Eighty Years’ War

Editorial illustration on the historiography of the Dutch Revolt

For BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review's 50th anniversary issue, I illustrated "50 Years of the Eighty Years' War in BMGN" by Anne-Laure Van Bruaene. The essay provides an overview of how the journal itself has written about the Dutch Revolt since its founding in 1970.

I drew a heraldic lion, the traditional symbol of the Low Countries, pinned with archival reference tags and divided like a butcher's diagram. The lion, and the history it represents, is something to be studied piece by piece. It no longer swings a sword. It holds a pen. Dutch and Belgian flags wind around it together: fifty years of historians from both nations steadily annotating, citing and reassessing it.