THE DUTCH REVOLT against the Habsburg regime of King Philip II of Spain had a decisive impact on the development of Dutch literature from the mid-sixteenth century onward. The civil war that broke out around 1568 brought sweeping changes to the political, economic, and religious landscape, changes that are reflected in literature. By 1590 the seven northern provinces of the Low Countries in effect constituted an independent republic, as distinct from the southern provinces, where Spanish rule was consolidated and strengthened. The growing divide between the two was caused principally by religious differences, the southern Netherlands falling under Counter-Reformation Catholic rule, while the Republic was religiously diverse with a dominant Calvinist minority. Literature therefore developed within two rapidly diverging environments. Close similarities of language, genre, and subject matter remained, but they functioned in changing contexts.

Nevertheless we continue to see parallels between North and South, and the way in which new literary genres were introduced is one example. In the 1560s the Low Countries began to adopt elements of international Renaissance literature, first in the South and later in the North, with sonnets and odes gradually replacing the verse forms of the chambers of rhetoric, and tragedy and comedy taking over the function of the morality play. The focus was increasingly on individual authors, although the early decades of the seventeenth century saw a final flourishing of the chambers of rhetoric, with their collective activity.