Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age - Softcover

Schama

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520061470 ISBN 13: 9780520061477

Publisher: University of California Press, 1992

Synopsis

Describes the cultural and social milieu of seventeenth-century Holland, where, despite great material wealth and general prosperity, an "anxiety of superabundance" permeated all aspects of the culture

About this title

About the Author

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University in New York. His publications include Patriots and Liberators, The Embarrassment of Riches, Citizens, Dead Certainties, Landscape and Memory, and Rembrandt's Eyes.

From the Inside Flap

Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in constant dread of being corrupted by happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama re-creates in precise detail a nation's mental state. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators. He tells us how the Dutch celebrated themselves and how they were slandered by their enemies.

"History on the grand scale...An ambitious portrait of one of the most remarkable episodes in modern history."--New York Times

"Wonderfully inclusive; with wit and intense curiosity he teases out meaning from every aspect of Dutch seventeenth-century life."--Robert Hughes

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520061470
• ISBN 13: 9780520061477
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 711