Flanders under the Spanish occupation, a boy born the same day as Philip the Second, and the ashes of his burned father worn in a bag round his neck. De Coster wrote the Flemish national epic in French in 1867, and it was ignored until after his death; Tyl the trickster becomes the resistance itself. Thirteen plates of Brueghel and Teniers bring the peasant world of proverbs, carnival and winter fairs that Tyl turns topsy-turvy into the book itself.



