“This is an important book that deserves to be listened to, debated, and absorbed into the discourse of this field.” —Elizabeth Honig, University of California, Berkeley “The author’s erudition, lucid writing, and meticulous research make these essays on the themes of marriage, politics, social harmony, and discord excellent reading for undergraduates as well as researchers.” —A. Golahny Choice “In this compelling study, Margaret D. Carroll explores how shifting political and cultural climates, in part the result of longstanding foreign domination, fueled an extraordinary flourish of pictorial invention in the early modern Lowlands. Through six carefully chosen case studies, the author investigates how certain seminal works of Netherlandish art inventively register contemporary responses to local, political discourse. While Carroll casts her sociohistorical net broadly, a focused discursive thread drives the choice and chronological arrangement of her case studies and her broader ideological concerns. She argues that a fundamental philosophical progression in the Brabant—from an ethos of relative social cooperation based in accelerating capitalist interests in the Burgundian Netherlands to one of social strain and conquest wrought by rising demands of absolutist courts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—stimulated local artistic innovation in very pointed ways.” —Catherine H. Lusheck Renaissance Quarterly “With her superb individual studies and her searching investigations into questions of historical belief-systems and their transformations over time, Carroll’s important, clearly written book makes an impressive contribution to contextual art history and the history of ideas. It is certain to stimulate scholars, and likely to engage non-specialists and students who have an interest in this volatile, fascinating extended period and region.” —Dan Ewing CAA Reviews “This book provides a welcome addition to scholarship on late medieval and early modern Netherlandish art–and because it is so readable, it provides a rare scholarly resource that is accessible to undergraduate students interested in the field.” —Todd M. Richardson HNA Newsletter and Review of Books