Antwerp and the Golden Age.

Antwerp’s wealth from trade allowed it to become a patron of the arts, funding architecture, painting, and printing, which made it a vital center for the exchange of ideas and culture?.

This book explores how a diverse group of influential people contributed to the city being a social and economic powerhouse and how it impacted their lives.

Shows the impact of the Reformation on the arts.



A remarkable painting by the Antwerp painter Maerten de Vos, 'Moses Showing the Tablets of the Law to the Israelites', shows

wealthy merchants, artists and poets, a ground-breaking botanist, a pioneer in women’s education, and the greatest publisher of

the age gathered around a portrayal of Moses and Aaron with the stone tablets of the law engraved with the Ten Commandments

in Dutch.

In searching for an answer to the question of what brought together this diverse group of influential people in sixteenth-century

Antwerp, Richard Willmott turns to their letters, diaries, friendship albums and poetry to write a group biography. As he finds

out more about each life and explores the links that brought them together, he shows how a network of friendship and exchange

of scholarly ideas that crossed the Channel and Europe’s borders lay behind the rich civilisation of sixteenth-century Antwerp,

until it was destroyed by the struggle for political and religious power in the Eighty Years War when the Dutch fought the Spanish

for independence.

About the Author

Richard Willmott read English at Cambridge University and took an MA in Early Modern French Literature at the University of

East Anglia. He has taught literature all his life. His other books include an introduction to metaphysical poetry, an edition of

Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and The Voluble Soul, a monograph on the poetry of the priest and poet

Thomas Traherne. In retirement he has chaired the Traherne Association and enjoys stewarding in Hereford Cathedral's early

modern chained library, and visiting art galleries.