. Go under were farmers, craft and tradesmen, shopkeepers, and government bureaucrats. Below that stood skilled laborers, maids, servants, sailors, and other persons employed in the service industry. At the bottom were "paupers": beggar or day laborer.

9. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a 1632 oil painting commissioned by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, the Guild was permitted one public dissection every year. Anatomy is the study of the structure of the bodies of people or animals, dissection means cutting. Every five to ten years, the Surgeon's Guild would commission a portrait by a leading portraitist of the period. This painting was one of the famous works of Rembrandt. He was only 26 years old then. In the work, official City Anatomist of Amsterdam, Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is explaining the musculature of the arm to medical professionals; musculature is a system of muscles. Some of the spectators are doctors who paid commissions to be included in the painting. The dead body is a criminal convicted for armed robbery, sentenced to death and was hanged early that day. In this painting the artist captured a spirit of civic pride of a relatively open Dutch society. This spirit of civic pride was one of the reasons for the prosperity of the trade, science and culture in the Dutch Republic. The Dutch enjoyed high literacy rates, and Dutch entrepreneurs took advantage of this. In seventeenth century Holland became a great center for the book trade and production of news, Bibles, political pamphlets.

10. Rembrandt.

Rembrandt is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art and the most important painter in Dutch art history. His works depict a wide range of style and subject matter, from portraits to landscapes, historical and mythological as well as animal.

11. The Abduction of Europa. Abduction is act of capturing and carrying away by force. The work has been described as "a shining example of the 'golden age' of Baroque painting". Remember in Greek myth Europa was a princess of Phoenicia, One day Zeus changed himself into a white bull, seduced her ride the bull and flew to an island, Crete. The name of Europe came from Europa, at the beginning Europe only means Crete, gradually the whole Greece, after the expansion of the Roman Empire it extended to its modern boundaries.

12. René Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. He was born French but spent about 20 years in the Dutch Republic, Once Served in the Dutch States Army. He is generally considered one of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age. He is often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” His philosophy known as Cartesianism rested or the Dual existence of matter and mind. Matter was the material world, Mind was the spirit of the creator. In his work Discourse on method, he argued how skepticism could be used to produce certainty. His best-known philosophical statement is "I think, therefore I am". He was not perfect thus a perfect being had to have place knowledge within him. Therefore, a perfect being-God existed. His greatest contribution is that he proved the new science could be harmonized with the old religion.

13. Key words: the Netherlands, Amsterdam, The Dutch Golden Age, the Dutch East India Company, Rembrandt, Descartes.

This is the end of seven point four.