The origins of this monograph can be traced to a stormy November afternoon in 1981. Browsing through the bookshop of the Erasmus-university in Rotterdam I came across Quentin Skinner's study on The foundations of modern political thought. Although the two volumes dealt with the political thought of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and therefore had little to do with the theories of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, high up on the charts of the Rotterdam curriculum of normative political theory, I was permitted to put them on the examination list.

As always during an oral examination I was asked to criticize the books I had studied. Trying to think of something original, I hazarded that the section on the Dutch Revolt in the superb study of Quentin Skinner was rather poor. Somehow that remark must have stirred a tender chord, as it was suggested that I do a study of the political thought of the Dutch Revolt for my graduate thesis. Reading about four treatises published during the Revolt to justify the resistance against Philip II should suffice. Such was the beginning of what became, in 1984, the topic of my Ph.D. research.

Throughout the past years several people have helped me to find my way through Dutch sixteenth-century history, the history of European political thought and the main collections of sixteenth-century literature in the Netherlands and Belgium.