English Protestant Literary Networks in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1592–1620 The Household of God

Chapter 1. Historical Background to the Founding of the Dutch Republic, the Development of Dutch Economy, Anglo-Netherlandic Relations, Sir Edward Conway, and the Cautionary Town of Brill c. 1580-1620; Chapter 2. “Nurseries of Souldiery” and the tyrocinium (SP 84/72 f. 105): A Case Study of the Cautionary Town of Brill; Chapter 3. Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Horace Vere and the Poetics of Militant Pan-Protestant Heroism; Chapter 4. “Let us not grieve the Soul of the stranger”: Attitudes towards Dutch and Flemish Migrants in Early Modern London Texts; Chapter 5. “Now instrument of blood, why doe ye seek vs?” (4.2.2055): Anglo-Dutch Republicanism and Transnational Literature in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s Lucanic-inspired Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619); Conclusion and Epilogue

Biography

Dr. Siobhán Cucu is an Irish scholar and lecturer in Early Modern Studies, specialising in Anglo-Dutch literary and cultural relations. She received her PhD from University College Cork in 2017, where her research examined transnational networks between England and the Low Countries in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She has taught at a range of institutions including Brunel University London, University College Cork, and the University of Tübingen. Her research focuses on early modern literature, theatre, religion, and the public sphere, with particular interest in transnational cultural exchange.

“The Household of God provides a fascinating view of Anglo-Dutch relations during the European Renaissance from the perspective of plays, pamphlets, poems, and state papers, which engaged with such issues as republicanism and Protestant unity. Cucu is a scrupulous historian and archivist but also a deft storyteller. The Household of God rings with mesmerizing tales of a bygone age, when faith and politics were often one in the same, and Protestants across Europe felt compelled to join together in executing God’s will in the world. Readers will appreciate the wide range of authors included—Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker among them—as well as Cucu’s enlightening account of the town of Brill and the lives of English exiles in the Netherlands.”

Ryan Hackenbracht, Texas Tech University