New book coming out in February

Searching in the Netherlands for a portrait of my 11 x great grandparents, I came across a remarkable painting by the Antwerp painter Maerten de Vos, 'Moses Showing the Tablets of the Law to the Israelites', which shows wealthy merchants, artists and poets, a ground-breaking botanist, a pioneer in women's education, and the greatest publisher of the age gathered around a portrayal of Moses and Aaron with the stone tablets of the law engraved with the Ten Commandments in Dutch. In searching for an answer to the question of what brought together this diverse group of influential people in sixteenth-century Antwerp, I turned to their letters, diaries, friendship albums and poetry and ended up writing a a group biography. As I found out more about each life and explored the links that brought them together, I decided there was a book to be written about how a network of friendship and exchange of scholarly ideas that crossed the Channel and Europe's borders lay behind the rich civilisation of sixteenth-century Antwerp, until it was destroyed by the struggle for political and religious power in the Eighty Years War when the Dutch fought the Spanish for independence. And now, slightly to my surprise, it is coming out next February! It's called 'Antwerp and the Golden Years: Culture, Commerce and Conflict' (Unicorn).