Jan van Naaldwijk’s Chronicles of Holland

Book excerpt: The little-known author Jan van Naaldwijk, whose two early sixteenth-century Dutch chronicles of Holland are preserved in autograph manuscripts in the British Library, wrote at a moment reputed to be the turning point between medieval and Renaissance modes of historical writing. While he primarily relied on the medieval historical tradition of Holland, he expanded it in ways that allow us to appreciate the broader impact of innovations occurring at the same time in more 'professional' scholarly circles. This is the first in-depth study of these chronicles and their relation to their sources, placed in the wider context of history writing running from the mid-fourteenth century into the eighteenth, providing new insights into the continuities and transitions that characterized the historical tradition of Holland from the late middle ages well into the early modern period. An accompanying cd-rom contains transcriptions of both Jan's chronicles. Winner of the Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize 2012 Short-listed for the Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize 2012.