Talk:Historiography of the Eighty Years' War

A few criticisms

Dear@Nederlandse Leeuw. First of all a generous compliment: I think this article has rightly been rated "B-class" by several projects. However, I still have a number of criticisms which I hope you will consider "constructive". I understand that the article is mainly an English translation of your article Historiografie van de Tachtigjarige Oorlog in the Dutch Wikipedia (to which this article links). There of course is no objection to that. However my first criticism of both articles is that it apparently does not build on other Dutch sources on the subject of Dutch historical writing about the Tachtigjarige oorlog, like e.g. RvS, ed. (March 2005). "Tachtigjarige Oorlog in de literatuur". DBNL Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (in Dutch). Retrieved 3 January 2023. Instead it appears primarily the result of your own extensive research. I do not mean to say that it sins against the prohibition of Original Research, but it sometimes seems to come close. In any case I think on a subject like this "original research" is unavoidable, and editors in "real" encyclopedias often engage in it. But I think you would have been on safer ground if you would have relied on the works of others, at least as a framework for your own endeavor. In this respect I confess that I myself used Jonathan Israel's The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford History of Early Modern Europe. 1995. ISBN 0-19-873072-1 HB; ISBN 0-198-20734-4 as a "crutch" when I started the first version of Eighty Years' War back in 2009, ruthlessly excerpting his work, and shamelessly stealing some of my chapter titles from him. No scintilla of "original research" (well, hardly any) as a result. Maybe that is the other extreme :-)

That brings me to my next criticism. I chose Israel, because he was an exponent of the "new" Anglophone historiography of the Dutch Revolt, that was started with Geoffrey Parker (1977). The Dutch Revolt. London: Allan Lane.. As the title of this book already indicates, these Anglophone historians opened up a new perspective on the history of the Dutch struggle for independence (as Ernst Kossmann notes in his review of the book: Kossmann, E. H. (January 1979). "Reviewed Work: The Dutch Revolt by Geoffrey Parker". The English Historical Review. 94 (370): 127–129. doi:10.1093/ehr/XCIV.CCCLXX.127. JSTOR 567166.) beginning with dropping the "sacrosanct" (for Dutchmen) notion of "Eighty Year's War" and exchanging it for a moniker that implicitly limits the subject to the period up to 1609, and focusing less on the military-history aspects of the subject, than on the politico-social aspects. As a recent Dutch immigrant to the U.S. I equally thought it appropriate to sever my ties with the Dutch historiography, and transfer my allegiance to the new Anglophone approach that at the time was clearly distinct from the previously dominant approach of historians like Pieter Geyl and John Lothrop Motley. This new perspective tried to abandon the "Dutch" or "Spanish" nationalist biases, and replace them with an "international" (read: "British"), "above the warring parties" stance, as Kossman approvingly notes in his review. I remain agnostic about the question whether this ambition was always successful, but it was clear that this Anglophone "school" of historians was distinct from continental "schools" and deserves recognition as such. Which it does not receive in your article. I think you represent the "Dutch Revolt/Eighty Years' War" dichotomy as something that originated in Dutch historiography, and that it nowadays has been decided in favor of the latter moniker. This may be the case in the Dutch sphere (I do not know), but definitely is not the case in the Anglophone sphere. If you ask an American what he thinks about the "Eighty Years' War", you probably draw a blank, but the term "Dutch Revolt" probably elicits a vague recognition. The same applies in reverse to the term "Dutch Republic:", which is unknown to most Dutchmen, who are used to think in terms of the Republiek der (Zeven) Verenigde Nederlanden. My point is: we write here for an Anglophone audience, not a Dutch one. What probably suffices for a Dutch audience, does not suffice for an Anglophone audience, because it insufficiently "meshes" with Anglophone experiences and cultural predilections. Simply translating the Dutch article (excellent though it may be) does not suffice; it needs to be reworked for an Anglophone audience, beginning with the sources-section which hardly mentions "historiographical" and historical works from Anglophone authors. But it also needs to give more emphasis to the approach of the Anglophone historians that belong to this Anglophone "school" (apart from the authors already mentioned I would also include Simon Schama and James Tracy, to name a few).

As an aside, needless to say I deplore the fact that the title "Dutch Revolt" has completely disappeared and that this now only exists as a redirect page. When I started "Eighty Years' War" back in 2009, I did not mean it as as alternative for the Dutch Republic article that pre-existed, but I thought that an article was needed to emphasize the military-history aspects of the subject. I was perfectly content to leave the political, social and cultural aspects of the subject to "Dutch Republic". I therefore started out by changing "Eighty Years' War" from a redirect page (as it then was) to a legitimate article. We apparently have come full circle. But I don't want to reopen that discussion. These are my main points for the moment. I may have some detail criticisms in future.--Ereunetes (talk) 22:51, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Dear @Ereunetes: I'm grateful to receive such feedback from you (I already suggested such a possibility at Talk:Trial of Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius and Hogerbeets, where our roles are reversed). I'll break it down by points to make discussion more focused:

• The English article is actually the original, the Dutch version is a translation of the original (so I had to translate some material back from English into Dutch, which in hindsight wasn't the most practical option haha). You're right that in several places it might skirt OR, and I'm open to adjusting the text wherever necessary in order to comply with policy. But as you said, it's virtually unavoidable, because the subject is historians writing about what other historians wrote, and they thereby automatically become the subject of the article as well, so avoiding primary sources is almost undoable by definition. I think the best we can do is to quote relevant authors rather than interpreting their words far beyond what they literally say (which would be OR/SYNTH), so I have stuck closely with the source texts without resorting to plagiarism. (A major advantage of extensively quoting 19th-century historians is that there are no copyright issues, unlike those you might face be extensively quoting Israel ;) ). It's true that in some cases it's better, however, to rely on modern authors such as indeed Parker or Israel to portray the positions of older authors such as Hooft, Strada, Fruin, Nuyens, Geyl etc. Van der Zeijden 2012 was a very useful source of that, I believe we need more of those kinds of sources.
• You're quite spot on that the British school marked by Parker and Israel deserves more recognition and elaboration than I have so far given them. In part this is because it would require me to buy several new books, whereas the Dutch ones I used were either already in my possession (I did buy Groenveld & Leeuwenburg 2020 just for this article as well as the Eighty Years' War articles restructuring project), or publicly available because they were public domain on DBNL.org or Google Books. I do think I should buy Israel's 1995 Rise of the Dutch Republic; it has been quoted so extensively by you, other Wikipedians and by scholars in the field that there is barely any getting around it. I'm just a little careful not to buy lots of expensive books (call it Dutch zuinigheid :D ) if I can support the same kind of material from free open reliable sources, but for the modern period I will probably have to if I want to do it properly. These may indeed include not just Israel, but also Parker, Schama, Tracy, and others. The refutation of Dutch (and Spanish) nationalist and pro-Protestant biases are indeed important problems, and it is why I have devoted so much attention to Fruin & Nuyens as laying the groundwork for that debate. But I haven't really dedicated much attention to Spanish historiography at all, which is certainly something that the British school can help to fill. I'm personally quite fond of British historiography, so that's not an issue for me.
• On the naming question "Dutch Revolt/Eighty Years' War", I've had quite an extensive discussion about it not just at Talk:Eighty Years' War#Merger proposal, but also at nl:Overleg:Tachtigjarige Oorlog#Nieuwe structuur sinds 29 juli. Long story short: my conclusion is that "Eighty Years' War" is indeed a problematic name, but "Dutch Revolt" is many times more problematic, and as a proposed alternative to "Eighty Years' War" it creates more problems than it attempts to solve. Neither name has been "sacrosanct" for decades now. I've been a proponent of "Dutch Revolt" myself for years, but I've changed my mind. Most Dutch Wikipedians at the recent discussion also seemed to, if not always entirely agree with me, understand my point that "Dutch Revolt" has been suffering from extremely bad periodisation and characterisation for decades, so that now nobody really knows what it refers to. It's easy to say "Eighty Years' War" is inaccurate and therefore not a perfect name, but when has there ever been a perfect name for a conflict? Moreover, the countless contradictory meanings that have been given to "Dutch Revolt" instead have only made it worse. Per WP:CRYSTAL I can't predict which way this debate is going to go, but on the English talk page we tentatively agreed on "Eighty Years' War" for the period articles, and on the Dutch talk page we were getting close to an understanding that lots of recent scholars who previously invoked "Dutch Revolt" have been shifting to "Eighty Years' War", or at least changed their periodisation of "Dutch Revolt" to coincide (more) with "Eighty Years' War" (that is, 1566/8–1648).
• I'm curious if there are similar trends in Anglophone or Hispanophone historiography. Excuse me, WHAT?! Ok I just found out the article has been translated to Spanish!! es:Historiografía de la Guerra de los Ochenta Años. Wow ok, that is very cool! So far all still the same sources I used, but if more Spanish-language sources will be added that may shed light on Spanish/Habsburg perspectives on the war, that would certainly be very interesting. Anyway, I do not expect Hispanophone historiography to be talking about the war as Revuelta holandesa or Revuelta neerlandesa or Revuelta de los Países Bajos any time soon. It should be obvious why: it's extremely Dutch-centric / Netherlands-centric, and also suggests all of "the Dutch" or "the Netherlands", or alternatively just "Holland", was in revolt, each of which is obviously wrong. I think an argument can be made that "Dutch Revolt" is actually more Dutch-nationalistic than "Eighty Years' War" ever was (even if invented by British historians, it sure seems to have appealed to many 20th-century Dutch historians, and not necessarily in a positive way, similar to how American historian Motley had a negative influence on many 19th-century Dutch historians such as Fruin and Bakhuizen). Guerra de los Ochenta Años and guerra de Flandes are the commonly used Spanish names, and I think for good reason. Even though "Flandes" is a pars pro toto for all Low Countries in the same way that "Holland" currently is for Nederland, it just indicates where it happened, not who are the supposed central actors in it, which is a major objection I've got against "Dutch" in "Dutch Revolt".
• I understand your disappointment. I myself have also had to abandon "Dutch Revolt" after championing it as a better name for years. It also turned out to be virtually impossible to separate 'the political, social and cultural aspects' from the 'the military-history aspects', resulting in WP:OVERLAP and WP:REDUNDANTFORKs (but I explained that already on my talk page). I should point out that 'the political, social and cultural aspects' of the war get quite a lot of coverage in Aftermath of the Eighty Years' War, Origins of the Eighty Years' War, as well as this article. I was also pondering whether it would be viable to create an article like "Sexual violence in the Eighty Years' War"; it's a subject I find quite important (also because of the role of women, which has so far not received a lot attention). Few people are willing to talk about it, unless "the enemy" did it, which results in lots of propaganda from both sides, but little self-reflection and holding one's own troops to account for war crimes. After all, that would undermine the "heroics" of one's own side versus the "evils" of the enemy that nationalist historiography is so loaded with.

I'm very open and curious towards any future detailed criticisms you might have. Together we can make Wikipedia better. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 18:01, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

This time I won't reply between your lines, as I am tempted to do by the way you structured your reply :-) Two points: I am not emotionally invested in either "Dutch Revolt" or "Eighty Years' War". I prefer "Dutch Revolt" (despite all its drawbacks) because apparently the Americans that are (potentially) interested in the subject only know this "search word". On the other hand, I first googled [historiography "Dutch Revolt"] and got 64,000 hits, but with [historiography "eighty years' war"] 382,000 results. So maybe there is more to be found with the second option. Anyway, both options indicated lots and lots of potentially useful Anglophone sources. But I suppose you tried this yourself. Don't forget google books and especially google scholar for the same exercise. I suppose you already did that for the Spanish sphere. I hope there are English-language historiographical articles among the harvest, because those are of course the most useful for our purpose of "fattening up" the article on sources from the Anglophone world. Second, I'll certainly try to be of assistance (for instance, putting in wikilinks to biographies of authors), but for the time being I have to give priority to other subjects. So please bear with me. Ereunetes (talk) 22:06, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Alright, well thankfully there aren't just Americans in the world, and Wikipedia's article titles aren't solely determined by searches Americans do. ;) The suggested source exploration is my standard approach. Part of the reason why there are so few Anglophone and Hispanophone sources is because I just wanted to publish this article instead of working on it for much longer. Articles such as this are always works in progress and never quite finished. It was meant as a kind of cherry on top of the Eighty Years' War restructuring project, where each of the new articles needn't be perfect, just better than the previous state of affairs without keeping the community and readers in suspense for too long. I always intended to do more revisions and expansions at a later date, and in the meantime welcome contributions from anyone else passing along (some have already been done).

This also meant I did not really address several topics that I announced in the introduction, such as those war crimes I mentioned earlier. The sentence Controversy also rages about the importance of the war for the emergence of the Dutch Republic as the predecessor of the current Kingdom of the Netherlands and the role of the House of Orange's stadtholders in it, as well as the development of Dutch and Belgian national identities as a result of the split of the Northern and Southern Netherlands. also goes quite unaddressed, except maybe for the Geyl and William of Orange sections. They point out the national borders are partially the result of the great rivers being major geographical barriers, and otherwise more or less military-historical happenstance, and weren't what Orange originally envisioned. A lot more can be said, and has been said, about this topic, especially the kleinneerlandist + belgicist versus grootneerlandist + rattachist versus heelneerlandist visions which Geyl brought into focus in the early 20th century (and that still have some minority influence). Geyl challenged the idea that history had to be this way, and demonstrated it could have happened quite differently, and the modern Netherlands and Belgium (and Luxembourg) and their created/developed national identities weren't "destined to be". Such insights are quite relevant to present-day discourse about national identity in the Low Countries. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 23:07, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

It may be a good thing that you didn't get around to getting involved in the "grootneerlandist" etc. controversy. I think that would find a better place in an article (if this exists) about the controversy itself and you could then refer to it here. I am afraid that Anglophone readers would not be very interested in this, if they just wanted to know more about historiography. Just a suggestion, of course.--Ereunetes (talk) 23:21, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

There is the Greater Netherlands article (which this article links to), which does mention the Eighty Years' War twice, and Geyl twice, although not Gerretson. I suppose you're right; the text is fine as it is in its coverage of this topic.

On the other hand, I am never much guided by the presumption of what Anglophone readers might be interested to read; what always counts for me is whether content has encyclopaedic value, and is delivered in an encyclopaedic manner. It always finds an audience, no matter how small. I've taken a quick look to check: of all the 240 pages I've created on English Wikipedia since 1 July 2015 (which doesn't include redirects, and expansions of other people's redirects or stubs etc. to full articles), 138 articles received an average of 2 to 550 views a day. A further 60 articles received 1 view a day, and the remaining 42 pages (often disamb pages such as Rhine campaign, or recently created pages such as List of battles of the War of the Fifth Coalition) have received a total of 57 to 1,324 views. The mere fact that a disamb page like Rhine campaign has helped Anglophone users and readers 57 times in the past 6 months (no doubt including myself several times), if only for a few seconds of navigation, is enough of an interest for me to create, or to have created, such a page.

You never quite know what readers are really interested in. For example, I wish Battle of Jutphaas (created 2018-02-16; 2,512 views in total, 1 per day on average) had drawn a little more attention than it so far has (I know it drew yours, because you subsequently wrote one of the commander's biographies, Jean Antoine d'Averhoult; great work!). On the other hand, for years I've been surprised that War of the Burgundian Succession (created 2015-05-12) has been in my top 10 of most-viewed articles (155,535 in total since 2015-07-01; 57 a day on average), even though it wasn't that long or well-written. Over the years I've improved its contents bit by bit to match its apparent popularity. The fact that Prussian invasion of Holland is 24th on the list no doubt has more to do with your excellent expansion of it rather than the fact that I originally created it as little more than a stub. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 12:58, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I would now like to return to my promise of more detail-criticisms. I have gone through par. 1.1 (17th and 18th century) with what you might deem a "fine comb" and on the way provided a number of wikilinks. These may sometimes seem duplicates of the ones provided in the "lede", but I think it always is prudent to repeat a wikilink if it is liable to help the reader. For instance, in the Lede Orange is referred to as "William the Silent" (correctly) but in the piece on P.C. Hooft he suddenly appears as "Orange". It may take a while for that penny to drop. I also think a wikilink should be provided the first time the need arises. I noticed that you gave a wikilink to Robert Fruin later in the article, but not the first time you mention him and Nuyens. So I put one in there.

However that may be, during this perusal a number of things occurred to me.

• I got the impression that you were engaging in a polemic against the "group of Protestant chroniclers" who in your opinion were unduly privileged above Catholic colleagues. However that may be, that whetted my appetite for knowing more about those Protestant historians. You do provide information on Grotius and P,C. Hooft, but what about Bor, van Meeteren, Altzema, and Baudartius? I would like to hear more! (as a sidebar, you'll notice that I write "van Meeteren" here with a lowercase "v" in "van". This conforms to the Anglophone convention of using lowercase in Dutch names like "de Witt" and "van Mook" in sentences, as opposed to using uppercase, as is the Dutch convention. In my experience some American editors get quite upset if you use the Dutch convention in "their" Wikipedia). In sum, I think you should add descriptions of the work of the gentlemen I mentioned in this section.
• I forgot to mention this in my remarks on the "Dutch Revolt" vs. "Eighty Years' War controversy, but a Dutch wikipedian left an objection against your assertion that the matter has been "decided" on the talk-page of your Dutch wikipedia article. You haven't (yet) dealt with it there.
• On the subject of polemics: my impression is that your polemical approach is not limited to the example I provided above, but that it informed the structure of the article in more places. This applies to your inclusion of the section "Alleged Cateau-Cambrésis Catholic conspiracy", which I think actually should appear as part of the articles on Causes of the War and possibly several other Wikipedia articles. You could here briefly refer to those other passages, but you need not explain the whole controversy. This applies mutatis mutandis to (most of) the section "Role of main players". You could use that material for edits in the relevant wiki articles. Dropping these sections here would provide space for our planned expansion of the article in the field of the historiography of Anglophone contributions to the field of study. As always, just a suggestion.--Ereunetes (talk) 23:21, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

  • Thanks for these corrections. :) I would appreciate a maintenance of British English conventions as indicated at the top of the article and this talk page in order to keep its style consistent.

  Extra linking mentions of Orange to William the Silent seems like a good idea. Strictly speaking, I named him William "the Silent" of Orange in the lede, as is my custom on English Wikipedia, because although his English Wikipedia article's title is William the Silent, "William of Orange" is also widely used in English literature, "Orange" is his commonly shortened name amongst scholars around the world, and "the Silent" is a rather strange nickname that hasn't been well-explained or understood by anyone. As William the Silent#Epithet notes, it is usually connected to Historiography of the Eighty Years' War#Testimony in Orange's Apology, but as that section discusses, the authenticity of Orange's 1580 testimony of a 1559 conversation between Henry II and Alba is questioned, let alone whether it is the actual origin of his nickname "the Silent". As the Epithet section goes on to say: Exactly when and by whom the nickname "the Silent" was used for the first time is not known with certainty. It is traditionally ascribed to Cardinal de Granvelle, who is said to have referred to William as "the silent one" sometime during the troubles of 1567. Both the nickname and the accompanying anecdote are first found in a historical source from the early 17th century.[35][36] This was 13 years before Orange published his Apology and was conferred upon him by an opponent rather than an admirer, so these two hypotheses are incompatible. All the more reason for me to avoid "the Silent" and default to "Orange".

  As for your other linkings, they seem fine to me; Dutch Wikipedia is overly allergic to linking to the same article more than once, but English Wikipedia is more helpful in repeating a link when readers might have forgotten who or what a certain topic was about again when they've gone through several sections of reading and may not remember who the guy with the strange name in section 2 was again. ;) In case of Fruin and Nuyens, the fact that their first mentions aren't linked is probably due to editing; I added the text above their first linkings later and forgot to check whether they were linked upon their first-ever mention in the final version, so thanks for that. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 13:37, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  I think we are in agreement. I have no objection at all to referring to "astutus Guglielmus" ("Slimme Willem"?) as Pieter Titelmans referred to him according to Fruin (this is in an edit in a footnote to the Epithet section of William the Silent I recently made) as "Orange". I have done this myself in the past. My point is that one cannot expect the unwary American reader to know about this convention without some form of explanation. I noticed that you changed "realize" back to "realise". No objection of course. I only changed it because "realise" is apparently "a thorn in the eye" (batavism!) of my (American) spell-checker; it angrily underlines the offending word in red right now as I am making this edit :-) Ereunetes (talk) 20:22, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  • On the "group of Protestant chroniclers": this is very much taken from the – indeed at times polemical – perspective of Nuyens, whom I know Fruin agreed with on this point (Nuyens quotes Fruin to that effect). But it doesn't really do "justice" to them, and I think you're correct that a late-20th-century or early 21st-century summary of these Protestant chroniclers' work is in order, not just a joint mid-19th-century Nuyens–Fruin general rejection. A van der Zeijden-like source would be needed here.

As for capitalisation of words such as van, de, der, den etc. in Dutch surnames whenever their first name is not mentioned, this is indeed a (rather recent) convention in written Dutch that appears to have arisen out of a need to distinguish such surnames from other words in a sentence that aren't part of the surname. This risk of confusion is minimal in English as it doesn't regularly use van, de, der, den in front of surnames, so with the exception of names such as Van Halen, you are right that this convention has no necessity in English. In some cases we may even translate van as of, usually in noble titles such as Willem van Oranje > William of Orange, but the preposition may be dropped altogether when using "Orange" as shorthand (as discussed above; Nuyens 1869 does this as well by simply writing Oranje). As you probably known as well, this is especially done before the 1811 Napoleonic introduction of standard Dutch surnames by civil registration; after that, words such as van become part of surnames and are no longer erased from abbreviations. As a non-noble person, Emanuel van Meteren seems to be a case where both Meteren and van Meteren are acceptable abbreviations (update: I've just changed it to Meteren to resolve the matter). Nuyens 1869 used the latter, without a capital V, but he didn't have to; on the other hand, he did capitalise van in Van Wesembeke just a few sentences later, but then falls back to not capitalising van in Prof. van Vloten (although this person was born in 1818, after 1811, so van had become an official part of his surname). Another pre-1811 non-noble person such as Frederik van Leenhof is commonly abbreviated as Leenhof, without van, or Van, or of, by English writers such as Israel 2001, while Dutch writer Harry Jansen 2010 p. 244–245 is a little inconsistent in writing Frederik van Leenhof (first mention, not capitalising van), Van Leenhofs boek (capitalising van, although it also happens to be the first word of the sentence) and de Leenhofcontroverse (omitting van as part of the surname). It remains a bit of a grey area, but from now on I will certainly not capitalise such words in Dutch surnames on English Wikipedia unless in direct quotations, or if they are also capitalised in Dutch even when the first name is mentioned (this may be especially the case with Flemish names such as Bart De Wever, which is always capital D, or Wouter Van Besien, which is always capital V). Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 14:17, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Just to make sure we are not at cross-purposes I'd like to state what the Dutch, and what the Anglophone conventions are for a Dutch name with a family-name affix like "van" or "de". As always Wikipedia is the place to look this up :-) I found this article van (Dutch), that gives the "Dutch" convention (and also the Belgian and South African conventions), but is unfortunately silent on what is in question here, to wit, what is the British or American academic usage? Let's take an example: "Jan de Wit". with affix "de". This uses lowercase when used in the full name; but: "De Witt was a Dutch grandpensionary"; "The mob disemboweled the de Witten on the Groene Zoodje". I hope this is satisfactory. Dropping the "van" in the examples you mention is also OK, but not universally so: "Van Gogh" cannot be abbreviated to "Gogh" for instance. Ereunetes (talk) 19:52, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I realize that my "de Witt" examples don't prove anything. I have therefore looked at what appears to be "good practice" in Wikipedia articles about "de Witt", starting with the Wikipedia page de Witt (surname). The entries on this disambiguation page seem to use the convention of a non-capitalized "de". But then I discovered that there is also a disambiguation page De Witt (surname)! And also a disambiguation page DeWitt (name). And never the twain shall meet, because it appears to be very important which capitalization one uses as a search term to navigate this warren properly. Some people have been confused here. However this may be, I might have chosen a better example. So I looked at the (randomly chosen) page Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. And this page proves a good example of a page that follows the convention of using lowercase "van" within sentences. My question: is there a Wikipedia Law that governs these spelling conventions? I am a babe-in-the-woods as far as "Wikipedia Legislation" is concerned. Ereunetes (talk) 21:35, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

PS: I've decided to put the question (especially of pre-1811 non-noble names) to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anthroponymy#Capitalising or omitting words in Dutch surnames, because it might be that colleagues of ours have already cracked this chestnut elsewhere. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:06, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Excellent idea: kick the question upstairs :-) But see my previous entry. Ereunetes (talk) 19:54, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I have been busy on the talk-page you mention while you were away. My two interlocutors on that page confirmed that we may safely (and proudly) continue using our Dutch capitalization practices, despite all the examples of Wikipedia editors who routinely drop the initial capital of stand-alone Dutch surnames with family-name affixes like van. Though there is no formal Rule to that effect, one of them quoted the Chicago Manual of Style on the treatment of foreign names in American English, to support use of Dutch capitalization conventions. So we don't have to take any backtalk :-) Still, I wonder why so many Americans use lowercase in names like van Leeuwenhoek instead of Van Leeuwenhoek? One of my interlocutors suggested that they simply make a guess. Maybe they are misled by the fact that after the Christian name(s) in a person's name the affix starts with lowercase. The reasoning may be: a proper name is" Christian name + surname." Dropping the Christian name leaves the surname. Ergo, you may use the version with the lowercase affix, "if only because the noun is already capitalized". There is a certain "logic" there. Why do the Dutch need two capitals in their surnames? I find the practice not only in Wikipedia, but also in the American press. I don't think it is a conspiracy; just something that "comes naturally", especially if you don't have a Chicago MOS at your fingertips. Ereunetes (talk) 00:55, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

• Naming: Yes, I granted that the matter hasn't been "decided" yet when I wrote Most Dutch Wikipedians at the recent discussion also seemed to, if not always entirely agree with me, understand my point that "Dutch Revolt" has been suffering from extremely bad periodisation and characterisation for decades, so that now nobody really knows what it refers to, and that on the Dutch talk page we were getting close to an understanding [...]. That is to say: I think it is evolving towards an agreement, but there is no agreement yet. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:18, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  Agreed, as far as I am concerned. But don't leave poor user "Happytravels" dangling on the talk page of the Dutch version of this article, please. He deserves an answer, I think, and is waiting since 22 November 2022 :-) Ereunetes (talk) 20:29, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

• On the "Alleged Cateau-Cambrésis Catholic conspiracy", I do not think it would be a good idea to merge that section into "Causes and motives". For that it is too big and specific of a claim of some sort of plot that is alleged to have been forged almost a decade the war broke out, and more than two decades before Orange said or wrote anything about it. Moreover, its authenticity has been widely called into question by historians such as Van der Lem and Haan, as it fit neatly within Protestant and Orange's personal propaganda, and it took Orange a very long time to bring it up if this had really been a motive/cause of the war (at least for him personally) all along. If it was, it would still just have been his personal motive until 1580 because he kept silent about it (one of the reasons why he might have become known as "The Silent") for 20 years, so no other rebel who fought against royalist Spanish Habsburg forces between 1566 and 1580 had ever been motivated by this alleged conspiracy that supposedly only Orange was privy to for all these years. And aside from Orange's dubious 1580 testimony, interpretations of the religious contents of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis as constituting a plan to exterminate all Protestants in Europe just because it calls for an oecumenical council, or that there must have been some "secret clause" (that nobody has ever found) in order to be able to explain why such devastating wars of religion would break out in France and the Low Countries in subsequent decades, are just quite unbelievable and difficult to take seriously in light of what we know (Haan 2010 has done excellent analysis on this). It was most likely just an early modern conspiracy theory that wasn't true, but served to explain complex and emotionally impactful developments, namely the devastating wars of religion in these two regions of Western Europe. In hindsight, modern historians looking back at the 16th-century Protestant Reformation in Europe aren't surprised that some European wars of religion would likely also take place in France and the Low Countries in the latter half of the 16th century after these had already happened in the Holy Roman Empire (and relatively small in Switzerland), Scandinavia (including the largest battle ever fought in Iceland), and the British Isles, i.e. all the neighbouring countries. France and the Low Countries had only gotten away relatively bloodless so far, with the 1535 Amsterdam Anabaptist riot and 1545 French Mérindol massacre being exceptions, but all the factors for large-scale religious wars were probably already in place. There is no need to presume a conspiracy for wars that would probably have occurred one way or the other. The only reason to take the Cateau-Cambrésis Catholic conspiracy theory seriously is because it became so widespread later and is still having an influence in modern times on people (including some scholars who preceded Haan) who believe it can't just have been all made up by Protestant propaganists (including Orange), or that it can't be a coincidence that after Philip II and Henry II conclude peace in 1559, their realms are suddenly engulfed in religious wars. For all these reasons, I think it is important to have a section on this topic in this article, separate from "Causes and motives". I have also included some of this information in other articles, such as Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559)#Religion, which is used as an excerpt here. That some bits might not be relevant enough such as the sentences about Pope Pius V and the Papacy is true, we could look at ways to exclude that from the excerpt. In turn, claims about the Spanish Inquisition being introduced in the Netherlands because of the ecclesiastical reorganisation prompted by the 1559 Super Universas papal bull might also be worth expanding on. In this context, it could be worth exploring the claim that this also threatened to weaken the position of the secular nobility, who now had to compete with a much larger number of bishops, and that following education to become a priest was now required for a nobleman in order to be elegible for episcopal office. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a prominent reason for the Netherlandish nobility to act in opposition to both the Vatican and Madrid's attempt to expand their power, thus forming an underlying cause/motive for many noblemen to support the revolt. (This is one of the loud complaints of Egmont in the 1984 Willem van Oranje series, and I've seen some literature backing that up, such as Geyl, Rogier, Smit and Parker saying the nobles joined the rebellion because they feared loss of their privileges, which is already mentioned in the text). Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 16:10, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  You almost convinced me that "Alleged Cateau-Cambrésis Catholic conspiracy" deserves its own free-standing Wikipedia article :-) Or you could make a new section "Major historiographical controversies" in this article and make this lemma one of the entries. This may be preferable, because some of the other issues you mention below could be usefully put in such a section. Ereunetes (talk) 19:25, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  Haha, well I'm glad I sparked your interest! I don't think "Major historiographical controversies" would be a good idea, because it would run the risk of becoming a random-facts or miscellaneous stuff section, just like "Clarification of causes" and "Related issues" in Historiographic issues about the American Civil War. These section titles say nothing and are somewhat arbitrary. Besides, what is considered "major" or "minor" could be POV, and anyone could insert their issue into this section (which might violate WP:UNDUE).

  On the other hand, I suppose it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to rename the whole section Allegations of Spanish Inquisition or something. After all, the last subsection title is Other claims of Spanish Inquisition in the Netherlands, and I suppose Cateau-Cambrésis Catholic conspiracy theory (consisting mainly of the Treaty or an alleged secret clause, and Orange's testimony about the same year) is just the most prominent of many arguments that have been put forward over the years that the Spanish monarchy was 'going to introduce the Inquistion in the Habsburg Netherlands any day now'. The Super Universas bull was a less popular argument that surely this was proof the Spanish Inquisition would be imposed upon the Low Countries soon. (Contrary to popular belief, everybody expected the Spanish Inquisition). So how about:

  • Allegations of Spanish Inquisition
    • Religion in the 1559 Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis
    • Testimony in Orange's 1580 Apology
    • 1559 papal bull Super Universas

  We could even broaden this section to encompass generally everything relating to the Spanish Black Legend relating to the Habsburg Netherlands, but perhaps that would make it too broad.

  On the other hand, perhaps it is time to also discuss some Catholic propaganda and myths relating to the war, such as the Martyrs of Gorkum (whose deaths have been exploited to claim all Catholics were innocent) and the so-called "Miracle" of Empel (which has been used to claim God was on Spain's side), etc. Plenty of Protestant propaganda and misleading narratives are being debunked in the current article (which at least in Dutch historiography of the war had been the major challenge until around 1900), but that doesn't mean we should let the "other side" off the hook. LJ Rogier had a lot to say about how Catholic apologists such as Nuyens sought to whitewash a lot of war crimes by the Spanish/royalist/Catholic forces and exaggerate those of the Dutch/Netherlandish rebels/States/Protestants. He said it doesn't matter who committed a crime, as a crime is always wrong, and both enemies and allies should be held accountable. Then again, I'm not sure how to organise such information inside this article yet. Any ideas? Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:37, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  Ideas? Me? :-) Not particularly. But maybe this article could offer some suggestions (also as a general framework for a historiography article) : Cruz, Laura. “The 80 Years' Question: The Dutch Revolt in Historical Perspective.” History Compass 5, no. 3 (May 2007): 914–34. It is easy to find (even a free podcast about it), but it is mostly behind paywalls. However, I found a way around that. Go to Google Scholar and enter the complete citation. You get one hit. To the right of the title you'll find a link "PDF academia.edu" and if you click that you'll get full access to a free pdf of the article (!) Enjoy! Ereunetes (talk) 22:10, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  I found it, thanks! Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 22:35, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I think I fell in love; pardon my youthful exuberance :-) I wish I had found and read this article when it was published in 2007. Or at least before I started meddling with Wikipedia. So much work could have been avoided; so much debate decisively ended. "Cruz!" would be the argument to end all discussions :-) My advice is: take this article as the starting point for your attempts at revision of the article, in the same sense I used Israel's "Dutch Republic" for the "Eighty Years' War" article (see my remarks above), and Schama's "Patriots and Liberators" for Batavian Republic and Patriottentijd. If there is any question about Cruz' academic credentials see here [1]--Ereunetes (talk) 23:09, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

It's an interesting article. I added some of Cruz' comments to Grotius' section, I hope it is not WP:UNDUE?

I must say however that I rather disagree with Cruz' overestimation of Motley's influence on Dutch historiography of the war, e.g. Motley’s liberal-Protestant account stood as the pinnacle of scholarship on the Revolt until the 1930s. As my article here shows, Motley was immediately challenged by Nuyens, van Vloten and eventually even Fruin, who by 1862 admitted being taken in by Motley. By 1870, Motley was pretty much out the window for serious scholars, and Fruin and Nuyens continued dominating historiography until around 1900, when others like Blok and Colenbrander took over. I am surprised how Cruz could miss all that. One reason could be that she thought Rise of the Dutch Republic wasn't published until 1865 (the correct year is 1856), so she may have missed the fierce debates taking place in between? So I advise caution in taking Cruz at face value. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 16:39, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

I suspect that "1865" is a simple typo and that she meant "1856". Speaking of Colenbrander: I miss his name in the article. So she is not the only one:-) In general: I think your criticism is of the "glass half empty" type, which I'd like to counter with my "glass half full" optimism :-) This may unintentionally sound patronizing, but I think she did a terrific job for someone who is not a native Dutch speaker, but nevertheless mastered an enormous amount of Dutch-language secondary literature (and probably primary sources also). There were bound to be some gaps (I myself miss more comments on Israel, whose Dutch Republic is not even mentioned, let alone his Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low Countries and the Struggle for World Supremacy, 1585–1713.) But she ended her survey in 2007, so she just missed James Tracy's The Founding of the Dutch Republic (2008). And many others, like the recent Dutch wave of military-history works, starting with Olaf van Nimwegen, The Dutch Army and the Military Revolutions, 1588-1688 (Boydell Press, 2010) and many others; I don't even know most of them. So there is scope for Original Research :-) As far as Motley is concerned: you know I share your skepticism. I think Motley never learned to read Dutch, let alone 16th/17th-century Dutch, so he must have cribbed from others (Groen van Prinsterer comes to mind who published in French) to get his apparent knowledge of Dutch archives. In any case, listening to Motley, I imagine hearing the voice of a ventriloquist, probably Groen again, who is the real auctor intellectualis of his Orangist ravings. Ereunetes (talk) 00:33, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Another suggestion: I noticed that you didn't mention François de Bas and his co-author F.J.G. ten Raa in the article. I think they at least deserve an honorable mention for their contributions in military history on parts of the Eighty Year's War. The Dutch edition of Van Nimwegen's book was entitled "Deser landen crijchsvolck". For the political aspects of the Dutch Revolt Helmut Koenigsberger should I think be mentioned for his work on Charles V and Philip II, and for Monarchies, states generals and parliaments: the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries (2001). Other works in the same sphere as Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987) are Jan Lucassen and Karel Davids (eds.) A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective (Cambridge, 1995). Also on the political aspect of the Revolt: Peter Arnade, who has written works like Beggars, iconoclasts, and civic patriots. The political culture of the Dutch Revolt (2008) and Robert Oresko, G.C. Gibbs, and H.M. Scott (eds.), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: essays in memory of Ragnhild Hatton (1997) . If I think of more, I'll be sure to mention them (I think all of these are not in the article and not in Cruz's historiography Ereunetes (talk) 21:46, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

@Ereunetes: Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate it! Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 08:42, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Structure and scope

Dear Ereunetes, your question about whether the "Role of main players" fits the article's scope is an interesting one, which has prompted me to look at the structure of other war/conflict-related historiography articles in the Category:Historiography by war or conflict. This is a rather large topic so I decided to split it off as a separate section here on the talk page). The first thing to notice here is that it seems virtually impossible to compare this article 1-on-1 with another Historiography of war X article, because it's either not a 'war', or just part of a war. But here I go:

• Historiographic issues about the American Civil War, which served as my main source of inspiration for this article, is entirely thematically organised, and not chronologically or geographically or by point-of-view schools. However, the sections "Clarification of causes" and "Related issues" are de facto random-facts sections.
• Historiography of the Crusades is organised chronologically, except for the Terminology, Chronological and geographical frameworks, and Studies of primary sources sections. (I've just made some slight adjustments to that article to conform with well-established conventions).
• Historiography of the French Revolution has a mix of chronological and point-of-view schools organisation, similar to, but different from, Historiography of the Cold War.
• Historiography of the War of 1812 is organised by points-of-view schools sections. I like how "Popular views" and "Historians' views" are separated, but the function of the "American views" and "Canadian views" is not immediately apparent: some views mentioned in these sections are popular views (e.g. Canadian opinion polls), or political views (e.g. U.S. presidents and members of Congress). Moreover, the Historians' views section is subdivided into thematic subsections rather than into historians' schools, which deviates from the organisation of the sections.
• Historiography of the Paraguayan War is entirely chronologically organised.
• Historiography on Carlism during the Francoist era is just a bibliography in prose format, thematically organised.
• Historiography of the causes of World War I is entirely chronologically organised, except for "the Fischer thesis" points-of-view schools section, which stretches from 1961 to at least 2014, overlapping with the "Later works" section (1960-2000) and "Post 2000" section.
• Historiography of the Battle of France is organised chronologically, with two exceptions for "national" interpretations (French and German, respectively)
• Historiography of World War II is throroughly disorganised. "Historiographical viewpoints" is a bit randomly thematic. The Taylor section more or less a review or a single 1961 book. Then random excerpt section leads to Historiography of the Battle of France above. A geographical "Eastern Front" section is subdivided in a half-sourced random facts lede section, a thematic "War crimes of the Wehrmacht" subsection, another random 2006 book review posing as a subsection, and a randomly unsourced thematic "Holocaust denial" subsection. Penultimately, a geographic section titled "German-occupied Europe" (in scope overlapping with all previous sections) starts with a random-facts lede section, a thematic "Common themes: heroic liberation from Nazis" subsection, and then some random-facts by countries subsections with dubious links. Finally, a random thematic section "Women" with a main-article link to "Women in World War II" instead of text concerning historiography of women in World War II. This article really needs to be reorganised and rewritten. (Update: I've done some rewriting to fix the most egregious issues).
• Historiography of the Cold War has a point-of-view schools organisation that is more or less organised chronologically by the order in which each school emerged, similar to, but different from, Historiography of the French Revolution.

My tentative conclusion is that there is no established or commonly or broadly agreed structure that articles on the Historiography of war X, but (except for a mention in the Carlism bibliography) no other article in this meta-analysis has a section or subsection dedicated to the role of the main players of the conflict in question. That makes mine an anomaly, and vulnerable to your challenge. I suppose it's possible to move valuable materials to the biographies of the people in question, or in the case of Maurice and Oldenbarnevelt to your Trial of Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius and Hogerbeets, but wouldn't you agree that putting them side by side has added value? So much discussion and writing revolves around what kinds of people they were, and how their actions (including successes and failures) influenced the outbreak, course and conclusion of the war (although I haven't covered anyone after 1625).

More importantly, the meta-analysis reveals that there are many options available for structuring information in a Historiography of war X article, and some are clearly better than others. The eternal dispute between pro-chronology and pro-thematic historians manifests itself all over these pages, especially in the World War II article where it constantly jumps back and forth. The advantage of doing everything chronologically is that it allows readers to follow the general debates between historians throughout the centuries, but the disadvantage is that it has to be vague on specifics. I found myself having to do both a chronological general overview, as well as thematic sections on more specific issues that I felt I couldn't do justice in the chronological general overview. This resulted in 2. Name and periodisation (the most important point of contention that prompted me to write the article in the first place), 3. Causes and motives, 4. Alleged Cateau-Cambrésis Catholic conspiracy, and 5. Role of main players. As stated, I also intended to do a section on the stadtholderate/republicanism/monarchism, and a section on Dutch and Belgian nationalism, nation-building, national identity etc. and the grootneerlandist challenge to kleinneerlandist and belgicist national(ist) historiography. In addition, I was considering writing a section or even an article on the role of women and sexual violence, and a translation of nl:Migratiestroom in de Nederlanden as a demographic/socioeconomic thematic article on refugees and their impact, about which a section in this article could serve as historiographic analysis.

I'm curious to hear how you think a Historiography of war X article can or should be organised generally, and how this one can or should be specifically. I'm open to many suggestions and options, as there appears to be nothing like well-established conventions for these types of articles on English Wikipedia yet. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 18:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I have no fixed opinion on the correct structure of historiographic articles on whatever war X (or Y, or "Eighty Years'"). But then: should the question not be even more broad? I mean, we use the term "Eighty Years'War" here no longer as a moniker for a particular military history, but implicitly include the social, political, and cultural aspects also (see the discussion above). I have no particular problem with the structure you have chosen up to and including section 3.Causes and motives. For the rest see my previous suggestions. Ereunetes (talk) 20:39, 6 January 2023 (UTC)