Over the ten years of The Bruegel Boy’s gestation, I drew substantially on many books, and found bits and scraps of inspiration and information in dozens of others. But fiction is by definition a product of the creative imagination, not a marshalling of evidence and argument. Consequently, as Rose Tremain says,

“All the studying and reading, all the social fieldwork, all the location visiting, all the garnering of what is or what has been - must be reimagined before it can find a place in the text. It must rise into the orbit of the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind before it can acquire its own truth for the work in question [...] Reimagining implies some measure of forgetting. The actual or factual has to lose definition, become fluid, before the imagination can begin its task of reconstruction. Data transferred straight from the research area to the book will simply remain data. It will be imaginatively inert.” (Rose Tremain, ‘The First Mystery’ in The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored, ed. Clare Boylan, Penguin, 1993; my italics)

So even if I wanted to provide a formal, traceable list of sources and references, I simply could not do so. Instead, this list attempts to acknowledge the work of the writers who have helped me most, and give some pointers towards further reading for anyone who would like to discover more about Bruegel, his work and his world.

I have therefore not included the many academic papers on specific aspects of Bruegel which a scholarly search engine such as Google Scholar or JSTOR will easily find. If you are interested in research as part of writers’ creative process - how to do it, when to do it, and the strange business of changing facts into fictions - click through to This Itch of Writing.

But since history, art, faith and love are some of the great subjects of human enquiry, most of the books listed here are of course well worth reading or browsing for sheer pleasure.

Bruegel

  • Manfred Sellink, Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints. Ludion, 2007.

  • Philippe and Françoise Roberts-Jones, Bruegel, Flammarion, 2012

  • Walter S Gibson, Bruegel, Thames & Hudson, 1977

  • Bruegel: The Hand of the Master, ed. Elke Oberthaler, Sabine Pénot, Manfred Sellink and Ron Spronk, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wein, 2018

Some of the books I drew on to write The Bruegel Boy

Art-Making

  • Susie Nash, Northern Renaissance Art, Oxford University Press, 2008

  • Craig Harbison: The Art of the Northern Renaissance, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995

  • Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook: ‘I Libro dell’Arte’, trans Daniel V. Thomson Jnr, Dover, 2000

  • Philip Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, Viking, 2001

  • Daniel V. Thompson, The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, Dover, 1956

  • Nicholas Penny, A Closer Look at Pictorial Space, National Gallery, 2017

  • David Bomford and Ashok Roy, A Closer Look at Colour, National Gallery, 2009

  • Jo Kirby, A Closer Look at Techniques of Painting, National Gallery, 2011

  • Susan Lambert, Prints: Art and Techniques, V & A Publication, 2001

  • T J Clark, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, Thames & Hudson, 2018

  • Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, Allen Lane, 2008

Faith and Politics

  • Alastair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries, Hambledon & London, 2003

  • Alistair Hamilton: The Family of Love, James Clark & Co., 1981

  • Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant image question in Western and Eastern Europe, Routledge, 1993

  • Diarmaid MacCulloch: Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700, Allen Lane, 2003

  • Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction (4th Edn), John Wiley & Sons, 2012

  • Diarmaid MacCulloch: All Things Made New, Writings on the Reformation, Allen Lane, 2016

  • Christopher F. Black, The Italian Inquisition, Yale University Press, 2009

  • Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision 4th Edition, Yale University Press, 2014

  • Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580, Yale University Press, 1992

  • Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971

  • Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806, Oxford University Press, 1995

  • Pieter Geyl, History of the Dutch-Speaking Peoples 1555-1648, Phoenix Press 2001

  • Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings, trans Mary T. Clark, Paulist Press, 1984

Social History

  • Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife, Pandora, 2001

  • Michael Pye, The Edge of the World, Viking, 2014

  • Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Penguin 1990

  • François Boucher, A History of Costume in the West, new edn. trans John Ross, Thames & Hudson, 1987

  • James Laver, A Concise History of Costume, Thames & Hudson, 1969

  • Elizabeth Currie: Inside the Renaissance House, V & A Publishing, 2006

  • Judith Flanders, The Making of Home: The 500-year story of How Our Houses Became Homes, Atlantic Books, 2014

  • John Guy: Gresham’s Law: The Life and World of Queen Elizabethh I’s Banker, Profile Books, 2020