The Eighty Years' War and the establishment of two states in the Low Countries inaugurated the publication of numerous texts to support a distinct Northern and Southern identity. This study analyses urban and regional chorographies written both in the North and in the South in the seventeenth century. It examines different strategies that chorographers developed to make sense of the recent and more remote past. It also looks at the development of different historiographical traditions in the Protestant North and the Catholic South and thus contributes to the current research interest in the history of historiography, cultures of memory and identity formation.