Double Agents

The early modern system of brokerage as a widespread practice of transmission and dissemination of political, intellectual and cultural ideas and objects has, in recent years, received some scholarly attention. Agents from different professional backgrounds – diplomats, scholars, artists, priests, booksellers and merchants – have, however, been studied mostly from a single, disciplinary perspective. The chapters making up this present volume all focus on individuals and professional groups who, in the course of their careers, became involved in multiple modes of cultural and political transfer. Together they present an international and interdisciplinary examination of early modern brokerage, a phenomenon which was permeating early modern society – and possibly even one of the fundamental organizational principles of that society.

Contributors include: Robert Hill, Thomas Kirk, Bianca Chen, Maartje van Gelder, Maurits A. Ebben, Peter Hauge, Susanna Kubersky-Piredda, Salvador Salort Pons, Martin Dönike, Badeloch Vera Noldus, and Marika Keblusek.

This publication was financed by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) as part of the VIDI research project "Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe".

Marika Keblusek, Ph.D. (1997) in Book History, Leiden University, is Assistant Professor in Art History at Leiden University. She has published widely on book history and cultural history including Your Humble Servant. Agents in Early Modern Europe (2006).

Badeloch Vera Noldus, Ph.D. (2002) in Architectural History, Utrecht University, is heritage consultant in Copenhagen. She has published on cultural exchange and art history, including Trade in Good Taste (2004), Your Humble Servant (2006) and Pieter Isaacsz (2007).

"This is a worthy contribution to a developing area of scholarship, and will appeal to historians working in a wide range of fields, from early modern diplomacy to collecting. It is a useful building block in arriving at an understanding of early modern agency. Its true value is in making available to the scholarly community these case studies, rather than providing the definitive study of early modern agency. We look forward to further efforts by the contributors to this volume and to further projects on early modern agency." – Christina M. Anderson, Hertford College, University of Oxford, in: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring 2012), p. 226.

"Double Agents is an exciting book. It contains valuable additions to our understanding of the motivations of individual agents, of the mechanisms of brokerage, and of the cultural contexts in which it took place. Many of these essays provide stimulating analyses and syntheses of how the contemporary symbiosis between the worlds of high politics and the fine arts conditioned the ways that agents adopted strategies of networking and gift-giving to fulfil their goals, which seem primarily directed towards obtaining social mobility. Keblusek, Noldus, and their collaborators have given an important incentive to further research on what one contributor labelled as ‘the fundamental organizational principle’ (60) of early modern society." – Michael Auwers, University of Antwerp, in: European History Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2014), p. 345.