A remarkable painting by the Antwerp painter Maerten de Vos, 'Moses Showing the Tablets of the Law to the Israelites', 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, Richard Willmott turns to their letters, diaries, friendship albums and poetry to write a group biography. As he finds out more about each life and explores the links that brought them together, he shows 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.