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KAVALER Ethan Matt (ed.), VAN BRUANE Anne-Laure (ed.)Netherlandish Culture of the Sixteenth Century : urban perspectivesTurnhout : Brepols, 2017, XVI-388 p.Collection Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800) ; 41ISBN 978-2-503-57582-7N 2691Résumé éditeur :A selection of essays by an international group of historians and art historians on the rich urban culture of the sixteenth-century Low Countries.The authors of this volume examine various fields of cultural discourse in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century: the political, commercial, religious, artistic, and sensory domains, and less obviously metaphysical properties like time and space. What defined the Low Countries were not its borders and its territories but its cities, and their economies dominated political relations. A dense network of large cities and small towns developed hand in hand with a broad range of textile and luxury industries. In Antwerp, culture was commerce: its art and printing industries catered to much of the Western world and, at the same time, carved a confident self-image celebrating the liberal arts as a means of social and self-improvement. Antwerp is omnipresent in this book, with essays on its painting, printing, politics, and public festivals. But other cities such as Bruges, Leuven, and Leiden also figure prominently. It was precisely the interconnectedness of urban centers, large, middle and small, rather than their autonomous character, that defined civic culture in the Low Countries. Among the topics treated are differing notions of urban topography, the dialogue between city and court, issues of censorship, and the sensory and psychological response to texts and images.Ethan Matt Kavaler is Director of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. He specializes in early modern Netherlandish art and Gothic art and architecture throughout northern Europe. He is the author of Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise and Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe 1470-1540.  He is now writing a book on Netherlandish sculpture of the sixteenth century.Anne-Laure Van Bruaene is Professor of Early Modern Cultural History at Ghent University. She specializes in the urban culture of the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. Her research interests include the history of guilds and confraternities and the social contexts of art, literature and religion. She is the author of Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400-1650).Axe de recherches :  Axe 1 : Cultures visuelles et matérielles