While situating Rubens’s pastoral landscapes within the context of certain literary and cultural manifestations of the pastoral in the Southern Netherlands in the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, notably around Rubens’s lifetime, in this essay I will argue that these images are much more than the corollary of a pastoral tradition. These manifestations include the production of original pastoral literature, translations of classical pastoral poetry, pastoral disguises and enactments in courtly circles, as well as evidence for the existence of pastoral literature in Rubens’s own library. The literary and cultural cultivation of the pastoral proves to be systematic in the Southern Netherlands and strengthens the suggestion that Rubens’s pastoral imagery should be dealt with as a distinct genre. Yet, as I will attempt to show, these images are, moreover, marked by particular ambition and sensuousness, introducing thus an important twist as Rubens’s trademark.