Studies of medievalism usually begin in the century that gave us the term medieval, which was coined in the 1830s. In this book, Coen Maas examines the work of medievalism in the era when this periodizing construct was first being theorized and put into practice among humanists, and he does so by focusing on one intellectually fertile region that was undergoing dramatic political, social, and religious changes. Throughout the Low Countries, and within specific cities or provinces, the rhetorical uses of the medieval past both reflected and advanced a surprisingly varied number of projects.

Two substantial introductory chapters set up the argument. The first surveys European humanists’ formulations of the medium ævum that separated classical antiquity from their own contemporary epoch (variously defined), revealing the shared vocabulary, narrative strategies, and intertextual citations that characterized these frameworks. In the second, Maas sketches the generic conventions of humanist historiography in the Low Countries, and the expectations that historians and their readers shared. The next five chapters comprise a series of careful case studies chosen to highlight uses of the medieval past in different works of history. In each, astute close readings of humanist Latin texts are accompanied by very clear English translations and explanations of the conventions that undergird the author's rhetorical choices—making it possible (even for those without any knowledge of Latin) to see how these texts were constructed, and how they would have been understood by a wider intellectual community.

In 1516–17, the Gouda alderman Reynier Snoy produced a Historia Hollandie (circulated in manuscript) that depicted that medieval county as a worthy rival of classical antiquity, not its dark successor. He also stressed the peaceful transfer of dynastic power as crucial to its economic prosperity and liberty, here defined as freedom from burdensome financial obligations of the kind that were being imposed, in his own day, by Habsburg rule. Here, there is indeed a break with the medieval past, but it is an unfortunate one. Produced a decade later, the printed Cronica Brabantiae Ducum, by Adrianus Barlandus, was a history of the duchy of Brabant from its seventh-century origins up to the year of publication (1526). A professor of Latin at Louvain and a member of Erasmus's inner circle, Barlandus condensed information from an older Dutch vernacular chronicle but reshaped it to legitimize the rule of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, who was the current duke. In so doing, he radically reoriented Brabant's history away from France while, at the same time, throwing his weight behind the imperial condemnation of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521). By contrast, the civil servant Peter van Dyeve (Petrus Divaeus) used the humanist training he had received at Louvain to make a case for Brabant's constitutional independence as rooted in its archive of medieval charters and privileges. His history, published ca. 1563, was then used to legitimize the Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs, a movement in which van Dyeve was closely involved from 1568 to his death, in 1581.

The final two case studies delve into the verse and prose histories of Holland written by the aristocrat Janus Dousa, with the assistance of his son, Janus the younger (who predeceased his father, at the age of twenty-five). These were histories commissioned by the University of Leiden and both, in their different ways, argued for the importance of Holland's medieval origins and cast the foreign rule of the Habsburgs as a violation of the Batavian ius genitium, or right to self-governance. In a final chapter, Maas discusses the relationship between Latin and vernacular history writing in the Low Countries during this formative era. The brief conclusion is followed by several appendixes.

I have only two points of criticism. The first regards the book's length, which could have been shortened to make the author's interventions sharper, without sacrificing its wealth of detail. The second concerns the twenty-four handsome black-and-white plates—engraved portraits, manuscript pages, printed frontispieces—that punctuate the text, but whose relationship to it is never explained. They seem to serve as mere illustrations, rather than as vehicles for furthering the argument. That said, both of these flaws also testify to the book's extraordinary intellectual generosity, which is very much to be praised.