Fiction is by definition a product of the creative imagination, not a marshalling of evidence and argument, and as I said in This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin.

“The writer revising a first draft, or re-building it totally, is always chiefly concerned with the best-adapted to the new environment: not with what isn’t useful, but with what is. The no-longer-useful disappears, unheeded, into the mud, so comparing the first, second, or umpteenth drafts would only show the traces, not the process, of how each evolved into the next. And if the essential work of murdering our darlings involves cutting away the traits that would show the finished novel’s relationship to its origins, then we get out the knife and do the deed, so that a liberating amnesia leaves us free to imagine new things. It’s for the literary palaeontologists of posterity to dig in the mud-turned-rock, and puzzle out the evolutionary stages from such fossilised corpses as they can find.”

So although over the ten years of The Bruegel Boy’s gestation I drew substantially on all these books as well as many, many others, this list is definitely a suggestion for further reading, not a formal list of sources and references. I have also, therefore, not included many academic papers on specific aspects of Bruegel, his work and his world, which a search on JSTOR will easily find.

Having said that, since history, art, faith and sex 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, Flammarrion, 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

Art-Making

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

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

  • Cennino Cennin, 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

  • 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

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

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

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

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

  • C V Wedgwood: William the Silent, Jonathan Cape, 1944

Social History

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

  • 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