TOwards a Social History of Early Modern Dutch

From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries patterns of living andcommunication in the Netherlands transformed dramatically due to developmentssuch as t... » 

From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries patterns of living andcommunication in the Netherlands transformed dramatically due to developmentssuch as the rise of cities and the invention of the printing press. Nowcultural historian Peter Burke demonstrates the key role these changes playedin the growth of early modern Dutch. Burke casts a wide net in order to revealthe factors that led to alterations in the Dutch language exploring forexample the everchanging relationship between the vernacular and Latin theincorporation of words from other languages and the birth of a movement towardstandardization. Placing these trends in a panEuropean context Burkesanalysis of the evolution of Dutch will prove to be illuminating reading forcultural historians in a variety of fields. «