From Personal Memory to National Myth: Narratives of Heroism during the Dutch Revolt, 1568–1648

The first phase of the Dutch Revolt, from 1568 till the early 1580’s, can be characterized as a civil war. This part of the war kindled the imagination of following generations and enjoyed immense popularity as the founding tale of the Dutch Nation from the seventeenth century onwards. The stories about the rebellions of towns and citizens, the sieges and sacks, were developed in local communities and confessional groups and families, but subsequently got incorporated in a broad spectrum of public media, songs, plays, art, objects, newsprints, and popular history books.

After several decades there emerged a sudden rising interest in the fates of individual heroes and martyrs. As they developed further, most of these stories lost historical detail but gained in strength of plot and emotional overtones. Some typical and recurrent elements in the seventeenth century tales of the Revolt include: the braveness of the common citizens of besieged towns, spectacular escapes from the hands of the Spaniards, the ‘manlike’ role of women, many clever tricks to mislead the enemy, secret communications through smuggled messages between besieged towns and armed forces, and numerous miraculous victories in which the hand of God could be surmised. Only much later, in the nineteenth century, personal sacrifices, moral principles, and love for the home town or country became more central.

This paper analyzes the shared characteristics and variety of these heroic narratives and explores how their content, meaning, and generic structure changed during the transmission from the personal communicative memory of families or local communities to the more lasting collective cultural memory embodied in history books and other media that circulated more widely, served a broader audience, and have persisted over several centuries.