Reformation and the Practice of Toleration: Dutch Religious History in the Early Modern Era 9004353941, 9789004353947

Table of contents :
Reformation and the Practice of Toleration: Dutch Religious History in the Early Modern Era
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 "Remnants of the Papal Yoke": Apathy and Opposition in the Dutch Reformation
2 Hubert Duifhuis and the Nature of Dutch Libertinism
3 Dutch Particularism and the Calvinist Quest for "Holy Uniformity"
4 Confessionalism and Its Limits: Religion in Utrecht, 1600-1650
5 A Clash of Values: The Survival of Utrecht's Confraternities after the Reformation and the Debate over Their Dissolution
6 Possessed by the Devil? A Very Public Dispute in Utrecht
7 Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe
8 "Dutch" Religious Tolerance: Celebration and Revision
9 Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations and Realities of Religious Toleration
10 "In Equality and Enjoying the Same Favour": Biconfessionalism in the Low Countries
11 Religious Encounters in the Borderlands of Early Modern Europe: The Case of Vaals
12 "For They Will Turn Away Thy Sons": The Practice and Perils of Mixed Marriage in the Dutch Golden Age
13 Integration vs. Segregation: Religiously Mixed Marriage and the "Verzuiling" Model of Dutch Society
14 Intimate Negotiations: Husbands and Wives of Opposing Faiths in Eighteenth-Century Holland
Index

Citation preview

Reformation and the Practice of Toleration

St Andrews Studies in Reformation History Lead Editor Bridget Heal (University of St Andrews) Editorial Board Amy Burnett (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) Euan Cameron (Columbia University) Bruce Gordon (Yale University) Kaspar von Greyerz (Universität Basel) Felicity Heal (Jesus College, Oxford) Karin Maag (Calvin College, Grand Rapids) Roger Mason (University of St Andrews) Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews) Alec Ryrie (Durham University) Jonathan Willis (University of Birmingham)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sasrh

Reformation and the Practice of Toleration Dutch Religious History in the Early Modern Era By

Benjamin J. Kaplan

leiden | boston

Cover Illustration: Clandestine church in The Hart, called “Our Lord in the Attic” (Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, see also figure 7.3). Courtesy of Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kaplan, Benjamin J., author. Title: Reformation and the practice of toleration : Dutch religious history in the early modern era / Benjamin J. Kaplan. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2019. | Series: St Andrews studies in Reformation history, ISSN 2468-4317 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019023110 (print) | LCCN 2019023111 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004353954 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004353947 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004353947 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004353954 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Reformation--Netherlands. | Religious tolerance--Netherlands--History. | Religious tolerance--Christianity--History. | Netherlands--Church history. Classification: LCC BR395 (ebook) | LCC BR395 .K37 2019 (print) | DDC 274.92/06--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019023110

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2468-4317 ISBN 978-90-04-35394-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-35395-4 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements  vii List of Illustrations  viii List of Tables  x Abbreviations  xi Introduction  1 1

“Remnants of the Papal Yoke”: Apathy and Opposition in the Dutch Reformation  27

2

Hubert Duifhuis and the Nature of Dutch Libertinism  46

3

Dutch Particularism and the Calvinist Quest for “Holy Uniformity”  84

4

Confessionalism and Its Limits: Religion in Utrecht, 1600–1650  101

5

A Clash of Values: The Survival of Utrecht’s Confraternities after the Reformation and the Debate over Their Dissolution  124

6

Possessed by the Devil? A Very Public Dispute in Utrecht  146

7

Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe  164

8

“Dutch” Religious Tolerance: Celebration and Revision  204

9

Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations and Realities of Religious Toleration  223

10

“In Equality and Enjoying the Same Favour”: Biconfessionalism in the Low Countries  254

11

Religious Encounters in the Borderlands of Early Modern Europe: The Case of Vaals  279

12

“For They Will Turn Away Thy Sons”: The Practice and Perils of Mixed Marriage in the Dutch Golden Age  298

vi

Contents

13

Integration vs. Segregation: Religiously Mixed Marriage and the “Verzuiling” Model of Dutch Society  316

14

Intimate Negotiations: Husbands and Wives of Opposing Faiths in Eighteenth-Century Holland  336

Index  359

Acknowledgements The essays in this volume originally appeared in the following places: 1 The Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 651–67. 2 Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 105 (1992): 1–29. 3 Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History 82 (1991): 239–56. 4 Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age, edited by Joaneath A. Spicer with Lynn Federle Orr (­Baltimore, 1997), 60–71. 5 De zeventiende eeuw 16/2 (2000): 100–17. 6 Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 738–59. 7 American Historical Review 107/4 (October 2002): 1031–64. 8 Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, edited by R. Po-chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop (Cambridge, 2002), 8–26. 9 Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations and Realities of Religious Toleration (Amsterdam, 2007). 10 A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, edited by Thomas Max Safley (Leiden, 2011), 99–126. 11 Dutch Crossing 37 (2013): 4–19. 12 Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Steven ­Ozment, edited by Benjamin J. Kaplan and Marc R. Forster (Aldershot, 2005), 115–33. 13 Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, c. 1570–1720, edited by Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, and Judith Pollmann (Manchester, 2009), 48–66. 14 Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, edited by C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist, and Mark Greengrass (Aldershot, 2009), 225–48. I am grateful to the original publishers for permission to republish the essays. Specific acknowledgements appear in the individual essays, but I would like here to express my gratitude to all the institutions that supported the ­research on which the essays are based, and my heartfelt thanks to the many colleagues whose feedback helped me improve them.

Illustrations Map 0.1

The Dutch Republic and its Generality Lands  22

Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

7.1

7.2 7.3 7.4

7.5 7.6 7.7

7.8

Anna Maria van Schurman, Gijsbertus Voetius, 1647. Colored chalk drawing  106 J. Steffelaar, Interior of the St. Gertrudis schuilkerk in Utrecht, 1896. Oil on canvas   112 Wooden tabernacle with door painted by Nicolaus Knüpfer, ca. 1650. Ebony, ebony veneer, oak, and copper  113 Dirck van Voorst, Portrait of an Unknown Priest, 1615. Oil on panel  114 Jan van Bijlert, Holy Trinity with Saint Willibrord and Saint Boniface, 1639? Oil on canvas. Formerly Onze Lieve Vrouwekerck, Huissen, Gelderland, destroyed in 1943  116 House called “The Hart,” corner of Oudezijds Voorburgwal and Heintje Hoekssteeg, Amsterdam, exterior view. Detail from J.L. van Beek after C. van Waardt, De Bloei der R.C. Kerk te Amsterdam. Etching, ca. 1805  165 Cross-sectional drawing of The Hart (Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder), with clandestine church beginning on the third floor  166 Clandestine church in The Hart, called “Our Lord in the Attic” (Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder). Modern photograph taken from the main floor  167 Auslauf to Schloss Hernals, outside Vienna. Worshippers are depicted traveling from the city to services at the castle. Engraving ca. 1620 by Matthias Merian the Elder, in Topographia provinciarium austriacarum, Austriæ Stÿriæ, Carinthiæ, Carniolæ, Tyrolis, etc. (Frankfurt am Main, 1659)  176 Aerial photograph of the schuilkerk Vrijburg, the former Remonstrant Church in Amsterdam, built 1629–31, located between rows of houses  181 A. Schoemaker, Keizersgracht 102–108: the row of houses in front of Vrijburg, ca. 1630. Pen drawing   182 The Sardinian Embassy Chapel, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Designed by Jean Baptist Jacque, 1760. Etching from R. Ackermann, The Microcosm of London, vol. 1 (London, 1808)  191 Attic synagogue in Traenheim, Alsace, interior view. Modern photograph by Bernard Keller  192

Illustrations

ix

7.9 Clandestine church versus public church: St. Ninian’s, Tynet, and St. Gregory’s, Preshome, in Scotland. Modern drawings by Peter F. Anson  197 7.10 Aerial view of the Evangelical Lutheran and Reformed churches on the Dorotheergasse, Vienna, constructed in the 1780s. Detail from engraving by Joseph Daniel Huber, 1785  198 9.1 Gerrit Berckheyde, Dam Square, View to the North, 1674 (detail)  226 9.2 Lambert Doomer, View of Old Town Hall and the Waag, ca. 1640 or 1650  226 9.3 “A Merchant of Armenia.” Engraving from Nicolas de Nicolay, Les navigations peregrinatios et voyages, faicts en la Turquie (Antwerp, 1576)  228 9.4 Romeyn de Hooghe, The former Portuguese synagogue on the Houtracht, ca. 1675–1695  231 9.5 “Lutheran Church on the Spui.” Engraving from Olfert Dapper, Historische beschryving der stadt Amsterdam… (Amsterdam, 1663)  232 9.6 “Ambassadors from Salé.” Engraving from Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten… (Amsterdam, 1676)  239 9.7 Vincente Carducho, The Expulsion of the Moriscos, 1627  241 9.8 Jacob de Gheyn II, Three studies of an African man wearing a turban, ca. 1605–1629  246 9.9 “The city of Algiers.” Engraving from Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten… (Amsterdam, 1676)  247 11.1 Isaak Tirion, Nieuwe en Naauwkeurige Kaart van de drie Landen van Overmaaze Valkenburg, Daalhem en ’s Hertogenrade (Amsterdam, 1739)  282 13.1 Rembrandt, The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild, 1662  316

Tables 4.1 4.2 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4

14.5

14.6

Number of Catholic communicants reported to Rome  119 Religious affiliations of Utrecht painters  121 Bergen op Zoom – percentage of all marriages that were mixed  324 Utrecht – marriages registered as Reformed-Catholic  325 Percentage of all marriages registered as Reformed-Catholic in 3 Holland communities  328 Rotterdam – marriages registered as Reformed-Catholic, in 10-year totals  328 Enkhuizen – marriages registered as Reformed-Catholic  329 Amsterdam – marriages registered as mixed with one Reformed partner  330 The Noorderkwartier in 1742 – distribution of mixed couples  332 Amsterdam 1760 – who married spouses of a different faith (according to registration)  333 Frequency of conversion by one or other spouse  344 Who converted  345 Who married Catholics  345 How the children were raised: all locales, couples with children and no conversion, situation prior to death of either spouse (where indicated) (a) Wife Reformed, Husband Catholic  349 (b) Husband Reformed, Wife Catholic  349 How the children were raised: complete locales only, couples with children and no conversion, situation prior to death of either spouse (where indicated) (a) Wife Reformed, Husband Catholic  350 (b) Husband Reformed, Wife Catholic  351 The balance of religious power or influence within mixed marriages  352

Abbreviations AAU BR RKR GPB

Archief voor de geschiedenis van het Aartsbisdom Utrecht Bibliotheek Rotterdam Collectie Remonstrantse Kerk Rotterdam Cornelis Cau et al., eds., Groot placaet-boeck, Inhoudende de placaten ende ordonnantiën ende edicten van de Doorluchtige Hooghmogende Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden, ende vande Edele Groot Mogende Heeren Staten van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslandt, mitsgaders van de Edel Mogende Heeren Staten van Zeelandt, 9 vols. (The Hague, 1658–1797) GUP Johan van de Water, ed., Groot [Utrechts] Placaatboek, vervattende alle de placaten, ordonnantien en edicten der edele mogende heeren Staten ’s lands van Utrecht; mitsgaders van de borgemeesteren en vroedschap der stad Utrecht; tot het jaar 1728 ingesloten, 3 vols. (Utrecht, 1729) HNA Het Nationaal Archief, The Hague HUA Het Utrechts Archief BA I Bewaarde Archieven I (708) BA II Bewaarde Archieven II (709) KR Nederlandse hervormde gemeente Utrecht, kerkeraad (746) OSA Oud Synodaal Archief (1401) SA II Stadsarchief II (702) SVU Staten van Utrecht (233) SAA Stadsarchief Amsterdam SAD Stadsarchief Delft WMV Werken der Marnix-Vereeniging

Introduction This book brings together fourteen previously published essays on the ­religious history of the Netherlands in the early modern era. Examining first the Dutch Reformation in the sixteenth century, then the practice of religious toleration in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the essays follow a loose chronological trajectory that coincides with the arc of my career. Originally published between 1991 and 2013, the essays reflect both the evolution of my interests and the major changes the field has undergone since I entered it. When I began to study Dutch religious history in the 1980s, one of the first things I learned about it was the dearth of works available in English. To be sure, Anglophone scholars such as Alastair Duke, Jeremy Bangs, and Phyllis Mack Crew had made recent contributions to the field, and Duke’s essays in particular offered English-readers an excellent starting point for study of the Dutch Reformation.1 Considerably more was available on the Dutch Revolt, with which the story of the Reformation was inextricably intertwined, from the 1560s, and scarcely a study of Dutch politics or culture in the Golden Age did not touch somehow on religious matters. That was true too for the work of Simon Schama, one of my mentors, who introduced me to the ways one could approach Dutch culture through visual sources, which one could “read” even without knowing Dutch. A few books by Dutch historians had appeared in English translation, as had scattered essays, including some in the Acta Historiae Neerlandicae, a series established precisely to address the inability of foreigners to access Dutch scholarship. Taking these bits and pieces together, though, the situation still contrasted very sharply to the quantities of major scholarship in English on the German Reformation, Christian Humanism, and other subjects I had been studying. For an aspiring young scholar, the situation was frustrating but also exciting, as it hinted of opportunities. So I began to learn Dutch. 1 Carl Bangs, “Dutch theology, trade and war, 1590–1610,” Church History 39 (1970): 470–82; Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville, 1971); Carl Bangs, “Regents and Remonstrants in Amsterdam,” in In het spoor van Arminius … studies aangeboden aan Prof. G.J. Hoenderdaal (Nieuwkoop, 1975), 15–29; Phyllis Mack Crew, Calvinist preaching and iconoclasm in the Netherlands, 1544–1569 (New York, 1973); Phyllis Mack Crew, “The Wonderyear: Reformed Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands,” in Religion and the people, 800–1700, ed. Jim Obelkevich, Patrick J. Geary, and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies (Chapel Hill, 1979), 191–220. Duke’s essays were subsequently published as a collection: Alastair C. Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London, 1990).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_002

2

Introduction

As I did, I soon discovered that the relative dearth was not confined to ­ nglish-language materials. Demographics were partly to blame: Dutch history E could never have as many practitioners as there were historians of Germany, France, or other countries with larger populations and more universities. Compounding the problem, it seemed that study of the early modern period had fallen out of fashion in the Netherlands, attracting fewer students and less interest than it once had. Of course, when studying the sixteenth century, one could not consider the lands of what we now call “The Netherlands” in isolation from those comprising modern-day Belgium: to avoid confusion, the term “Low Countries” can usefully serve in English to denote all seventeen northern and southern provinces ruled before the Revolt by the Habsburg Emperor Charles v. But Belgium too is a small country, and very Catholic: few Belgian historians studied Protestantism. Thus I found that the existing historiography on the Reformation in the Low Countries had enormous gaps and that much of it was quite old. A few topics were well served by recent works, for example the early Reformation in Flanders and the Reformed Church in Amsterdam.2 Many more, though, had not been treated for decades, while for others one had to go back to the work of nineteenth-century scholars. The age of the historiography also had methodological implications. In the academic world where I was being trained, the study of history had been revolutionized since the 1960s by the advent of history “from below,” gender history, the study of “popular culture,” the influence of the French Annales school, historical anthropology, and other innovations. Debate raged about how to conceive the place of religion in early modern communities and its relationship to society, culture, and politics – a subject on which my other mentor, Steven Ozment, had very strong views. In the Netherlands, by contrast, even recent works seemed, for the most part, old fashioned. Religious history continued there to be construed usually as church history – as a history of theology, ecclesiastic institutions, and “church-state relations.” It focused overwhelmingly on the thought and actions of leading clergy and other elite groups.3 Most studies, moreover, treated a single church or movement, to which the historian usually had a tie by personal affiliation or family background. In this and other respects, Dutch historiography still echoed the so-called “pillarization” (verzuiling) that had divided Dutch society along religious lines in the late nineteenth 2 Johan Decavele, De dageraad van de reformatie in Vlaanderen (1520–1565), 2 vols. (Brussels, 1975); R.B. Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam. De kerk der hervorming in de gouden eeuw, 5 vols. (Amsterdam/Baarn, 1965–78). 3 Joke Spaans, “Zeventiende-eeuwse kerkgeschiedenis en interdisciplinariteit,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 14 (1998): 206–14.

Introduction

3

and first half of the twentieth century. The legacy of this division was apparent even in the work of Arie van Deursen, one of the most innovative Dutch religious historians of the 1970s. His book on the Dutch Reformed Church in the early seventeenth century was pathbreaking in its focus on practice rather than precept and its concern for the experiences of ordinary church-goers.4 The other Dutch scholar whose work excited me was Juliaan Woltjer, who with great kindness welcomed me into his “contactgroep xvide eeuw” and steered my research toward the city of Utrecht, whose Reformation became the subject of my doctoral dissertation. Woltjer had formulated an interpretation of the Dutch Reformation that broke with the pillarized traditions of Dutch church history. Emphasizing the “vague and fluid character” of religious allegiances in the sixteenth century, he had pointed to the importance of what he called the “middle groups” of Dutch society. Not adhering to either Calvinism or Tridentine Catholicism, these groups constituted a sort of swing vote, Woltjer argued, that repeatedly tipped the balance one way or another in the course of the Revolt.5 In revealing a discrepancy between official church teachings and the sentiments of the majority of people, this interpretation seemed to me to accord with the findings of Keith Thomas, Carlo Ginzburg, Robert Scribner, and other historians on popular piety elsewhere in Europe. It also seemed to exemplify a resistance, likewise found in other lands, to religious reform and to the process by which Europe’s rival churches developed into the dogmatic, disciplinarian entities that German historians called “confessions.” Woltjer was open to considering such international perspectives, and in 1994 he himself published an article comparing the Dutch Revolt to the French Wars of Religion.6 Most of his life’s work, though, was distinctly national in 4 Arie Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldebarnevelt (Assen, 1974). 5 J.J. Woltjer, Friesland in hervormingstijd (Leiden, 1962), quotation on 78. See also J.J. Woltjer, “Het beeld vergruisd?,” in Vaderlands verleden in veelvoud. 31 opstellen over de Nederlandse geschiedenis na 1500, ed. G.A.M. Beekelaar et al. (The Hague, 1975), 172–81; J.J. Woltjer, “De Vrede-makers,” in De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte, ed. S. Groenveld and H.L. Ph. Leeuwenberg (The Hague, 1979), 56–87; and a later piece, J.J. Woltjer, “Political Moderates and Religious Moderates in the Revolt of the Netherlands,” in Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585, ed. Philip Benedict et al. (Amsterdam, 1999), 185–200. Woltjer’s interpretation was partly anticipated by J.W. Smit, “The Present Position of Studies Regarding the Revolt of the Netherlands,” in Britain and the Netherlands: Papers delivered to the Oxford-Netherlands Historical Conference 1959, ed. J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (London, 1960), 11–28. 6 J. J. Woltjer, “Geweld tijdens de godsdienstoorlogen en de Nederlanden: een vergelijking,” Trajecta 3 (1994): 281–96, later published in English as J.J. Woltjer, “Violence during the Wars of Religion in France and the Netherlands: A Comparison,” Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 76 (1996): 26–45

4

Introduction

character. Not that Woltjer ignored local and provincial particularisms – to the contrary. But as for other Dutch historians of his and previous generations, so for Woltjer the Revolt was above all an episode, arguably the most important one, in the history of the “fatherland.” Woltjer framed his questions in terms of phenomena specific to the Low Countries and found explanations for them in factors operating within the Low Countries. Such was the national historiographic tradition, stretching back to the nineteenth century. It seemed novel, therefore, in the 1980s for a foreigner like myself to come to the Netherlands to produce an urban case study of the Reformation based on foreign models, employing as an interpretive framework a pair of concepts, “confessionalism” and “confessionalization,” that were equally new and nonDutch. These tools enabled me to reinterpret one of the most characteristic features of the Dutch Reformation, the struggle between Calvinists and the ­opponents they called “Libertines,” as a manifestation of a wider European phenomenon. Of course I was hardly the first buitenlander to apply foreign models and paradigms to Dutch history or to put the latter in a wider context. Among my predecessors were the German émigré in London Helli Koenigsberger, who saw Dutch Calvinism in its early years as conforming to a particular type of movement, the “revolutionary party”; and Geoffrey Parker, who viewed the Revolt from a Spanish perspective and found explanations for its course in the state of Philip ii’s finances and other external factors.7 Fusing religious and social history, Heinz Schilling had devoted his doctoral dissertation to refugees from the Low Countries in Germany and England, while for his part, Duke had made passing comparisons between the Reformation in the Low Countries and in other parts of Europe. Such work, though, was limited, at least outside economic history, and some of it was not well received in the Netherlands.8 Thus I found myself intruding into what were possibly the two most conservative fields in the Dutch historical profession: “church history” and “­history of the fatherland.”9 It was not that developments abroad were unknown in 7 H.G. Koenigsberger, “The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands during the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 27 (1955): 335–51; Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish road, 1567–1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (Cambridge, 1972); Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, N.Y, 1977); Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659: Ten Studies (London, 1979); Heinz Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten im 16. Jahrhundert: Ihre Stellung im Sozialgefüge und im religiösen Leben deutscher und englischer Städte (Gütersloh, 1972). 8 Judith Pollmann, “Internationalisering en de Nederlandse Opstand,” bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review 124 (2009): 515–35. 9 Wim Janse understated greatly when he observed that Dutch church historiography was not “in the fashionable vanguard.” More bluntly, Willem Frijhoff condemned this historiography in 1981 as “deadly dull” (oersaai). Wim Janse, “A Century of Historiography: The Nederlands

Introduction

5

the Netherlands. Rather, I learned, the Dutch historical scene was fragmented, with distinct circles of scholars adopting different approaches. The Wageningse school did socio-economic studies of rural regions on the model of the French Annales. Van Deursen pursued history from below and the study of popular culture. Rudolf Dekker had produced a study of riots in early modern Dutch cities and, with Lotte van de Poll, begun to explore female transvestism.10 Most importantly in my own field, Willem Frijhoff had pioneered the application of historical anthropology and l’histoire de mentalité to Dutch religious history. Having spent fifteen years in France, mostly at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Frijhoff was appointed in 1983 to a chair at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where he emerged as one of the principal conduits of French and other foreign influences on Dutch historiography.11 Under his aegis Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Willem de Blécourt, among others, began to study the history of magic and witchcraft in the Netherlands. By the late 1980s, some of Woltjer’s students too had embraced new methodologies. Henk van Nierop returned from a year’s fellowship in Boston bursting with excitement and ideas. And, as I discovered, Joke Spaans was a year or two ahead of me in adopting the German “Stadt und Reformation” model, incorporating social and cultural as well as political dimensions in her account of the Reformation in Haarlem.12 Most foreigners who study Dutch history are inclined to place the latter in a European context and to compare it to the history of other parts of Europe. We do these things as a matter of course, given our backgrounds and training, but

10

11 12

Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, 1900–2000,” Church History and Religious Culture 90 (2010): 651–74; Willem Frijhoff, “Van ‘histoire de l’Eglise’ naar ‘histoire religieuse.’ De invloed van de ‘Annales’-groep op de ontwikkeling van de kerkgeschiedenis in Frankrijk en de perspectieven daarvan voor Nederland,” Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 61 (1981): 113–53, quotation p. 149. A.M. van der Woude, “The A.A.G. Bijdragen and the study of Dutch rural history,” Journal of European Economic History 4 (1975): 215–45; A.M. van der Woude, “Dertig jaar Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis,” A.A.G. Bijdragen 28 (1986): 1–42; Arie Th. van Deursen, Het Kopergeld van de Gouden Eeuw, 4 vols. (Assen, 1978–1980), subsequently published in English as Arie Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge, 1991); Rudolf M. Dekker, Oproeren in Holland gezien door tijdgenoten. Ooggetuigeverslagen van oproeren in de provincie Holland ten tijde van de Republiek (1690–1750) (Assen, 1979); Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, Daar was laatst een meisje loos. Nederlandse vrouwen als matrozen en soldaten: een historisch onderzoek (Baarn, 1981). See his programmatic essay Frijhoff, “Van ‘histoire de l’Eglise’ naar ‘histoire religieuse.’” Some of his important early essays are included in Willem Frijhoff, Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002). Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (The Hague, 1989).

6

Introduction

also from necessity in order to demonstrate the relevance of our subject and value of our employment to non-Dutch colleagues and students.13 In the 1990s, the Dutch historical profession was seized by a new concern (or a renewed one, as it had precedents) to do the same. A trio of socio-economic historians led the way, issuing in 1988 a call for Dutch colleagues to join them in identifying the distinctive features of Dutch history by comparing the latter to what, echoing Jan and Annie Romein, they called “the general human pattern.” The resulting group spent the 1992–93 academic year working out their ideas together, producing eventually two books.14 It goes almost without saying that the religious diversity and toleration for which the Netherlands became famous in the seventeenth century constituted one of the Dutch “deviations” the group considered. A more ambitious comparative project was prompted by the progress of European integration. Funded in 1991 by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (nwo) and running for ten years, it examined “Dutch culture in a European perspective.” Organized around four chronological “vantage points” (IJkpunten), the project resulted in no less than twenty monographs and five works of synthesis, including 1650: Bevochten eendracht by Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, which naturally gave ample attention to religious culture.15 Then in 1997 the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Science convened a conference with an explicitly comparative design. It brought Dutch and foreign specialists together to analyze “Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands.”16 Not coincidentally, the 1990s also saw changes in the relationship between foreign and Dutch historians. For one, the number of foreigners working on Dutch history increased markedly, thanks in large measure to the teaching and mentoring of students by Schama, Parker, Duke, and other scholars outside 13 14

15

16

Benjamin Schmidt, “Dikes and Dunes: On Dutch History and Dutchness,” bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review 133 (2018): 82–99. Karel Davids, Jan Lucassen, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, De Nederlandse geschiedenis als afwijking van het algemeen menselijk patroon. Een aanzet tot een programma van samenwerking (Amsterdam, 1988); Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen, eds., A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective (Cambridge, 1995); Karel Davids et al., eds., De Republiek tussen zee en vasteland. Buitenlandse invloeden op cultuur, economie en politiek in Nederland 1500–1800 (Louvain, 1995). Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650. Bevochten eendracht (The Hague, 1999), subsequently published in English as Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650: Hard-Won Unity (Basingstoke, 2004). A special issue of bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review (volume 117, issue 4 [2002]) was devoted to critical reflections on the synthetic volumes of the IJkpunt series; my own review of the same appears in European Review 12/4 (2004): 615–19. The papers presented were subsequently published in Philip Benedict et al., eds., Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585 (Amsterdam, 1999).

Introduction

7

the Netherlands including Jonathan Israel, James Tracy, and Jan de Vries. The increase reflected also a rising international interest in the history of Europe’s smaller countries – a sense that the prevailing picture of early modern Europe had been distorted by giving disproportionate attention to the countries that had risen to great-power status in the modern era. The result was a veritable boom in English-language works on the early modern Low Countries, amplified by an increase in English-language works by Dutch historians. This boom included many works on religion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.17 At the same time, Dutch historians began to attend more international conferences. Until then, while Dutch historians may have read the work of foreign ones, direct, personal interactions between the two groups had been limited, so much so that special efforts were required to bring them together. Thus in 1959, the incumbent of the chair in Dutch history at the University of 17 Duke, Reformation and Revolt; Charles H. Parker, The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620 (Cambridge, 1998); Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (Boston, 2000); Gary K. Waite, David Joris and Dutch Anabaptism, 1524–1543 (Waterloo, Ont., Canada, 1990); Gary K. Waite, Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles v, 1515–1556 (Toronto, 2000); Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis, 1550–1577 (Baltimore, 1996); Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995); Andrew Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford, 1992); Judith Pollmann, Religious choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641) (Manchester, 1999); John Paul Elliott, “Protestantization in the Northern Netherlands, A Case Study: The Classis of Dordrecht 1572–1640” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1990); Christiane BerkvensStevelinck, Jonathan Irvine Israel, and G.H.M Posthumus Meyjes, eds., The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden, 1997); Joris van Eijnatten, God, Nederland en Oranje. Dutch Calvinism and the search for the social centre (Kampen, 1993); J. van Eijnatten, Mutua christianorum tolerantia. Irenicism and toleration in the Netherlands: The Stinstra affair 1740–1745 (Florence, 1998); Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Willem Frijhoff, eds., Witchcraft in the Netherlands from the fourteenth to the twentieth century (Rotterdam, 1991); R. Po-chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop, eds., Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, 2002) resulted from a conference held in 1999. Also important were sections of Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995); Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 1555–1590 (Cambridge, 1992); James D. Tracy, Holland under Habsburg rule, 1506–1566: The Formation of a Body Politic (Berkeley, 1990); J.L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics of Particularism (Oxford, 1994); Davids and Lucassen, eds., A Miracle Mirrored; and Deursen, Plain Lives; as well as many articles. Frijhoff’s essays appeared in English in 2002 (see above note 11) but it would not be until 2007 that an English edition of his major monograph would be published: Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607–1647, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Leiden, 2007).

8

Introduction

London, my predecessor Ernst Kossmann, had organized together with John Bromley what became the first Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference. Convened every three or four years, these conferences established some communication and comraderie between Dutch and English historians. In 1980, the theme of the conference was “Church and State since the Reformation,” and participants on the Dutch side included Nicolette Mout and G. Groenhuis.18 These were small-scale events, though, and limited to historians from the two countries. Their importance began to decline in the 1990s as they came merely to supplement a rich menu of events where Dutch and foreign historians met as a ­matter of course. Between the foreign scholars whose research focused on the Low Countries and Dutch scholars who wished to present their findings abroad, the number of papers on Dutch history at Sixteenth Century Studies and other international conferences rose sharply. The pace of change accelerated in the first decade of the new century. With globalization adding force to European integration, a powerful vogue for “internationalization” swept the Dutch universities. Dutch scholars came under pressure to demonstrate that their work had international standing, to achieve which they increasingly published in the global lingua franca. In 2006 the Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, which since 1986 had carried an English subtitle, was rechristened Church History and Religious Culture, while by 2011 English had become the predominant language in the premiere periodical of the Dutch historical profession, which was renamed bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review. The very distinction between “foreign” and “Dutch” scholars became somewhat fluid, as more Dutch scholars studied or worked abroad, Dutch universities hired non-Dutch academics, and European funding bodies encouraged collaborative projects with “investigators” from different countries. Meanwhile, digital communications, ease of travel, and the ever-growing resources of the internet reduced the effective distance between scholars in the Netherlands and het buitenland. Such changes were not as rapid in Belgium as in the Netherlands, but they moved in the same direction. In Belgium too church history has, by now, largely given way to the study of religious culture and the place of religion in relation to society, culture, and politics. The work of Belgian historians is more informed than it used to be by international perspectives and comparisons, and is published more often in English. Contacts and exchanges between Belgian and foreign scholars have become more routine, though it remains the 18

A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse, eds., Britain and the Netherlands, volume vii: Church and State Since the Reformation. Papers Delivered to the Seventh Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference (The Hague, 1981).

Introduction

9

case that fewer foreign scholars study the history of the southern Low Countries that remained under Habsburg rule than of the northern provinces that emerged from the Revolt as an independent republic. The most outstanding exception is Craig Harline, whose work, along with that of Luc Duerloo, Paul Arblaster, Judith Pollmann, and others, has gone some way toward addressing the relative neglect by religious historians of the southern provinces after the Revolt.19 Today the amount of top-notch work available in English on the Low Countries in the early modern era is far greater than when I was a student. For this, as a teacher of mostly monolingual British students, I am grateful. The quality is excellent too, as many Dutch and Belgian colleagues do work on the international cutting edge of the discipline. That said, the relative dearth of works on the history of the Low Countries compared to other lands persists, as I believe it always will, and is particularly great in religious history. To mention only the most glaring gap, to this day there exists no modern monograph in any language on the Dutch Reformation as a whole (one is now finally in preparation, by Christine Kooi). In this situation, collections of essays have played an important role in meeting the need for more, and more accessible, works.20 For this reason I welcomed with special enthusiasm an invitation from the editors of the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History to assemble a collection of my essays. Over the course of my career I have fluctuated between work 19

20

See i.a. Craig E. Harline, The Burdens of Sister Margaret: Inside a Seventeenth-Century Convent (New Haven, 2000); Craig E. Harline and Eddy Put, A Bishop’s Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders (New Haven, 2000); Craig Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New York, 2003); Luc Duerloo and Marc Wingens, Scherpenheuvel: het Jeruzalem van de Lage Landen (Leuven, 2002); Luc Duerloo, Dynasty and Piety: Archduke Albert (1598–1621) and Habsburg Political Culture in an Age of Religious Wars (Farnham, 2012); Paul Arblaster, Antwerp & the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven, 2004); Judith Pollmann, Catholic identity and the revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635 ­(Oxford, 2011), Chs. 5–6. Examples include Duke, Reformation and Revolt; Alastair C. Duke, Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. Judith Pollman and Andrew Spicer (Aldershot, 2009); Frijhoff, Embodied Belief; Hsia and Van Nierop, eds., Calvinism and Religious Toleration; Arie-Jan Gelderblom et al., eds., The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs (Leiden, 2004); Alastair Hamilton, Sjouke Voolstra, and Piet Visser, eds., From martyr to muppy. A historical introduction to cultural assimilation processes of a religious minority in the Netherlands: The Mennonites (Amsterdam, 1994); Benjamin J. Kaplan et al., eds., Catholic communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720 (Manchester, 2008); Berkvens-Stevelinck, Israel, and Posthumus Meyjes, eds., The Emergence of Tolerance; Gijswijt-Hofstra and Frijhoff, eds., Witchcraft in the Netherlands; A. den Hollander et al., eds., Religious Minorities and Cultural Diversity in the Dutch Republic: Studies Presented to Piet Visser on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Leiden, 2014).

10

Introduction

on the Netherlands informed by a European perspective and work on Europe informed by a Dutch perspective. For this volume I have selected essays that fall clearly into the former category, with the exception of “Fictions of Privacy,” which straddles the two fairly evenly. As noted earlier, the order of the essays follows a loose chronological trajectory that coincides – not coincidentally – with the changing focus of my work in the field. Thus the volume begins with the “Libertine” opposition to Calvinist reform in the sixteenth century and concludes with relations between spouses of different faiths in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Following the advice of the series editors, I have not made significant changes to the text of the essays. I have also not altered the references cited in the essays except to standardize their form and update them as necessary (some archives, for example, have changed their name). Instead, the next part of this introduction places the essays in their historiographic context, traces developments in our understanding of their subjects, and refers readers to the most relevant works to appear since their publication. It is intended as an update and supplement to the essays, not an overview of the field, so it omits some subjects of great importance, such as the history of Dutch Jewry. I offer it with apologies to colleagues whose work, for the sake of concision, I do not mention.

…

One of the biggest questions left hanging by Woltjer’s work concerned the character of religious culture in the Low Countries before the Revolt and during its early phases. Woltjer himself had divided his “middle groups” into two categories, “Protestantizers” who had moved in the direction of adopting Protestantism but not (yet) gone all the way, and “traditionalists” who remained wedded to pre-Tridentine Catholicism.21 While these characterizations offered a useful starting point, they failed to capture the variety and positive content of the forms of piety Netherlanders cultivated in the sixteenth century. Several avenues of research have been pursued in recent decades that shed light on these forms. One focuses on the so-called Libertines, whose beliefs and practices are the subject of the first two chapters of this book. Accepting many tenets of Protestantism but refusing to submit to Calvinist discipline, I argue, Dutch Libertines can best be understood not as occupants of some half-way house between Catholicism and Calvinism, as Woltjer had suggested, nor as 21

For adoption of the term “protestantizers” (as well as “middengroep”) see e.g. Henk van Nierop, Beeldenstorm en burgerlijk verzet in Amsterdam 1566–1567 (Nijmegen, 1978), 26 and passim; H. ten Boom, De Reformatie in Rotterdam, 1530–1585 ([Amsterdam], 1987), 217; Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation, 56–8.

Introduction

11

Christian humanists, as traditional interpretations had held, but as opponents of confessionalism who refused to conform to the stringent new norms and regulatory mechanisms being established by churches across Europe. Within this broad umbrella of a-confessional dissent, the Libertines who left records of their beliefs articulated ideas that were influenced above all by the original Protestant message of liberation from clerical tyranny and by a spiritualist piety that developed out of late medieval mysticism. Work by Mirjam van Veen, Jesse Spohnholz, and Gerrit Voogt has confirmed the extent of spiritualist influence on leading Libertines such as Dirck Coornhert and Hubert Duifhuis,22 while work on later periods has shown that spiritualist influences persisted through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, both within and outside the Dutch Reformed Church.23 As for the form of church organization Libertines wished to establish, Woltjer had argued that they favored an inclusive “volkskerk” that admitted people of different beliefs as members, a view that subsequently became a commonplace in the historiography. Also important to the Libertines, I argue in Chapter three, was particularism, that is, local control over religious affairs and the ability to vary ecclesiastic arrangements depending on local circumstances. Dutch Calvinists, who idealized “holy uniformity,” vehemently opposed this. More recent historiography has rightly pointed out that such uniformity, along with other aspects of confessionalism, could never be fully achieved or established once and for all, either in the Low Countries or elsewhere in Europe. Rather it should be conceived “as a continually fluctuating and unstable cultural praxis that was carried out performatively.”24 To recognize this dynamic, though, does 22

23

24

Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam G.K. van Veen, “Calvinists vs. Libertines: A New Look at Religious Exile and the Origins of ‘Dutch’ Tolerance,” in Calvinism and the Making of the European Mind (Leiden, 2014), 76–99; Mirjam G.K. van Veen, “Spiritualism in the Netherlands: From David Joris to Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 129–50; Gerrit Voogt, Constraint on trial: Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and religious freedom (Kirksville, Mo., 2000), esp. 224, 233; see also Van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 1555–1590, 262. The spiritualist element of Libertine piety is evident but ignored in Truus van Bueren and Corinne van Dijk, Overschilderd: van Gregoriusmis naar Bijbeltekst. De Reformatie van de Utrechtse Jacobikerk (Hilversum, 2017). Andrew C. Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton, 1991); Michiel Wielema, The March of the Libertines: Spinozists and the Dutch Reformed Church (1660–1750) (Hilversum, 2004); see also the classic work by Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans église: la conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnel au xviie siècle (Paris, 1969). Gary Waite and Michael Driedger are currently undertaking a research project called “Amsterdamnified” that aims to elucidate the role of spiritualism in the early Enlightenment in the Low Countries and England. Quotation from Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Einleitung,” in Konfessionelle Ambiguität: Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and Andreas Pietsch (Gütersloh, 2014), 9–26. See likewise Benjamin

12

Introduction

not alter the role of uniformity as a major point of contention between Calvinists and Libertines.25 Another avenue of research has focused on the amateur dramatic societies known as “chambers of rhetoric.” Distinctive to the Low Countries, these organizations articulated in their public performances a wide variety of religious views, including spiritualist ones. Gary Waite has argued that their eclecticism was an adaptation of Reformation rhetoric to Netherlandish circumstances – a way for the rhetoricians, as invested, responsible citizens of the middle and upper-middling strata of society, to promote reform while maintaining civic harmony and protecting their communities from punishment.26 Anne-Laure van Bruaene has similarly found the rhetoricians to have conducted “an engaged but often eclectic religious discourse … that was tailored to the needs of educated urbanites.”27 Through this discourse, she argues, the rhetoricians “contributed also … to an increasing interiorization and intellectualization of the faith.” It has long been understood that such interiorization was faciliated in the Low Countries by high levels of literacy and education, which stimulated demand for vernacular bibles and devotional literature, and that it was strongly promoted by the Modern Devotion, whose nature as a movement has been clarified by the work of John van Engen.28 Van Bruaene finds these processes operating widely “among the broad middle groups” of urban society.

25 26 27 28

J. Kaplan, “The Context of Conversions in Early Modern Europe: Personal Agency and Choice in the Construction of Religious Identities,” in A Question of Identity: Social, Political, and Historical Aspects of Identity Dynamics in Jewish and Other Contexts, ed. Lilach Sagiv et al. (Jerusalem, 2019), 315–35. On the Netherlands specifically, see Judith Pollmann, “How to Flatter the Laity? Rethinking Catholic Responses to the Reformation (discussiedossier over Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635),” bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review 126 (2011): 97–106; Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam G.K. van Veen, “The Disputed Origins of Dutch Calvinism: Religious Refugees in the Historiography of the Dutch Reformation,” Church History 86 (2017): 398–426. Cf. Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 64–75. Gary K. Waite, “Reformers on Stage: Rhetorician Drama and Reformation Propaganda in the Netherlands of Charles v, 1519–1556,” Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte 83 (1992): 209–39; Waite, Reformers on Stage. Anne-Laure van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden 1400–1650 ([Amsterdam], 2008), quotations from 215 and 214. John van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008). Also important is P. Bange et al., eds., De doorwerking van de Moderne Devotie, Windesheim 1387–1987. Voordrachten gehouden tij­ dens het Windesheim Symposium Zwolle/Windesheim 15–17 oktober 1987 (Hilversum, 1988). On vernacular bibles see Paul Arblaster, “‘Totius Mundi Emporium’: Antwerp as a Centre for Vernacular Bible Translations, 1523–1545,” in The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs, ed. Arie-Jan Gelderblom et al. (Leiden, 2004), 9–31.

Introduction

13

Here Van Bruaene uses the term “middle groups” in a socio-economic sense as a synonym for “middle classes” or “middling sorts.” Historians would do well, though, to bear in mind the danger of conflating these social “middle groups” with Woltjer’s religious ones, for the two were far from identical. Sixteenth-century religious culture has been illuminated from a different angle by historians asking about the condition and character of Catholicism before the Counter-Reformation. One of the most important recent works to address this question is Judith Pollmann’s Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635, which takes as its starting point an international comparison: Why did Catholics in the Low Countries behave so differently in the 1560s and 1570s from their counterparts in France, who committed so many large-scale acts of violence against Protestants in their communities? Why in the Low Countries did Catholics react so passively to the 1566 iconoclasm and later instances of Protestant aggression?29 Based on a reading of chronicles and other non-institutional sources, Pollmann argues that the state of Catholicism in the Low Countries was not weak or deficient, as had often been suggested.30 Her findings follow a trend in the study of pre-Tridentine Catholicism across Europe and agree with research focused on the Low Countries by ­Gerrit Verhoeven, Llewellyn Bogaers, Charles Caspers and P.J. Margry, and R ­ uben Suykerbuyk, among others.31 Pollmann argues that lay Catholic behavior resulted not from a lack of piety but from the kind of piety taught by Catholic clergy in the Low Countries, who until the 1580s encouraged their flocks to see heresy as divine punishment for the sins of society and to “combat” it by repenting and reforming themselves rather than by attacking heretics. Michal Bauwens has recently questioned whether Catholic responses to the 1566 iconoclasm should be characterized as passive at all. As she and other contributors 29 Pollmann, Catholic Identity; discussion forum on the book in bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review 126/4 (2011): 75–106. See also Judith Pollmann, “Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence 1560–1585,” Past and Present 190 (2006): 83–120. 30 The most influential book to make the latter argument was Jacques Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux en Flandre à la fin du Moyen-Âge (Paris, 1963). 31 Gerrit Verhoeven, Devotie en negotie. Delft als bedevaartplaats in de late middeleeuwen (Amsterdam, 1992); Llewellyn Bogaers, Aards, betrokken en zelfbewust. De verwevenheid van cultuur en religie in katholiek Utrecht, 1300–1600 (Utrecht, 2008); Ruben Suykerbuyk, “The Matter of Piety. Material Culture in Zoutleeuw’s Church of Saint Leonard (c. 1450– 1620)” (Ph.D. diss., Universiteit Gent, 2017); Charles Caspers, De eucharistische vroomheid en het feest van sacramentsdag in de Nederlanden tijdens de late middeleeuwen (Louvain, 1992); Charles Caspers and P.J. Margry, Het mirakel van Amsterdam. Biografie van een betwiste devotie (Amsterdam, 2017), Chs. 1–2; P.J Margry and Charles Caspers, Bedevaart­ plaatsen in Nederland, 3 vols. (Amsterdam/Hilversum, 1997).

14

Introduction

to a special issue of bmgn show, militancy was not the only alternative to inaction: Catholics made many efforts in the latter half of the sixteenth century to protect and, where possible, restore relics, altarpieces, and other parts of the material infrastructure of their religion.32 If there is one subject we have learned a great deal more about in the past couple of decades, it is Dutch Catholicism and its adherents. No subject in early modern Dutch religious history has been the focus of so many new books and dissertations.33 Unlike previous scholarship, this new wave is not intent on establishing the unique, national character of Dutch Catholicism. To the contrary, Pollmann and Janssen have both shown how greatly Catholics who fled the Low Countries during the Revolt were influenced by their encounter in exile with a militant, confessional, “international” form of Catholicism, and how they brought that form back with them to the Low Countries. According to Janssen, their experience of exile mirrored that of Dutch Calvinists, and so consequently did the formative role of that experience in the development of their religion.34 Spohnholz and Van Veen have recently questioned the role that previous scholars had attributed to exile in the development of Dutch 32

Michal Bauwens, “Under Construction? The Catholic Community in Ghent after the Beeldenstorm,” bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review 131 (2016): 81–98, and other contributions to issue 1 of the same volume. 33 Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Bertrand Forclaz, Catholiques au défi de la Réforme. La coexistence confessionelle à Utrecht au xviie siècle (Paris, 2014); Joke Spaans, De Levens der Maechden. Het verhaal van een religieuze vrouwengemeenschap in de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw (Hilversum, 2012); Geert H. Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2016); Gian Ackermans, Herders en huurlingen. Bisschoppen en priesters in de Republiek (1663–1705) (Amsterdam, 2003); F.J.M. Hoppenbrouwers, Oefening in volmaaktheid. De zeventiende-eeuwse rooms-katholieke spiritualiteit in de Republiek (The Hague, 1996); M.G. Spiertz, Reformatie en herleving van het katholicisme in Nijmegen (1591–1623). Rogier herzien en herdacht (Nijmegen, 1993); Jaap Geraerts, ­Patrons of the Old Faith: The Catholic Nobility in Utrecht and Guelders, c. 1580–1702 (Leiden, 2019); Ottie Thiers, Bedevaart en kerkeraad. De Amersfoortse vrouwenvaart van 1444 tot 1720 ­(Hilversum, 1994); Margry and Caspers, Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland with online database http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/bedevaart/ (accessed 23 October 2018); Charles Caspers and P.J. Margry, Identiteit en spiritualiteit van de Amsterdamse Stille Omgang (Hilversum, 2006); Caspers and Margry, Het mirakel van Amsterdam. Biografie van een betwiste devotie; Christine Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age: Heretics and Idolaters (Cambridge, 2012); Caroline Jacomine Mudde, “Rouwen in de marge. De materiële rouwcultuur van de katholieke geloofsgemeenschap in vroegmodern Nederland” (Ph.D. diss., Universiteit Utrecht, 2018); Carolina Maria Lenarduzzi, “Katholiek in de Republiek. Subcultuur en tegencultuur in Nederland, 1570–1750” (Ph.D. diss., Universiteit Leiden, 2018); Genji Yasuhira, “Civic Agency in the Public Sphere: Catholics’ Survival Tactics in Utrecht, 1620s–1670s” (Ph.D. diss., Tilburg University, 2019). 34 Pollmann, Catholic Identity; Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile.

Introduction

15

­ alvinism, and they have offered a useful corrective by pointing out that many C Libertines too spent time outside the Netherlands.35 Detailed evidence, however, supports the contention of Janssen and Pollmann that the experiences Dutch Catholics had in exile radicalized them. As several historians have now shown, the sort of Catholicism that subsequently prevailed among Catholics in the Dutch Republic was strongly informed by international, Tridentine norms, as well as by Jansenism and other influences.36 In Chapter four, I trace the rise of Catholic confessionalism in Utrecht and draw parallels between it and comparable developments among other religious groups in the city. As I note, though, Utrecht was in some respects an exceptional case, for the medieval church left many remnants there that contributed to the flourishing of Catholicism in the seventeenth century. This point has been confirmed by the findings of Bertrand Forclaz and Genji Yasuhira.37 In general, the dismantling of the institutions of the Catholic Church in the course of the Reformation handed Catholic reformers in the Republic a cleaner slate than reformers had in parts of Europe where Catholicism remained the official faith. Consequently, the leaders of the Holland Mission faced less resistance to reform from within the Catholic community than did their counterparts elsewhere.38 By the same token, though, the situation left Catholic clergy dependent on the laity for housing, financial support, places of worship, recruitment, protection, and many ancillary services. In this and other respects the situation of Dutch Catholics had parallels with that of Catholics on the British Isles, as an edited volume from 2009 demonstrates.39 In Dutch cities, wealthy Catholic patricians and merchants gave crucial support to the Holland Mission, as did the women known as kloppen or klopjes, whose lives and religious culture have been illuminated by Joke Spaans in a delightful book on the main community of kloppen in Haarlem.40 Recent work by Jaap Geraerts on 35

Spohnholz and Van Veen, “Calvinists vs. Libertines”; Spohnholz and Van Veen, “The Disputed Origins of Dutch Calvinism”; Jesse Spohnholz, The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 2017). See likewise Johannes Müller, Exile Memories and the Dutch Revolt: The Narrated Diaspora, 1550–1750 (Leiden, 2016), Ch. 1. 36 See esp. Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile; Parker, Faith on the Margins; Hoppenbrouwers, Oefening in volmaaktheid; Geraerts, Patrons of the Old Faith, 129–89. 37 Forclaz, Catholiques au défi de la Réforme, esp. Ch. 1; Yasuhira, “Civic Agency in the Public Sphere,” esp. 218–21 and 277–86. Recent work on religion in seventeenth-century Utrecht also includes Frits Broeyer, Het verleden van Utrecht als remonstrantse stad, 1610–1618. Maurits’ zwaard (Utrecht, 2018). 38 Parker, Faith on the Margins, 5, 17–8. Likewise Spaans, De Levens der Maechden, 39–40. 39 Kaplan et al., eds., Catholic communities in Protestant states. 40 Spaans, De Levens der Maechden.

16

Introduction

the provinces of Utrecht and Gelderland has revealed the equally important role played in the countryside by Catholic nobles, who supported the Mission strongly but on their own terms, with a keen sense of the ecclesiastical rights their families were owed.41 Such dependence ran against the grain of Tridentine reforms, which sought to foster a more hierarchic relationship between clergy and laity, and to increase the distance between the two. Given the numerous obstacles to asserting their authority faced by Catholic clergy – not least the obstruction of governmental authorities – the confessional character of Dutch Catholicism could only be a product of consent and collaboration, not an imposition “from above” on local Catholic communities.42 By turning to ego-documents as their source base, Pollmann and Carolina Lenarduzzi have made clearer than ever the contributions made by lay people in the revival and refashioning of Dutch Catholicism.43 In the Republic’s other churches too lay consent and collaboration were indispensible. That was true not only of the dissenting Protestant churches but also of the official Dutch Reformed Church, which was never established by law in the same way that state churches were in most European lands. Contrary to the paradigm originally developed by Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhardt, the rise in the Republic of confessionalism in the religious sphere was not part of a broader “confessionalization” process that reshaped state and society.44 Confessionalism here was not driven or even accompanied by political centralization; to the contrary, the particularism discussed in Chapter three emerged from the Revolt stronger and more entrenched, in some respects, than before. While all the churches operated systems of ecclesiastic discipline, only people who voluntarily became church members were subject to them. Magistrates 41 Geraerts, Patrons of the Old Faith, 190–249. 42 Charles Parker has called this process “cooperative confessionalization.” Charles H. Parker, “Cooperative confessionalisation: Lay-clerical collaboration in Dutch Catholic communities during the Golden Age,” in Catholic communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1620, ed. Benjamin Kaplan et al. (Manchester, 2009), 18–32. 43 Pollmann, Catholic Identity; Lenarduzzi, “Katholiek in de Republiek.” 44 The case of the Netherlands is hardly the only one that belies the “statism” of the original paradigm, which has been widely critiqued and acknowledged. See i.a. Joel F. Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in ­Germany, 1555–1870,” The Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77–101; Ute Lotz-­Heumann, “The Concept of ‘Confessionalization’: A Historiographical Paradigm in Dispute,” ­Memoria y Civilización 4 (2001): 83–114; Heinrich Richard Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Plädoyer für das Ende des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung,” Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997): 639–82. On its inapplicability to the Republic specifically, see Olaf Mörke, “‘Konfessionalisierung’ als politisch-soziales Prinzip? Das Verhältnis von Religion und Staatsbildung in der Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Tijdschrift voor sociale geschiedenis 16 (1990): 31–60; Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines.

Introduction

17

made only limited efforts to impose stricter, more puritanical norms of behavior on the inhabitants of their communities, and those efforts had limited success. Chapter five shows how one such disciplinary initiative was resisted by members of Utrecht’s elite who articulated an alternative, more traditional morality that placed supreme value on civic peace, social concord, and familial honor.45 Chapter six shows Utrecht’s magistrates prioritizing these same values rather than a determination of “truth” in the case of two women who reputedly were possessed by the devil. Finally and most obviously, the rise of confessionalism was not accompanied by any sustained effort to impose religious uniformity on the Dutch population. To be sure, religious conditions in the Republic varied greatly by province and locale, and it would be a mistake to project onto the rest of the Republic the same patterns of religious diversity and mixing that prevailed in Holland and Utrecht.46 That said, it remains true that Philip ii’s heavy-handed attempt at confessionalization in the 1560s cemented, by way of reaction, a general consensus in Dutch society in favor of tolerating religious diversity. While Calvinism became the sole official faith of the Republic, non-Calvinists were everywhere guaranteed freedom of conscience.47 This principle was construed as safeguarding the ability of individuals not only to dissent from Calvinist teachings but to perform non-Calvinist devotions within the privacy of their homes. The right to perform domestic devotions was then exploited by dissenters to establish places of worship, so-called schuilkerken, in houses and other private buildings. Thus the Republic combined an official, “public” church whose services no one was legally compelled to attend with a private sphere whose boundaries were extended to accommodate worship by dissenting congregations. 45

46

47

See more recently Judith Pollmann, “Het Utrechtse tuchthuis of de grenzen van het gezag in de Gouden Eeuw,” in Het Gelijk van de Gouden Eeuw. Recht, onrecht en reputatie in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden, ed. Michiel van Groesen, Judith Pollmann, and H. Cools ­(Hilversum, 2014), 91–106. On regional variations see Maarten Prak, “The politics of intolerance: citizenship and religion in the Dutch Republic (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries),” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop (Cambridge, 2002), 159–75; Israel, The Dutch Republic; 372–89, 640–43; J. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-Reformatie. Numerieke aspecten van protestantisering en katholieke herleving in de noordelijke Nederlanden, 1580–1880 (Assen, 1964); Hans Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland. Omvang en geografische spreiding van de godsdienstige gezindten vanaf de Reformatie tot heden (Assen, 1992). On the complicity of the Dutch Reformed Church in this diversity, see esp. Alastair C. Duke, “The Ambivalent Face of Calvinism in the Netherlands, 1561–1618,” in International Calvinism, 1541–1715, ed. Menna Prestwich (Oxford, New York, 1985), 109–34 (also published in Duke, Reformation and Revolt, Ch. 11); and recently Michal Bauwens, “Religieuze co-existentie en de publieke kerk. Walcheren en Staats-Vlaanderen, 1602–1630,” bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review 126 (2011): 2–24.

18

Introduction

While the former was distinctive to the Republic, the latter was not. As I show in Chapter seven, close counterparts to the Dutch schuilkerken could be found elsewhere in early modern Europe. Historians generally agree that the distinction between public and private spheres functioned as the most important regulatory mechanism by which religious diversity was accommodated in the Republic. They continue, though, to debate the nature of the distinction. In Chapter seven I emphasize two points: first, the sensory quality of the distinction – the extent to which it depended on certain visible and auditory signals. This was not true only of the buildings in which worship took place: Caspers and Margry have analyzed how, after the Reformation, Catholics in Amsterdam continued to celebrate a famous eucharistic miracle by processing through their city, but now did so discreetly, silently, in small groups or individually. Ottie Thiers has found Catholics in Amersfoort deploying similar obfuscating tactics to continue their Marian devotions.48 My second point concerns the fictional character of the ­distinction – its existence ultimately in the mind rather than in space as a cultural construct, a set of agreements between religious minorities, civic authorities, and ordinary Calvinists. Usually tacit rather than explicit, those agreements were subject at times to renegotiation and indeed violation. As Spohnholz has noted, Catholics did not always observe prohibitions against manifesting their faith in public, especially in places where they formed the largest religious group. Lenarduzzi thus finds Catholics in the Dutch Generality Lands manifesting their faith publicly more often than their co-religionists further north. Steven Mullaney, Angela Vanhaelen and Joseph Ward have turned the public-private distinction “inside out,” arguing that “[i]n the huiskerk, private space opens up into, opens up as, public space.” Frijhoff has suggested that toleration functioned chiefly in the liminal spaces between the public and private, while Christine Kooi, in her description of relations between Calvinists and Catholics, has used spatial concepts in a looser, “metaphorical” sense. Most provocatively, Genji Yasuhira has recently argued that the private may actually be an anachronistic, modern category that had no substantive, positive definition in the seventeenth century.49 This claim has prompted me to begin a reexamination of 48 49

Caspers and Margry, Identiteit en spiritualiteit van de Amsterdamse Stille Omgang; Thiers, Bedevaart en kerkeraad. Jesse Spohnholz, “Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries,” in A  Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. Thomas Safley (Leiden, 2011), 47–73; Lenarduzzi, “Katholiek in de Republiek,” esp. 287–346; Steven Mullaney, Angela Vanhaelen, and Joseph Ward, “Religion Inside Out: Dutch House Churches and the Making of Publics in the Dutch Republic,” in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (London, 2010), 25–36, quotations from title and 34; Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 39–65; Kooi, Calvinists

Introduction

19

seventeenth-century legislation and other sources, where I find terms related to privacy appearing not infrequently and not without important meanings. With its thousands of semi-clandestine dissenting churches, as well as more public places of worship for Lutherans and Jews, the Dutch Republic was known across seventeenth-century Europe for its religious diversity and toleration. By many it was celebrated for these things, by others denounced. Either way, as Chapter eight shows, toleration became part of the Republic’s distinctive identity and was eventually elevated into a national characteristic: by their own account, the Dutch did not just practice toleration, they were by nature tolerant. Indeed, it was implied if not stated that they were the most tolerant people in Europe. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this myth encouraged a congratulatory strain in historical writings by liberal scholars. By the 1980s, though, it had begun to provoke a reaction. Scholars such as Jonathan Israel, Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, and Andrew Pettegree rejected Dutch ­tolerance – prior to the Enlightenment, at least – as a mere “semblance” belied by reality. Without a basis in principles, they argued, it was a pragmatic policy of limited scope pursued only when it served economic and political interests.50 While these revisionist arguments performed a useful role in bringing a more critical approach to the subject, their heuristic value was limited by their couching the issue in terms of a false dichotomy: either the Dutch were, or were not, truly tolerant. Since then, several strategies have helped us move beyond this debate. One is to examine seventeenth-century representations of toleration as representations – to analyze their forms, functions, and relationships to reality. Thus in Chapter nine I explore the reasons why Muslims, or people who looked like them, could be found in so many seventeenth-century Dutch texts and images, giving them a cultural prominence that did not reflect the tiny number of Muslims who were actually to be found in the Republic.51

50

51

and Catholics; Genji Yasuhira, “Confessional Coexistence and Perceptions of the ‘Public’: Catholics’ Agency in Negotiations on Poverty and Charity in Utrecht, 1620s–1670s,” bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review 132 (2017): 3–24; Yasuhira, “Civic Agency in the Public Sphere,” introduction and conclusion. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, ed., Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiende eeuw tot heden (Hilversum, 1989), esp. the editor’s introduction; Israel, The Dutch Republic, 372, 655, 676, 1033; Andrew Pettegree, “The politics of toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620,” in Tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (Cambridge, 1996), 182–98. In addition to the Moriscos enumerated in Chapter nine, Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld has uncovered evidence of others living in Amsterdam in the years 1616–1629; these Moriscos probably came to the Netherlands with the Sephardi Jews for whom they worked as servants; some worked for the Bet Jacob Sephardi community. See her book Poverty and welfare among the Portuguese Jews in early modern Amsterdam (Oxford, 2012), 199 and 456 note 196; with more detail in her dissertation The Chosen Poor: Charity and Welfare among

20

Introduction

Gary Waite explores such representations further in a new book, but more work on them still needs to be done.52 The debate whether the Dutch were truly tolerant is an extreme version of a more generic and common fallacy of rating societies and eras as more or less tolerant. While such judgements are perfectly valid as personal applications of our own values, they are profoundly problematic as scholarly descriptions of an objective reality. As I have argued elsewhere, one of their most problematic features is that they take the forms of tolerance found in modern Western countries to define tolerance itself, judging others by how closely their ideas about religious diversity and ways of handling it resemble our own. But toleration has historically taken a variety of forms that are incommensurably different from one another.53 While the most important of these forms in the Republic was based on the distinction between public and private spheres, Yasuhira has pointed out that from as early as the 1620s it was supplemented by the legal, public recognition of Catholics for a few limited purposes. For example, while some Catholic priests in Utrecht were tolerated only by connivance, others registered with the municipal authorities and were given official license to reside in the city.54 The same inconsistent mix of forms could be found elsewhere, and not just vis-à-vis Catholics. Chapter ten of this book examines an arrangement that might be considered diametrically opposed to the public-private distinction. Known as “biconfessionalism,” it involved the full legal approval of two faiths. Best known from examples in the German and Swiss lands, this arrangement was implemented in the 1570s and 1580s by more than two dozen Dutch and Flemish cities that for a time allowed both Calvinists and Catholics to worship publicly, with neither faith relegated to the private sphere. Religious militancy and the wider

52

53 54

the Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Jerusalem, 2005), 226 note 144 (my thanks to Dr. Bernfeld for the reference and information). Regarding actual Muslims see also Maartje van Gelder, “Tussen Noord-Afrika en de Republiek. Nederlandse bekeerlingen tot de islam in de zeventiende eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 126 (2013): 16–33; Maartje van Gelder, “The Republic’s Renegades: Dutch Converts to Islam in Seventeenth-Century Diplomatic Relations with North Africa,” Journal of Early Modern History 19 (2015): 175–98. Gary K. Waite, Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse: From Religious Enemies to Allies and Friends (New York, 2018); see also Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Toleranz,” in Europäische Erinnerungsorten, Band 2: Das Haus Europa, ed. Pim den Boer et al. (Munich, 2012), 337–44. A somewhat ahistorical concept of “emblems of coexistence” is utilized in Wayne P. Te Brake, Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2017). Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). Yasuhira, “Civic Agency in the Public Sphere,” esp. Ch. 3.

Introduction

21

dynamic of religious politics during the Revolt led these experiments to fail, but even then biconfessionalism did not disappear from the Low Countries entirely. Principally it survived as an unrealized possibility of which Dutch people remained keenly aware. Dutch Catholics cheered in 1672–73 when Louis xiv imposed it on the parts of the Republic he conquered, and grieved when it was abolished after his forces retreated.55 Biconfessionalism proved a lasting and stable arrangement only in two distant, rather marginal parts of the Republic: Maastricht and the so-called Lands of Overmaas (part of modern-day Limburg) (Map 0.1). Here Dutch authorities introduced it in the 1630s, and it persisted almost continuously to the end of the early modern era.56 Another, more widespread arrangement involved allowing religious dissenters who were prohibited from worshiping in their home communities to travel to services in another place where their worship was legal or at least tolerated. In the Holy Roman Empire, where it was most common, this practice was called Auslaufen. Dutch Catholics performed it when they went on pilgrimage to places such as Uden, Handel, and Kevelaer, where they could participate in rites that were banned on Dutch soil.57 For Catholics who lived near one of the Republic’s borders, especially that with the Habsburg southern Netherlands, Auslaufen was a more frequent, even weekly, practice. It worked in reverse as well: as I show in Chapter eleven, Protestant dissenters in neighboring Catholic lands travelled regularly to Dutch Overmaas to worship in the village of Vaals. Utilizing this outpost to provide services for foreign co-religionists who were barred by their rulers from worshiping even privately, Dutch authorities positively encouraged such border-crossings. Thus, like other early modern lands, the Republic relied on not one but several arrangements to accommodate religious diversity. At least as important as arrangements for worship were the personal and social relations between people of different faiths. Understanding the contours of such relations, how they were regulated by formal and informal mechanisms, and how they changed over time is one of the most lively areas of current research on the history of toleration. The starting point for historians of the Netherlands is the reputation the Republic had in its day as a place where, as 55

Yasuhira, “Civic Agency in the Public Sphere,” Ch. 4; Forclaz, Catholiques au défi de la Réforme, Ch. 5. 56 See esp. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, 2014); W.A.J. Munier, Het simultaneum in de landen van Overmaas. Een uniek instituut in de Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis (1632–1878) (Leeuwarden, 1998); P.J.H. Ubachs, Twee heren, twee confessies. De verhouding van staat en kerk te Maastricht, 1632–1673 (Assen, 1975). 57 Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 144–50, 161–71; Marc Wingens, Over de grens. De bedevaart van katholieke Nederlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Nijmegen, 1994); for an excellent recent analysis see David Martin Luebke, Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (Charlottesville, 2016), esp. 104–33.

22

Introduction

Map 0.1

The Dutch Republic and its Generality Lands MAP BY BILL NELSON

Sir William Temple put it, “the differences in [religious] Opinion make none in Affections, and little in Conversation, where it serves but for entertainment and variety…. Men live together like Citizens of the World, associated by the common ties of Humanity, and by the bonds of Peace….”58 It was a commonplace of contemporary foreigners, and it became equally one of historians, that adherents of 58

William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London, 1673), 182.

Introduction

23

different religions mixed easily in Dutch society and got along well with one another in daily life. Willem Frijhoff coined the term “ecumenicity of everyday life” (omgangsoecumene) to capture this state of affairs. Using more scientific terminology, one might say that relations between the religious groups were characterized by high levels of social integration and cultural assimilation. But is this characterization accurate? Is it equally so for all periods? In 1995 Simon Groenveld presented a contrasting hypothesis, that from around 1650 to 1750 Dutch society manifested a form of verzuiling comparable to that of a much later era. Adherents of different faiths, he suggested, had separate schools and charitable institutions, married and socialized mostly within their separate groups, did business likewise with their co-religionists, and had distinct subcultures. Two years later, Spaans published a monograph on charity in Friesland, where she found a trend, starting in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, towards the separation of charitable institutions and funds along religious lines. More recent work on charity has identified elsewhere a similar change, whose reality Frijhoff himself has acknowledged.59 My own research on interfaith marriage, presented in Chapters twelve through fourteen, offers support for another element of Groenveld’s hypothesis. While the extant primary sources have sharp limitations, they suggest that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics was more problematic culturally and less common socially than scholars had believed. This suggests that in the Republic, as in other parts of Europe, the social and cultural ramifications of confessionalism, at least v­ is-à-vis Protestant-Catholic differentiation, may not have reached their greatest extent until the early eighteenth century.60 59

60

See Chapter 13, notes 1–19 for relevant references; also Forclaz, Catholiques au défi de la Réforme; Yasuhira, “Confessional Coexistence and Perceptions of the ‘Public,’”; Daniëlle Teeuwen, Financing Poor Relief through Charitable Collections in Dutch Towns, c. 1600–1800 (Amsterdam, 2016), 35–9, 59–61. Frijhoff’s concessions to aspects of Groenveld’s thesis are apparent in Frijhoff and Spies, 1650. Bevochten eendracht, 358; Willem Frijhoff, “Was the Dutch Republic a Calvinist Community? The State, the Confessions, and Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands,” in The Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared, ed. André Holenstein, Thomas Maissen, and Maarten Prak (Amsterdam, 2008), 112; Willem Frijhoff, “How Plural Were the Religious Worlds in EarlyModern Europe? Critical Reflections from the Netherlandic Experience,” in Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, ed. C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist, and Mark Greengrass (Farnham, 2009), 48–9. The relevant literature covering other parts of Europe is voluminous. For the German lands see i.a. Louis Châtellier, Tradition chrétienne et renouveau catholique dans le cadre de l’ancien diocèse de Strasbourg (1650–1770) (Paris, 1981); Étienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen, 1991); Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001); and most recently Victoria Christman and Marjorie Plummer, eds., Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (Leiden, 2018), 176–247.

24

Introduction

Numerous studies, though, have presented evidence that does not support Groenveld’s argument.61 My own tentative conclusion is that confessional segregation in some spheres by no means precluded integration in others. For example, as Geraerts has shown, few members of the Catholic nobility in Utrecht and Gelderland intermarried with Protestants at any time in the seventeenth century. Yet they socialized regularly with Protestants at weddings and funerals, in confraternities and hunting societies, in their capacity as local seigneurs, and when serving in military or public office. Equal complexity is to be expected in the cultural domain, where little research has so far been done. Examining printed illustrations in religious books, Els Stronks has painted a complex picture of shifting confessional divergences and convergences.62 As a more nuanced picture emerges of social and cultural relations beween people of different faiths, the limitations of both paradigms – omgangsoecumene and verzuiling – are gradually becoming apparent. One way to escape them is through the techniques of microhistory, which put such abstractions to a sort of reality test. Examining relations between people of different faiths on the most intimate of scales, recent microhistories reveal them to be not static social systems but dynamic processes involving agents, choices, and repeated negotiations.63 ­Biographies of individuals reveal such dimensions too.64 Though very different methodologically, the quantitative approach taken in the last chapter of this book demonstrates similarly the freedom of religiously mixed couples in the Republic to select among a variety of possible arrangements for managing religious diversity within the family.65 61

See Chapter 13, note 14. For an overview of the issue generally see Judith Pollmann, “From freedom of conscience to confessional segregation? Religious choice and toleration in the Dutch Republic,” in Persecution and Pluralism: Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe 1550–1700, ed. David Trim and Richard Bonney (Oxford and Bern, 2006), 123–48. For an extended treatment of the issue focusing on Utrecht, see Forclaz, Catholiques au défi de la Réforme, Part 2. 62 Geraerts, Patrons of the Old Faith; Els Stronks, Negotiating Differences: Word, Image, and Religion in the Dutch Republic (Leiden, 2011). 63 Kaplan, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping; Craig Harline, Conversions: Two family stories from the Reformation and modern America (New Haven, 2011); Craig Harline, Jacobs vlucht. Een familiesaga uit de Gouden Eeuw (Nijmegen, 2017); Henk Roosenboom, Ontvoerd of ge­ vlucht? Religieuze spanningen in Brabant en de zaak Sophia Alberts (1700–1710) (Hilversum, 2016); Henk F.K. van Nierop, Treason in the Northern Quarter: War, Terror, and the Rule of Law in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton, 2009). 64 See e.g. Wiebe Bergsma, De wereld volgens Abel Eppens. Een Ommelander boer uit de zestiende eeuw (Groningen, 1988); Judith Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius, 1565–1641 (Manchester, 1999). 65 Compare to Dagmar Freist, Glaube – Liebe – Zwietracht. Konfessionell gemischte Ehen in Deutschland in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2017).

Introduction

25

Debate on the changing contours of interconfessional relations is one of several factors prompting historians to pay more attention to the latter half of the early modern era. When I entered the field, scholarly interest focused chiefly on the years circa 1570 to 1620 – the formative period in which the Republic’s distinctive religious settlement took shape. Religious developments in the following five decades or so, during the height of the Golden Age, received less attention except from historians of Calvinism, who always attached great importance to the Further Reformation and disputes between Voetians and Cocceians. Few historians studied religion in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century, and those who did were mostly intellectual historians interested in the Enlightenment. This rather dramatic chronological skewing had not always existed; in earlier generations some scholars had written works covering several centuries.66 In the 1980s, Willem Frijhoff was almost the only historian whose publications had an equally wide scope. Thanks largely to the influence of historical anthropology, by the 1990s there were others, including historians of witchcraft and magic, who from the start concerned themselves with the longue durée.67 Today, by contrast, a majority of historians of religion in the Netherlands study the periods after 1620. Some like myself have migrated from an original focus on the earlier period; others belong to a new generation who from the beginning defined their subject in extended chronological terms. Bringing a range of concerns and methodologies, they face the

66

67

I.a. L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1945–47); H.A. Enno van Gelder, Vrijheid en onvrij­ heid in de Republiek. Geschiedenis der vrijheid van drukpers en godsdienst van 1572 tot 1798 (Haarlem, 1947); W.P.C. Knuttel, De toestand der Nederlandsche katholieken ten tijde der Republiek, 2 vols. (Den Haag, 1892); Johannes Reitsma, Geschiedenis van de Hervorming en de Hervormde Kerk der Nederlanden (Groningen, 1892); Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam. Hans de Waardt, Toverij en samenleving. Holland 1500–1800 (The Hague, 1991); Willem de Blécourt, Termen van toverij. De veranderende betekenis van toverij in NoordoostNederland tussen de 16e en 20ste eeuw (Nijmegen, 1990); Gijswijt-Hofstra and Frijhoff, eds., Witchcraft in the Netherlands; also informed by anthropology was Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur. De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam, 1578–1700 (Hilversum, 1990); and Margry and Caspers, Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland. Taking very different approaches but also broad chronologically were F.A. van Lieburg, Profeten en hun vaderland. De geografische herkomst van de gereformeerde predikanten in Nederland van 1572 tot 1816 (Zoetermeer, 1996); and Peter van Rooden, Religieuze regimes. Over ­godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland, 1570–1990 (Amsterdam, 1990), which proposed a novel paradigm for Dutch religious history over the very longue durée; see in English Peter van Rooden, “Long-term Religious Developments in the Netherlands, ca 1750–2000,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod (Cambridge, 2002), 113–29.

26

Introduction

challenge of reassessing the balance between continuity and change over the early modern era.68

…

The historiographic developments outlined above have direct relevance to the essays that follow, but by no means are they the only recent ones of significance. Specialists on Calvinism, for example, have begun a reassessment of the Synod of Dordt (1618–19), whose quatercentenary is currently being marked, while new perspectives have opened up on religion in the Dutch colonial world.69 It is even more important to acknowledge the contributions to our understanding of Dutch religious history made by scholars who do not define themselves primarily as historians of religion but as social, political, cultural, or ­intellectual historians; as art or literary historians, historical anthropologists, biographers, or genealogists. Thanks to the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and to interdisciplinary institutions such as the Amsterdam Centre for the Study of the Golden Age and the Low Countries Seminar in London, early modernists of different stripes have more knowledge of each other’s work and more intellectual exchange today than ever before. This is invaluable, for it has equipped us to appreciate and explore the fascinating overlaps between the history of religion and that of subjects such as migration, material culture, gender, knowledge, and the emotions. The days when religious history was defined as church history and studied in isolation are, for most scholars, well past. 68

69

Among intellectual historians of the later period, Joris van Eijnatten, Ernestine van der Wall, and Andrew Fix have perhaps devoted the most attention to religion. Historians whose work has moved forward in time include Kaplan, Spaans, Parker, Van Nierop, Waite (see note 22 above on his current project), and Janssen (who is leading a new project on “The Invention of the Refugee”). Religious historians whose work from the beginning extended over the longue durée include Lenarduzzi and Mudde, as well as Bogaers for an earlier period. Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–19) (Woodbridge, 2005); Aza Goudriaan and Fred van Lieburg, eds., Revisiting the Synod of Dordt (1618–19) (Leiden, 2011); a nine-volume edition of the Acts of the Synod of Dort is being published to commemorate the Synod’s quatercentenary: Donald Sinnema et al., eds., Acta et documenta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechtanae (1618–1619) (Göttingen, 2015-). On the colonies see esp. Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch origins of American religious liberty (Philadelphia, 2012); Jonathan I. Israel and Stuart B. Schwartz, eds., The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624–1654) (Amsterdam, 2007); G.J. Schutte, ed., Het Indisch Sion. De Gereformeerde kerk onder de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Hilversum, 2002); H.E. Niemeijer, “Calvinisme en koloniale stadscultuur. Batavia 1619–1725” (Ph.D. diss., Vrije Universiteit, 1996); Charles H. Parker, “Converting souls across cultural borders: Dutch Calvinism and early modern missionary enterprises,” Journal of Global History 8 (2013): 50–71; Parker is currently preparing a book on the role of Dutch Calvinism in early modern world history.

Chapter 1

“Remnants of the Papal Yoke”: Apathy and Opposition in the Dutch Reformation In the early summer of 1566, a wave of mass rallies swept the Habsburg Netherlands. As Catholic officials watched paralyzed, large crowds gathered outside the gates of cities to listen to illegal Protestant sermons. These so-called hedgesermons began spontaneously, without planning by any organization. Most of the sermons were not even given by ordained ministers, but by a motley assortment of self-appointed preachers that included weavers, shoemakers, and apostate monks. Their sermons attracted huge crowds, by the standards of the day; if enthusiastic chroniclers may be believed, the largest crowds topped ten thousand.1 Philip ii may have been determined to keep the Netherlands for Catholicism, but by 1566 loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church had grown weak and desire for reform strong among broad segments of Netherlandish society. The hedge-sermons are just one piece of evidence among many pointing to this fact. Clerical callings were in decline; vernacular Bibles sold in large numbers, as did the works of humanist and Protestant authors; in Holland, priests used subterfuges to signal their support for the Gospel; in Friesland and Groningen, regulars were abandoning their monasteries and cloisters. Most dramatic of all was the large-scale resistance that Philip provoked when he sought to rejuvenate and reform the Catholic Church in the Tridentine spirit. Committed Protestants, willing to risk persecution, were still few, but a much larger number of Netherlanders were inclined to tolerate or even support them. Such people, who were still nominally Catholic but had accepted some Protestant notions, J.J. Woltjer has called “Protestantizers.”2 For a brief, heady moment in 1566, it seemed as if they too might embrace the Reformation. Fifteen years later, north and south had split and the “United Provinces” abjured their allegiance to the Spanish crown. Calvinism became the official faith of the new Dutch nation. Calvinist ministers preached in the old ­parish 1 Phyllis Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands 1544–1569 (Cambridge, 1978). 2 See J.J. Woltjer, Friesland in hervormingstijd (Leiden, 1962), 90–104 and passim; Alastair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London and Ronceverte, 1990), 8–10, 60–1, 155–59.

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churches, received salaries from the secular authorities, and accompanied the new nation’s armies and navies into battle. Catholicism was outlawed; the practice of other religions required special permission.3 Yet, in a seeming paradox, now that the Reformed Church had become the new establishment in the north, few of the Dutch chose to join it. In 1585, Rotterdam counted no more than 500 Reformed Church members out of a population of over 7500 (7%). In 1608 there were only 1600 members in Delft, a city of 15,000 (11%). As late as 1617–18 the percentage still stood at only ten for both Haarlem and ­Deventer.4 The surviving evidence is sketchy, but all of it suggests how few committed Calvinists there were in the young Republic. Even if one includes the pre-adolescent children of church members (who were not included in the membership rolls), one finds that it was common for committed Calvinists to account for less than a quarter of a city’s population. Of the remaining threequarters, some belonged to other churches, legal or illegal. Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and a variety of sectarians all managed to organize religious services in the tolerant environment of the Dutch Republic. An extraordinarily large number of people, though, declined to join any church at all. In Haarlem, Rotterdam, Deventer, and Utrecht, all the churches together had combined memberships of less than half the population.5 The most striking and significant fact for the early religious history of the Dutch Republic is the number 3 On the position of the Reformed Church as official, “public” church of the United Provinces see esp. Heinz Schilling, “Religion und Gesellschaft in der Calvinistischen Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande. ‘Öffentlichkeitskirche’ und Säkularisation; Ehe und Hebammenwesen; Presbyterien und politische Partizipation,” in Kirche und gesellschaftlicher Wandel, ed. Franz Petri (Cologne, 1980), 197–250. In Drenthe and the city of Groningen the Reformed Church attained this position only in 1594. Otto J. de Jong, Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis (Nijkerk, 1986), 158. 4 H. ten Boom, De reformatie in Rotterdam 1530–1585 (n. p., 1987), 180–81; J. Briels, “De Zuidnederlandse immigratie 1572–1630,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 100 (1987): 338–39; Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (’s-Gravenhage, 1989), 89; Mathieu Gerardus Spiertz, “Die Ausübung der Zucht in der IJsselstadt Deventer in den Jahren 1592–1619 im Vergleich zu den Untersuchungen im Languedoc und in der Kurpfalz,” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 49 (1985): 170. For compliations of similar figures see also A. Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Assen, 1974), 132–34; Alastair Duke, “The Ambivalent Face of Calvinism in the Netherlands, 1561–1618,” in International Calvinism 1541–1715 ed. Menna Prestwich (Oxford, 1985), 110. 5 Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie, 104; Ten Boom, Reformatie in Rotterdam, 180–81; Spiertz, “Die Ausübung der Zucht in der IJsselstadt Deventer”; Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995). In Antwerp, before its fall to the Spanish, 37% declared no loyalty to any church. J. van Roey, “De correlatie tussen het sociale-beroepsmilieu en de godsdienstkeuze te Antwerpen op het einde der xvie eeuw,” in Sources de l’histoire religieuse de la Belgique (Louvain, 1968), 239–58.

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of people who belonged to no church at all. This was a phenomenon without precedent or parallel in Europe. Such people did not constitute a uniform or united group – far from it. Some became known as “sympathizers” (liefhebbers) of the Reformed Church, attending sermons there with some regularity but not taking communion. The rest, who did not attend any services at all, Calvinists called “Libertines,” a label that historians have retained to this day, despite its derogatory connotations. Some Libertines became vocal critics of the Reformed Church; most, however, grew apathetic and ceased to practice religion altogether, at least publicly. Over the years, the number of Libertines declined, and by the 1650s most people had affiliated with one church or another.6 In its time, though, Dutch Libertinism was a mass phenomenon, exposing clearly the lack of enthusiasm with which the Dutch greeted religious reforms as soon as those reforms were institutionalized. To put it simply, the Dutch Reformed Church was not very popular; a lot of potential members – people who in the 1560s had favored some sort of Protestantizing reform – kept their distance from it. Why they did so is a question that has greatly exercised historians in recent years. Scholars have long known that Calvinism had a larger core of devoted followers in the southern provinces than the northern ones (though many of these followers fled north in the 1580s, when the Spanish regained control over their homes). They have also pointed to the continuing war with Spain, which made joining the Reformed Church a potentially life-threatening act if the Spanish ever won. In addition, historians have noted the competition that the Reformed Church faced from other churches and the very limited degree to which Dutch secular authorities encouraged membership in the Reformed Church. More recently, they have stressed the difficulties which the Reformed Church itself placed in the path of prospective members.7 Taking all these factors into account, however, one is still left with a large residue of popular apathy, opposition, and ambivalence that demands explanation. What were the attitudes and beliefs of the apathetic, the hostile? In asking this question, one is seeking to understand the religious mentalities of this amorphous majority of Netherlanders that stood outside the churches in the late sixteenth and 6 See J. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-Reformatie. Numerieke aspecten van protestantisering en katholieke herleving in de noordelijke Nederlanden, 1580–1880 (Assen, 1964), 54–68; J.J. Woltjer, “Het beeld vergruisd?” in Vaderlands verleden in veelvoud. 31 opstellen over de Nederlandse geschiedenis na 1500, ed. G.A.M. Beekelaar et al. (The Hague, 1975), 177–78. 7 Alastair Duke in particular has stressed this last point, which has gained widespread acceptance. See his Reformation and Revolt, 269–93. For a summary of the other difficulties facing the Dutch Reformed Church see Wiebe Bergsma, “Calvinismus in Friesland um 1600 am Beispiel der Stadt Sneek,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 80 (1989): 252 ff.

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early seventeenth century. Understanding this group, in turn, can shed light on a much broader phenomenon: the apathy and opposition which religious reformers faced in many other parts of Europe at the same time. It is, alas, impossible to penetrate directly the minds of people who left no personal statements of belief and did not vote with their feet for one church over another. Compounding the difficulty, the behavior of most Libertines traces no ritual pattern that could be analyzed using anthropological models. Apathy, inaction, silence, minimal compliance – such phenomena pose grave and largely unaddressed difficulties for the historical researcher.8 One way that historians have often “read” the Libertines’ typical behavior is to consider it irreligious. Numerous historians have suggested that Dutch Libertines simply lacked religious conviction. J.C. Naber, for example, attributed to them a “decided unbelief.”9 In drawing this conclusion, Naber was simply ratifying the judgment of contemporary Calvinists, a judgement implicit in the very word “Libertine.” According to Calvinists, those who refused to join a church did so in order to avoid submission to any religious and moral strictures. They wished to live licentiously, as “atheists” and “epicureans,” believing, according to Philip Marnix, “that one must simply overcome all remorse of conscience … and indulge oneself to one’s heart’s content.” This attitude made Libertines enemies not only of the Reformed faith, argued Marnix, but of all religion, all morality, and all obedience to authority.10 Understood in this sense, Libertinism was hardly restricted to the Netherlands. In fact, the first complaints about Libertinism issued from Protestant reformers in Germany in the late 1520s. And, significantly, it seemed to these reformers that their own efforts had helped to create the problem. A frustrated Luther declared in his Small Catechism that the common man had already “mastered the fine art of abusing” the new evangelical freedom.11 The Strasbourg reformer Caspar Hedio protested likewise in 1534 that many people had 8 9 10

11

For a model approach to such behavior, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985). J.C. Naber, Calvinist of Libertijnsch? (1572–1631) (Utrecht, 1884), 15. Philip Marnix, Ondersoeckinge ende grondelijcke wederlegginge der geestdrijvische leere, in Godsdienstige en kerkelijke geschriften, ed. J.J. van Toorenenbergen (’s-Gravenhage, 1873) 2:viii. See similarly Pierre Viret, L’Interim fait par dialogues, ed. Guy R. Mermier (New York, 1985), 113. On the history and usage of the term “Libertine,” see Gerhard Schneider, Der Libertin. Zur Geistes- und Sozialgeschichte des Bürgertums im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1970); J.C. Margolin, “Réflexions sur l’emploi du terme libertin au xvie siècle,” in Aspects du libertinisme au xvie siècle: actes du colloque international de Sommières, ed. M. Bataillon (Paris, 1974), 1–33. The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia, 1959), 338.

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taken wrongful advantage of the changes brought by Protestantism: when Catholic confession was abolished, they had stopped attending confession altogether; not only had they ceased to observe papist holidays, as asked, but the sabbath as well.12 John Calvin complained in 1539 that “neither people nor prince distinguishes between the yoke of Christ and the tyranny of the pope.” Many, “having shaken off the yoke of Christ, will not endure any discipline; they want to overturn all order, though boldly claiming the name of reformation.”13 One modern scholar has suggested that the reformers were correct – that ordinary Europeans were taking advantage of the Reformation to free themselves from all religious and moral strictures. Investigating Lutheran Germany, Gerald Strauss has uncovered a mass of visitation reports that complain of widespread ignorance of dogma, absenteeism from services, refusal to attend catechism classes, disrespect for the church, and moral laxity. A “horrible epicureanism” prevailed, according to one report. Strauss concludes that there was a “monumental public lack of interest in religion” and that formal religion, Catholic and Protestant equally, made little impact on the “everyday lives and thoughts” of the populace.14 Certainly the reformers thought so, at least in moments of despair. At times, it seemed to them as if their efforts, far from uplifting Europe in a great spiritual and moral renewal, had unleashed hordes of atheists and sinners.15 To explain Dutch Libertinism, then, is to gain insight into a much broader, international phenomenon. Rather than equate inaction with irreligion, 12

13

14 15

Quoted in Steven Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, 1975), 154. See also Lorna Jane Abray, The People’s Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy, and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500– 1598 (Ithaca, 1985), 44. Quoted in William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (New York, 1988), 218. See likewise the warning issued in 1530 by the Nuremberg jurist Christoph Scheurl “that, although the sola in sola fide was still being disputed by the experts, people seemed to be all too eager to act on it. ‘How devoid of works we have become now,’ he noted, ‘is, alas, plain for all to see.’” Gerald Strauss, “The Reformation and Its Public in an Age of Orthodoxy,” in The German People and the Reformation, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia (Ithaca, 1988), 204. Five of the eight lay pamphleteers studied by Paul Russel likewise criticize people within the Protestant camp who misused their newly-found Christian freedom as an excuse for sinning; see his Lay Theology in the Reformation: Popular Pamphleteers in Southwest Germany 1521–1525 (Cambridge, 1986), 217. These early complaints do not yet use the term “Libertine” for the phenomenon being described, as would regularly be done by the 1570s. Gerald Strauss, “Success and Failure in the German Reformation,” Past and Present 67 (1975): 54, 52, 56, and passim; Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978), 266, 268–99. Strauss, “Success and Failure,” 30–3; Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning, 274.

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­ owever, I propose here to follow the lead of the Calvinists themselves and h relate the sentiments of the silent majority to the words of the outspoken few. For among those whom the Calvinists called Libertines was a minority that loudly criticized the Dutch Reformed Church. Perhaps the most famous of such Libertine critics were Hubert Duifhuis in Utrecht, Caspar Coolhaes in Leiden, Dirck Coornhert in Haarlem, and Herman Herbertszoon in Gouda. Calvinists not only linked the silent to the outspoken by calling them both Libertines, they asserted that the majority of Libertines, through inaction, was “acting out” the beliefs expressed by these vocal critics. In Leiden, for example, Calvinists explicitly identified Coolhaes as spokesman for the silent. Coolhaes, they said, had “joined the throng of those who form the largest party of all, namely those who want to form a new general Catholic Church, and do not desire to marry any particular religion, among whom are the still-standers, speculators, and lookers-on [Stilstaenders, Speculeerders end’ Tockijckers], and those who always seek but never find.”16 This active minority of Libertines left an abundance of sources testifying to their views, including pamphlets, letters, sermons, plays, chronicles, and trial records. To be sure, these sources offer limited access to the beliefs of the vast numbers of unchurched. Nevertheless, it is surely significant that the portrait of Libertinism they reveal is far removed from that of its Calvinist critics, and far removed also from the equation of Libertinism with Erasmian humanism that historians frequently make. Instead, these sources suggest Libertinism to have been a vehemently anti-confessional form of piety whose most important strands were composed of spiritualism and a distinctly Protestant brand of anticlericalism. For the past century and a half, most historians who have credited Dutch Libertines with some form of piety have associated their movement with Erasmian humanism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they usually regarded Libertinism as part of a distinctly Dutch, “national-Reformed” movement. This autochthonous movement for religious reform supposedly ran from the Modern Devotion through Erasmus of Rotterdam, the so-called “sacramentarians” of the 1520s, and the Libertines to the Arminians.17 Erasmus, though, 16 17

Quoted in W. Bergsma, “Zestiende-eeuwse godsdienstige pluriformiteit. Overwegingen naar aanleiding van Abel Eppens,” in Historisch bewogen. Opstellen over de radicale reformatie in de 16e en 17e eeuw (Groningen, 1984), 24. For an overview of this historiography see D. Nauta, “De reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie,” in Geschiedschrijving in Nederland, ed. P.A.M. Geurts and A.E.M. Janssen (’s-Gravenhage, 1981), 2:206–27; J.C.H. Blom and C.J. Misset, “‘Een onvervalschte Nederlandsche geest.’ Enkele historiografische kanttekeningen bij het concept van een ­nationaal-gereformeerde richting,” in Geschiedenis godsdienst letterkunde. Opstellen

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was considered the pivotal figure in the movement, expressing most cogently its characteristic piety: tolerant, undogmatic, with a belief in human free will and an inclination to view sermon-on-the-mount ethics as the essence of Christianity. Since World War ii, historians have tended to discard the nationalist element of this interpretation and retain only the humanist. In this vein, H.A. Enno van Gelder has declared that the Libertines comprised the “party of Erasmus,” that they were “humanists after the downfall of humanism” in other lands. For Enno van Gelder, that made them fundamentally modern types, the precursors of nineteenth-century liberalism.18 The claim that humanism was a popular, indeed mass movement in the Netherlands sounds peculiar, though, when evaluated against the broader European context. For among the attributes that non-Dutch scholars universally attribute to humanism is a pronounced elitism. To be sure, by the second half of the sixteenth century, secondary schools across Europe had adopted components of the humanist educational program. Still, only a privileged minority of youths ever attended such schools, in the Netherlands as elsewhere. It is also true that many of Erasmus’ works were published in the vernacular. Yet even more editions of Erasmus’ works appeared in English than in Dutch.19 There is a logical problem here as well. Even if Erasmian humanists did promote an undogmatic, tolerant, ethically-oriented piety, that does not mean that all such piety was necessarily inspired by humanism, as Enno van Gelder and others assume. Carlo Ginzburg’s Cheese and the Worms provides ready confirmation of this fact. There, the Italian miller Menocchio, who had no exposure to humanism whatsoever, espouses a very idiosyncratic set of beliefs with all the above characteristics. Ginzburg can only marvel at the extraordinary “convergence between the most progressive circles among the educated classes and popular groups with radical leanings.”20 Lorna Jane Abray has found the same lack of dogmatism to be typical of lay piety generally in sixteenth-century Strasbourg,

18

19 20

aangeboden aan dr. S.B.J. Zilverberg ter gelegeheid van zijn afscheid van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, ed. E.K. Grootes and J. den Haan (Roden, 1989), 221–32. H.A. Enno van Gelder, “Humanisten en Libertijnen, Erasmus en C.P. Hooft,” Nederlandsch Archief voor kerkgeschiedenis N.S. 16 (1920): 35–84; idem, Vrijheid en onvrijheid in de Republiek. Geschiedenis der vrijheid van drukpers en godsdienst … van 1572 tot 1619 (Haarlem, 1947). For recent examples of the humanist interpretation see D. Nauta, “Religieuze situatie bij het begin van de strijd 1568–1579,” in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, new edition (Haarlem, 1979) (henceforth cited as agn), 6:202–14; W. Nijenhuis, “De publieke kerk veelkleurig en verdeeld, bevoorrecht en onvrij,” in agn, 6:325–43. Simon Willem Bijl, Erasmus in het Nederlands tot 1617 (Nieuwkoop, 1978), 367–69. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York, 1980), 41.

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yet she finds nothing distinctly humanistic about its sources or inspiration.21 From England too comes evidence of a “rustic pelagianism” not inspired by humanism: “I mean well, I hurt no man, nor I think no man any hurt. I love God above all and put my whole trust in Him. What would ye have more?”22 Considerations like these suggest the need for a reexamination of the primary sources. According to those sources, what made one a Libertine was one’s rejection of ecclesiastic discipline. Indeed, refusal to submit to such discipline formed the single indisputably common denominator of Libertine attitudes and actions. This fact, though, is highly suggestive, for the event that decisively alienated a majority of Netherlanders from the Roman Catholic Church was the attempt made by Philip ii to introduce the Counter-Reformation to their land.23 The “new bishoprics scheme” and the edicts of the Council of Trent together would have strengthened immeasurably the power of the Catholic hierarchy to discipline and regiment the lives of ordinary parishioners. The number of bishoprics was to rise from 4 to 14; each bishopric was to have two inquisitors; church officials were to conduct annual visitations of all parishes; lists were to be compiled of people to be punished for failing to confess at least once a year or for breaking the church’s moral code. Such innovations were not repugnant only to the minority of committed Protestants, for whom they spelled new heights of persecution. Future “Libertines” denounced the reforms as a “Spanish inquisition” and joined in opposing them. In the process, resistance to Philip’s religious policy became a truly mass phenomenon. Of course the Dutch Revolt against Spain owed much of its impetus to this resistance. But where the Revolt succeeded (that is, primarily in the northern provinces), Libertines were not about to comply with renewed demands for discipline, this time from the Calvinists. Calvinist discipline was, if anything, even stricter than what Catholic reformers had proposed. Administered by consistories, it followed a well-known set of procedures, beginning with private admonitions and ending, in the most extreme cases, with excommunication. In practice, Dutch consistories resorted to excommunication very 21 Abray, The People’s Reformation, 178 ff. 22 Quoted in Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford, 1967), 37; see likewise Arthur Dent, Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (London, 1601), 27. 23 For general accounts of this attempt, see L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1945–47), 1:201–419; J.  ­Decavele, “Reformatie en begin katholieke restauratie 1555–1568,” in agn, 6:166–85; M.G. Spiertz, “Succes en falen van de katholieke reformatie,” in Ketters en papen onder Filips ii (Utrecht, 1986), 58. The standard work on the “new bishoprics scheme” is M. ­Dierickx, De oprichting der nieuwe bisdommen in de Nederlanden onder Filips ii 1559–1570 (Antwerp, 1950).

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rarely; in Amsterdam, for example, only thirty-three excommunications were pronounced in the entire period 1578–1700.24 However, consistories frequently barred offenders temporarily from taking communion, until the offenders repented of their acts and were reconciled with the church. More peculiar in the world of international Calvinism, Dutch consistories also enforced church discipline in anticipation, as it were, by requiring candidates for church membership to prove themselves worthy of admission. Candidates had to produce attestations testifying to their moral purity and demonstrate a knowledge of correct dogma. Ironically, through such requirements, Calvinists themselves made it less than easy for some would-be members to join their church. Calvinists had great difficulty understanding how any person of principle could object to their system of ecclesiastic discipline. People who belonged to other churches they could understand, even while reviling them: such people were simply adhering to a different, mistaken set of doctrinal and behavioral rules. But those who would not submit to the discipline of any church had to be immoral, godless individuals out to make life as easy for themselves as possible. So, at least, ran Calvinist logic, following that of Calvin himself.25 Yet such accusations cannot be taken at face value. Most reformers were notoriously quick to impugn the piety of anyone who disagreed with them, and they were especially quick to do so when their opponents succeeded in turning their own arguments against them. That is precisely what happened in the interaction of Dutch Calvinists and Libertines. Outspoken Libertines used bona fide Protestant arguments to criticize the Dutch Reformed Church, especially its use of ecclesiastic discipline, which they called a “remnant of the papal yoke.”26 Dutch Libertines claimed that such discipline was an oppressive holdover from Catholicism, a tool of clerical tyranny that should have been abolished with the Reformation. From its inception, the Protestant movement presented itself as a movement of liberation, restoring to Christians their “evangelical freedom.” Reformers said they were stripping away all that had been added to Christianity over the course of centuries and returning the religion to its pristine, simpler form. Protestants of all casts shared this negative message, that religion was to be less 24 25 26

Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur. De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam, 1578–1700 (Hilversum, 1990), 138, 148. All but one of the excommunications occurred before 1643. See Jean Calvin, Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins qui se nomment spirituelz (1545), in Joannis Calvini Opera, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss (Brunsvigae, 1863–1900), 7:145–248, esp. 164–65, 192. Pieter Bor, Oorsprongk, begin, en vervolgh der Nederlandsche oorlogen, beroerten, en borgerlyke oneenigheden (Amsterdam, 1679), 2:832.

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burdensome. As to why Christianity had grown so burdensome Protestants had a simple explanation. The fault, they said, lay with Catholic clerics, who, greedy for wealth and power, had sought to exercise a “tyrannical” dominance over the laity. In order to achieve such dominance, the Catholic clergy had made “human additions” to the Bible. Chief among these additions were two: the requirement that Christians perform “works” to achieve salvation, and the “power of the keys” – the power of the church to judge those works, and thus to forgive men their sins or damn them on behalf of God. Reformers claimed in effect that the clergy had added all kinds of unnecessary requirements for salvation, and then made the laity come pleading – to them, the clergy, not to God – to be admitted to heaven. In both respects the clergy were said to have arrogated powers belonging properly to God alone. Of course, mainstream reformers had no intention of abolishing all religious burdens or of eliminating all clerical authority. If the sola Scriptura principle legitimized attacks on Catholicism, it also legitimized the new orthodoxies, rituals, and ecclesiastic structures which Protestants developed to replace the old ones. No sooner, though, did reformers turn from demolition to reconstruction than they came under attack for betraying their own principles. Consider, for example, sola fide: already by 1528 Luther had to defend himself against accusations that he was a “neo-papist” because he considered baptism necessary for salvation.27 For Luther, baptism was a vehicle of faith, not a “work” which one performed, but clearly others disagreed. The German reformer Johannes Brenz, writing in 1533, explained the difficulty: mandating specific forms of religious observance could easily, though in his view wrongly, be construed as implying “that by the observance of such prescribed works men repent their sins and earn God’s grace.”28 Dutch Calvinists found themselves in the same quandary when they required the performance of certain acts and rituals for salvation. And that they did, in practice if not in theory. For while all Calvinists assented to the doctrine of predestination, none could completely sever the bands of common sense that tied salvation to pious behavior and made salvation in some sense contingent on one’s actions here on earth. In theory, of course, Calvinists denied that one’s behavior could affect one’s salvation, which had been predetermined by God in eternity. As a corollary, no person could distinguish with certainty between the elect and the reprobate, whose identities God alone knew. The most apparently virtuous member of the Reformed Church might be predestined 27 28

Luther’s Works, vol. 51, Sermons i, ed. and trans. John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia, 1959), 184. Quoted in Ozment, Reformation in the Cities, 154.

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for damnation. On the other hand, Calvinists also held that salvation could not be achieved outside their church. As the Belgic Confession stated, “this holy gathering [i.e. the church] is an assembly of those who are saved, and ... outside the same there is no salvation.”29 According to Dutch Libertines, this position made a new works-righteousness of church rituals. It also, in their view, handed over the power of the keys to Calvinist consistories for further abuse. In practice, by controlling access to communion, consistories determined who would be presumed saved and who not. Requirements set by consistories for initial church membership became as good as prerequisites for salvation, while ecclesiastic censure took on the same dire implications that it had possessed prior to the Reformation. Caspar Coolhaes and another Libertine, C.P. Hooft, explicitly compared the house visitations which Calvinist ministers made before communion to auricular confession in the Catholic Church.30 In effect, Calvinist ministers set themselves up as judges over the doctrine and morals of the laity, just as Catholic priests had once done, and with no greater warrant. So it seemed to Libertines, who never tired of denouncing what they called the new “Genevan inquisition,” the Calvinist replacement for the old “Spanish inquisition” that Philip had sought to introduce. Calvinist ministers, they said, were “new papists.”31 That the former episcopal court in Utrecht had been called a “consistory” only cemented further Libertines’ association of Calvinist discipline with Catholicism.32 The parallels which Libertines drew between Calvinism and Catholicism did not stop here, though. Like the priests they succeeded, Calvinist ministers were accused of having made “human additions” to the Bible. These new additions took the form of catechisms and confessions, statements of doctrine written not by God but by men – ministers, to be precise – who then used the documents to test people’s orthodoxy. Libertines objected that this practice made a mockery of the Calvinists’ supposed adherence to the principle of sola Scriptura. Scripture alone was guaranteed to have been written with divine inspiration; it alone therefore could have binding authority.33 This ­reasoning 29

J.N. Bakhuizen van den Brink, De Nederlandse belijdenisgeschriften (2nd edit. Amsterdam, 1976), 123. 30 Duke, Reformation and Revolt, 292. 31 See e.g. the anonymous Ratelwachts ende Torenwachters waerschouwinge…. (1600), reprinted in Het Nederlandsch proza in de zestiendeeuwsche pamfletten uit den tijd der beroerten, ed. Paul Fredericq (Brussels, 1907), 372. 32 Johannes Wtenbogaert, Leven, kerckelijcke bedieninghe ende zedighe verantwoordingh (2nd edit. n. p., 1646), 3. 33 See e.g. Caspar Coolhaes, Een Christelijcke vermaninghe/ aen alle onpartydighe Predicanten: Om te waecken/ ende by tijts te voorsien/ dat die Sathan gheen nieu Pausdom/ aen des

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prompted Libertines to seek the abolition of all doctrinal tests. Hubert Duifhuis was typical in arguing that anyone who acknowledged Jesus Christ as their savior should be admitted to full church membership.34 Such a change would have eliminated in a stroke the clergy’s dominance and undermined entirely the confessional character of the Dutch Reformed Church. Predictably, Calvinist ministers responded by denying that they had made any “additions” to the Bible; they regarded confession and catechism as nothing more than convenient summaries or paraphrases capturing the essence of the Gospel message. This claim, however, fared poorly in a pluralistic society where ministers of different churches taught different doctrines, and all claimed merely to be paraphrasing Scripture. No one believed that truth was relative or that more than one interpretation of Scripture might be correct. The difficulty, then, lay in distinguishing purely Scriptural content from the “human additions” which were said to account for the differences of interpretation. On this score, Libertines denied the clergy any advantage over the laity. Clerics were as human and hence as fallible as anyone else, wrote Dirck Coornhert, a prolific Libertine pamphleteer.35 In this situation, lay people had the right and even the duty to judge the teaching of clerics in the light of their own reading of the Bible. In good Protestant fashion, Libertines proclaimed a priesthood of all believers. Their priesthood, however, unlike that of Calvinists, was so thorough in its equality that no distinction remained between clergy and laity. Duifhuis asserted that such a distinction was itself one of the “human additions” that had corrupted Christianity after the age of the apostles.36 In this way, too, Libertines took bona fide Protestant arguments to a new extreme. In part, then, Libertinism was a product of the Reformation. Sometimes using the very rhetoric of the early Protestant reformers, Libertines echoed what one scholar has called the “original Protestant message”: the call for liberation from the burdens of a clerically dominated and corrupted religion.37 Libertines, though, took this message to an extreme that undermined the authority of all religious establishments, Protestant as well as Catholic. In their view, all catechisms and confessions were “human additions,” all church orders were “human ordinances,” consistories were like episcopal courts, and the new ­ecclesiastic discipline was a scarcely modified version of the hated inquisition. ouden benaest veruallen plaets wederom oprechte (n. p., 1584); Herman Herbertsz., Naerder verclaeringe over 32 Articulen (1592). 34 BR, rkr ms. 500A, 199. 35 Dirck Coornhert, Wercken, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1630), 2:192r and passim. 36 BR, rkr ms. 500A, 120. 37 Ozment, Reformation in the Cities, Ch. 3.

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Why did Libertines understand the Protestant message in this way? What accounts for the particular twist they gave to Reformed theology? In recent years, historians have grown increasingly aware of the deep impact which late medieval culture had on how people of the sixteenth century understood the Reformation. Peter Blickle, for instance, has traced the influence of old communal ideals on the German peasants and townsmen who revolted in 1525 and claimed the Gospel as their justification.38 Robert Scribner has shown how many Germans greeted the Reformation as heralding the end of time and how others projected onto Luther the attributes of sainthood.39 These are disconcerting facts for those historians who like to view the Reformation as a clean and liberating break with the past. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the very act of appropriating – or rejecting – Protestant ideas required one to place them in a mental framework that was largely shaped in advance by one’s preexisting culture. Among Libertines, the most formative element in that culture seems to have been late medieval mysticism. Mystical theology apparently sank deep roots in the Netherlands. It formed the chief inspiration of several spiritualist sects that flourished there between the 1520s and the 1560s, among which were the Loists, the David Jorisites, and the Family of Love. In the long period before reforms were institutionalized, Netherlanders were exposed to the entire range of Protestant ideas, and yet faced the danger of persecution if they translated those ideas into action. This situation confirmed an old inclination to view religious reform as an internal, spiritual transformation, not dependent on the adoption of new, visible patterns of ritualized religious behavior.40 Some Libertines, like Duifhuis, even had ties to spiritualist sects; most did not, as best one can tell.41 Still, spiritualist notions derived from late medieval mysticism crop up in Libertine writings with a frequency hitherto unappreciated. At the heart of these notions lay the assertion that the road to salvation ran through spiritual rebirth and mystical union with God. To achieve salvation, we must first submit to the crucifixion and death of our old, sinful selves. 38

39 40 41

Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective, trans. Thomas A. Brady, Jr. and H.C. Erik Midelfort (Baltimore, 1981); Blickle, Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Atlantic Highlands, 1992). Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (New York, 1981), Chs. 2, 6. See the testimony of Franciscus Junius in E.H. Kossmann and A.F. Mellink, eds., Texts concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands (Cambridge, 1974), 57. On Duifhuis’ ties to the Family of Love, see Chapter 2; Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge, 1981), 83 ff.

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The “old Adam” within us must die, so that we can be resurrected as “the new heavenly Adam,” Christ. Through such rebirth, say Libertines, we will receive “a new heart and spirit,” that of Christ himself.42 Unlike Erasmian humanists, Libertines often suggested that human free will could achieve little good. The most important contribution we can make to our own salvation, they say, is to give up exercising our wills – to deny ourselves, become passive – so that the Holy Spirit may occupy and work through us. To signify this forsaking of the self, Libertines sometimes used the term gelatenheid, a cognate of the German word Gelassenheit, which crops up repeatedly in that classic of late medieval mysticism, the German Theology. By exercizing gelatenheid, they say, we can create a space within ourselves which the Holy Spirit can then fill. And if we shut off and immobilize our faculties of reason, the Holy Spirit will then be able to impart “divine wisdom” to us.43 This particular brand of mysticism has an intellectual genealogy that runs back beyond the German Theology to the writings of Meister Eckhardt. Late in his life, Eckhardt himself was charged by the Catholic Church with heresy, and in 1329 Pope John xxii condemned twenty-eight of Eckhardt’s propositions. From the beginning, then, the Catholic church recognized the subversive implications of Eckhardtian mysticism. If salvation could be achieved through a spiritual communion between the individual soul and God, and if the only medium for that communion was the Holy Spirit, what need did the believer have for church, clergy, sacraments, ceremonies, Scripture, or good works? The power of the Holy Spirit to do all that was necessary obviated the need for religious institutions or for religious authorities outside the soul of the individual.44 These were the implications. In practice, Eckhardt’s medieval followers ­seldom (if ever) drew them, and Eckhardtian mysticism did not generate a movement of rebellion against the Catholic Church. When Libertines, though, combined it with Protestant notions such as Christian freedom and sola fide, the same mysticism took on a much more radical complexion. In the context of the Reformation, it served as potent ammunition that could be directed with equal effectiveness against Catholic or Protestant institutions. If it ­suggested 42 BR, rkr ms. 500, 21, 142. 43 hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 18; hua, Familie Des Tombe 1070; Marnix, Ondersoeckinge, viii. On Coornhert’s use of the term gelatenheid, see H. Bonger, Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert. Studie over een nuchter en vroom Nederlander (Lochem, n.d.), 55; Bonger, Leven en werk van D.V. Coornhert (Amsterdam, 1978), 181 ff. Compare Duytsche Theology (n. p., 1644), 4–10, 41, 49, and passim. 44 Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, 1973), 1–2, 8, 12, and passim. On Eckhardt and his followers, see Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1972).

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that the mass was unnecessary as a medium of divine grace, it suggested the same of the Protestant Lord’s Supper. If it replaced the mediation of priests with the direct action of the Holy Spirit, it also robbed Protestant ministers of their special function as conveyors of God’s Word. Indeed, what need was there of the Bible at all if grace could be transmitted without it? According to the Calvinist theologian Lambert Daneau, some Dutch Libertines in fact drew this last conclusion, that preaching and reading the Bible was unnecessary.45 Not one of the Libertines, however, who have left record of their own opinions expressed such an extreme position. On the other hand, they commonly argued that one could not understand the Bible or benefit from its salvific message without direct illumination from the Holy Spirit.46 Furthermore, they denied that the Holy Spirit granted its illumination to clerics any more frequently than it did to lay people, or for that matter to scholars any more frequently than to illiterates – hence the egalitarian quality which they gave to the priesthood of all believers.47 Just as Libertines used Protestant arguments to draw damning parallels between the Reformed Church and the Roman Catholic, so too they used spiritualist ones. Ministers and priests, they argued, both attached excessive importance to ceremonies and promoted a mechanical, legalistic approach to God. In this regard, both resembled the evil “scribes and pharisees” of the New Testament.48 Likewise, ministers and priests both asserted a false monopoly over divine inspiration. You cannot “bind the gift of the Holy Spirit to rules,” Herman

45

Lambertus Danaeus, Ad libellum ab anonymo quodam libertino recens editum, hoc titulo, de externa seu visibili Dei Ecclesia, ubi illa reperiri possit, et quaenam vera sit etc. seu potius, adversus externam et visibilem ecclesiam Lamb. Danaei externa seu visibili ecclesia, necessaria Responsio ([Geneva], 1582), 43, 45. 46 BR, rkr ms. 500A, 391; BR, rkr ms. 500, 38; Casper Coelhaes, Seeckere poincten uut die Heylighe Godtlijcke Schriftuer/ ende veruolch vandien ghenomen: aenwijsende het ghene/ dat allen gheloouighen/ bysonder doch den Predicanten ende Leeraren van allerhande partien/ soorten/ ofte exercitie van Religien/ wel aen te mercken/ ende tachtervolgen van nooden is: Ende grootelijcks/ soo wel tot gherustheydt vann eens yeghelicken menschen conscientie/ als tot tijdtlijcken vrede/ soude mogen dienen (n. p., n. d.), 22r; H.C. Rogge, Caspar Janszoon Coolhaes, de voorloper van Arminius en der Remonstranten, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1865), 2:141. 47 BR, rkr ms. 500, 75 ff.; hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 23 ff.; Coornhert, Wercken, 2:192r; Coolhaes, Een Christelijcke vermaninghe, 8r. 48 Comparisons of Calvinist ministers to the Biblical scribes and pharisees can be found i.a. at: BR, rkr ms. 500A, 29; BR, rkr ms. 500, 47–9; BR, rkr 500A, 17 ff., 398; Coornhert, Wercken, 2:192r-v; Coolhaes, Een Christelijcke vermaninghe, 8v; Ten Boom, Reformatie in Rotterdam, 161. See likewise Danaeus, Ad libellum, 51; hua, svu 364 (1), item #5, ms. “K.” and Libertine rebuttal of “Vande Examinatie en[de] Jus Patronatus…”

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Herbertszoon pronounced.49 Herbertszoon meant that God did not choose the elect for their conformity to clerical standards of orthodoxy and behavior; anyone could receive the Holy Spirit, regardless of whether they belonged to the Reformed Church, the Catholic Church, or no church at all. E ­ cclesiastic discipline and religious persecution therefore served no purpose but to protect the power and status of clerics. Indeed, it seemed to Libertines that no cleric who resorted to discipline or persecution could possibly himself have received the Holy Spirit, whose action made one gentle, humble, and tolerant. Judging, then, from the words of the outspoken, two strains of piety predominated within Dutch Libertinism, the Protestant and the spiritualist. In their synthesis of these two strains, outspoken Libertines resemble a whole group of better-known figures outside the Netherlands, such as Sebastian Franck and Sebastian Castellio, who also understood Protestant notions through the filter of late medieval mysticism and creatively synthesized the two. George H.  ­Williams has labeled such figures “spiritualizers” and incorporated them into that varied tapestry known as the “Radical Reformation.”50 There too belong a greater number of Libertines than has previously been recognized.51 Certainly it would be an exaggeration to suggest that most Libertines had developed such sophisticated formulations of belief as those outlined above. Those Libertines who have left a substantial record of their thoughts tend to be members of elite groups. Coornhert, for example, served for a time as secretary to the Haarlem city government; C.P. Hooft was burgomaster of Amsterdam; Duifhuis, Coolhaes, and Herbertszoon were themselves ministers who defied the authority of Calvinist consistories and synods. Naturally they tended to express themselves in more complex ways than less educated or engaged Libertines. Still, lots of fragmentary evidence suggests how common such basic notions as the threat of clerical tyranny and the need for spiritual rebirth were. One pasquil that circulated in Utrecht long after Duifhuis’s death called Calvinist ministers “hypocritical monks” whose goal was “to make themselves

49

Quoted by S.B.J. Zilverberg, Dissidenten in de Gouden Eeuw. Geloof en geweten in de Republiek (Weesp, 1985), 22. 50 Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962). 51 Coornhert’s spiritualist sympathies have long been known: see Bonger, Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, 39–88. Those of Coolhaes are made clear by J. Kamphuis, Kerkelijke besluit­ vaardigheid. Over de bevestiging van het gereformeerde kerkverband in de jaren 1574 tot 1581/2… (Groningen, 1970). On Herbertsz. see D. Nauta et al., eds., Biografisch Lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlandse protestantisme, 3 vols. (Kampen, 1978-), 3:178–81. For the northern provinces see Bergsma, “Zestiende-eeuwse godsdienstige pluriformiteit.” On Peter de Zuttere in Rotterdam, see Ten Boom, Reformatie in Rotterdam, 158–65.

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master and you their servants.”52 Decorative panels commissioned by two Utrecht guilds, the porters and barge-men, carried spiritualist inscriptions.53 Sermons given by Duifhuis attracted so many people that a single church could not fit them all. And from a list of names it seems that two-thirds of Duifhuis’ followers came from the poorest segments of Utrecht society; only a third, at most, came from the elite.54 There is, finally, the evidence of the Calvinists themselves. “What is there more common or usual in these our churches,” wrote Marnix, “than for the chiefest of the Nobility, and infinite numbers of the Commonalty, to keep away from our assemblies, only because they are afraid of a new tyranny and yoke of spiritual dominion.”55 Today, historians draw extensive parallels between the Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran churches of the late sixteenth century. Whereas once they tended to emphasize the differences between the churches, historians now see the rise of a common pattern, which they call confessionalism. In all three churches, they see clerical authority increasing, ecclesiastic institutions gaining strength, definitions of orthodoxy narrowing, and discipline growing stricter.56 It is a telling confirmation of their thesis that some contemporaries, the Libertines, pointed out the very same parallels. This context helps explain why Libertine opposition to Calvinist reform took the peaceful and largely passive forms that it did. The spiritualist beliefs found so frequently in Libertine writings validated a personal quest for salvation, directing Christians to seek Christ not in institutions but in their own soul. But in addition, if Libertines remained outside all the churches, it may have been because their objections to discipline and clerical authority applied equally to all of them. Furthermore, since organization seemed inevitably in the late sixteenth century to bring with it control, to create an organized Libertine resistance movement would have defeated the very purpose the movement was ­intended to have. Those people who attended sermons in the ­Reformed Church without becoming members – the so-called “­sympathizers” – achieved much 52 53 54 55 56

P.J. Vermeulen, ed., “Eenige Utrechtsche paskwillen uit den tijd van Leycester,” Tijdschrift voor Oudheden, Statistiek, Zeden en gewoonten … van het bisdom, de provincie en de stad Utrecht 1 (1847): 70–1. Centraal Museum Utrecht, Catalogus van het historisch museum der stad (Utrecht, 1928), 557–58. hua, KR 404; Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 151–54. Letter from Philip Marnix to Jaspar Heidanus dd. March 31, 1577 (n.s.), in The Low Countries in Early Modern Times, ed. Herbert H. Rowen (New York, 1972), 58. See the works of Wolfgang Reinhard, Heinz Schilling, and especially Ernst Walter Zeeden. In English, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550– 1750 (London, 1989).

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of what Libertines desired without any commotion at all: for them, Reformed ministers were purely teachers and not figures of authority with powers of coercion. Their relation to the church allowed them to benefit from the edification it offered without having to satisfy and submit to its demands. Besides, to the extent that Libertinism became a more active, oppositional force pitting laity against clergy, it fell naturally under the direction of the established leaders of the lay community, the magistrates. In numerous cities, among them Leiden, Gouda, Medemblik, Hoorn, and Utrecht, the majority of magistrates were themselves Libertines. One further, crucial qualification, however, needs adding to our description of Libertine piety. For however much the spiritualist and early Protestant strains predominate in the surviving sources, the latter cannot be assumed to represent accurately the piety of all Libertines, who formed a huge, disparate, and unorganized group. In all likelihood, these strains predominate at least in part because they provided outspoken Libertines with the most powerful ideological ammunition then available against ecclesiastic discipline. Once Libertines had positioned themselves beyond the reach of the churches, however, free from the threat of discipline, they could believe anything they wished. They could be spiritualizers, but they could also be humanists, neostoics, sceptics, nicodemites, eclectics, or “rustic pelagians.” They could be truly indifferent to religion, as the Calvinists accused, or they could have any number of honest, simple beliefs that defied confessional category. Consider the dilemma of a Calvinist minister stationed in a South Holland village. Writing to a Leiden theologian for advice, he reported: [The farmers here] say that they are indeed convinced in their hearts of the truth of our religion, but are, however, too little advanced in the fundamentals of religion and cannot advance sufficiently on account of their agricultural pursuits. Nevertheless they seek to be received into the church, saying that they believe in Christ crucified, that they renounce their works except [those performed] by the sole merit of Christ. I ask whether this profession is adequate and whether I am allowed to admit such to the church, when their outward life coincides with this confession…. [T]hey press me greatly. Once I have admitted them, the Lutherans will say that they too can profess the same [things] and are similarly not be excluded in future from the service….57

57

Alastair Duke, Gillian Lewis, and Andrew Pettegree, eds., Calvinism in Europe 1540–1610: A collection of documents (Manchester, 1992), 195.

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What answer poor puzzled Johannes Lydius received is unknown. What we do know is that many such simple folk never became members of the Reformed Church. Dutch Libertinism, then, was no coherent belief system. It cannot even be reduced to the spiritualist and early Protestant strains that figure so prominently in Libertine sermons and writings. Rather, it was a broad cultural ­milieu, drawing its strength partly from the very variety of its cultural components and social constituencies. Some of these constituencies stood right on the margins of the Reformed Church, others were vehemently hostile to the latter.58 What all of them had in common was that their piety placed them outside the emerging confessional orthodoxies and institutions of their day. How many Europeans in other lands found themselves in the same predicament, only in a less tolerant environment? Acknowledgements Research for this article was made possible by grants from the Sheldon Fund of Harvard University and from the Joint Committee on Western Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. 58

See Willem Frijhoff, “Problèmes spécifiques d’une approche de la ‘religion populaire’ dans un pays de confession mixte: le cas des provinces-unies,” in La religion populaire (Paris, 1979), 35–43.

Chapter 2

Hubert Duifhuis and the Nature of Dutch Libertinism Hubert Duifhuis (ca. 1531–1581) has long occupied a modest place in the pantheon of Dutch national heroes. To be sure, he has never found great favor with some Calvinists, since he numbered among the most ardent opponents of Calvinism in the Dutch Reformation. Duifhuis was a “libertine”: neither Catholic nor Calvinist, nor a member of any other defined denomination, he championed the cause of religious tolerance. With other libertines, he campaigned against the theocratic aspirations of Dutch Calvinist reformers. In the process, he helped lay the foundations for the religious pluralism that characterized the Dutch Republic. Liberal historians have long esteemed Duifhuis for his efforts, and in the nineteenth century some scholars even hailed him as an embodiment of the tolerant Dutch “volksgeest.”1 For all the respect he commands, though, Duifhuis has never garnered as much scholarly attention as some other libertines, for example Dirck Coornhert. Unlike Coornhert, Duifhuis did not publish; he was not a pamphleteer, but a preacher and an organizer, roles which gave him great prominence in sixteenth-century society but which make access to his beliefs and ideas harder for historians.2 Unlike Caspar Coolhaes and Herman Herbertsz., two other libertine preachers, Duifhuis also had the historiographic misfortune to live the crucial years of his life in Utrecht, outside the much-studied province of Holland. The last full-length study of the Reformation in Utrecht appeared in

1 See e.g. the works of Barend Glasius and B. ter Haar cited in D. Nauta, “De reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie,” in Geschiedschrijving in Nederland, ed. P.A.M. Geurts and A.E.M. Janssen (The Hague, 1981) 2:206–27 (originally published in 1970). Duifhuis even appeared as the hero of a historical novel: E.J. Diest Lorgion, Hubertus Duifhuis. Een tafereel uit den tijd der kerkhervorming (Groningen, 1854). 2 A possible exception to Duifhuis’ not publishing is an anonymous pamphlet attributed to him by Werner Helmichius: Vande wterlyke kercke Godes, waer de selve nu te vinden is ende welcke alleen de rechte is daermen hem by behoort te voeghen, wat Leeraers men behoort te geloven…. (Utrecht, 1581). wmv, iii/iv, 17, 23; Olivier Fatio, Nihil pulchrius ordine. Contribution a l’étude de l’établissement de la discipline ecclésiastique aux Pays-Bas ou Lambert Daneau aux Pays-Bas (1581–1583) (Leiden, 1971), 71–6, 179–80.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_004

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1847; the last monograph on Duifhuis in 1858.3 As a result, Duifhuis is mentioned almost as briefly as he is frequently in histories of the Netherlands. The purpose of this article is to fill in one of the most glaring gaps in our knowledge of Duifhuis. Drawing chiefly on twenty-one sermons that have survived in seventeenth-century transcriptions, it will set out the fundaments of Duifhuis’ religious beliefs, placing them in the context of Duifhuis’ life and actions. In the process, it will suggest that scholars need to reconsider their interpretations of Dutch libertinism. Whether they praise him as a precursor of modern liberalism or condemn him for his shallow piety, scholars have usually considered Duifhuis, like other libertines, to be a Christian humanist. This near-universal view does not tally well with the contents of Duifhuis’ sermons. As the latter reveal, the two most essential components of Duifhuis’ beliefs were a distinctly Protestant brand of anticlericalism and a spiritualism rooted in late medieval mysticism. Humanism played a complex, but clearly subordinate role. To what extent the beliefs of other libertines resembled those of Duifhuis is a question we shall consider tentatively along the way. 1 Background Duifhuis is best known as the reformer of the Jacobskerk, one of four parish churches in the city of Utrecht. Originally a priest, Duifhuis served from 1574 to 1578 as co-pastor of the Jacobskerk parish. In 1577, though, he stopped hearing confessions and began to preach against “abuses” and “superstitions” in the Roman Catholic Church. At last, in June 1578 he broke with the church publicly and decisively. From then on he considered himself a Reformed Protestant and was generally considered as such by others. Criticized by the Utrecht canons, Duifhuis had to leave Utrecht. By August, though, popular pressure had forced the Utrecht magistrates to give Reformed Protestantism legal standing in their city. Duifhuis returned, and in October he began to administer the sacraments “all in accordance with God’s ordinance and that of the apostolic church.” At the same time he ceased to wear his surplice while preaching.4 Until January, 1579, Duifhuis shared the use of the Jacobskerk with Frans van Est, his former co-pastor, who continued to conduct Catholic services.5 But in that month, 3 H.J. Royaards, Geschiedenis der Hervorming in de stad Utrecht (Leiden, 1847); Jan Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, de Prediker van St. Jacob (Amsterdam, 1858). 4 Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, HS 7.B.212, item #1. 5 Th. H.J. van Riemsdijk incorrectly named Johan van Haller, rather than Van Est, as Duifhuis’ co-pastor; others have followed him in this error. See Riemsdijk, Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis

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Utrecht’s first religievrede was concluded, which granted exclusive use of the Jacobskerk to the Reformed. The wardens of the Jacobskerk thereupon removed all the paraphernalia of Catholic worship and re-outfitted the church for Duifhuis’ Protestant services, formerly held right amidst the images and altars. At no point did Duifhuis coordinate his reform efforts with those of the Calvinist ministers who were active simultaneously in Utrecht. Pieter Bor recounts in some detail the series of encounters that led to the mutual estrangement of Duifhuis and those ministers.6 The chief point of contention was not a dogmatic one; it was church order, in particular the ecclesiastic discipline which Utrecht’s Calvinists, like Calvinists throughout the Netherlands, considered an essential mark of a properly reformed church. Duifhuis disapproved of it, and refused to introduce it to his Jacobskerk congregation. The result was the formation of two separate churches in Utrecht, both of which claimed to be Reformed: one Calvinist, or “consistorial” (after the chief institutional embodiment of Calvinist discipline, the consistory), the other “libertine,” that is, lacking discipline. Heated rivalry between members of the two churches soon dominated religious politics in the city and continued long after Duifhuis’ death in 1581. The Jacobskerk survived as an independent entity until April, 1586, when the Earl of Leicester, as Governor-General of the Netherlands, forced it to merge with Utrecht’s Calvinist church.7 Of course Calvinist reformers did not face libertine rivals only in Utrecht. Leiden and Gouda are just the best-known of the other cities where one or more Reformed ministers dissented from the norms of the Dutch Calvinist establishment and challenged the legitimacy of ecclesiastic discipline. What distinguished Duifhuis from other libertine ministers was his unique success in founding a fully independent, libertine church. Elsewhere, libertine ministers managed to introduced some, but never all the practices established in the Jacobskerk. The most fundamental of those practices was the unconditional granting of full membership to everyone who desired it.8 Unlike Calvinist van de kerspelkerk van St. Jacob te Utrecht (Leiden, 1882); compare hua, BA ii 423, 1574–75, 1576–77. 6 Pieter Bor, Oorsprongk, begin, en vervolgh der Nederlandsche oorlogen, beroerten, en borgerlyke oneenigheden, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1679–84), 2:833. 7 For a full account of the Reformation in Utrecht, including Duifhuis’ activities, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995). 8 For primary source accounts of Jacobskerk practices, see esp. Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:832; Johannes Wtenbogaert, Kerckeliicke Historie (Amsterdam, 1647), 195, 220–21; and idem, Leven, kerckelijcke bedieninghe ende zedighe verantwoordingh (2nd ed. n.p., 1646), preface,

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congregations, which restricted membership to persons of demonstrated doctrinal and moral purity, the Jacobskerk welcomed all comers. That meant that anyone who desired could take communion in the Jacobskerk whenever it was administered. Duifhuis did not test prospective church members for their worthiness to receive the sacrament, nor did he bar established church members from taking communion if they sinned or deviated doctrinally. In sum, Duifhuis exercized no ecclesiastic discipline, and saw no need for a consistory or elders. Duifhuis declared that the church wardens were his elders, and the traditional custodians of parish charity, known as pot masters (potmeesters), his deacons. Both types of official seem to have continued to function as they had before 1578. Pot masters distributed charity to needy parishioners irrespective of the doctrines they adhered to; Duifhuis consoled sick and dying parishioners at their request on the same a-confessional basis. In performing baptisms Duifhuis used a Reformed liturgy, but did not seek assurances from parents that their beliefs matched his, and did not exact any promises that they would raise their infants as Reformed Christians. In his preaching, Duifhuis followed the schedule of Biblical texts known as the weekly Gospel and Epistle. He refused to give catechism sermons, a standard Calvinist practice. In 1580, William of Orange attended one of Duifhuis’ sermons and declared it one of the most edifying he had ever heard. These facts are, for the most part, well known. What historians have known little of are the beliefs and sensibilities that motivated Duifhuis and lay behind the practices of the Jacobskerk. When Calvinist contemporaries called Duifhuis a “libertine,” they made their own opinion on this point clear. In sixteenthcentury usage, “libertine” was a pejorative label for someone who wished to live licentiously, free of all moral and religious strictures. It implied atheism, “epicureanism,” and a belief “that one must simply overcome all remorse of conscience … and indulge oneself to one’s heart’s content.”9 That is how Dutch Calvinists construed all rejections of ecclesiastic discipline. After all, in their view such discipline was an indispensible tool for upholding basic moral and religious norms. People who belonged to a rival denomination with its own form of discipline Calvinists could understand, even while reviling them: such people were simply adhering to a different, mistaken set of norms. But those 1–2. See also Geerard Brandt, Historie der Reformatie en andere kerkelyke geschiedenissen in en omtrent de Nederlanden, 4 vols. (2nd ed. Amsterdam, 1677), 1:618–19; Royaards, Geschiedenis der hervorming in de stad Utrecht, 146–57. 9 Philip Marnix, Ondersoeckinge ende grondelijcke wederlegginge der geestdrijvische leere, in Godsdienstige en kerkelijke geschriften, ed. J.J. van Toorenenbergen, vol. 2 (’s-Gravenhage, 1873), viii.

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who refused to submit to the discipline of any church had to be immoral, godless individuals out to make life as easy for themselves as possible. Any semblance of piety among them had to be a pretense. So, at least, ran the logic of Dutch Calvinists, following that of Calvin himself.10 Modern interpretations of Dutch libertinism are as loose as they are varied, but many of them share this basic imputation of irreligiosity. J.C. Naber, for example, attributed to the libertines a “decided unbelief.”11 The interpretive tack most widely followed, though, considers libertinism an expression of Erasmian humanism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, historians usually portrayed the libertines as part of a distinctly Dutch, “national” reformed movement, a movement said to draw much of its inspiration from humanism.12 Since then, most historians have discarded the nationalist element of the interpretation, retaining only the humanist.13 Of these, H.A. Enno van Gelder has argued most fully and forcefully for the Erasmian nature of Dutch libertinism.14 For him, the libertines comprised the “party of Erasmus”; they were “humanists after the downfall of humanism.” Like the earlier humanists, he says, libertines championed individualism, rationalism, ethics over dogma, and tolerance. For this reason, Enno van Gelder considered libertinism a fundamentally modern phenomenon, a precursor of nineteenth-century liberalism. Yet while he denied that libertinism took a directly anti-religious stance, Enno van Gelder insisted that, like humanism in general, it was a shallow religiosity, directed more towards man and this world than towards God and the afterlife. To him it represented a step towards “the pagan, philosophizing ethics

10

11 12 13 14

John Calvin, Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins qui se nomment spirituelz (1545), in Treatises Against the Anabaptists and Against the Libertines, transl. and ed. Benjamin Wirt Farley (Grand Rapids, 1982), 159–362. On the meaning of the term “libertine” more generally, see J.C. Margolin, “Réflexions sur l’emploi du terme libertin au xvie siècle,” in Aspects du libertinisme au xvie siècle: actes du colloque international de Sommières, ed. M. Bataillon (Paris, 1974), 1–33; Gerhard Schneider, Der Libertin: Zur Geistes- und Sozialgeschichte des Bürgertums im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1970). J.C. Naber, Calvinist of Libertijnsch? (1572–1631) (Utrecht, 1884), 15. For a survey of this literature, see Nauta, “De reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie.” Barend Glasius, Petrus Hofstede de Groot, F. Pijper, and Johannes Lindeboom deserve special mention among the historians there surveyed. For examples see D. Nauta, “Religieuze situatie bij het begin van de strijd 1568–1579,” in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, new edit. (Bussum, 1979), 6:202–14; W. Nijenhuis, “De publieke kerk veelkleurig en verdeeld, bevoorrecht en onvrij,” in ibidem, 6:325–43. H.A. Enno van Gelder, “Humanisten en Libertijnen, Erasmus en C.P. Hooft,” Nederlandsch Archief voor kerkgeschiedenis N.S. 16 (1920): 35–84; idem, Vrijheid en onvrijheid in de Republiek. Geschiedenis der vrijheid van drukpers en godsdienst … van 1572 tot 1619 (Haarlem, 1947).

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of the eighteenth century.”15 In the same vein, L.J. Rogier accused Duifhuis of a “rather colorless piety” and of theological “obscurity and shallowness.”16 Only in 1977 did Alastair Hamilton reveal the intimate and longstanding connections between Duifhuis and the spiritualist sect known as the Family of Love. Hamilton’s pioneering researches suggested that these connections probably shaped Duifhuis’ mature religiosity more than any other single influence. That is, in fact, the case, and so to understand Duifhuis’ beliefs we need first to examine his life. 2 Biography Hubert Jacobsz. Duifhuis was born, probably in 1531, to a well-to-do family in the small town of Scheveningen, on the coast just outside The Hague. His father, an owner of herring ships, served for many years in the magistracy of that town.17 In 1540 he obtained for his son an appointment as altar-priest in the Scheveningen Oudekerk. This benefice was clearly intended to support the boy’s studies. Of these we know nothing, until in 1549 Duifhuis matriculated at the University of Louvain, where presumably he studied theology.18 By 1556 Duifhuis was serving as curate in the St. Barbara Gasthuis in Delft, and in 1557 he received the prestigious pastorate of the St. Laurenskerk in Rotterdam. This appointment had the consent of an array of highly-placed Catholic officials, including the inquisitor Franciscus Sonnius.19 In recommending Duifhuis for the Rotterdam pastorate, Sonnius is said to have followed the advice of Ruard 15 16 17

18

19

Enno van Gelder, “Humanisten en Libertijnen,” 35, 47, 45. L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het Katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1945–47), 1:136, 519. Jacob Simonsz. served as schepen of ’s-Gravenhage from 1525 through 1557; he also served as schout of Scheveningen in 1539, schout of both Katwijk’s and Valkenburg 1543–44, and hoofdman of the St. Anthony’s guild in Scheveningen in 1552 (A.J. Teychiné Stakenburg, “Huibert Duyfhuis [c. 1515–1581] Laatste pastoor der St. Laurenskerk,” Rotterdams jaarboekje series 7, vol. 1 [1963]: 207; Y.H.M. Nijgh, “Van Schilperoort,” Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 24 [1970]: 130–31). A. Schillings, ed., Matricule de l’Université de Louvain vol. 4 (Brussels, 1961), 383. Duifhuis appears here as “Hubertus Hagiensis [filius] Jacobi”; elsewhere he appears under the names Hubertus Littorinus and Hubertus Scopolinius (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 33; H. ten Boom, “Een Eigenhandig getuigschrift van Huibert Duyfhuis,” Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 61 [1981]: 198–99). Others who consented the Duifhuis’ appointment were the prior of the St. Barbara Hospital in Delft; the abbot of Utrecht’s wealthy Abbey of St. Paul; the bishop of Utrecht, George van Egmond; and probably also the president of the Hof van Holland, Gerrit van Assendelft (H. ten Boom, De reformatie in Rotterdam 1530–1585 [n.p., 1987], 100–01).

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Tapper, chancellor of the University of Louvain and an architect of the new bishoprics scheme.20 One of the few parish priests with a university education, at the age of twenty-six Duifhuis apparently met the emerging standards of Tridentine orthodoxy. By the late 1560s, though, much had changed, and Duifhuis was mildly suspected of heterodoxy by the Catholic hierarchy. A visitation report of 1567 called him “vacillating” or “uncertain” (dubius) in his convictions, and noted that he did not bother to rebaptize children baptized by Calvinists, or to baptize some children at all.21 The commissioners who wrote the report obviously did not know the even more remarkable fact that the previous year Duifhuis had married his housekeeper, Kryntje Pietersdr. Their marriage had been kept secret, and Duifhuis had continued to serve as Catholic pastor of the Laurenskerk. Clearly the marriage did not reflect any desire by Duifhuis to break with the Catholic Church. Many priests in Friesland, the Groninger Ommelanden, and the bishopric of Münster were marrying in the 1560s; some Münster priests were even offering the chalice to the laity in communion.22 Sharp, exclusive confessional lines, of the kind that would brand such practices as Protestant and definitely unacceptable within the Catholic Church, did not yet exist in many parts of Northern Europe. Until the introduction of Tridentine reforms, persons loyal to the Catholic Church could hope that such practices, admittedly not part of Catholic tradition, would be accepted as components of the Church’s final reform platform. Charles v himself had reluctantly conceded clerical marriage and communion in both kinds to Protestants in the Augsburg Interim of 1548; both Maximilian ii and the French clergy had urged the Council of Trent in its last session to accept the practices.23 It is possible that Catholics throughout the Netherlands sensed the same possibility, at least until the arrival in 1567 of Alva. In the “wonder year” of 1566, when Duifhuis married, the question of what final shape religious reform would take remained wide open.24

20 21 22 23 24

The assertion that Tapper recommended Duifhuis is made by A.H.L. Hensen (cited by Teychiné Stakenberg, “Huibert Duyfhuis,” 208). Teychiné Stakenburg, “Huibert Duyfhuis,” 210. J.J. Woltjer, Friesland in Hervormingstijd (Leiden, 1962), 64–6; R. Po-Chia Hsia, Society and Religion in Münster, 1535–1618 (New Haven, 1984), 93–4. Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (Princeton, 1959), 231–32; A.G. Dickens, The Counter Reformation (Norwich, 1969), 123–25. Phyllis Mack Crew has shown how disparate a group the hedge preachers of that year were; while all proclaimed the Gospel, their messages varied greatly (Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands [Cambridge, 1978], 100 ff., 146–47).

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Meanwhile, sometime in the 1560s, Duifhuis met Hendrick Niclaes and became attached to Niclaes’ spiritualist sect, the Family of Love.25 When Duifhuis and Niclaes met, Niclaes emphasized the need for man to regain the spiritual unity with God broken by the Fall.26 After the death of Jesus, he said, came a second Fall, by which the spirit was replaced by flesh, the Scripture read as a dead letter, and ceremonies and sacraments observed out of superstition. ­Niclaes saw himself as sent by God in the “last age of time” to enlighten the world, create a new church that would cut across confessions, and tell everyone to prepare for a new age in which ceremonies would be meaningless and man would be reunited with God. Salvation, Niclaes said, was to be gained by a series of steps, beginning with obedience to the “Service of Love.” Such obedience would be rewarded by God’s extending his grace, making one aware of and sorry for one’s sin. The next step was to imitate Christ: Christ “is gone before us there in for that we should in like manner, follow after him under the obedience of his love, in the death of the Crossee, to the safe making of us from our sins, become incorporated to him with his like death, and baptised….” Last came the “plucking of the Father and baptizing in the Father’s Name,” by which man becomes “godded,” that is “made conformable in a good-willing Spirit to the upright Righteousness….” Niclaes gave this “Spirit” greater importance than Scripture. The latter, ­Niclaes emphasized, may be understood only by those who have already followed Christ to his death, been resurrected with him in spirit, and admitted God into their hearts. In other words, one must possess the same spirit with which the Scriptures had been written. Contrary to the doctrine of mainstream Protestants, Niclaes said that Scripture gives witness of the Lord and of the

25

26

The following paragraphs on Niclaes, the other familists, and their beliefs are based on Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge, 1981); Hamilton, “Hiël and the Hiëlists: The Doctrine and Followers of Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt,” Quaerendo 7 (1977): 243–86; Hamilton, ed., “Seventeen Letters from Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt (Hiel) to Jan Moretus,” De Gulden Passer 57 (1979): 64–76; Hamilton, ed., Cronica; Ordo Sacerdotis; Acta HN. Three Texts on the Family of Love (Leiden, 1988); and N. Mout, “The Family of Love (Huis der Liefde) and the Dutch Revolt,” in Britain and the Netherlands, vol. 7, ed. A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (The Hague, 1981), 76–93. Extensive information on Duifhuis appears in Chapters forty-one through fifty of the Cronica (pp. 135–95). My sincere thanks to Prof. Hamilton for allowing me to examine his typed manuscript of this edition prior to publication. Duifhuis and Niclaes had many occasions to meet. Niclaes passed through Rotterdam, where his son lived, numerous times in the early 1560s on trips to and from Antwerp, where Christopher Plantin, the renowned publisher and a co-familist, was established. Then between 1565 and about 1568 Niclaes actually lived in Rotterdam. Hamilton, Family of Love, 83.

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Word, but is not the Word itself. Other spiritualists, like Sebastian Franck, had said the same before.27 The ambiguities in these beliefs were considerable, and for the time being worked to Niclaes’ advantage. What, for example, was precisely the nature of the union with God experienced by the “godded” man? Was it more than the mystical union envisioned by medieval writers like Tauler and Eckhart, to whom Niclaes owed so much inspiration? Was the “land of peace” which the godded man reached – described by Niclaes as characterized by nudism, absence of matrimony, and communal ownership of property – an allegorical representation of a spiritual state, or was it to be realized on earth? And did the baptism discusssed by Niclaes involve only a spiritual change, or did he intend some rite to be performed? In sum, the question was whether the Family was a purely spiritual union of the reborn or an organized sect. This ambiguity allowed Niclaes in the 1560s to attract two very different followings. But in 1567, after a vision, Niclaes himself began to turn to the second option. He moved to Cologne and began to gather his followers around him. And in a work never published, entitled Ordo Sacerdotis, he elaborated a detailed program for his sect, including a hierarchic ecclesiastic structure, ceremonies, and rules for social life. It was when Niclaes began to put parts of this program into practice that he alienated his less literally-minded followers. Duifhuis was one of the first to defect. Duifhuis had remained at his post in Rotterdam, but by the spring of 1572 he was under investigation by the Catholic Church for heresy. The grounds of suspicion were his refusal to call Krijntje Pietersdr. his concubine (“bijzit”) and remarks he had made that seemed to exonerate heresy. When a woman had complained to him that her daughter kept the company of Anabaptists, Duifhuis, reassured by the mother that the girl otherwise behaved well, had reportedly told her not to worry, since “good fruit never came from a bad tree.”28 Duifhuis fled to Cologne only after a Spanish priest attacked him from the pulpit.29 The seventeenth-century church historian Geerard Brandt has passed on to posterity a dramatic story about that flight. As he tells it, on the same day as the priest’s attack inquisitors came to question Duifhuis. The latter was able to delay their questions with wine and good food until the following day. Meanwhile, that night, with the help of his brother Leendert (then first burgomaster 27

Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1973), 36. 28 Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, 1:614. 29 Since the Spanish priest was there to preach to Spanish troops, and since the troops only arrived in mid-April, Duifhuis must have fled some time after then. Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, 1977), 133–34.

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of Rotterdam), Duifhuis escaped.30 In fact, Duifhuis’ departure was not nearly so unplanned. An intimate friend of his, a co-familist named Cornelis Jansen, had already left for Cologne, asked Duifhuis to follow him, and even rented a house there for both of them to live in. Expecting trouble, Duifhuis had his refuge already prepared.31 In Cologne, though, intensive contact with Niclaes quickly led to conflict. Until then, Niclaes had regarded Duifhuis and Jansen as refractory but extremely promising disciples. Niclaes, the Cronica says, “had such hope in the two of them, that he longed for them more than for any others.”32 He hoped only that they would give up “their presumptuous knowledge” (“ere kloecke Wetenheit”) – in other words, their independence of judgement – and submit themselves entirely to him. Instead, within a few weeks of Duifhuis’ arrival, he and Jansen had broken decisively with Niclaes. Shortly after his arrival, Duifhuis and Jansen sat down with Niclaes and questioned him on his ideas, reading aloud a passage from Niclaes’ works, asking for explanations, even taking notes on his answers. The meeting ended amicably, but clearly Niclaes’ answers alienated them. A tense exchange of letters then formalized the break. Duifhuis and Jansen refused to recognize Niclaes as speaking for God; what he tried to pass for divine revelation they said was merely “human invention.” They accused Niclaes of “excessive concentration on the external aspects of religion,” as if the “Discipline of the Word” was physical, not spiritual, involving purification through rites and ceremonies rather than through the inner working of God’s Word. In other words, they disagreed with Niclaes’ attempt to turn the Family into an organized sect. Duifhuis in particular minced no words, saying that Niclaes’ call for obedience amounted to the demand “that he who is rich should surrender his wealth to the sect and he who has a beautiful wife should hand her over and take an ugly one instead.” Claims to divine authority, attachment to order and ritual, discipline and demanded obedience: Utrecht’s consistorials later alienated Duifhuis over precisely the same issues. Duifhuis and Jansen had set a fatal precedent. Within two years, most of Niclaes’ other distinguished followers left him on the same grounds as Jansen and Duifhuis had. These included the preeminent printer Christopher Plantin; numerous relatives and business associates of his; Antwerp humanists Abraham Ortelius, Justus Lipsius, and Benito Arias Montano; the printer Augustijn van Hasselt; and Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt. The last was to become the new 30 Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, 1:614–15. Leendert had pro-Spanish sympathies and himself fled in July 1572 when the Spanish troops abandoned the city (Nijgh, “Van Schilperoort,” 138–39). 31 Hamilton, ed., Cronica, 139. 32 Hamilton, ed., Cronica, 139.

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spiritual leader of this dissenting group, known later as Hiëlists, after Barrefelt’s pen name, Hiël.33 Barrefelt made no claims to his followers’ obedience and continued to see the true church as an invisible one with members among the pious of all confessions. Duifhuis maintained contact with Barrefelt and Plantin right until his death in April, 1581, and indeed was involved in editing Barrefelt’s largest work, Het Boeck Der Ghetuygenissen vanden verborghen Acker-schat, for publication by Plantin when he died. Despite this cooperation, Duifhuis’ relations with Barrefelt did not lack strains: in November, 1580, Barrefelt wrote to Plantin that Duifhuis “goes from one drivel [buesel] or blindness to the other; he comes to me always, and when I say something he shuts right up and makes no response.” In the same letter, Barrefelt expressed his concern that if a split were to develop between Duifhuis and the group, Duifhuis not be able to claim that he had been thrown out.34 Duifhuis thought some passages of the Acker-schat poorly written (Plantin agreed), and was supposed to provide Plantin with his annotations on the text, but the ill health which plagued Duifhuis in his last years prevented his ever doing so.35 Meanwhile, in 1574 Duifhuis had taken up his duties as co-pastor of Utrecht’s Jacobskerk. He was no longer married, his wife having died in July of that year.36 Duifhuis chose to accept Utrecht’s offer of the co-pastorate over two competing offers, both significantly for positions as Reformed minister (one came from Rotterdam, the other from The Hague).37 Duifhuis’ choice clearly indicated a continuing preference for the Catholic Church over the Protestant ones, a preference which most of his co-familists shared. Devaluing ceremonies and the entire visible apparatus of salvation, most familists held that until spiritual growth rendered the external worship of God superfluous, one might better observe the formalities of the Catholic Church. To create an alternate church structure with alternate ceremonies seemed only to grant such external aspects of worship a false importance. Moreover, the religious divisions 33

Niclaes claimed the conflict was over money, not principle; Hamilton suggests that doctrine was more important, but a financial disagreement played a part, too. Hamilton, Family of Love, 85–6; Hamilton, “Hiël and the Hiëlists,” 254. 34 Christophe Plantin, Correspondance de Christophe Plantin, ed. Max Rooses and Jean ­Denuce, 9 vols. (Antwerp/’s-Gravenhage, 1882–1918), 6:194. 35 Plantin, Correspondance, 6:207–09, 210; E. Grosheide, “Utrechtse relaties van Christoffel Plantijn,” Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1981: 209–10, 221. 36 M.G.L. den Boer, “De Unie van Utrecht, Duifhuis en de Utrechtse religievrede,” Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1978: 77. Hamilton, who does not cite this article, dates Duifhuis’ arrival in Utrecht to March, 1574, but Den Boer gives good reasons why it must have been after July. Hamilton, Family of Love, 89; Hamilton, “Hiël and the Hiëlists,” 254. 37 Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, 1:617.

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which Protestantism had introduced seemed to Duifhuis, as to Barrefelt and other familists, a positive evil. Given Duifhuis’ marriage, his beliefs, and his flight from Rotterdam in the face of heresy charges, it seems remarkable that Utrecht’s Catholic magistrates would offer Duifhuis a co-pastorate. They surely knew whom they were calling to the post, for, as the several offers he received show, the man had a wide reputation. Tridentine reforms had made little headway in Utrecht, and the city did have a contingent of familists (how many is unknown) who might have exerted influence on the decision.38 More importantly, while in retrospect familist and Tridentine piety seem to clash directly, Duifhuis’ appointment suggests the continuing variety and fluidity of reform sentiments. Humanism and late medieval mysticism both challenged the doctrinal and institutional bases of the Catholic Church, yet neither was in itself Protestant. Though the Reformation brought them under suspicion, they had been before and continued to be bona fide expressions of Catholic piety. In time, the Counter-Reformation, where fully implemented, squeezed out, or at least placed many controls on, such variety within the Catholic camp. But this was a gradual and inconsistent process. In the 1560s, even Catholic reform circles were divided, and there were few persons within them not divided internally between the church’s more permissive past and its Tridentine future.39 Until as late as 1577 or even 1578, Duifhuis hoped to reform the Catholic church from within. Other spiritualists clearly shared that hope.40

38 39 40

Hamilton, ed., Cronica, 192. The case of the humanist scholar Benito Arias Montano offers an extreme example of this phenomenon. See B. Rekkers, Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598) (London/Leiden, 1972); Hamilton, Family of Love, 74–82. Yet one other fact may help clarify the mystery of Duifhuis’ acceptability to orthodox Catholics. Prior to his arrival in Utrecht, the two co-pastors of the Jacobskerk were Frans van Est and Johan van Haller; Van Est seems to have been the senior of the two, since he gave the annual lenten series of sermons on Christ’s passion. In 1574, Haller, who had served as pastor since 1559 and was also a notary, was stripped of his pastorate and in effect replaced by Duifhuis. This demotion to vicar was a very unusual move. The one clue we have explaining it comes from the list of persons admitted to communion by Utrecht’s Calvinist church starting in 1579: Van Haller received communion there for the first time on Christmas day, 1581 – at the first opportunity, that is, at a respectable time after the death of Duifhuis in April of that year. The timing suggests that he was perhaps a supporter of Duifhuis, but, as early as 1574, he may still have been considerably more sympathetic to Calvinism than Duifhuis, too much so to be any longer acceptable as Catholic pastor. hua, Notarisarchieven U002a001, fo. 69r; hua, BA ii 423, 1574–75, 1576–77; hua, KR 404.

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The Sermons

3.1 Spiritualism Duifhuis’ surviving sermons all date from after the break with Catholicism, that is, from between June 1578 and April 1581.41 Only one scholar has previously examined them, Jan Wiarda, who wrote his 1858 Th.D. thesis largely on their basis. Wiarda concluded that Duifhuis was “eclectic” in his dogma, agreeing for the most part with Reformed doctrine, with the exception of predestination.42 And indeed, Duifhuis’ sermons contain many passages acceptable to the Reformed: he preaches against transubstantiation, processions, the veneration of saints and images, the papacy, bishops, exorcism, purgatory, the mendicant ideal of holiness, and ritual confession; he argues for the all-sufficiency of Christ’s unique sacrifice, Christ’s role as the one and only mediator between man and God, and a purely symbolic understanding of the eucharist. While excerpting such doctrinal points, though, Wiarda missed much of the essential thrust of the sermons. These demonstrate conclusively that the kernel of Duifhuis’ religiosity, at this late stage in his life as before, was spiritualist, and its chief source the mysticism of Meister Eckhardt, Johannes Tauler, and the German Theology. To be saved, man must achieve union with God through spiritual rebirth. This message lay at the heart of all Duifhuis’ sermons; it is one which the preacher conveyed with enthusiasm and depth of feeling. Through such rebirth, sinful man can be recreated in the sinless likeness of God. Through ­rebirth, D ­ uifhuis promised, the faithful will receive “a new heart and spirit”: that 41

These sermons have survived in three seventeenth-century transcriptions. Two of them are now in the Collectie Remonstrantse Kerk Rotterdam, housed in the Bibliotheek Rotterdam. BR, rkr 500 (called by Wiarda “Handschrift S.”), is entitled “Naargelate sermoenen van Saliger heer Huijbrecht Duijfhuijsen” and contains the following: 1st sermon on Christmas day, Luke 2:1–5 2nd sermon on Christmas day, Luke 2:15–20 1st sermon on St. Stephan’s day, Acts 6:8–10 2nd sermon on St. Stephan’s day, Acts 6:15–7:1 Extract from a sermon on Matth. 26:1–2 Sermon on Easter day, Mark 16:1–7 (ends in mid-sentence) BR, rkr 500A (called by Wiarda “Handschrift v.”) is entitled “De Historie van’t lijden onses Saligmakers Jesu Christi uijt de vier Euangelisten te samen gevougt, en verklaringe daar over gedaan, in Predicatien afgedeelt.” It contains a series of fourteen lenten sermons. Wiarda included in his work numerous, often extensive excerpts from these two manuscripts, from which other scholars since then have gratefully drawn. The third manuscript, not known to Wiarda, is now in Het Utrechts Archief (hua, Bibliotheek 30183). It contains a single sermon, entitled “Sermoen op de pincxterdag. gedaen door pater hubertus duijfhusen predicant in S’Jacobs kerck tot Vtrecht.” 42 Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 78–96.

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of Christ ­himself. Christ will be born in the hearts of the faithful, and they will be transformed from “the old Adam” into Christ, “the new heavenly Adam.”43 This transformation involves death as well as birth. To be reborn, Duifhuis told his audience, we must first kill the “old Adam” in us. The most important figure which Duifhuis used for this process of death and rebirth was Christ’s Passion. We must all, he said, willingly submit to the crucifixion and death of ourselves as sinners before we can be “resurrected in a new life with Christ” and so be “united” with him. To achieve union with God, in other words, we must imitate Christ. This late medieval theme, associated particularly with the Modern Devotion, resonated throughout Duifhuis’ preaching. “Christ in his passion has left behind for us an example, that we should follow his footsteps.” We must “forsake ourselves, go outside ourselves, take up our cross, and obediently imitate Christ, living not one’s self but God [hem selven niet leven maer God].”44 Since all that is not Christ in man is human and sinful, we must empty our hearts of ourselves, so that, by divine action, we may then be occupied by Christ. As for Eckhart, Tauler, and the author of the German Theology, so too for Duifhuis was self-abnegation a crucial part of the process by which we achieve mystical union with God. Duifhuis praised the virgin Mary because, upon hearing the Annunciation, she “made herself empty internally of all earthly solicitude and care, and desired not other than that the Lord’s will and work might be accomplished in her.” The disciples similarly had to empty themselves “before they could be filled with the Holy Spirit [on Pentecost], for a vat must be empty if it is to be filled.”45 Likewise, the point of imitatio Christi for Duifhuis was always this forsaking of the self. Duifhuis used the term “gelatenheijt” to express the passivity it involved – the same term used in late medieval mystical works, including the German Theology. If God is to go in, the creatures must first out … if that pure dove the Holy Spirit should have a place in us – which we await [verbijden] in all patience and resignation [lijdesaemheijt ende gelatenheijt], held oneself still from our own work and observed a sabbath – then it might repair everything in us that is delapidated, create in us a new heaven and a new earth, where he, who is justice itself, might live, yea, establish again that kingdom of Israel….46 43 BR, rkr 500, 21, 142. 44 BR, rkr 500A, 3, 80. Other passages urging the imitation of Christ include BR, rkr 500, 3, 71, 80, 145, 150, 258, 269, 411–12, 559, 614; BR, rkr 500A, 638. 45 hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 16, 17. 46 hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 18. Cf. Duytsche Theology (n.p., 1644), 4–10, 41, 49, and passim.

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Christopher Plantin, Duifhuis’ fellow familist, likewise wrote of the need to deny “one’s own affections and desires until the will is made one with that of God.”47 Unlike other spiritualist authors, though, Duifhuis attributed an important role to Scripture in this process of rebirth. Duifhuis remained vague about the precise relation between Scripture and the Holy Spirit. But whereas Barrefelt clearly envisaged a future third age in which direct revelation by the Holy Spirit would supercede the revelation of the Gospel, Duifhuis asserted that the Gospel would never be superceded completely; Christ had revealed everything necessary for our salvation.48 “God’s word,” he said, “is that imperishable seed through which the children of God are reborn”; and again, more precisely, like a “seed,” he said, God’s Word, when planted in fertile ground and rained on with the water of the Holy Spirit, will grow into Christ.49 Clearly Duifhuis was avoiding both the extreme spiritualist position and the position of Calvin, who denied the distinction between Scripture and Spirit, arguing that the latter was simply the means by which the former was planted in man’s heart.50 Duifhuis preached the Bible, saying it is the “blood of the New Testament…through which you are sanctified.” But, he said, read by someone whom the Holy Spirit has not illuminated, the Bible “is a dead [dootslaende] letter, a sea of afflictions.”51 The Holy Spirit enables us to penetrate beyond the literal meaning of the words of Scripture, to understand their real, spiritual significance, and hence to appropriate their salvific efficacy. Duifhuis traced the origin of many past errors to the literal reading of Scripture.52 Reborn man achieves a mystical union with God in which his heart and soul are replaced by Christ’s. When Christ lives in man’s heart through faith, “man is so completely united spiritually with him [Christ] that his members become members of Christ, moved and governed as if by his spirit.”53 Considering this union a divine mystery (a groote verborgentheijd), Duifhuis remained vague as to its exact nature. Nevertheless, its consequences seemed clear: through rebirth we are united with God and “gradually become uniform with his nature [allenxkens sijnen aerde gelijckformich worden].”54 In a sense, then, we become God. 47 Plantin, Correspondance, 6:132–37, as paraphrased by Hamilton (Family of Love, 95). 48 BR, rkr 500A, 505. 49 BR, rkr 500A, 711, 701. 50 Calvin, Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, 224–25. 51 BR, rkr 500A, 391; BR, rkr 500, 38. 52 BR, rkr 500A, 196 ff. 53 BR, rkr 500A, 115–16. 54 BR, rkr 500A, 639.

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As Steven Ozment has noted, such deification assumed the existence within man of a “spark of will and reason” (synteresis voluntatis et rationis) that was “the residue of man’s prefallen and even precreated purity.” This spark was considered by late medieval German mystics to be the “unique locus for God’s mystical birth in the soul.”55 In his surviving sermons, Duifhuis mentions such a spark twice. The first time, he compares the operation of the Holy Spirit in imparting faith to the act of lighting a fire by blowing on a spark.56 In the second instance, Duifhuis contrasts the repentance of Judas for his treason with that of Peter for his forsaking of Jesus: the difference is “that Peter’s remorse is mixed with faith, though little, to which prayer is added, which, being fanned by a small remaining spark of the Holy Spirit, bore a living hope, on the word of the promise, that the Lord desires not the death of the sinner”; Judas, by contrast, “distrusts God’s grace, extinguishes the remaining spark, which would have prodded him to faith and hope, clings to the judging and wrath of God, cannot trust his goodness.”57 As we have seen, this idea of the “godded man,” so totally incompatible with Luther’s and Calvin’s conception of man as always and totally a sinner, was one of the chief tenets of Hendrik Niclaes. But the range of Protestant thinkers who shared it included Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Anabaptist Hans Denck, and the Lutheran pastor Valentin Weigel.58 If all reborn men are in some real sense God, are not all their actions, even the most apparently immoral, performed by God? And are those actions then not by definition good? Calvin was quick to use this logic of the absurd to discredit all notions of human deification. These he regarded as nothing more than excuses to justify the abdication of moral and religious responsibility. Such was never Duifhuis’ goal. To him, mystical union with God represented the most intimate and intense religious experience possible. In no way did it excuse immorality. If Duifhuis sometimes glowed with joy when contemplating this union, just as often he admonished his audience of the “spiritual warfare” (geestelijke strijd) which the faithful always had to wage against “satan, the world, [and their] own flesh.” Man’s “evil nature” survives rebirth, and makes his continuous struggle against sin often painful and difficult.59 Rebirth, then, does not of itself bring perfect union with God. Elsewhere, using standard Reformed terminology, Duifhuis distinguishes between justification, accomplished through the imputed righteousness of Christ, and sanctification, which 55 Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 3, 5. 56 BR, rkr 500A, 663. 57 BR, rkr 500A, 445. 58 Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 123, 229, 231. 59 BR, rkr 500A, 38–9.

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follows gradually.60 But Duifhuis was simply inconsistent. At one point he suggested that even justification by faith was reversable.61 Spiritualist notions of union and perfection, on the one hand, and mainstream Protestant ideas about man’s continued imperfection throughout life and his imputed righteousness, on the other, jostled with each other in Duifhuis’ mind. As a preacher, not a systematic theologian, he never had to reconcile them. Duifhuis was consistent, though, in rejecting any abdication of moral responsibility on the part of the reborn. He argued repeatedly that faith of necessity bore fruit in ethical behavior, and that those who lived immorally could not have true faith.62 For Duifhuis, then, spiritualism did not serve as a camouflage; it was a religiosity rich in its own right. This was its positive aspect. It had a strong negative one too. If salvation could be achieved through a spiritual communion between the individual soul and God, and if the only medium for that communion was the Holy Spirit, what need did the believer have for church, clergy, ceremonies, sermons, Scripture, or intellectuals to interpret Scripture? The power of the Holy Spirit logically obviated the need for religious institutions and authorities outside one’s own soul.63 In Duifhuis’ sermons, spiritualism provided the ideological basis for a scathing attack on ecclesiastic institutions and authorities generally, and on the Calvinist Reformed Church and its clergy in particular. One of Duifhuis’ chief objects of attack was religious ceremony. Even before 1517, Catholic humanists had criticized religious “works,” such as pilgrimages, the repetition of prayers, and monastic confinement, as meaningless unless accompanied by faith. The Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone had discredited “works-righteousness” altogether. Works, declared Protestant reformers, do not contribute in the slightest to one’s attaining salvation, even when accompanied by faith. Duifhuis’ spiritualist theology of salvation led him to take the rejection of religious works even further. Such works, Duifhuis contended, include all external acts of worship, without exception; religious ceremonies have no salvific power. That means, according to Duifhuis, that the form those ceremonies took is inconsequential, and that the very performance

60 BR, rkr 500A, 66–7. On the irreversability of justification, see also BR, rkr 500A, 13. 61 “Maer als wij inden noot van Christo wijcken, niet getrouw blijven, te rug sien na de werelt, soo verliesen wij ‘t kleet der onnooselheijt en geregtigheijt, ‘twelck ons in den beginne des geloofs uijt genade was aengedaen” (BR, rkr 500A, 339). Other passages bearing on these issues are: BR, rkr 500, 13 (which encapsulates much of Duifhuis’ inconsistency), 21, 25–6, 33, and 143; BR, rkr 500A, 54, 149–51, 459–60, and 687. 62 Cf. e.g. BR, rkr 500, 71–5. 63 Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 1–2, 8, 12, and passim.

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of ceremonies is optional. “Everything the dispute is now about, that is mostly about external things; we should omit them, or, to the extent that we use them, we should use them for the exhortation of love among one another and let each person retain his understanding of them.”64 It was not that Duifhuis considered ceremonies evil in themselves. He regarded them rather as he did everything in the transitory, material world: neither good nor bad in themselves, they derived their value solely from the use to which they were put and the spirit in which they were performed. In this context, ceremonies could have a proper and even necessary role. And like other Protestants, Duifhuis distinguished between ceremonies invented by men and ones prescribed by God, arguing that in practice only the latter should be observed.65 More generally, Duifhuis regarded ceremonies as concessions to human weakness. As sinful man can know God only through “images, shadows and figures” and not “in his essence,” so he lacks the capability of worshipping God purely spiritually.66 To attach, however, any spiritual significance to the physical act of performing a ceremony is superstitious and positively harmful: as long as we rely upon or trust something, set our hope on transitory things, like ceremonies, external religions, may it appear ever so fine as it always will, it is idle and useless, and holds us back so that we cannot come further to see our poverty, to view our nakedness, and to observe our imprisonment.67 This is precisely what Calvinists do, accused Duifhuis; despite their best intentions, they thus retain the superstitious, shallow ritualism of Catholicism. In this fundamental sense, the two religions, and indeed all “external religions,” he claimed, are alike. Duifhuis echoed the comparison which mainstream Protestants made between Catholicism and “ritualistic” Judaism, and extended it to Calvinism as well. He saw little point in converting from one external religion to another. In committing such a conversion, Duifhuis said, so like a pig “does one fall out of the one snare and into the other, so leads the one blindman the other, so do we wallow without ruminating, trot for bread, as is the nature of pigs….”68

64 hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 13. 65 BR, rkr 500A, 56. 66 BR, rkr 500, 18. 67 BR, rkr 500, 4–5. 68 BR, rkr 500, 69–70. Compare Barrefelt, Acker-schat, xx.

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Duifhuis appreciated how deeply Calvinists rejected the ceremonies of the Catholic Church. But the very ardor the Calvinists displayed in reforming them, and the fixity of their new forms, suggested to him that Calvinists still attached to ceremonies an unjustified value. It was as if the forms had spiritual significance in themselves. The Protestant reformer Johannes Brenz had seen this latent contradiction as early as 1533: when reformers mandated specific new forms of religious observance, he feared, they might be misinterpreted as implying “that by the observance of such prescribed works men repent their sins and earn God’s grace.”69 Duifhuis levelled precisely this accusation. By the very priority Calvinists gave to the reform of externals, he felt, they granted such externals backhandedly an importance almost as great as they had enjoyed under Catholicism. This belief that physical things or actions conveyed spiritual powers amounted, indeed, to idolatry: Behold, o my dear friends, this has always been the way of the depraved hypocritical nature, that it continues to hang onto the external, onto its outward temples, circumcision, and other things, and [they] have made little gods of them, through which they are hindered from being able to come to the true essence, of which the other things were figures.70 The willingness of churches to fight with each other over differences in ceremony reflected, in Duifhuis’ view, the same rampant superstition. On a deeper level, the very fact that the churches differed from each other indicated to Duifhuis that all were deficient. This was the practical meaning which Duifhuis gave to the contrast drawn by his co-familist Barrefelt between the unity and simplicity of the divine, on the one hand, and the multiplicity inherent in the earthly, on the other. For Barrefelt, multiplicity implied division, divisiveness, and conflict; God, by contrast was “uniform” (“eenwezig”). When Christians actualize the divine within themselves and forsake their earthly natures, they lose their multiplicity and can no longer conflict with each other. The true religion thus is that which unites men; what divides can only, by definition, be “opinion” or “earthly reason,” not true religion.71

69 Brenz, Kirchen Ordnung. In meiner genedigen Herrn der Margraven zu Brandenburg (Nürnberg, 1533), p. A 3 a, quoted in Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven/ London, 1975), 154. 70 BR, rkr 500, 105–06. 71 Barrefelt, Acker-schat, x, xxij, and innumerable other passages. Compare Duytsche Theologie, 16–18, 30.

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As the Lord’s Supper was the most important ecclesiastic rite, so to Duifhuis it was the prime example of idolatry and superstition in practice. Duifhuis pointed to the Calvinists’ policy of excluding people from the Lord’s Supper as proof of how they confused the physical rite with the spiritual transaction that took place at the rite. He rejected flatly the Calvinist argument that “a little leaven sours the entire dough” – i.e. that the participation of a known sinner spoiled the efficacy of the sacrament for everyone. Duifhuis agreed that a unity existed among the participants but insisted that it was purely spiritual; it did not derive simply from their physical presence. To suggest otherwise, according to Duifhuis, is to imply that Judas must have contaminated the other apostles by his presence at the Last Supper. Jesus, knowing that Judas would betray and Peter disavow him, admitted both to the Last Supper: You say: we many are one bread and one body, as many of us receive one bread; I say to you in response, that you shall not prove to me that Peter shared in Judas’ treason, or the other apostles in Peter’s betrayal; that burden he must bear alone, he alone must pour out tears for it. But that you allege that we many are one body, as many as receive one bread,  that must not be understood as pertaining to that external bread; for understand those words aright: he says not as many as receive one bread are one body, but as many as receive one bread in true faith, they are all one body; that is, all who receive Christ Jesus – who says there: I am that bread that has come from heaven – they shall all be one body and ruled by one spirit….72 Judas’ participation in the Last Supper became, for Duifhuis as for other libertine writers, the most outstanding argument for open admission to communion. To Duifhuis it represented Christ’s own “institution.”73 If properly ­reformed, he said, Calvinists would extend such openness not only to sinners but to those who differed from them doctrinally.74 3.2 Protestant Anticlericalism If the visible churches all made the same mistake of attaching spiritual importance to worldly institutions and practices, Duifhuis had a ready explanation why: clerics, he said, use such institutions and practices to exercise a tyrannical dominance over the laity. Whereas Duifhuis adopted a tone of reproach and 72 BR, rkr 500, 129 (Wiarda, 107–08). 73 BR, rkr 500A, 126 ff. and BR, rkr 500, 119–32 (Wiarda, 104–9). 74 BR, rkr 500A, 131.

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exhortation to the misguided laity, he frothed in anger and indignation at those whom he felt bore ultimate responsibility. In his sermons, Duifhuis launched a prolonged, scathing attack on clerical authority in general, and on the Calvinist ministers in particular, who used the “Apostolic ordinance” as a “cloak” (“decsel”) for their tyranny.75 This attack drew its strength from a source other than spiritualism. Echoing the early Protestant call for “Christian freedom,” it turned bona fide Protestant arguments against the Calvinist establishment. Calvinists, too, of course, attacked what they regarded as “tyrannical” religious authorities. Since the beginning of the Reformation, Protestants had denounced the Catholic Church for exercizing a “tyranny of conscience” and claimed that their own forms of worship offered “freedom of conscience.” Clearly, such tyranny did not refer simply to religious intolerance or theocracy, as it does today; both were inherent in the aspirations of sixteenth-century Calvinists. Rather, in what had become by the 1570s an established Protestant rhetorical tradition, “tyranny of conscience” referred to the burdens of a religion corrupted by a power-hungry clergy. Protestants claimed that over the course of centuries, Catholic clerics had made “human additions” to the Bible. These additions had corrupted the “pure” Christianity practiced in the apostolic age. Chief among the additions were two: the requirement that Christians perform “works” to attain salvation, and the power of the keys – the power of the church to judge those works, and thus to forgive men their sins or damn them on behalf of God. Protestants claimed in effect that the clergy had added all kinds of unnecessary requirements for salvation, and then made the laity come pleading – to them, the clergy, not to God – to be admitted to heaven. In both respects the clergy had arrogated to itself powers belonging properly to God alone. The reformers therefore limited the power of clerics to what they saw as their original, Biblical mandate. By stripping away human additions and returning to a Christianity based solely on the Bible, Protestants sought to recapture what Luther called “the freedom of the Christian man.” A crucial part of it consisted of freedom from clerical domination. Duifhuis extended this attack on the Catholic clergy to clerics of all denominations. Just as Protestant reformers contrasted Christ to the Papal Antichrist, so Duifhuis contrasted Christ to clerics in general. Even more often, he used the scribes and pharisees of the New Testament as clerical prototypes, devoting long passages in his lenten sermons to their castigation. In his account, they are the villains responsible for Christ’s Passion; it is they who want an external religion of ceremony, human ordinances, pomp, and splendor. They 75 BR, rkr 500, 30; cf. likewise BR, rkr 500A, 424–25.

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condemn Jesus to death because he threatens to undermine their power and wealth.76 The scribes and pharisees, though, were far from unique. In every church and every age, Duifhuis said, it is in the interest of clerics to transform their spiritual leadership into worldly power and wealth. Duifhuis saw a perfect continuity between the pharisees of the New Testament, Catholic priests, and Calvinist ministers. Repeatedly Duifhuis drew direct parallels between the pharisees of the New Testament and the “Pharisees of our time,” who “worry that their wealth, highness, and authority shall be lessened by the gospel….”77 “The previous pharisees have died, but not the pharisaic spirit – it remains; it appears presently among those who are called Evangelical, or reformed.”78 That spirit, Duifhuis felt, thoroughly tainted Calvinism: Is that a Christian religion? Fie on them [the Calvinists] that they sing their own praises thus; their pastors or ministers strive for highness, in order to reign over another, and command, just as much as the previous [Catholic] ones ever did. Should this be the way among God’s folk? Good Lord, they thus show that they have never yet known God’s true religion, for the latter teaches a different lesson: that is, humility, etc.79 Duifhuis repeatedly contrasted Christ’s humility, which true Christians imitate, with the clerics’ arrogance and thirst for power. This common libertine theme was in essential agreement with the original impulse of the Protestant Reformation. As the pharisees of the New Testament had had Jesus killed, Duifhuis argued, so in his own time did clerics use religious persecution. Through it they sought to enforce their monopoly on religious authority. Duifhuis denied clerics any such monopoly. In good Protestant fashion, he proclaimed a priesthood of all believers.80 Departing, however, from the magisterial reformers, Duifhuis went on to deny any distinction whatsoever between clergy and laity. Using a classic Protestant argument to new ends, Duifhuis asserted that the distinction between clergy and laity had no Scriptural basis but was rather one of the “human additions” that had corrupted Christianity after the age of the apostles. Clerics have no more authority than any other individual. 76 BR, rkr 500, 29; BR, rkr 500A, 29–30; BR, rkr 500A, 17. 77 BR, rkr 500A, 29. Similar passages: BR, rkr 500, 47–9; BR, rkr 500A, 17 ff., 398. 78 BR, rkr 500, 110. 79 BR, rkr 500, 49. 80 BR, rkr 500A, 119–22; BR, rkr 500, 108–9; BR, rkr 500A, 39; hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 3.

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Duifhuis viewed his own vocation accordingly. To his listeners he portrayed himself as just one in a company of believers, seeking to share his own enlightenment for the good of his neighbor, who might accept or reject what he said. Like Barrefelt, and in contrast to Hendrik Niclaes, Duifhuis made very modest claims for himself: “and I hope never to boast of myself as being any more than a fellow sheep of Christ’s flock, like you people, and to go with you to that same father and Lord, my dearest friends, and to seek grace, and to be taught rightly by him.”81 At one point, Duifhuis made a clear distinction between two types of sending, “general” and “special.” The first the prophets had, the second Moses and Jesus. Only the latter gives the receiver the power to establish a “new law” – that is, to form a new church or to reform the ceremonies and institutions of the old. Such a sending must be confirmed by the performance of miracles or the approval of the secular authorities. The former sending, by contrast, derives from the law of love and nature, according to which a person seeks to do to another as he would wish to happen or be done to himself. This sending is common to all people who are wonderously enlightened or gifted by God…. [T]hese people speak not as having authority or power, or as if they may command something, like the former may; rather, they seek to counsel, teach and exhort their fellow man from the heart to attain that blessing which they have tasted.82 Clearly, Duifhuis considered himself (and all other clerics) to have received a general, not a special sending. Most clerics, though, tyrannize the laity by claiming for themselves powers that properly belong to God alone. Ecclesiastic discipline represented to Duifhuis precisely such an abuse. No man has the power to judge the piety of his fellow men, for no man can know what lies in their hearts. And yet Calvinist consistories do precisely that when, through initial tests and later through discipline, they regulate admittance to communion, restricting it to those whom they deem pure. Calvinist ministers, Duifhuis declared, “overstep the office of angels” when they try to separate the wheat from the chaff.83 Once again he contrasted the ministers with Christ:

81 BR, rkr 500, 51. 82 Quote from BR, rkr 500, 46; more generally, BR, rkr 500, 45–6, excerpts of which appear in Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 97–9. Cf. also BR, rkr 500A, 140. 83 BR, rkr 500A, 23.

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Who is impure the Lord knows; man may err in judgment, but the Lord may not, no one shall deceive him…. I cannot therefore understand, that one ought to turn away from the Lord’s Supper any person who desires to go to it; for if the Lord and Master (whose students we should be) has not turned away his own betrayer, whose heart he knew, how do you presume [hoe wilt gij] to turn away your brother, created by God, whose heart you do not know and do not see?84 That only God can know whose heart is pure was one of Duifhuis’ chief arguments for leaving admission to communion open. The ultimate basis for the religious authority wielded by clerics, in Duifhuis’ view, was their claim to be the sole arbitrers of correct doctrine. They alone knew with certainty the meaning of Scripture, they said. But was this so? What made clerics so privileged? For Duifhuis, this question translated into another about the value of the theological training which clerics received: was it necessary in order to understand God’s Word? Duifhuis’ resounding answer was no. In extensive, virulent passages, Duifhuis railed against the cleric as scholar, who falsely used his erudition as a means to monopolize spiritual authority.85 Anticlericalism merged with a sophisticated anti-intellectualism. Duifhuis often expressed his anticlericalism, as he did other views, by drawing parallels between his own times and those of Jesus. Jerusalem in Christ’s day was a city filled with “the scholars, and the high and great schools” to which children were sent from all over to study, “as occurs here in our lands [from whence children are sent] to Louvain, Paris, Geneva, or Rome.” In those schools in Jerusalem the students “disputed and argued day after day [vast dagelijcks] over many external and useless questions, as is commonly the nature of students.” No one was allowed to teach religion without having first studied in those schools. Jesus, of course, and Stephan too, broke this rule, and hence were such a threat to the scholars’ power, thus provoking their hostility. Scholars think always that they are indispensible, because they have erudition, which however is idle and naught without the spirit of God; yes, more persons are made worse than improved by it, if the spirit of God is not present…. [Scholars must realize] how God’s spirit does not bind itself to their high schools of Geneva, or Louvain, or elsewhere…. O dear friends, do you think that he needs your high school? Through twelve fishermen he can instruct the 84 BR, rkr 500A, 128 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 107). 85 BR, rkr 500A, 649–50; BR, rkr 500, 44 ff., 51–2, 75 ff., 83 ff.; hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 23 ff.

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world as he pleases. Take care therefore that you do not resist with your wisdom God’s wisdom…. O you scholar, if you are not entirely given over to evil, take it to heart: I do not spurn your erudition, but I counsel you as myself, to give all this up, and regard it as dung, to gain Christ….86 Schools have no monopoly of divine inspiration. Duifhuis contrasted all earthly schools with “the school of the Holy Spirit,” and the scholars and pharisees who attended “the high schools” with the unlearned shepherds and apostles of the New Testament whom the Holy Spirit had taught.87 This emphasis on the Holy Spirit as teacher formed the basis of his anti-intellectualism. The Holy Spirit alone teaches divine wisdom. One does not need clerics, scholars, or schools to teach one what to believe.88 Indeed, the common folk “frequently give their teachers or great masters all too much respect and trust.” Rather, one needs only to consider God’s word in one’s heart.89 Like Sebastian Franck, Duifhuis regarded with open hostility the pretensions of the clergy to divine wisdom; to him the pretensions constituted in themselves proof that it lacked such wisdom. Duifhuis cited the same adage as Franck, “the more learned, the more wrong” (hoe geleerder hoe verkeerder), and argued that the simple and unlearned have even more to teach of real piety than the learned.90 The apostles, for example, were “a bunch of lowly craftsmen,” and yet taught divine wisdom; the same “still occurs every day.”91 On the surface, this theme seems paradoxical coming from a cleric who himself had studied at university, could write good Latin, and knew works by a range of church fathers, Greek as well as Latin.92 It is a theme, however, which 86 BR, rkr 500, 75–6. 87 BR, rkr 500, 87–8. 88 BR, rkr 500, 59. 89 BR, rkr 500, 86, 59. 90 BR, rkr 500, 87; Franck cited in Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 155, where Ozment cites no fewer than five places where the adage occurs in Franck’s writings. 91 BR, rkr 500A, 652. 92 See Duifhuis’ letter of 1578 written in Latin to the fugitive Catholic priest Jacob Buyck, formerly pastor of the Oudekerk in Amsterdam, in which he cites those three church fathers, plus also Jerome, Athanasius, Lactantius Firmianus, and Augustine, in Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 27–33. In the sermons themselves, Duifhuis refers to or cites church fathers and all other works besides the Bible extremely sparingly: Augustine (BR, rkr 500A, 107, 109, 114, 714; hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 16), Cyprian (BR, rkr 500A, 85, 109), Ambrose (BR, rkr 500A, 109, 122), Chrysostom (BR, rkr 500A, 109), and Cyril (BR, rkr 500A, 364). Cicero is cited once (BR, rkr 500A, 404), Seneca once (BR, rkr 500A, 404), Boetius twice (BR, rkr 500A, 404, 656), St. Bernard once (BR, rkr 500A, 238), and St. Anselm once (BR, rkr 500A, 308). Dionysius the Areopagite is referred to once in the sermons (BR, rkr 500A, 729) as a real person whose works Duifhuis has not read, but he has read discussions of them.

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some of Europe’s greatest scholars found appealing. Benito Arias Montano, for example, wrote that “the pious and the simple who profess truth, do not trust overmuch in their judgement and human intelligence, and who know the true path to Christ” are the only ones who can understand the book of Revelations.93 Erasmus, who saw textual scholarship as the most promising path to religious reform, nevertheless exonerated the Dutch for their lack of great scholars in his day by attributing it to the greater esteem in which they hold “moral excellence.”94 The spiritualist critique of learning went beyond the humanist critique of scholasticism to encompass even learning based on the linguistic tools of humanist scholarship. Those tools, Duifhuis felt, had themselves become instruments of oppression, vehicles for a small group to claim exclusive access to the truth. In his eyes, Protestant reformers had turned humanism into a new scholasticism. Duifhuis singled out for scorn the linguistic capabilities which humanists and, later, Protestant scholars considered essential to understand divine matters. The three Biblical languages, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, have no special status, he argued, and give no access to any hidden wisdom. They were merely the most widely understood languages during Christ’s life on earth; God had used them to communicate with as many ordinary people as possible. Indeed, Duifhuis suggested, if some deeper meaning lies behind the use of these languages on the inscription on Christ’s cross, it is “that the scholars of this world have always wished to build over Jesus’ head, to write, dispute, and argue with their understanding above the understanding of Jesus.” It is from the pretensions of the scholars’ worldly wisdom, which will not submit to Christ’s wisdom, that “so many atrocious abuses and excesses of superstition in God’s church” arise, as well as “so many various divisions and opinions in Christendom.”95 Learning, Duifhuis felt, was like ceremony. Sebastian Franck had said as much explicitly: “Those who now want to be learned about God through much The reference implies clearly that Duifhuis did not know Lorenzo Valla’s notes on the New Testament, where at Acts 17:22–34 Valla proves that the Neoplatonist author could not have been the same as the Dionysius whom St. Paul converted on the Areopagus in Athens. See Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (Princeton, 1983), 65–6. 93 Preface to Montano’s commentary on the Book of Revelations, where Montano says that Barrefelt’s writings on the same made him understand that book of Scripture for the first time. Quoted in Hamilton, Family of Love, 95. 94 Desiderius Erasmus, The “Adages” of Erasmus, ed. Margaret Mann Phillips (Cambridge, 1964), 211. 95 BR, rkr 500A, 649–52, the most extensive and explicit single anti-intellectual passage; the quotes are from 650 and 651.

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reading and writing and many books, arts, and languages do precisely the same thing as those who want to be righteous through good works.”96 Learning and ceremony, Duifhuis argued, are in themselves neither good nor evil, “but when people stand on it and rely on it,” then learning does positive harm. The scholar who relies on his learning to gain him salvation is like the rich man who relies on his riches. Just as it is harder for a rich man to get into heaven than to get a camel through the eye of a needle, “so goes it too with the scholar, for just as one sees the one [i.e. the rich man] trust in his temporal wealth, to which he makes God a helper who shall rescue him in necessity, so the other [i.e. the scholar] does it with his erudition which he puts his trust in.”97 And what one trusts is one’s God. Just as to trust in money is to worship Mammon, so trusting in erudition was also idolatrous – it meant investing the worldly and human with divine power. Like the merchants who bought engravings castigating the pursuit of money, so scholars of spiritualist inclination tempered their own enthusiasm for erudition with an awareness of its human limitations. The critique of money became the model for viewing the whole relationship between the worldly and the spiritual. Duifhuis applied the same model, for instance, to power. It too derives its value from the use to which it is put; the good Christian may therefore participate in government so long as he justifies his power by directing it to pious ends.98 Just as ceremonies lack value without faith, so does learning without direct illumination from the Holy Spirit. Schools teach “human wisdom,” but that has nothing in common with “divine wisdom,” imparted by the Spirit, which alone teaches truth in sacred matters. Like countless writers before him, including Erasmus, Duifhuis likened divine wisdom to folly: it is the reverse of human wisdom, and makes no sense by human standards. Has not God made the wisdom of this world foolish? For seeing that the world through its wisdom did not know God in his wisdom, it pleased God to save the faithful through a foolish sermon. God chose what is foolish to the world, furthermore, in order to shame the wise disputers and arguers….99 Catechisms and confessions of faith, Duifhuis argued, were products of this new scholasticism. He equated them with scholastic “glosses” and rejected 96 Paradoxa (1535) #163, quoted in Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 154. 97 BR, rkr 500, 87. 98 BR, rkr 500A, 493–99. 99 BR, rkr 500, 80. See likewise BR, rkr 500, 29, 68.

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them categorically. All such written statements of doctrine, he said, had been written by men, not by God, and were thus to be considered “human additions” to Scripture. Here again Duifhuis took a typically Protestant notion to a new extreme. Only Scripture had unquestionably been written with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; it alone therefore could have binding authority. To Duifhuis, preaching the Word of God meant preaching exclusively from Biblical texts and never from a catechism. Duifhuis proclaimed “that the Holy Scripture was his catechism” and that he would accept no catechism “written by men.”100 As Duifhuis was well aware, though, Calvinists denied adding anything to the pure Word of God. Like Luther and the other magisterial reformers, Calvinists claimed that Scripture was “self-interpreting.” By this they meant that it contained no ambiguities, and hence that there was no need for anyone to interpret it. In effect, Calvinist pastors claimed that their sermons and writings merely paraphrased Scripture. And Duifhuis agreed that that is what they should do.101 But how then could one choose between churches, when the ministers of those churches all claimed merely to be paraphrasing Scripture? The de facto religious pluralism that existed in the Netherlands tended itself to undermine such claims. At the same time, no one believed that truth was relative or that more than one interpretation of Scripture could be correct. The dispute, said Duifhuis, is not about the Bible per se, but about “the interpretation of it,” and the real problem is how to distinguish purely Scriptural content from the “human additions” that accounted for differences in interpretation. For this, Duifhuis believed, enlightenment by the Holy Spirit is necessary. Yet even when God through his Spirit had graced you with his wisdom, you should retain a sense of ultimate uncertainty, since such enlightenment comes in degrees, and who is to say that someone with a different understanding of Scripture has not received more of it than yourself? God has not revealed all to any human being; he alone knows things with complete objectivity and certainty. Ultimately, then, no man can judge infallibly in divine matters; one must always be willing to learn from others who have received insights you have not.102 Clerics have no superiority over lay people in this regard. However learned, clerics are as liable to err as any other men.103 Gouda’s libertine minister Herbert Herbertsz. said likewise of the Heidelberg Catechism “that it was men, who could stray or err, who assembled it.”104 Duifhuis shared with many other 100 Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:832; Wtenbogaert, Leven, 1. 101 BR, rkr 500A, 397–99. 102 BR, rkr 500, 111. 103 BR, rkr 500, 84. 104 Quoted in H.C. Rogge, Caspar Janszoon Coolhaes, de voorloper van Arminius en der Remonstranten, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1865), 2:180.

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libertines a sense that in some ways clerics, by the very nature of their calling, were less, not more, reliable interpreters of Scripture: all had a vested interest in their own interpretation. They were the most “partisan” (partijdig) of doctrinal judges. It was, however, an article of faith for Duifhuis that the truth would ultimately win out. Being divine, it was by nature stronger than the human, and would prevail in open competition. Noting that everyone accepted the Bible as the basis for determining correct doctrine (a dubious assertion if meant to apply also to Catholics), Duifhuis suggested that all religious teaching be based on it exclusively; God would then eventually reveal how to understand it correctly. A certain providential fatalism encouraged Duifhuis to be patient with the imperfection of the present and formed the wellspring of his tolerance. Duifhuis cited the adage: “if this be the work of man then it shall perish, but if this be of God then you cannot resist it.”105 Coornhert argued likewise: civilized religious discourse, he said, would eventually reveal which confessional group is in the right. Religious persecution, however, would prevent such discourse. By calling on the state to suppress all other churches, Coornhert complained, Calvinists avoid competition in the open market of religious ideas and thus hinder the ultimate revelation of the truth. Duifhuis agreed, and suggested that calls for coercion were signs that the callers were losing the competition, in which case they deserved even less to have their ideas enforced. Only the Church of Antichrist favors religious persecution; the true Church of Christ relies solely on the “naked truth” to prevail.106 In the meantime, Duifhuis called on every lay person to judge for himself and practice as his conscience directs: “If the Scripture does not say it so, then believe no writing or words of man, for the Scripture you are bound to believe, but not any writing or words of man, except to the extent that they are faithful to the Scripture and the sense of the Holy Spirit.”107 Leiden’s libertine minister Caspar Coolhaes wrote similarly that every layman had the right and even the duty to judge how the teachings of pastors compared with those of Saint Paul.108 Again, Duifhuis agreed. If all are prone to error, all are also capable of interpreting Scripture correctly. Duifhuis did not specially privilege secular authorities with this power of critical discernment and independent judgment. 105 BR, rkr 500, 81, “is dit werck vande menschen soo salt wel vergaen, maer ist wt godt soo en meucht gijt niet tegenstaen.” Duifhuis likewise cites the adage, “al is de logen snel, de waerheijt achterhaelt se wel” (BR, rkr 500A, 23). 106 BR, rkr 500, 85, 88. 107 BR, rkr 500, 131 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 109). 108 Casper Coolhaes, Seeckere poincten uut die Heylighe Godtlijcke Schriftuer… (n.d. [1584], n.p.), preface.

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These he granted to all persons.109 In this fundamental sense, he undermined all, not just clerical, religious authorities. For Duifhuis, the key contrast was between the human and the divine. Using the same language as Barrefelt, he called all human knowledge in religious matters “opinion” or “choice” (verkiesinge), an expression of the human will, by nature uncertain and arbitrary. Echoing the late medieval mystics, he suggested that to receive divine knowledge one has to empty oneself of this will and cease relying on one’s own understanding. Divine wisdom is given by the Holy Spirit, and so the same rules apply to receiving it as to receiving that Spirit. Duifuis castigated the scholars in his audience: You think you can measure it all according to a certain ruler which you employ to that end, be it in part articles gathered together from Scripture, which you then made your gloss on, which you call your confession or catechism, and then you want to try and judge everyone as to whether they are sound of doctrine or not, and think you can thus set posts for the Holy Spirit according to which the latter must regulate itself….110 Gouda’s Herbert Herbertsz. made a similar point in dramatic fashion when he called the Heidelberg Catechism “a new monstrance in which they [the Calvinists] want to incarcerate Christ.”111 “Do you not understand,” Herbertsz. asked his Calvinist colleagues, “that by acting so you are hindering Christian freedom, trying to bind the gift of the Holy Spirit to rules, breaking the bond of Godly peace (in order to protect your human treasure), and introducing a new human servitude or bondage?”112 Duifhuis argued likewise that the Holy Spirit was not subject to human coercion and did not respect worldly distinctions between clerics and laymen – or among churches. The Spirit is as little bound to any church as it is to any school. The Spirit “blows where it wishes”; if it departs from a community, the latter is no longer of God. And since one cannot understand Scripture without the Spirit, no community is an infallible interpreter of Scripture. Duifhuis recommended that the individual believer maintain a critical independence from all visible churches.113

109 BR, rkr 500, 131 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 109). 110 BR, rkr 500, 180. 111 Rogge, Caspar Janszoon Cooolhaes, 2:180–81, as translated by Alastair Duke (“The Ambivalent Face of Calvinism in the Netherlands, 1561–1618,” in International Calvinism 1541–1715, ed. Menna Prestwich [Oxford, 1985], 131). 112 Quoted by S.B.J. Zilverberg, Dissidenten in de Gouden Eeuw (Weesp, 1985), 22. 113 BR, rkr 500, 35–6.

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Morality and Tolerance

Being of this world, the visible churches are necessarily imperfect. Just as they all contain good men as well as bad, so each has adopted some correct doctrines and some erroneous ones. In his sermon on the seamless coat of Jesus, Duifhuis compared the churches in his day to the soldiers fighting over that coat and, finally, tearing it up, each receiving a piece. So each of the churches, fighting over correct doctrine, has grasped one part of the true meaning of Christianity, but takes its part as the only important one.114 Ultimately such fighting, which Duifhuis likened to scholastic “disputation,” signifies an error more fundamental than any doctrinal one: it elevates doctrine generally to an undeserved prominence. Saving faith is not knowledge of or subscription to a particular doctrine; it is rather that spiritual rebirth which transforms the believer. Not knowing for sure which doctrine is correct, humans cannot discern the true church on the basis of its doctrines. They can, however, discern it from the behavior of its members. For the true church is that which best promotes spiritual rebirth, and the latter in turn inevitably produces ethical behavior. A desire to dispute over doctrine reveals flesh-bound passions alien to the reborn: pride in one’s own human wisdom, lack of love, and other, still baser feelings. Those with the desire have not emptied themselves of their sinful human nature, received the Holy Spirit, and been reborn.115 Giving up such disputation is thus an important prerequisite to receiving the Holy Spirit, and if the churches gave up their quarreling, they would all receive divine grace: “O most beloved friends, if we came together in concord nowadays, the Holy Spirit would not be denied to us any more than to the others, for it is one God and one Lord who works everything in everyone.” Meanwhile, lack of love makes our prayers ineffective.116 Here was one point on which Duifhuis occupied the moral high ground, a point on which the assumptions of the day worked in his favor. Calvinist reformers held that their own sending need not be proven by miracles of the kind performed by Jesus and the apostles. They agreed with Duifhuis that such miracles no longer occurred. Their sending was attested to, rather, by miracles of moral regeneration – by the ethical fruits which their faith bore, and by the strength which it gave the faithful to suffer exile and, if necessary, martyrdom.117

114 BR, rkr 500A, 659. 115 See e.g. hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 15. 116 hua, Bibliotheek 30183, 12 and 14. 117 BR, rkr 500, 71–5 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 81–2).

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True faith is more than knowledge of facts or doctrines (which D ­ uifhuis calls een historijaels letter kennis of geloof); it necessarily generates virtue and love: Is it then enough, someone might ask, that we believe this, and know that it happened this way [i.e. that Christ died, releasing us from out sins, and rose on the third day, and so forth], and that we all know the story of the resurrection of Christ, how he conquered? O beloved, the Lord demands of us a faith that is such, that it is lively and forceful, and that it is active through love. That faith is of such a nature, that it offers itself up and gives itself over entirely to the Lord, for faith looks to action [want die geloove siet op die daet]….118 Given this widely accepted notion of faith, Duifhuis was able to question the validity of the Calvinists’ reforms by challenging his hearers simply to look at their behavior. In the two virtues which Duifhuis saw as the heart of Jesus’ ethical teachings – love and humility – the Calvinists came up sorely lacking. Neither love nor humility, Duifhuis argued, drives them to set themselves up as a group apart, claim exclusive possession of God’s favor, accuse everyone not admitted to their communion of a lesser piety, and damn as heretics those who disagree with their doctrines. It is a “cruel, fierce nature” that is revealed “in turning people away from the holy communion; in doing so we consider ourselves superior to others.”119 It is not gentleness that leads them to defy lawful secular authorities, or to plunder and smash other people’s property in iconoclastic fury. Those who display such qualities “one might call deformed rather than reformed.”120 To such behavior Duifhuis contrasted the thorough change which spiritual rebirth brought, transforming “the avaricious into generous, the drunken into sober, the wrathful into patient.”121 Sometimes Duifhuis suggested, in humanist fashion, that ethics comprised the very heart of religion: “herein resides the particular task [het bijsonder deel] of religion, that man cease doing evil and learn to do good; then shall the Lord accept with pleasure the worship of one who acts according to His word; otherwise, it is all in vain.”122 Usually, though, he tied ethics to spiritual rebirth, regarding the former as the fruits of the latter. Chief among the virtues which the reborn Christian shows are humility, patience, and love, the same virtues 118 BR, rkr 500, 140. See likewise BR, rkr 500A, 722; and BR, rkr 500, 23 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 134). 119 BR, rkr 500A, 133. 120 BR, rkr 500, 49. 121 BR, rkr 500, 75 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 82). 122 BR, rkr 500A, 354 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 7).

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which Jesus exemplified in dying on the cross to redeem man. The most important of those virtues, however, is love. Duifhuis called it the greatest of all the Christian virtues, and “the most characteristic mark of Christians.”123 It is the fulfillment of the Law of the Old Testament and the only law still binding on Christians.124 True Christians, he said, citing Galatians 5, have a faith “that works through love.”125 Undoubtedly, the heart of the entire Gospel message reduced for Duifhuis to a call for love of one’s neighbor. Such love, however, has immediate social implications. Like the soldiers who fought over the dead Jesus’ clothes and divided them amongst themselves, so today do people seize on different parts of true religion, each mistaking his part for the whole. Each bans, blasphemes, and brands as heretical those who hold on to different parts. But all such people lack love, which binds the parts together and cannot itself be divided. Love “is the overcoat [den boven rock], the bond of completeness, which ought to hold everything together.”126 Love, in other words, is a bond of unity that unites all Christians. Driven by fleshly passions, religious disputes and divisions feed and strengthen “the old man” and thus hinder rebirth. They signal a lack of love, and hence also a failure to grasp the essence of the Gospel. When worn by true Christians, Christ’s mantle, symbolizing love, unites them so that they share “one heart, one soul, one spirit.”127 For Duifhuis, the rule of love was an injunction to maintain social harmony in all spheres, but especially the religious. Love dictates that we recognize all our fellow Christians as spiritual brothers and maintain unity with them. That means first of all that the visible church should be latitudinarian, admitting all Christians to full membership. Whom Duifhuis considered Christian varied somewhat, but in any event it was an extremely broad category that included persons of all denominations. Christians, he said at one point, are all those who acknowledge Jesus Christ as their savior; at another, he noted approvingly that in the days of the apostles all who held to the Twelve Articles were considered Christians.128 In a society, however, where multiple churches coexist, the rule of love also demands, according to Duifhuis, that we recognize members of other churches as Christian brothers. In other words, love requires, as does humility, that we practice tolerance – of all varieties of

123 BR, rkr 500A, 133; see likewise 73–4. 124 BR, rkr 500A, 658–59. 125 BR, rkr 500A, 661. 126 BR, rkr 500A, 660–61; cf. likewise 73–4. 127 BR, rkr 500A, 658. 128 BR, rkr 500A, 199, 660.

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Christianity. Indeed, Duifhuis called tolerance the chief characteristic of true Christianity.129 The injunction to love one’s Christian brothers also imposes a duty to help them achieve salvation. For Duifhuis, that meant that a true ministry had to be directed towards all Christians, the unreformed as much as the already converted. One must preach the truth “publicly … in the synagogues or temples, where the people gather” to the entire “people and community.” One must not create a separate church of one’s own following.130 The same duty also requires that one be flexible in one’s own practices, since none have any intrinsic worth; all are merely the means to achieve an end, human salvation. Duifhuis pointed to their iconoclasm as an example of how Calvinists put the demonstration of their own sanctimony above care for the salvation of mankind. By smashing images, the Calvinists had turned ten people away from God’s Word for every one they had attracted, and this negative result far outweighed the positive one, that the images were gone.131 For the greater good of helping as many people as possible achieve salvation, one must often compromise temporarily on less important, external matters like images. This is also a reason for leaving admission to the Lord’s Supper open; for the apostle Paul teaches “that those who stand are to seek every means to set their fallen brother on his feet.”132 Duifhuis’ earnestness on this point, and on everything relating to the supreme value of love, can scarcely be exaggerated: Therefore I beseech from the deepest bottom of my heart, bear and have patience with each other in love … and have patience with your fellow man in love, and bear with him in his weakness; do not be ready immediately to cast him out, cut him off, undo him: as the Lord Jesus, or his dear apostles did not do….133 One must always minister to human frailty. Such had also been the counsel of Anastasius Veluanus, author of the widely read Der Leken Wegwijzer (1555). Its motto was Luke 22:32: “When thou art converted, go and lend strength to thy brother.”134 129 BR, rkr 500A 133, 199. 130 BR, rkr 500A, 353, 355. 131 BR, rkr 500A, 317 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 189–90). 132 BR, rkr 500, 125 (Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 105). Cf. likewise BR, rkr 500A, 132–33 and 356. 133 BR, rkr 500A, 133. 134 Anastasius Veluanus, Der Leken Wegwijzer, in Bibliotheca Reformatoria Neerlandica, ed. S. Cramer and F. Pijper, vol. 4 (The Hague, 1906), 123–376. Quote from the end of the table of contents.

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5 Conclusion Duifhuis was no maverick or unique case. While it is not yet possible to make an accurate typology of libertine sentiments, even a modest sampling of sources reveals how common many of Duifhuis’ key themes were. Plays, pasquils, casual remarks, and reports of popular opinion, as well as pamphlets and sermons, echoed Duifhuis’ complaint that the Calvinst clergy was trying to exercise an unscriptural, tyrannical dominance over the laity, just as the Catholic clergy had done for centuries. The goal of these “scribes,” these “hypocritical monks,” said one pasquil, is “to make themselves master and you their servants,” and “to place a heavy yoke on your neck.”135 Calvinists themselves acknowledged how widespread these fears were. “What is there more common or usual in these our churches,” asked Philip Marnix, “than for the chiefest of the Nobility, and infinite numbers of the Commonalty, to keep away from our assemblies, only because they are afraid of a new tyranny and yoke of spiritual dominion.”136 Many libertines, furthermore, agreed with Duifhuis on the means by which the clerical “tyranny” was exercized. Though they denied it, the “new papists” had made “human additions” to the Bible, in the form of catechisms and confessions of faith. They had introduced “human ordinances” in the form of church orders and elevated the importance of ceremonies, while denigrating the sufficiency of faith and spiritual rebirth for salvation. With their consistories, they had retained in a new form the Catholic ecclesiastic courts, and with them the claims of the church to judge on God’s behalf in spiritual matters. The “power of the keys” – the power of the church hierarchy to declare persons damned or saved – lived on in the Calvinist church in the form of tests for admission to communion and measures like excommunication, by which individuals could be excluded from the rite. In the final analysis, ecclesiastic discipline, the means by which Calvinist clerics enforced their authority, formed the linchpin of this “tyrannical” system. Accordingly, it was the object of fiercest attack by libertines throughout the Netherlands. When Utrecht’s consistorials denounced the Jacobskerk as a “libertine” church, Hubert Duifhuis retorted “that it was no libertinism to wish to remain in Christian freedom.”137 Sometimes using the very rhetoric of the early Protestant reformers, employing lines of argument which those reformers had 135 P.J. Vermeulen, ed., “Eenige Utrechtsche paskwillen uit den tijd van Leycester,” Tijdschrift voor Oudheden, Statistiek, Zeden en gewoonten … van het bisdom, de provincie en de stad Utrecht 1 (1847): 70–1. 136 As quoted in Herbert H. Rowen, ed., The Low Countries in Early Modern Times (New York, 1972), 58. 137 Wtenbogaert, Leven, 2.

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turned against the Catholic Church, Duifhuis echoed what a modern scholar has called the “original Protestant message”: the call for liberation from the burdens of a clerically dominated and corrupted religion.138 Duifhuis, though, took this message to an extreme that undermined the authority of all religious establishments, Protestant as well as Catholic. This transformation was not the result of simple exaggeration. Sebastian Franck had accomplished it by drawing on late medieval mystical traditions.139 Duifhuis reached the same end by the same means. He shows, in fact, manifold similarities to a series of better known thinkers outside the Netherlands, such as Franck and Castellio, who understood Protestantism through the filter of late medieval mysticism and creatively synthesized the two. Such thinkers have been appropriately labeled “spiritualizers,” and incorporated into that varied tapestry called the “Radical Reformation.”140 There, too, most likely, belong more Dutch libertines than has previously been recognized. As a member of the Family of Love, Duifhuis clearly had more intimate, personal ties to mystical movements than many other libertines. Still, as research progresses the roster of libertines with similar sympathies continues to grow.141 Mystical culture, though, had special difficulties in the late sixteenth century, not only in the Netherlands, but also, for example, in Catholic Spain, where great mystics like Teresa of Avila came countless times under suspicion of heresy. For this culture clashed with the dominant trend of the period toward confessional consolidation. Churches of every denomination were developing increasingly specific doctrines, church orders, and liturgies, striving thus to fix the bounds of acceptable religious thought and behavior. Mysticism not only transgressed those bounds, it denied, at least implicitly, the relevance of organized religion as a whole for true piety and salvation. In doing so, it clashed with the entire strategy for reform which those churches 138 Ozment, Reformation in the Cities. 139 Alfred Hegler, Geist und Schrift bei Sebastian Franck (1892), cited by Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 14. 140 George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962). 141 Coornhert’s spiritualist sympathies have long been recognized: see e.g. H. Bonger, Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert. Studie over een nuchter en vroom Nederlander (Lochem, n.d.), 39–88. Those of Coolhaes are made clear by J. Kamphuis, Kerkelijke besluitvaardigheid. Over de bevestiging van het gereformeerde kerkverband in de jaren 1574 tot 1581/2… (Groningen, 1970). On Herbertsz. see D. Nauta et al., eds., Biografisch Lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlandse protestantisme, 3 vols. (Kampen, 1978-), 3:178–81. On followers of Duifhuis in Utrecht see Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines. For the northern provinces see W.  Bergsma, “Zestiende-eeuwse godsdienstige pluriformiteit. Overwegingen naar aanleiding van Abel Eppens,” in Historisch bewogen. Opstellen over de radicale reformatie in de 16e en 17e eeuw (Groningen, 1984), 9–30.

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were p ­ ursuing, a strategy that involved an unprecedented strengthening of the power of the visible church and its clergy. As the tool par excellence of confessional self-­definition and reform, ecclesiastic discipline naturally became the focus of hostility among those many Netherlanders for whom late medieval mysticism, which had flourished in their land more than anywhere else, was still vital. In this sense, Duifhuis’ beliefs cannot be considered a compromise or middle position between Calvinism and Tridentine Catholicism. Both the Catholic traditions and the Protestant innovations which Duifhuis drew upon were essentially pre-confessional. Many, certainly, were the points of contact between Duifhuis’ libertinism and Erasmian humanism. Both placed a great value on ethical behavior, scorned dogmatic niceties, and promoted tolerance. In a more negative sense, Duifhuis drew frequently on humanist rhetoric to assault the confessional clergy, portraying them as modern-day scholastics who disputed over meaningless questions and wrote “glosses” on Scripture. Yet the chief textual echoes one hears in Duifhuis’ sermons are from the German Theology and The Imitation of Christ, not from Erasmus’ works. And in his vehemently anti-­intellectual stance, Duifhuis went far beyond the humanist critique of scholasticism to reject a central plank of the Christian humanist platform: that scholarship itself was necessary to reveal divine truth and bring about meaningful reform. Duifhuis mocked the very idea that a command of ancient languages had any bearing on true piety, or that good Latin promoted good morals. The Holy Spirit, he insisted, could enlighten anyone and give them a wisdom to which the scholars’ erudition could not compare. Spiritualism made Duifhuis a radical egalitarian, compared to Erasmus. All this should make us reconsider the “Erasmian” nature of Dutch libertinism, as sketched by Enno van Gelder and others. In the very prominent case of Duifhuis, at least, humanism took a back seat to spiritualism and Protestantism. These two ideologies provided Duifhuis with powerful ammunition to use against his Calvinist opponents, far more powerful than humanism offered. For while the educated classes of the late sixteenth century were all being brought up on Erasmus’ Colloquies and other humanist texts, the churches had largely succeeded by then in domesticating humanism and turning it from a threat into a tool of confessional education. As for the individualism and tolerance often attributed to the libertines, they were indeed genuine. Ironically, though, these characteristics, which to Enno van Gelder seemed so essentially modern, derived in Duifhuis’ case not from any secularization or Renaissance “enlightenment,” but from late medieval and early Protestant religious sentiments.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Nicolette Mout, Steven Ozment, and J.J. Woltjer for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. Research for it was made possible by grants from the Sheldon Fund of Harvard University and from the Joint Committee on Western Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

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Dutch Particularism and the Calvinist Quest for “Holy Uniformity” “It is amazing what a rude and abominable chaos of diverse spirits and opinions this city is.”1 So in 1579 complained Werner Helmichius, one of the first Calvinist ministers to serve the city of Utrecht after it joined the Dutch Revolt against Spain. Like his colleagues elsewhere, Helmichius was dismayed and sometimes perplexed by the variety of religious sentiments flourishing in the northern Netherlands. Most people there had rejected Counter-Reformation Catholicism along with Philip ii’s proto-absolutism. That did not mean, however, that they had become Calvinists. On the contrary, in the 1570s and following decades Calvinism remained the religion of a minority. It had to contend not only with the remnants of Roman Catholicism but also with Anabaptists, Lutherans, and a host of sectarians. As if this array of familiar rivals did not suffice, Dutch Calvinists discovered to their great bewilderment that their most formidable opponents were not members of any rival confession or sect at all. Strangely enough, these opponents often claimed to be Reformed Protestants, while at the same time they rejected Calvinist church order and refused to submit to any form of ecclesiastic discipline. Calvinists called them “Libertines.”2 Calvinist-Libertine conflict was one of the most widespread and characteristic phenomena of the Dutch Reformation. Not limited to the northern Netherlands (Calvin himself struggled with “Libertine” opponents in Geneva), it attained there a unique importance, often eclipsing conflict between different confessional groups.3 It burst into the open wherever Libertines had effective leadership, which included the cities Leiden, Gouda, Medemblik, Hoorn, Amersfoort, and Utrecht. Even where they lacked such leadership, Libertines 1 “Mirum quam incultum et tetrum diversorum animorum, diversarumque opinionum chaos sit haec civitas” (Werner Helmichius to Arend Corneliszoon Croese, July, 1579, in H.Q. Janssen and J.J. van Toorenenbergen, eds., Brieven uit onderscheidene Kerkelijke Archieven, wmv series iii, volume 4 [Utrecht, 1880], 7.). 2 On the history and meaning of this derogatory label, see esp. Gerhard Schneider, Der Libertin: Zur Geistes- und Sozialgeschichte des Bürgertums im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1970). 3 On “Libertines” in Geneva see Ross William Collins, Calvin and the Libertines of Geneva ­(Toronto, 1968), 95–200; F.W. Kampschulte, Johannes Calvin, seine Kirche und sein Staat in Genf (Leipzig, 1869–95), 2:3–278; E. William Monter, Calvin’s Geneva (New York, 1967), 66–92 and passim.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_005

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were responsible for much of the resistance Calvinist reformers faced when they attempted to fashion a theocratic “New Israel” in the young United Provinces. That attempt, as historians well know, failed, and despite the adoption of Calvinism as its official credo, the United Provinces became the most tolerant and pluralistic nation in seventeenth-century Europe. To understand this fundamental characteristic of their land in its Golden Age, Dutch historians have long appreciated the need to explain the nature and causes of Dutch Libertinism. Traditionally they have done so in three ways. These ways are not mutually exclusive, and more often than not historians combine at least two of them. Sometimes they regard the Calvinist-Libertine conflict as one between church and state. Pointing out the prominence of urban magistrates in the Libertine party, they say that Libertinism was a form of Erastianism, an expression of hostility to the claims of the Dutch Reformed Church to power and independence.4 At other times, historians attribute the conflict to a difference in belief systems. They argue that Libertines, despite their claims, were not Reformed Protestants but something else: either Erasmian humanists, or bearers of a distinctly Dutch, “national” religious sentiment, or simply irreligious. Along the same lines, Libertines are sometimes characterized as a “middle group” straddling the border between Catholic and Protestant convictions.5 The third interpretation holds that one of the chief issues dividing Calvinists and Libertines was a social one: the shape the Dutch Reformed Church should take as a religious community. Should that church be an exclusive company of committed believers, or, as Libertines wished, a comprehensive, open body that welcomed all persons to communion and full membership?6 4 For one important example, see J.C. Naber, Calvinist of Libertijnsch? (1572–1631) (Utrecht, 1884), 11 ff., 21 ff., and passim. 5 These four variants, again, are often combined. For important examples of them, see Johannes Lindeboom, De confessioneele ontwikkeling der Reformatie in de Nederlanden (The Hague, 1946), 34–54; H.A. Enno van Gelder, “Humanisten en Libertijnen, Erasmus en C.P.  Hooft,” Nederlandsch archief voor kerkgeschiedenis N.S. 16 (1920): 35; L. Knappert, Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Hervormde Kerk gedurende de 16e en 17e eeuw (Amsterdam, 1911), 82; J.J. Woltjer, Friesland in Hervormingstijd (Leiden, 1982), 90–104 and passim. 6 See Naber, Calvinist of Libertijnsch?, 4, 22, and passim; H. Smitskamp, Calvinistisch Nationaal Besef in Nederland vóór het midden der 17de eeuw (The Hague, 1947), 15; A. Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldebarnevelt (Assen, 1974), 226; J.J. Woltjer, “Introduction,” in Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning, ed. Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden, 1975), 1; G. Groenhuis, De Predikanten. De sociale positie van de gereformeerde predikanten in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden voor +/- 1700 (Groningen, 1977), 101–02; Alastair Duke, “The Ambivalent Face of Calvinism in the Netherlands, 1561–1618,” in International Calvinism 1541–1715, ed. Menna Prestwich (Oxford, 1985), 109–34; J.J. Woltjer, “De religieuze situatie in de

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Since the 1970s, this third interpretation has gained in strength and popularity. The purpose of the following materials is to examine it through a case study of Utrecht in the years 1578–1586. Such a study will show that the shape of religious community was indeed the most hotly contested issue dividing Calvinists and Libertines. It will also show that the issue was broader than historians have usually realized. Exclusivity versus openness was perhaps the most important of its aspects, but it was not the only one. Equally contested was the extent to which localities should have religious autonomy. Considering these two aspects together will reveal clearly the relevance of this Dutch dispute to some of the most pressing, trans-national concerns of contemporary Reformation scholarship. 1 As recent work has revealed, Calvinist exclusivity goes a long way to explaining why the Dutch Reformed Church acquired so few members in the early years of the Dutch Republic.7 That church had served as the official, “public” church in some parts of the revolting provinces since 1573; by 1581, it did so almost everywhere.8 Its ministers preached in the old parish churches, received salaries from the secular authorities, accompanied the nation’s armies and navies into battle. Catholicism was outlawed; the practice of other religions required special permission. The Dutch Reformed Church was uniquely privileged – but it was never “established.”9 However much Dutch Calvinists relished the unique role of their church, and however committed they were to extirpating “heresy,” they nonetheless insisted that church membership be voluntary. Unlike their co-religionists in other lands, they did not advocate laws requiring people to eerste jaren van de Republiek,” in Ketters en papen onder Filips ii, Rijksmuseum Het Catharij­ neconvent Utrecht (Utrecht, 1986), 97, 100–02. 7 On the number of church members, see J. Briels, “De Zuidnederlandse immigratie 1572–1630,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 100 (1987): 339; Deursen, Bavianen, 132 f.; Duke, “Ambivalent Face,” 109 f.; Alastair Duke and Rosemary L. Jones, “Towards a Reformed Polity in Holland, 1572–1578,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 89 (1976): 382, 385 f. 8 Drenthe and the city of Groningen formed the only exceptions; there the Reformed Church had to wait until 1594 to obtain the position it enjoyed elsewhere (Otto J. de Jong, Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis [Nijkerk, 1986], 158). 9 On this distinction, see esp. Heinz Schilling, “Religion und Gesellschaft in der Calvinistischen Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande – ‘Öffentlichkeitskirche’ und Säkularisation; Ehe und Hebammenwesen; Presbyterien und politische Partizipation,” in Kirche und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in deutschen und niederländischen Städten der werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Franz Petri (Cologne/Vienna, 1980), 197–250.

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join the Reformed Church. On the contrary, Dutch Calvinists set obstacles before potential members in the form of high standards for admission. While the specifics varied, these standards always entailed passing a doctrinal examination, giving evidence of moral purity, and submitting to ecclesiastic discipline.10 Calvinist reformers knew that many people otherwise sympathetic to Reformed Protestantism were unable or unwilling to meet these standards; nevertheless, they consciously forfeited potential members in order to uphold them. Two factors account for this “sectarian tendency” in Dutch Calvinism, according to Alastair Duke.11 One was Anabaptism, which was so strong in the Netherlands that it compelled Dutch Calvinists to adapt in order to compete effectively. Like Anabaptists, Dutch Calvinists came to see themselves as “children of God,” specially chosen and set apart from the “children of the world.” Under no circumstances were the worldly to be admitted to the Lord’s Supper. Their presence there, Calvinists said, would pollute the rite and endanger its efficacy for everyone. This special sense of identity and this belief in the antagonistic relationship between church and world made Dutch Calvinists give their church some of the characteristics of an Anabaptist, “gathered” one. The other factor was the heritage of the years prior to 1572. Until then, Habsburg persecution had forced Dutch Reformed congregations to operate either secretly “under the cross” or in the safety of exile. By a self-selecting process, only the few who had been willing to risk life and property or suffer exile for the sake of their faith had sought membership in them. Given the conditions under which these congregations had operated, stringent requirements for joining them had made sense and excluded no one. But when the Dutch Revolt changed those conditions and gave the Reformed Church new privileges and duties, Dutch Calvinists showed themselves willing to adapt only partially. They agreed to baptize all infants, for example, and welcomed everyone to their sermons. But they remained just as exclusive and demanding as before with regard to communion. Reformers were not prepared to compromise the purity of that rite in order to secure the following of the many people who were still “weak in faith.” To do so, said Werner Helmichius, would be to give “that holy thing to the dogs.”12 10 11 12

F.L. Rutgers, ed., Acta van de Nederlandsche synoden der zestiende eeuw, wmv series ii, vol. 3 (Utrecht, 1889), 29, 147, 200, 238, 250, 271–72, 392, 407–08, 500. Duke, “Ambivalent Face.” “dat heylige den honden gegeven hebben” (Pieter Bor, Oorsprongk, begin, en vervolgh der Nederlandsche oorlogen, beroerten, en borgerlyke oneenigheden, 4 vols. [Amsterdam, 1679], 2:844). The experience of the English Marian exiles had a similar effect on the course of the Puritan separatist movement in England as that of the Dutch fugitive churches on

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The irony was that, through their exclusivity, Dutch Calvinists unintentionally contributed to the religious diversity for which the Netherlands soon became famous. By keeping people out of their church, they encouraged them to affiliate with other churches or to keep away from church altogether. These policies did not please the Libertines. As historians have shown, the latter went to the other extreme, advocating that the Dutch Reformed Church give up its exclusivity, its dogmatic rigidness, and its striving for moral purity. They wanted a Reformed Church fully suited to take over the social functions of the old Roman Catholic establishment – a church that could embrace and serve all the inhabitants of the Netherlands, or at least all those who did not remain firmly attached to Roman Catholicism. To put it another way, they wanted a church somewhat like the Church of England, which could comprehend the extremes of Puritan and conservative Anglican and everything in between. Historians have termed what the Libertines wanted a “volkskerk,” meaning a national, comprehensive, or people’s church.13 In the Libertines’ opinion, such a church had many advantages. For one, by uniting the Dutch people religiously, it would eliminate (or at least reduce) the danger that religious differences might fuel civil strife and disorder.14 Such is the contrast presently drawn between Calvinist and Libertine ideals of religious community. In the event, the Calvinists got their way and the Dutch Reformed Church became an exclusive one. Libertines, left without a better option, either sought religious fulfillment at home or else joined the ranks of the so-called “sympathizers [liefhebbers] of the Reformed religion.” The last group, a large one, consisted of persons who, though barred from taking communion in the Reformed Church, attended sermons there with some regularity. In Utrecht, however, and there alone, Libertines did have a better option: joining an independent, Libertine church. Its founder was a former priest named Hubert Duifhuis. Since 1574 Duifhuis had served as co-pastor of the Jacobskerk, one of Utrecht’s four parish churches. In 1578, with broad support from magistrates and burghers, Duifhuis renounced Roman Catholicism and began to reform the Jacobskerk. In doing so, he acted independently of Helmichius and his Calvinist colleagues, who simultaneously were forming a Calvinist congregation on the model of those already established ­elsewhere.

13 14

Dutch Calvinism. See e.g. Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca and London, 1963), 39–40. For use of the term “volkskerk,” see Deursen, Bavianen, 226; Groenhuis, De predikanten, 101–02; Smitskamp, Calvinistisch Nationaal Besef, 15. The comparison with the Church of England was suggested to me by Professor J.J. Woltjer in conversation. See Naber, Calvinist of Libertijnsch?, 4, 22.

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Calvinist and L­ibertine reformers thus created two separate churches in Utrecht, both claiming to be “Reformed.” Heated rivalry between the two churches soon dominated religious politics in the city. The Jacobskerk survived as an independent entity only until April, 1586, when the Earl of Leicester, Governor-General of the Netherlands, forced it to merge with Utrecht’s Calvinist church. The struggle between Calvinists and Libertines, however, continued to shape the course of religious reform in Utrecht into the early seventeenth century. Even then it did not die, but reemerged in different form in the Remonstrant controversy of the 1610s.15 For eight years, though, from 1578 to 1586, Utrecht’s Libertines had what Libertines elsewhere never did: a church which realized all their ideals. Full membership in the Jacobskerk was open to all persons, unconditionally.16 That meant that anyone who desired could receive communion whenever it was administered. Unlike Calvinist ministers, Duifhuis kept no list of persons admitted to the Lord’s Supper, and made no house visitations prior to that ceremony. He recommended that people examine themselves and decide on their own worthiness to receive the sacrament. He did not presume to judge another’s worthiness, nor did he brook any other person’s doing so. The Jacobskerk lacked consistory, elders, and deacons. Duifhuis declared that the church wardens were his elders, and the traditional custodians of parish charity, known as pot masters (potmeesters), his deacons. Both types of official seem to have continued to function as they had before 1578. The Jacobskerk thus lacked all powers of ecclesiastic discipline. Regardless of morals or beliefs, everyone was admitted; no one could be expelled or kept from communion. Other practices of the Jacobskerk produced the same openness. Duifhuis performed baptisms with a Reformed liturgy, but without seeking assurances from parents that their beliefs matched his, and without demanding that they promise to raise their infant as a Reformed Christian. He consoled sick and dying parishioners at their request, irrespective of the doctrines they adhered to; pot masters distributed charity to needy parishioners on the same a-confessional basis. In his preaching, Duifhuis denounced Catholic “abuses” 15 16

For a comprehensive account of Calvinist-Libertine conflict in Utrecht and its significance, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995). For primary source accounts of Jacobskerk practices, see esp. Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:832; Johannes Wtenbogaert, Kerckeliicke Historie (Amsterdam, 1647), 195, 220–21; idem, Leven, kerckelijcke bedieninghe ende zedighe verantwoordingh (2nd ed. n.p., 1646), preface, 1–2. See also Geerard Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, 4 vols. (2nd ed. Amsterdam, 1677), 1:618–19; Herm. Joh. Royaards, Geschiedenis der hervorming in de stad Utrecht (Leiden, 1847), 146–57.

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and “superstitions.” He refused, however, to give catechism sermons on Sunday afternoons, a standard Calvinist practice. Indeed, Duifhuis was hostile to all catechisms and confessions of faith, denying them any binding doctrinal authority. Christians, he argued, are required to believe only what is in the Bible; conversely, all who accept the Bible as God’s Word (and Christ as their savior) are true Christians. Knowing well how variously Scripture could be interpreted, he defined “Christian” very broadly.17 On the local level, then, the Jacobskerk was indeed comprehensive. It invited fellow parishioners and burghers to remain fellow church members, and sought to unite them all by the bonds of Christian love and charity. Its structure fostered no divisions within the local community. But the Jacobskerk also manifested a second characteristic that was just as distinctive: it was an autonomous, local church. Without autonomy, the Jacobskerk could not have deviated from Calvinist norms in all the ways mentioned above. Quick to grasp this principle, Calvinists focused most of their attacks on the Jacobskerk here.

2

Unlike the Jacobskerk, the Calvinist-dominated Dutch Reformed Church was a distinctly supralocal entity. It had been so ever since 1571, when the Synod of Emden laid down its basic structure.18 The Emden synod formally united the twenty-eight or more “fugitive churches” in England and Germany plus the more than sixteen churches operating “under the cross” in the Netherlands. To bind these bodies together, the synod adopted the organizational structure of the French Reformed Church. That is, it arranged for local consistories to send delegates to regional classes (the Dutch equivalent of presbyteries), classes to send delegates to provincial synods, and provincial synods delegates to national synods.19 This structure was centralized and hierarchic, but not in the same way the Roman Catholic Church was. To differentiate their synods from Catholic ones, Calvinists called them “greater,” not “higher” church gatherings. Every local church and minister remained the equal, in theory, of every other. There were, moreover, many parallels between local consistories and magistracies, provincial synods and Estates, national synods and the Dutch Estates General. 17 18 19

BR, RKR 500; BR, RKR 500A; hua, Bibliotheek 6037B. These three manuscripts contain copies of twenty-one sermons given by Duifhuis in the Jacobskerk after the fall of 1578. J.F. Gerhard Goeters, ed., Die Akten der Synode der niederländischen Kirchen zu Emden vom 4.-13. Oktober 1571 (Neukirchen, 1971). Holland formed a minor exception in that it had two “particular” synods, one for its northern and another for its southern half, instead of a single “provincial” synod.

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In both secular and church polity, authority was fragmented, and ascended from the local level upward. Be this as it may, authority came to rest in this system at a level which Libertines found uncomfortably high. It was the classis which tested and approved candidates for the ministry, and local congregations needed its approval to appoint ministers. A classis or synod could remove from office any functioning minister who committed a serious moral transgression or was guilty of heresy. More important, no local church could decide for itself on dogma, church order, or any other fundamental issue. When an issue arose locally which affected all the churches of a region, the consistory passed it on to the classis for resolution; classes similarly passed on issues of wider significance to the synods. In this way, all decisions of fundamental import came to be made at the highest level, that of national synods. Such decisions, furthermore, did not require unanimous consent, as did equivalent secular ones. At synods, unlike in the Estates General, the majority vote always prevailed.20 Duifhuis and his followers rejected the authority of Calvinist classes and synods and declined to create any supralocal institutions of their own.21 Prominent Libertine ministers in different cities, such as Caspar Coolhaes in Leiden and Herman Herbertszoon in Gouda, championed many of the same positions as Duifhuis, and yet these leaders never coordinated activities.22 The same held for the many more obscure Libertine ministers who sprang up in the Utrecht countryside. They believed too firmly in local autonomy to have any interest in organizing nationally. In the case of Utrecht’s Jacobskerk, this particularism rested on a double foundation: the church’s manner of appointing ministers and its position on “adiaphora,” matters indifferent to salvation. Since at least 1550, Utrecht’s lay community had taken an active role in deciding who would provide pastoral care in the Jacobskerk parish. In that year, church wardens and parishioners had petitioned Bishop George of Egmond to continue in the office of vice-curate a priest whom they had found to be

20 Goeters, Akten, 79–9, 84–7; Rutgers, Acta, 241, 494. 21 A resounding denunciation of Calvinist classes and synods appears in HUA, SVU 606, ms. “g.” 22 On Coolhaes, see esp. H.C. Rogge, Caspar Janszoon Coolhaes, de voorloper van Arminius en der Remonstranten, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1865); J. Kamphuis, Kerkelijke besluitvaardigheid. Over de bevestiging van het gereformeerde kerkverband in de jaren 1574 tot 1581/2 ondanks de oppositie van het confessioneel en kerkelijk indifferentisme, zoals deze oppositie inzonderheid vanuit Leiden werd gevoerd (Groningen, 1970). On Herbertszoon, see esp. C.C. Hibben, Gouda in Revolt: Particularism and Pacifism in the Revolt of the Netherlands 1572–1588 (Utrecht, 1983), 112–29.

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q­ ualified and diligent. Utrecht’s magistrates had supported their request.23 In 1574, Utrecht’s magistrates are said to have offered Duifhuis the co-pastorate of the Jacobskerk, though the provost of the Utrecht cathedral chapter, not they, held the right of patronage to all the city pastorates; whether other Utrecht laity played a part in obtaining Duifhuis’ services we do not know. At any rate, with the establishment of the two Reformed congregations in 1578, magistrates, wardens, and parishioners reserved to themselves jointly the exclusive right to appoint and dismiss Jacobskerk pastors. From their perspective, this act continued and extended a line of legitimate, lay-initiated reform.24 By the time of Duifhuis’ death in 1581, the procedure for appointing new ministers had been standardized: parishioners and wardens nominated, magistrates approved and installed.25 For his part, Duifhuis never bothered to be re-ordained. He claimed simply to be continuing to serve his congregation, now a Reformed one, in the role of pastor.26 Utrecht’s Libertines justified these arrangements and all their other unique practices by defining “adiaphora” very broadly. They included in this category all church orders. Whether or not a church enforced ecclesiastic discipline, for instance, could and should vary by locality, they argued, depending on what would most effectively promote the spiritual welfare of people living there. Church orders and discipline, they said, were “indifferent things … in which each might proceed in the manner that was most edifying.”27 One application of this principle in 1578 triggered the final parting of ways between Duifhuis and Utrecht’s Calvinist ministers. After a midwife baptized a newborn infant who seemed about to die, Duifhuis denounced the practice publicly, but infuriated Calvinists by refusing to declare the baptism invalid or to rebaptize the child himself. Duifhuis regarded this compromise with popular sensitivities as a valid tactical maneuver, justified if it enabled him to win more people for

23 24

hua, BA ii 387. Such lay initiative prior to the Reformation, well known in the German context, was not restricted among the Dutch cities to Utrecht, as a recent study of Rotterdam shows. See H. ten Boom, De reformatie in Rotterdam 1530–1585 (n.p., 1987), 49–60. On Germany, see Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, trans. and ed. H.C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. (Durham, 1982), 46–9. 25 This procedure was followed in the appointment of Jacobskerk ministers Herman Elconius (Duifhuis’ successor), Tako Sybrants, and Cornelis Martini Royenburg. See hua, SA ii 121 (4 April, 13 May, 24 July 1581 [Elconius]; 11 June, 13 June 1582 [Sybrants]; 7 June 1585 [Royenburg]). 26 Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:832. 27 “middelbare dingen … daer in een yeder mocht volgen den voet die stichtelijkst was” (Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:837).

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Protestantism.28 Especially at this early stage in Utrecht’s Reformation, Duifhuis felt that the strong had to accommodate their weaker fellow Christians in order to help them. God, he believed, meant the visible church to have enough flexibility to serve its true purpose of helping people achieve salvation. Utrecht’s Calvinist ministers protested, appealing to Scripture and arguing that apostolic precedent had set for all time and place the structure and practices of the “true church.” But Duifhuis and his followers refused to heed them. Even the apostles, Duifhuis said, had been human and hence fallible.29 Moreover the apostolic church had been designed to meet particular historial circumstances, the most salient being the hostility of secular authorities to Christianity. The order of the apostolic church might well suit a modern church suffering under persecution, but since a “Christian government has come to all the [Dutch] cities,” said Duifhuis, that order is unnecessary. The apostles themselves would have been content to do without deacons, for example, if government-appointed pot masters had existed in their day.30 Behind the Calvinists’ insistence on a single, universally valid church order lay another argument, however, one deeply rooted in basic assumptions about the world. To them, variety did not merely imply deviation from what was correct; it constituted an evil in itself. Variety, they said, was a species of disorder, and as such it offended God, who held order sacred. Like John Calvin himself, Dutch Calvinists ascribed an intrinsic sacrality to order, believing that it reflected God’s own nature and desires.31 In 1578, the consistory of Delft expressed these sentiments in a draft remonstrance to the Jacobskerk: Since the church is God’s house and the Apostle Paul wishes that all things proceed in the same house with order and decorum, [and] since God is a God of order and not of disorder, so do we consider it insufficient that God’s Word be preached purely; a regime and order must also be maintained, which does not happen if every minister, following his own

28

The same reasoning led Duifhuis to oppose iconoclasm and to continue to wear a surplice while preaching until January, 1579, when a religious settlement was reached. At that time, the magistracy had the images and altars removed from the Jacobskerk and Duifhuis put aside his surplice. BR, rkr 500A, 317, printed in Jan Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, de Prediker van St. Jacob (Amsterdam, 1858), 189–90; hua, SA ii 1, item no. 21; HUA, Archief van de Staten van Utrecht in de landsheerlijke tijd 645. 29 BR, rkr 500A, 696–723. 30 BR, rkr 500, 65–7, printed in Wiarda, Huibert Duifhuis, 102–04. 31 On Calvin, see William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (New York, 1988), 34–6, 49–50, and passim.

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head, governs his church as seems best to him, without consulting with anyone.32 What the Delft consistory meant by order was nothing less than “uniformity” in doctrine, ceremony, and organization. Such uniformity it termed “holy.”33 Six years later, Utrecht’s ministers were still repeating and elaborating on the same injunction. In petition after petition, they demanded “uniformity or harmony of the Evangelical Religion following the Word of God and the example of all the surrounding Provinces.”34 This desire for “holy uniformity” inspired Dutch Calvinists to craft a religious unity that transcended the limits of parish, city, and province. Such unity took many forms. One was the national structure given to the Dutch Reformed Church, one of the few national institutions in the United Provinces. Its very existence fostered ties among Calvinists who lived in different places. Libertines were able to prevent the church from holding more than six national synods between 1571 and 1618. In the intervening years, however, provincial synods paid close attention to the precedents being set by their counterparts in other provinces. Through a lively correspondence, ministers consulted on common problems and passed on the fruits of their experience.35 More important was the uniform nature of Calvinism as a religious culture. Classes and synods used ecclesiastic discipline to insure that Calvinists throughout the Netherlands shared identical beliefs and worshipped uniformly. Whether in Utrecht or Haarlem, Dutch Calvinists sang the same hymns (those of Peter Dathenus), recited the same prayer formulae, and learned the same catechism (the Heidelberg Catechism). True, Calvinists as well as ­Libertines recognized some matters as adiaphoral, in which variation was 32

33 34

35

“Daer na, dewijl de gemeente ‘t huys Gods is, en den Apostel Paulus wil, dat alle dingen ordentlijk en geschicktelijk in denselven huyse sullen toegaen, dewijl God een God des ordens en niet der onordentlijkheyt is, zo achten wy niet genoeg, dat men Gods woord reynlijk prediken, maer datter ook een regiment en ordeninge onderhouden moet wesen, ‘t welk niet geschiet, als een yder Dienaer, zijn eygen hooft volgende, zo alst hem goet dunkt zijn kerke regeert, sonder raed met yemant te plegen….” (Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:834). “heylige gelijkformigheyt” (Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:834). “gelijckycheijt ofte eendrachticheijt der Euangelischer Religien naede woorden Goodts ende allen omleggende Prouincien exempell….” (HUA, SVU 606, ms. “f.”). This is one of four such petitions or tracts that have survived, with Libertine rebuttals (HUA, SVU 364(1), item no. 5; HUA, SVU 606). In one tract, Utrecht’s Calvinists echoed the very words of the Delft consistory (HUA, SVU 606, ms. “La. m.”). An impressive fragment of this correspondence survives in the collection of letters written to Arend Corneliszoon Croese, minister in Delft (sad, Archief van de kerkeraad van de N.H. Gemeente te Delft 70–107 and 112).

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t­ olerable – for instance whether communion was received standing or sitting, or whether baptized infants were sprinkled once or thrice with water.36 Like all other aspects of Calvinist religious life, however, adiaphora were rigorously defined by synods and highly restricted in scope. Calvinism permitted no variety even roughly equivalent to that of Catholicism before the Reformation, when Utrecht celebrated the feast of St. Martin, its patron saint, and Haarlem that of St. Bavo. From the 1570s on, Calvinism was one of the chief cultural forces uniting the very disparate cities and provinces of the northern Netherlands. Calvinism also operated as an integrating force socially, especially with regard to the flood of immigrants – perhaps 100,000 of them by 1600 – who came from the southern provinces. An unknown but by all accounts large proportion of these immigrants were Protestants who would have suffered persecution had they remained at home. Fellow countrymen and yet strangers, they formed a significant contingent within the Calvinist congregations of the north. In Utrecht, immigrants made up about a third of the entire Calvinist congregation.37 The Dutch Reformed Church received these immigrants far more hospitably than civil society generally did. It took immigrants years to gain burgher privileges or eligibility for municipal charity; even the rich and noble among them were initially excluded from governing circles; northerners mocked their different manners and speech. The Dutch Reformed Church, however, immediately granted those with attestations full membership, eligibility for charity, and positions of leadership as elders and deacons. In the eyes of the church, they were the equals of any native, and certainly better than the majority who remained outside its congregations. Libertines, by contrast, were suspicious of these “foreigners,” and tried to contain their influence. As Calvin’s “Libertine” opponents in Geneva had once complained about French immigrants, Dutch Libertines complained that these immigrants from the southern Netherlands were to blame for many of the problems of the Reformed Church. Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft, the Libertine regent of Amsterdam, declared in 1597 that “most of the disturbances which have arisen, and do still arise, in any part of the United Netherlands, originate with the admission of foreigners to the ­government” – by which he meant the government of the church as well as of the state.38

36 Goeters, Akten, 24–7. 37 hua, KR 404. For a complete socio-economic analysis of the composition of Utrecht’s Calvinist and Libertine congregations, see Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 138–54. On the immigrants more generally, see Briels, “De Zuidnederlandse immigratie,” 331–55. 38 Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (New York/Nashville, 1971), 162. On Hooft see H.A. Enno van Gelder, De levensbeschouwing van Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft, Burgemeester van Amsterdam 1547–1626 (Utrecht, 1982).

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Calvinist unity also extended, though less strongly, beyond the borders of the Netherlands to the international Reformed community. Already in 1571, the Synod of Emden had declared Dutch Calvinism part of an international movement by signing the French confession of faith and adopting the Genevan and Heidelberg Catechisms as instructional material. This move was all the more natural since many of the synod participants were at the time living in exile, and as such had directly experienced the sympathy and support which Reformed Protestants of different lands regularly gave each other. Moreover, until the University of Leiden opened its doors in 1575, Dutch Calvinists frequently travelled to Geneva or Heidelberg to study theology. Later, those who had spent time abroad avidly maintained contact with Theodore Beza and other Reformed leaders by correspondence. To Dutch Calvinists, the international character of Reformed Protestantism had immense appeal. In their eyes, it testified to the truth of their beliefs and the correctness of their forms of worship. Their church could claim with real justification to be “Catholic” in the sense of universal. And the more uniform the beliefs and practices were of the various Reformed churches throughout Europe, the more this claim seemed to hold true. In 1618, Dutch Calvinists invited representatives from abroad to the Synod of Dordt, so that the decisions taken there would establish an internationally accepted orthodoxy as well as define Dutch Calvinism. It was therefore with great seriousness that Utrecht’s Calvinists accused the ministers of the Jacobskerk of having “isolated and separated [themselves] from all other Reformed ministers, not only from these Netherlanders, but also from [those of] Germany, France, England, yea of all Christendom.”39 As Jacobskerk ministers were quick to point out, however, Reformed Protestantism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century was far from the uniform movement Dutch Calvinists sometimes wishfully portrayed it to be.40 To justify their deviation from the norms of Dutch Calvinism, Utrecht’s Libertines frequently noted the variety of bona fide Reformed church orders found in Europe. They cited especially often the church order of Zurich, which left discipline entirely in the hands of magistrates.41 The city of Zwingli and Bullinger offered them 39 40

41

“van allen anderen Gereformeerde Kerken-dienaers/ niet alleen van dese Nederlanders: maer ook van Duytsland/ Vrankrijk/ Engeland/ ja der gantscher Christenheyt afgesondert en gesepareert hebben” (Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:843). Even within the Netherlands, a single, national church order was more ideal than reality. In practice, each province had its own church order. On the variety within Dutch Calvinism, see W. Nijenhuis, “Varianten binnen het Nederlandse Calvinisme in de zestiende eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 89 (1976): 358–72. HUA, SVU 364(1), item no. 5, ms. “k”; HUA, SVU 606, ms. “g”; Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 2:838; Wtenbogaert, Kerckeliicke Historie, 235.

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a prestigious and undeniably orthodox alternative to the Genevan ecclesiastic model. So concerned was Utrecht’s consistory to rebut this argument that in 1584 it sent an emissary to Zurich to consult with Rudolf Gualtherus, Bullinger’s son-in-law, and other ministers. From them the emissary obtained a statement concerning the Zurich church order which Utrecht’s consistory subsequently offered as proof that the Libertines’ appeal to the model of Zurich had no basis in fact. Zurich’s ministers, the consistory asserted, “would swell with anger that such a business was being covered up and conducted under their name.”42 Whether or not this assertion was true, the point remained that Dutch Calvinists “allow[ed] themselves to think that the church order or government of Geneva, which is just one city, is so formed as to apply to and be accepted by all peoples,” a belief Libertines firmly rejected.43

3

The case of Reformation Utrecht shows, then, that Calvinist and Libertine models of religious community differed in not one, but at least two respects. The Calvinist model entailed local division and supra-local integration, the Libertine one local unity and particularism. Until now, historians have largely ignored this second dimension.44 Contemporaries regarded it as critical. Repudiating the Calvinist quest for “holy uniformity,” Hubert Duifhuis and the other members of Utrecht’s Jacobskerk took up a principled position in defense of variety and local religious autonomy. 42

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“haer well grotel. belgen souden dat mit haren name sodanighe saecke bedeckt ende gedreuen soude worden” (HUA, SVU 606, ms. “f.”). The emissary sent by Utrecht’s consistory was Johannes Wtenbogaert, later a founder of the Remonstrant Brotherhood (on his trip to Zurich, see Wtenbogaert, Leven, preface). The Libertine Coolhaes in Leiden translated a tract by Gualterus to support his arguments against ecclesiastic discipline (see Kamphuis, Kerkelijke besluitvaardigheid, 30 n. 13). “die sich laeten dunken, dat de Kerkelijke Ordening, of regeering van Geneven, sijnde niet dan een stadt, sou sijn geformeert, om op alle volken te passen, en van de selve aengenomen te worden” (speech made in 1597 by Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft, quoted in Brandt, Historie der Reformatie, 1:822). The only substantial examination of religious localism in the Netherlands is by Hibben, a political historian (Gouda in Revolt, Chapter 4). For mentions of this factor, see H.L. Ph. Leeuwenberg, “De religie in de Republiek omstreeks 1609,” in De kogel door de kerk?, ed. S. Groenveld et al. (2nd ed. Zutphen, 1983), 227–28; Simon Schama, The Embarassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), 59; Smitskamp, Calvinistisch Nationaal Besef, 19–21. None of these historians have considered the two dimensions of religious community in relation to each other.

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Translated into practice, Libertine particularism grew as complex and multilayered as Dutch society itself. On the national stage, Libertines defended the right, enshrined in article thirteen of the Union of Utrecht (1579), of each province to regulate its own religious affairs as it saw fit.45 Such power, however, did not remain concentrated at the provincial level. The Libertines who dominated Utrecht’s provincial estates until 1586 let religious authority devolve almost completely on urban magistrates. The latter saw their cities as sacral as well as civic bodies, and strove to preserve their unity. Magistrates, though, often had to reckon in turn with cohesive, assertive parishes like that of the Jacobskerk. Municipality and parish then found ways to coordinate their actions and share responsibility for religious affairs. In the case of the Jacobskerk, the result was that the parish remained the fundamental unit of religious community: the Jacobskerk retained the social and institutional organization of a preReformation Catholic parish. So did Libertine churches in the Utrecht countryside. They and their noble patrons enjoyed a relationship with the provincial estates similar to that of the Jacobskerk with the Utrecht city magistrates. In this way, province, city, and parish shared religious authority and significance. Such complexity, though, in no way diminished the Libertines’ essential particularism. This trait, like their desire for local unity, set Libertines at odds with the dominant religious trend of their day, which historians in recent years have termed “confessionalism,” or “the formation of confessions” (Konfessionsbildung).46 After the variety and spontaneity of impulses that characterized religious reform in the first half of the sixteenth century, confessionalism entailed the consolidation of new doctrinal orthodoxies and ecclesiastic establishments. Affecting Lutheranism, Catholicism, and Reformed Protestantism in similar ways, it brought sweeping changes to religious life throughout Europe. In each of the affected denominations, beliefs and practices grew more uniform, while the institutional controls that enforced such uniformity grew stronger. People learned to think that their religious loyalties transcended local boundaries, linking them to all who believed as they did, wherever they were. At the same time, people increasingly affirmed their own religious identities by excluding from their fellowship and relating antagonistically to those of differing beliefs. In these respects and others, the struggle 45 46

The text of the article appears in S. Groenveld and H.L. Ph. Leeuwenberg, eds., De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte (Den Haag, 1979), 34–5. A considerable literature now exists on confessionalism. In English, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London and New York, 1989). See also Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen (München/Wien, 1965); Wolfgang Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionelen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 10 (1983): 257–77.

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between Calvinists and Libertines in the Netherlands was one between champions and opponents of Reformed confessionalism. It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore all the dimensions of this Dutch struggle, which had parallels not only in other Reformed lands, but in Catholic and Lutheran ones as well. Before 1572, the Netherlands themselves had witnessed a similar conflict between Tridentine reformers and traditional Catholics. Like the Libertines, the latter had defended a communal, particularistic model of religious community against the agents of divisiveness and ­supra-local integration.47 Why they did so and why opposition to all varieties of confessionalism was so strong in the Netherlands are questions historians need to consider further. Part of the answer lies in the modes of piety and cultural currents that held sway in these lands. Libertines were fiercely anticlerical, and they combined Reformed doctrines with spiritualist and other elements whose roots went back to the late Middle Ages. Another part of the answer, though, relates directly to the two models of community discussed above. For, of the two, the Libertines’ model was far more compatible with the existing structure of Dutch society than the Calvinists.’ In an age when religious allegiance had enormous potential to disrupt and remould the secular realm, Libertines fashioned a church whose shape mirrored and thereby reinforced the traditional shape of Dutch society. In this sense, theirs was a conservative program for religious reform. By the same token, Calvinist reform threatened the communal, particularistic character of Dutch life in every sphere, not just the religious.48 This is not to say that Libertine reform lacked all secular dynamism: in the early phases of the Dutch Revolt, the future shape of all institutions was uncertain, and local elites struggled not only to preserve, but to increase their autonomy and power. It served their interests very well to have a Libertine church susceptible to their influence and control. Nevertheless, when faced with a choice between Calvinist and Libertine reform programs, Utrechters, at least, had no doubt which promised more radical change. Events subsequently confirmed their suspicions. 47

48

For general accounts of Catholic reform attempts in the 1560s and opposition to them, see L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e eeuw, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1945–47), 1:201–419; J. Decavele, “Reformatie en begin katholieke restauratie 1555–1568,” in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 15 vols. (2nd ed. Bussum, 1979), 6:166–85; M.G. Spiertz, “Succes en falen van de katholieke reformatie,” in Ketters en papen, 58. Heinz Schilling has ably described the operation of this same dynamic in the German context; see his “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1–45.

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Acknowledgements An earlier version of this article was presented to the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in St. Louis, October 28, 1988. I would like especially to thank Steven Ozment, Simon Schama, and J.J. Woltjer for their helpful comments and suggestions concerning its subject matter. Research for the article was made possible by grants from the Sheldon Fund of Harvard University and from the Joint Committee on Western Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

Chapter 4

Confessionalism and Its Limits: Religion in Utrecht, 1600–1650 In religious descriptions of the Dutch Republic Utrecht has often played a special role: that of antitype. From the seventeenth century to our own, scholars have commonly portrayed the new country that emerged from the Dutch Revolt against Spain as essentially Calvinist. To be sure, the Republic always had its religious dissenters, and humanist regents resisted stubbornly the imposition of Calvinist theocracy. Still, it was asserted, by 1620 if not earlier Dutch Calvinists had come to dominate the Republic; it was they who set the prevailing cultural tone for the Dutch Golden Age, with its sober tastes and artistic realism. Utrecht, in this portrait, was the exception that proved the rule. Once the ecclesiastic capital of the northern Netherlands, seat of a huge bishopric, Utrecht remained “a fervently Catholic city” even after the Reformation; more than half, perhaps as much as three quarters of its population continued to confess the old faith. No wonder, then, its painters adopted the styles of Counter-Reformation Italy and gravitated towards such “un-Dutch” genres as pastoral and history.1 Though the association of genuine Dutch culture with Calvinism has never gone unchallenged, it remains common today, except among specialists in religious history. For over the past few decades, research has accumulated ­establishing once and for all how very much more complex the religious character of the Republic really was. Indeed, a consensus now exists within the field that religious pluralism was as fundamental a characteristic of Dutch society as its official Calvinism. Catholics and Mennonites, Remonstrants and Lutherans, Jews, sceptics, mystics, waverers, and “Libertines”: taken together, these dissenters actually outnumbered members of the Calvinist Dutch Reformed 1 Christopher Brown, “The Utrecht Caravaggisti,” in Gods, Saints & Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Albert Blankert et al. (Washington, 1980), 101; Paul Huys Janssen, Schilders in Utrecht: 1600–1700 (Utrecht, 1990), 22. Compare Jakob Rosenberg, Seymour Slive, and E.H. ter Kuile, Dutch Art and Architecture 1600–1800 (New York, 1977), 21, 30; Dirk Faber, “Der Zustand in der Republik,” in Hollandische Malerei in neuem Licht. Hendrick ter Brugghen und seine Zeitgenossen, ed. Albert Blankert and Leonard J. Slatkes (Braunschweig, 1986), 16. For a historiographic review of the “Protestantization thesis,” see John Paul ­Elliott, “Protestantization in the Northern Netherlands, A Case Study: The Classis of Dordrecht 1572–1640” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1990), 1–47.

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Church.2 No other land in Europe had such a mix of faiths, which, to add yet more diversity, varied enormously from one town or village to the next. Dutch society was truly a religious “stew,” as one contemporary song put it; Utrecht’s Werner Helmichius, an early Calvinist minister, called it rather a “rude and abominable chaos.”3 Either way, Dutch society as a whole was not nearly as Calvinist as scholars once confidently asserted. The significance of this finding for our understanding of Dutch art is only now being explored.4 Viewed in this light, Utrecht seems less a contrast or antitype than a distinctive variant among the rich variety of Dutch cities. It was indeed a center of Catholic life in the Republic, though its Catholic population was not as large as often said. It had other distinguishing features as well, among them a large Lutheran congregation, few Mennonites, a university, and a Calvinist leadership renowned for its strictness. At the same time, Utrecht had much in common with other Dutch cities: above all, the peace and amity in which people of different faiths managed to live with one another. By 1600 the most precarious phase of the Dutch Revolt had ended and with it most of the uncertainty about the parameters of religious life in the new country. These did not differ in Utrecht from elsewhere in the Republic. By virtue of its supporters’ steadfastness in times of utmost peril, and the association of Catholicism with the hated Spanish regime, the Reformed Church had won unique status as the official church of the Netherlands. It enjoyed financial support from the government, use of the old parish churches, and, most significantly, a monopoly over the public sphere. At the same time, it was not an “established” church, like its counterparts elsewhere in Europe: no one was required by law to join it or attend its services. Those who disliked the church, for whatever reason, retained “freedom of conscience.” This principle meant, at a 2 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995), 29, 68, and works cited there. 3 Utrecht Universiteitsbibliotheek, Manuscripts HS. 5.H.8, 60v-62v: “De Noortsche Rommelpot”; H.Q. Janssen and J.J. van Toorenenbergen, eds., Brieven uit onderscheidene Kerkelijke ­Archieven, wmv series 3, vol. 4 (Utrecht, 1880), 7. 4 Recent contributions include: Xander van Eck, “From doubt to conviction: Clandestine Catholic churches as patrons of Dutch Caravaggesque painting,” Simiolus 22 (1993/94): 217–34; Xander van Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie. Goudse schuilkerken 1572–1795 (Delft, 1994); Volker Manuth, “Denomination and iconography: The choice of subject matter in the biblical painting of the Rembrandt circle,” Simiolus 22 (1993/94): 235–52; John Michael Montias, “Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: An Analysis of Subjects and Attributions,” in Art in History/History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, ed. David Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, 1991), 331–72; P.J.J. van Thiel, “Catholic elements in seventeenthcentury Dutch paintings, apropos of a children’s portrait by Thomas de Keyser,” Simiolus 20 (1990–91): 39–62.

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minimum, that they could believe as they wished; in practice, it usually meant that they could worship God as they saw fit, providing they did so discreetly, within the privacy of their home. In any event, religious worship remained an entirely voluntary matter. People could affiliate with the Reformed Church, with one of the dissenting churches, or, most remarkably, with none at all.5 In the years around 1600, the last option was the most frequently chosen. Researchers in city after city have found that at this time a majority of the Dutch did not belong to any church.6 Such was the case in Utrecht as well. Protestant ideas, spreading since the 1520s, had discredited in the eyes of many Utrecht’s once-mighty Catholic establishment; the Reformation of the 1570s and 1580s had then demolished its institutions. The Reformed Church, though privileged, was in severe disarray and had failed to attract a wide following. The sentiments of the urban population were highly fluid, with many people undecided, perhaps confused, and some clearly disillusioned with religious institutions in general.7 From this starting point, the chief development of the period 1600–1650 was what religious historians call the rise of confessionalism. It had three aspects: first, the ecclesiastic structures of religious life were rebuilt. Each of the major confessions (or denominations, as they are also called) implemented an effective system of church governance; each fielded a corps of well-trained, professional clergy and built, if necessary, churches for them to work in; each thus provided its lay followers finally with regular services and pastoral care. Second, the confessions – Catholic and Calvinist in particular – competed fiercely with one another to win over the doubters and the unaffiliated. In a broader sense, they were competing not just for followers but for legitimacy: each wanted its version of Christian truth recognized as the only truth. This struggle shaped not only the tenor of public religious discourse but life within the churches as well. Definitions of orthodoxy, for example, grew increasingly rigid and precise. Finally, each of the confessions struggled on a second, internal front, to ensure that its purported followers actually obeyed its teachings. Through education, persuasion, and disciplinary measures, church leaders sought to mould not just the behavior but the very thoughts and feelings of congregants. 5 Heinz Schilling, “Religion und Gesellschaft in der calvinistischen Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande. ‘Öffentlichkeitskirche’ und Säkularisation; Ehe und Hebammenwesen; Presbyterien und politische Partizipation,” in Kirche und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in deutschen und niederländischen Städten der werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Franz Petri (Cologne, 1980), 204–22. 6 See note 2. 7 For the course of the Reformation in Utrecht, see Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines.

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All of Utrecht’s churches – Calvinist, Remonstrant, Mennonite, Lutheran, and Catholic – experienced the rise of confessionalism in its three aspects, and in this sense their development between 1600 and 1650 ran in parallel. None of them failed to grow strong institutionally; none of them succeeded in imposing the desired conformity on their followers. In other respects, including the size of the following they gained, the churches had divergent histories. For Utrecht’s Reformed congregation, the rise of confessionalism had a specially rocky beginning. As of 1600, Utrecht’s congregation was not even Calvinist, properly speaking: it exercised no ecclesiastic discipline over its members; it did not participate in synods or classes (the Dutch equivalent of presbyteries); and its liturgy and teachings differed from those of other Dutch Reformed Churches. This was the legacy of a movement known as Libertinism. Often associated with the Haarlem engraver and writer Dirck Coornhert, Libertinism had followers throughout the Netherlands but nowhere enjoyed such broad and powerful support as it did in Utrecht. As a form of piety, it combined Protestant beliefs with spiritualist ones deriving from medieval mysticism. Perhaps most essentially, it proclaimed the freedom of the individual conscience from clerical control. Libertines claimed that they, not the Calvinists, were genuinely “reformed” Christians. In the 1590s Utrecht’s Libertines had complete control of the city’s Reformed Church.8 Not until 1605 did Utrecht’s Reformed Church adopt Calvinist norms, and even then it moved only to the most moderate of Calvinist positions. Associated with the predestinarian teachings of Jacob Arminius, this position set Utrecht’s church firmly on the side of the Arminians, or Remonstrants, in the bitter controversy of the 1610s. Utrecht emerged as a Remonstrant bastion, more so even than famous ones such as Rotterdam or Gouda. In fact, the real, if unofficial, leader of Utrecht’s Reformed Church in these years was Johannes Wtenbogaert, chief organizer and polemicist of the Remonstrant party. Largely due to his efforts, the Sticht became a model of Remonstrant practice, one that the States of Holland attempted to copy in 1614. Utrecht’s regents, meanwhile, had special reason to associate the Contra-Remonstrant party with political subversion and acted with unmatched severity to suppress it.9 This intolerance generated great bitterness and made the “alteration” of 1618 all the more radical. Among the men who played key roles in the ContraRemonstrant takeover of that year were the painters Paulus Moreelse and Joachim Wtewael. Both were rewarded with positions on Utrecht’s new city 8 On Libertinism, see Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 68–110. 9 On the uprising of 1610 (in which Joachim Wtewael was involved), see D.A. Felix, Het oproer te Utrecht in 1610 (Utrecht, 1919).

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council, which was thoroughly purged and restructured.10 As late as the 1640s, Utrecht’s council remained as completely dominated by Contra-Remonstrants as it had been in the 1610s by Remonstrants; even the stadholder Frederick Henry was unable to shake their grip, as he managed to do with ease in many towns of Holland. While the provincial court and estates remained mixed religiously, for three decades Utrecht’s Calvinist consistory could count on the support of the city magistrates, at least for certain goals.11 It was the magistrates who took the initiative in 1634 to found an Illustrious School, which in 1636 became the University of Utrecht. Conceived from the start as a bulwark of Calvinist orthodoxy, the university was meant to counter the influence of liberal (vrijzinnig) Leiden and, at the same time, to bring a long-sought prestige to its host town. It did both, rising to eminence almost immediately with the appointment of Gisbertus Voetius (figure 4.1) as professor of theology. From the 1630s through the 1660s, Voetius was the most influential theologian in the Netherlands, the informal leader of Dutch Calvinism. In Utrecht he dominated both the university (nicknamed the Academia Voetiana) and the Reformed congregation, which he served as minister. Over time, his former students, among them his own two sons, filled the ranks of Utrecht’s professoriate and ministry. Intellectually, Voetius was a fiery champion of Contra-Remonstrant dogma and of Aristotelian philosophy. The S­ aturday morning disputations which he ran served as a forum for attacks on all rival truths: Remonstrant, Catholic, and, from 1639, Cartesian. These were lively debates, as the latter had their supporters too in the city. Thanks to Voetius and the university, the great controversies of the day became fodder for Utrecht’s intellectual life.12 10

11

12

Izaäk Vijlbrief, Van anti-aristocratie tot democratie. Een bijdrage tot de politieke en sociale geschiedenis der stad Utrecht (Amsterdam, 1950), 78–81; W. Bezemer, ed., “De magistraatsverandering te Utrecht in 1618,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 17 (1896): 71–106; gup, 3:183–84. Moreelse was appointed to the vroedschap in 1618, as was Wtewael’s brother Jan; Wtewael himself joined it in 1632. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), 492–94. Consistory and magistracy overlapped in personnel quite substantially in these years. For a list of magistrates see gup, 3:183–95; for a list of elders and deacons see F.A. van Lieburg, De Nadere Reformatie in Utrecht ten tijde van Voetius. Sporen in de gereformeerde kerkeraadsacta (Rotterdam, 1989), 152–59. By contrast, Arend van Buchell c­ omplained in 1640 that Arminians and Catholics still ran the provincial court: Arend van Buchell, Notae quotidianae, Werken uitgegeven door het Historische Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht, 3rd series, 70 (Utrecht, 1940), 106. J.E.A.L. Struick, “De stichting van een tehuis voor de Muzen en de eerste bewoners,” in Goede buur of verre vriend. De relatie tussen de Universiteit en de stad Utrecht, 1636–1986, ed. J.E.A.L. Struick et al. (Utrecht, 1986), 7–24; G.W. Kernkamp et al., De Utrechtse U ­ niversiteit

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FIGURE 4.1 Anna Maria van Schurman, Gijsbertus Voetius, 1647. Colored chalk ­drawing, 20 × 15 cm (7 7/8 × 5 7/8 in.) Courtesy of Photo RKD – ­N ederlands Instituut voor ­K unstgeschiedenis, Den Haag 1636–1936, 2 vols. (Utrecht, 1936), 1:1–72, 229–63; A.C. Duker, Gisbertus Voetius, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1897–1915), 2:1–70, 132–229, 3:1–102; Israel, The Dutch Republic, 584–87.

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As minister, Voetius showed concern for the behavior as well as orthodoxy of his flock. A profound admirer of England’s Puritans, Voetius championed in this sphere what he himself called “precision”: an insistence that God’s Law – the Ten Commandments and other biblical injunctions – be observed strictly and completely. Voetius would brook no softening of its demands, no accommodations to human weakness. To the contrary, he equated faith itself with an acceptance of this Law in all its rigor. He inveighed regularly against the profanation of the Sabbath; dancing he declared a serious infraction, and in the 1640s he and his consistory waged a campaign to suppress it. Voetius also took aim at the luxury and materialism that he saw prevailing ever more in Dutch society. Lavish feasts; tulip mania; long, curly hairdos; revealing, brightly colored clothes; the spit-and-polish shine of proud burgher homes – none of this squared, in his view, with the sober modesty demanded by God of his people.13 Neither Voetius’s rigor, however, nor the support of local government made Utrecht’s Reformed congregation thrive in these years. Considered from a social perspective, the Contra-Remonstrant victory of 1618 came at a high price: what the congregation won in cohesion and institutional strength it lost in popularity. Few of Utrecht’s Remonstrants ever reconciled with it, and other potential members too were repelled by the church’s doctrinal rigidity and what they viewed as its sanctimony.14 Only in the 1650s, with the beginning of the “Further Reformation,” did the church gain a new spiritual vigor, and with it a new popularity. After their expulsion from the Reformed Church in 1619, Utrecht’s Remonstrants formed a congregation of their own. Initially they faced persecution that, by Dutch standards, was quite severe: the city government even employed soldiers from the local garrison to break up their furtive gatherings. In 1626, Frederick Henry put a stop to this practice and made clear his will that the Remonstrants should enjoy the same freedoms as other Protestant dissenters. His intervention paved the way for the building in 1629 of a schuilkerk, or ­clandestine church, for the congregation. The preferred recourse of all the 13

14

On Voetius’s “preciesheid,” see Gisbertus Voetius, Godzaligheid te verbinden met de wetenschap, ed. Aart de Groot (Kampen, 1978), esp. 11–15; Gisbertus Voetius, “Selectae Disputationes Theologicae,” in Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John W. Beardslee iii (New York, 1965), 316–34; Duker, Gisbertus Voetius, 2:230–70. Concerning paintings, Voetius declared in 1643 that hanging them for decoration was permissible so long as they were not obscene, did not show people of either sex naked or scantily covered, and did not include representations of God, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, or other (Catholic) subjects that encouraged idolatry and superstition. Duker, Gisbertus Voetius, 2:261 n. 2. See Arnoldus Buchelius, Observationes ecclesiasticae sub presbyteratu meo. 1622–1626, ed. S. Muller, in Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 10 (1887): 56.

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unprivileged confessions, a schuilkerk was a house rebuilt on the inside to function as a church while continuing to look from the outside like any other domicile. Invisible from the street, the schuilkerk rarely escaped the notice of its neighbors or of local officials. Still, the pretence that it embodied – that it was just another private house – enabled dissenters to have a proper church life while leaving intact the monopoly of the Reformed Church over the public sphere.15 Two other Protestant groups had congregations in Utrecht as well: the Mennonites and Lutherans. Actually, by 1611 three separate Mennonite congregations had formed, each of them quite small; in 1636 the three united. ­Compared to their co-religionists in Holland, Utrecht’s Mennonites were few and poor.16 Utrecht’s Lutheran congregation, by contrast, was large and prosperous. Often overlooked, it was founded in the 1580s by émigrés from Antwerp, and achieved institutional maturity in the 1610s with the appointment of a permanent minister, a consistory, and deacons. From 1624 it had a proper schuilkerk. The congregation had numerous members of social distinction and received support from Lutheran princes in Germany and Scandinavia. Swelled by German immigrants fleeing the Thirty Years War, it attained its peak size in the 1640s.17 The chief rival to the Reformed Church, though, was the Roman Catholic Church. For it, the seventeenth century was no youth; to the contrary, its efforts built on an ancient foundation which the Reformation had never undermined 15

16 17

G.A. Evers, “De schuilkerk der Remonstrantsche gemeente in de Rietsteeg en hare bezitting op ‘t Heilig-Leven,” Jaarboekje van Oud-Utrecht (1933): 97–114; hua, SA ii 2244: Criminalia, items dd. 1619–1628; hua, SA ii 1 item nr. 80: Report on Remonstrants; Duker, Gisbertus Voetius, 2:14 n. 1 and appendix vi. After the building of their schuilkerk, the services of Utrecht’s Remonstrants were never again disturbed, and with peace and safety ensured, the 1630s saw explosive growth in the size of the congregation, as it brought in once-frightened sympathizers as active members. Served by three ministers, the Remonstrants needed a larger schuilkerk by 1640; thwarted by the magistrates from building a grand new one, they settled for enlarging their existing house of prayer, actually a converted barn, on the Rietsteeg. H.B. Berghuijs, Geschiedenis der Doopsgezinde gemeente te Utrecht (Utrecht, 1926); hua, Archief der Doopsgezinde Gemeente te Utrecht 192: List of members, etc. hua, Archief van de Evangelisch-Lutherse Gemeente te Utrecht 16: Resolutions and minutes of Lutheran consistory; C. Ch. G. Visser, De Luthersen in Utrecht (Utrecht, 1963); F.J.  Domela Nieuwenhuis, “Geschiedenis der Evangelisch-Luthersche gemeente te Utrecht,” in Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis der Evang.-Luthersche kerk in de Nederlanden, ed. J.C. Schultz Jacobi and F.J. Domela Nieuwenhuis (Utrecht, 1839), 77–150; Ronald Rommes, “Lutherse immigranten in Utrecht tijdens de Republiek,” in Nieuwe Nederlanders. Vestiging van migranten door de eeuwen heen, ed. Marjolein ‘t Hart, Jan Lucassen, and Henk Schmal (Amsterdam, 1996), 35–53.

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completely. Like no other Dutch city, Utrecht bulged with the remnants of medieval Catholicism. Most famous were the five collegiate churches: the Dom, or cathedral, former seat of the bishop (archbishop after 1559); Oudmunster (torn down in 1587); St. Pieter; St. Jan; and St. Marie. Possessing vast wealth, including a quarter of all the land in the Sticht, these churches had been secularized in the 1580s but not abolished as corporations. Their members, known as canons, now lacked all function but continued to enjoy the income of their rich prebends. As canonries came vacant, the city magistrates and provincial gentry took turns distributing these plums, the spoils of the collapse of Catholicism, to their sons. The old canons did not die out immediately, though, nor did the system for filling vacancies exclude Catholics until 1622. Thus some of the vast wealth of the medieval church remained in Catholic hands, helping to underwrite the survival and eventual recovery of the church. The same occurred with other religious endowments, as the families that had originally established them retained by law the so-called jus patronatus, the right to name their beneficiaries. Decade after decade, Utrecht’s Calvinists demanded furiously that all this wealth be turned ad pios usus – to pious, Protestant ends, such as charity, education, and the salaries of Reformed ministers. Even before the arrival of Voetius, who took special offense at the existing arrangement, Utrecht’s consistory had ruled that no canon could serve as elder or deacon.18 Naturally this stance alienated Utrecht’s elite. In fact, an element of class conflict had overlain the issue since the 1580s.19 In the 1590s Utrecht still teemed with aging priests from pre-Reformation days, supported by their old prebends and benefices. Threatened with loss of this support if they performed Catholic rituals, most of them, to be sure, had lapsed into apathy. Still, pastoral care for the laity never ceased entirely. This was crucial, for where such care did lapse, as in Dordrecht, Catholicism never recovered. Cornelis van Gouda, co-pastor of the Buurkerk, the most important of Utrecht’s four parish churches, served his flock faithfully; so, despite banishment 18 19

D.J. Roorda, “Prins Willem iii en het Utrechtse regerinsreglement. Een schets van gebeurtenissen, achtergronden en problemen,” in Van standen tot staten. 600 jaar Staten van Utrecht 1375–1975, ed. H.L. Ph. Leeuwenberg and L. van Tongerloo (Utrecht, 1975), 102. D.G. Rengers Hora Siccama, De geestelijke en kerkelijke goederen onder het canonieke, het gereformeerde en het neutrale recht. Historisch-juridische verhandeling, voornamelijk uit Utrechtsche gegevens samengesteld (Utrecht, 1905). For Calvinist complaints about the situation, see Vijlbrief, Van anti-aristocratie tot democratie, 70; Buchelius, Observationes ecclesiasticae, 53–4; Duker, Gisbertus Voetius, 2:294–328. By the 1660s, if not earlier, some Calvinists in the elite had joined Utrecht’s French-speaking, Walloon Reformed congregation, which was less precisian and had no rule against canons, as an alternative to the ­regular, Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation. Roorda, “Prins Willem iii en het Utrecht­se regeringsreglement,” 102.

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and torture, did the Dominican Roeloff Willemsz. Obyn. The convents, with their protective walls and well-equipped chapels, made perfect sites to hold clandestine services. Catholic lay folk also hosted services in their homes, where a room might be outfitted for the purpose with a simple altar, some candles, and a devotional image. Initially, worship remained ad hoc, furtive, and mostly small-scale. The situation began to change in the first decade of the new century, when the pope’s apostolic vicar, Sasbout Vosmeer, made Utrecht a center of the Holland Mission, an effort to win the lost Netherlandic provinces back for Catholicism. Utrecht offered Vosmeer several advantages: persecution was mild, priests many, and a large segment of the local elite had remained loyal to the old faith. In addition, the location strengthened Vosmeer’s claim to be reconstituting the old archbishopric and to be himself the successor of the pre-­ Reformation archbishops, due all the powers and privileges they once enjoyed. Philip Rovenius, who succeeded Vosmeer in 1614, pressed this claim further. Resident in Utrecht from 1628, in 1633 he established a Vicariate, a replacement for the old cathedral chapter, to help him administer his jurisdiction.20 From a lay perspective, Utrecht’s role as center of the Mission had important consequences. First, Utrecht’s Catholics never lacked for priests. As many as a quarter of all the priests in the Republic resided in the city: about forty in 1622, thirty-six in 1638, forty-five in 1656.21 Granted that some of them used Utrecht as a base from which to serve surrounding areas, this unique concentration still meant that Utrecht’s own Catholics enjoyed regular and increasingly well-organized services. By 1622, Utrecht’s old Catholic parishes had been fully reconstituted, each one based in a particular “station,” a site of clandestine worship served by a permanent pastor and chaplains. Over time, three of the parishes were divided into multiple stations, while from early on the Jesuits and Dominicans had run stations of their own. Thus Utrecht eventually emerged with fourteen Catholic stations, eleven within the city walls and three in suburbs. A “college of pastors” was formed in 1645 to supervise their spiritual life.22 Secondly, Utrecht’s pastors were men of the highest quality and 20

M.P.G. Spiertz, “Priest and Layman in a Minority Church: The Roman Catholic Church in the North Netherlands, 1592–1686,” Studies in Church History 26 (1989): 287–97; L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1945–47), 2:5–164, 380–86. 21 Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, 2:386–95; Israel, The Dutch Republic, 378–9. 22 aau 5 (1878): 183–91; aau 9 (1881): 201–15; Niek Boukema, “Geloven in het geloof. Een onderzoek naar de positie van de katholieken en de katholieke zielzorg binnen de stad Utrecht gedurende de periode 1580–1672, met accent op de eerste helft van de 17e eeuw” (BA History diss., Universiteit Utrecht, 1982), 57–8; Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, 2:395–96.

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standing. Adriaan van Orschot, “vir apostolicus,” was renowned as an effective missionary; Johannes Wachtelaar doubled as second-in-command to Rovenius. Like Vosmeer and Rovenius themselves, Utrecht’s secular priests tended to come from native patrician families; indeed, a disproportionate number stemmed from Utrecht’s own elite, as did Wachtelaar, Abraham van Brienen, Gerrit Pelt, and Herman van Honthorst, brother of the artist Gerrit. Over half these men had university degrees in 1622; by 1638 the percentage had risen to three quarters.23 Stations could operate, if necessary, in cramped, improvised prayer rooms, but, increasingly, they were based in elaborate schuilkerken. Recent study has shown that many Catholic schuilkerken were already in the first half of the seventeenth century richly decorated edifices.24 The provincial court of ­Holland scarcely exaggerated when it noted in 1643 that most had “very expensive altars, galleries [supported] on pillars, vaulted roofs, pews, organs, musicians and all sorts of musical instruments and, in sum, everything that might be asked of a chartered chapel.”25 Among Utrecht’s schuilkerken, St. Gertrudis, commonly known as “Den Hoek” (figure 4.2), held preeminence as seat of the apostolic provicar. Located on the Mariaplaats (where Abraham Bloemaert lived), it formed part of a large Catholic complex with housing for priests and “spiritual maidens,” or klopjes.26 These were unmarried women who in other circumstances would have joined convents. Forced to remain lay persons, they took oaths of obedience and chastity and wore simple, uniform clothing. They provided a variety of essential services to the Catholic community: caring for the poor, visiting the sick, catechizing children, cleaning and decorating the schuilkerken, singing at services. They were the pastors’ right hand, and without them the Catholic Church in the Republic could scarcely have functioned. Utrecht had more of them than any other Dutch city, except perhaps Haarlem; one estimate, made in 1662, put their number at five hundred.27 Of all the schuilkerken in Utrecht, we know most about the decoration of Maria Minor, also called Achter Clarenburch. Located in the imposing House 23 24 25

26 27

aau 20 (1893): 358–59; aau 12 (1884): 193. Paul Dirkse, Kunst uit Oud-Katholieke kerken, exh. cat. (Utrecht, 1989), 6; Van Eck, “From doubt to conviction,” 217–18; Van Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie. Compare Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, 2:676–77, 686–87, and passim. Quoted in H.A. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid. Een verhandeling over de verhouding van kerk en staat in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden en de vrijheid van ­meningsuiting in zake godsdienst, drukpers en onderwijs, gedurende de 17e eeuw (Groningen, 1972), 118. A.J. van de Ven, “De driehoek van Sint Marie te Utrecht,” Jaarboekje van Oud-Utrecht (1955): 33–80. Boukema, “Geloven in het geloof,” 72.

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FIGURE 4.2 J. Steffelaar, Interior of the St. Gertrudis schuilkerk in Utrecht, 1896. Oil on canvas, 64.5 × 52 cm (25 3/8 × 20 ½ in.) Courtesy of Het Utrechts Archief

Clarenburch, it functioned as replacement for the Buurkerk, from which came, supposedly, several of its artworks, including a statue of the Virgin.28 Most of its known decoration, though, dated from the 1620s and later. It had two tabernacles, one of chased silver representing the Wedding at Cana, the other 28

A.J. van de Ven, “Het Huis Clarenburch te Utrecht,” Jaarboekje van Oud-Utrecht (1952): 60; Dirkse, Kunst uit Oud-Katholieke kerken, 12.

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FIGURE 4.3 Wooden tabernacle with door painted by Nicolaus Knüpfer, ca. 1650. Ebony, ebony veneer, oak, and copper; 67 × 57 × 52 cm. (26 3/8 × 22 ½ × 20 ½ in.) (tabernacle), 46 × 28.5 cm (18 1/8 × 11 ¼ in.) (door) Courtesy of Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht / foto Ruben de Heer

made of wood with a painted door showing a flock of angels holding a monstrance and venerating the host displayed in it (figure 4.3). By the Utrecht artist Nicolaus Knüpfer, the painting dates to about 1650. There also survives a silver ciborium made in 1656 by Christoffel Jans. Visscher and a paten made in Antwerp about 1650.29 All these objects served to hold eucharistic wafers. Most 29

Van de Ven, “Het Huis Clarenburch te Utrecht,” 60; Dirkse, Kunst uit Oud-Katholieke kerken, 11, 115 (cat. nr. 158), 105 (cat. nr. 132), 107 (cat. nr. 138).

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i­mportantly, the church owned a set of six altarpieces, displayed in rotation over the course of the liturgical year. The series included three paintings by Hendrick Bloemaert: Calvary (1645; St. Maria Minor, Utrecht), The Adoration of the Shepherds (1647; Old Catholic Church, Utrecht), and Pentecost (1652; Old Catholic Church, Utrecht); one by Gerrit van Honthorst: Christ Presented to the People (1645); and two by unknown artists: an Ascension in the style of Honthorst and an Adoration of the Kings in the style of Rubens. The church also owned a Doubting Thomas (ca. 1625) attributed to Hendrick Bloemaert, aC ­ alling of St. Matthew (1625–30) by Jan van Bijlert, and a portrait of an unknown priest by another Utrechter, Dirck van Voorst (figure 4.4).30 This partial reconstruction of Clarenburch’s decoration says much about the character of Catholic spiritual life in Utrecht. Clearly, devotion to the eucharist played a central role. This accorded fully with the precepts of the Counter-­Reformation, which Rovenius and his troops strove to implant in the Netherlands. The three non-liturgical paintings point to another, more

FIGURE 4.4 Dirck van Voorst, Portrait of an Unknown Priest, 1615. Oil on panel, 78 × 107.2 cm (30 ¾ × 42 ¼ in.) Courtesy of Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht / foto Ruben de Heer 30 Dirkse, Kunst uit Oud-Katholieke kerken, 12, 13, 31 n. 29; Van Eck, “From doubt to conviction,” 225.

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d­ istinctive aspect of Dutch Catholic piety: its celebration of conversion and of the missionary priests who did the converting. As Xander van Eck has shown, artistic themes that captured moments when doubt and wavering were overcome by sudden insight or divine calling appear frequently in paintings owned originally by schuilkerken. Perhaps the pastors who commissioned these works meant them to speak in a hortatory, inspirational vein to those many Netherlanders whose religious loyalties were still weak or uncertain. The Conversion of St. Paul that hung in Utrecht’s clandestine Church of St. Dominic may have served the same purpose.31 As for the missionary priests themselves, their celebration spurred demand for portraits. It also manifested itself in a devotion to Saints Willibrord and  Boniface, the original missionaries who converted the Netherlands. ­Promoted heavily by the apostolic vicars, this devotion took a great variety of forms. It had special significance in Utrecht, which had been founded by ­Willibrord around 690 and made the seat of his bishopric. Jan van Bijlert highlighted this special connection between saint and city in his painting, Holy Trinity with St. Willibrord and St. Boniface (figure 4.5). In fact, two tendencies within Dutch Catholicism overlapped in the veneration of these two saints: the cult of conversion and the celebration of specifically Dutch “national” saints: Servatius, Lebuinus, Plechelmus, Odulphus, and Jerome, as well as Willibrord and Boniface.32 Promotion of these local saints functioned as an appeal to tradition, a reminder that the Catholic faith had shaped the history and very identity of the Netherlands, and of Utrecht especially. Even Calvinists found it difficult to separate Catholic heritage from civic custom. Utrecht’s magistrates repeatedly condemned the celebration in November of the feast of St. Martin, the city’s former patron, yet Utrechters of all religions continued, as before, to march with burning torches around the city on St. Martin’s eve. The feast of Three Kings remained a popular holiday in Utrecht as well, perhaps helping to explain the profusion of Adorations by Utrecht painters, as that by Abraham Bloemaert.33 Catholicism had sunk deep roots in communal culture; those roots now helped it to weather the blasts of official Calvinism. Both figuratively and literally, then, the first half of the seventeenth century was a period of church building. Disorganized groups of believers worshipping furtively (except the Reformed) yielded to congregations with a regular ministry, strong organs of governance, and well-equipped places of worship. 31 Van Eck, “From doubt to conviction”; Van Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie. 32 Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, 2:762–67. 33 gup, 3:470–73; Llewellyn Bogaers, “Een kwestie van macht? De relatie tussen de wetgeving op het openbaar gedrag en de ontwikkeling van de Utrechtse stadssamenleving in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw,” Volkskundig Bulletin 11 (1985): 111–14.

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FIGURE 4.5 Jan van Bijlert, Holy Trinity with Saint Willibrord and Saint Boniface, 1639? Oil on canvas, 296.5 × 201 cm (116 ¾ × 79 1/8 in.). Formerly Onze Lieve Vrouwekerck, Huissen, Gelderland, destroyed in 1943 Courtesy of Photo RKD – Nederlands Instituut voor ­K unstgeschiedenis, Den Haag

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This development, experienced by all the confessions, went through its most intense phase in the 1610s and 1620s; by 1650 it was complete. Unfortunately, we know much less about the outcome of the rise of confessionalism in its other two aspects: the competition among the churches for followers and the attempts by each church to inculcate in its followers its distinctive norms and values. Long curious about the first issue, historians only recently have attached due importance to the second. Previously, historians assumed that those attempts had met with success. Yet even where they held vast coercive powers, religious leaders in early modern Europe never managed to transform their flocks as thoroughly as they wished. In the Republic, they simply lacked such powers. Even the famous discipline meted out by Calvinist consistories could have limited effect since church membership, and with it subjection to that discipline, remained voluntary. Given the extraordinary religious freedom they enjoyed, Netherlanders could not only choose whether to affiliate with a church but having done so could maintain with relative ease a critical distance from the teachings of their purported leaders. Ultimately, they could decide for themselves how to interpret and what importance to assign to prescribed norms. As a result, religious sentiments varied within churches as well as among them. One way to make sense of this compound diversity is to distinguish within every congregation between a core of committed members who fully internalized the norms of their church and a series of wider but more peripheral circles. Contemporaries did so all the time: Catholic leaders, for example, distinguished between “the devout,” “good,” and “nominal” Catholics. The first group included those who confessed and took communion at least monthly; it also included the klopjes and the householders who risked high fines to allow clandestine services in their homes. “Good” Catholics confessed and communed at least once a year, at Easter, while the nominal ones had recourse to the church chiefly to sanctify birth, marriage, and death with the sacramental rites of passage.34 The Reformed Church, likewise, had its core and peripheries. Its elders and deacons certainly belonged to the former; so in Utrecht did the circle of Voetius’s friends, among them Utrecht’s celebrated savante, Anna Maria van ­Schurman, whose portrait drawing of her friend is illustrated here (see ­figure 4.1). Members of the church (lidmaten) showed almost as much commitment, for to gain membership and with it access to communion, they had to 34

Spiertz, “Priest and Layman,” 297–98. So dependent on its core of lay followers was the Catholic Church in the Netherlands that Vosmeer considered creating a formal hierarchy of lay officials.

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pass an examination and submit freely to church discipline. Presumably these members often took their children to services with them; the latter might have felt a genuine faith or simply been doing what their parents commanded. More distinctive to the Reformed Church was the semiofficial category of “sympathizer” (liefhebber), composed of adults who attended sermons with some regularity but did not take communion and were not subject to discipline. These sympathizers were a very mixed lot; at one end of the spectrum, they included “members in training”; at the other, as one Calvinist noted, “it often happens that among the persons who call themselves liefhebbers lurk Catholics, Mennonites, Libertines, and atheists.”35 One might, for a variety of reasons, attend a Calvinist sermon without assenting to all its doctrines. It can be highly misleading, therefore, to categorize people, for example, simply as Catholic or as Calvinist. With this caveat, it remains worthwhile to attempt a sketch of Utrechters’ church affiliations. Unfortunately, the current state of research offers few facts; the rest is uncertain extrapolation. In 1620, right after the expulsion of the Remonstrants, Utrecht’s Reformed consistory counted about two thousand church members.36 In all probability, this marked the nadir of the church’s popularity for the entire century. In the 1650s, the Reformed church experienced a burst of accelerated growth that raised its membership to about seven thousand; the list of new members suggests it entered that decade at around five thousand.37 None of these figures include children or liefhebbers. To estimate the size of the entire community of Reformed church-goers one might perhaps double the number of members. The number of Remonstrants is even less clear. Until 1619, of course, they dominated the official Reformed Church, most of whose members were thus Remonstrant, at least in a general sense. Then began a period of persecution, during which some Remonstrant conventicles attracted over two hundred attendees. As soon as persecution stopped, active membership shot up, but to what level is unclear. We know only that Utrecht’s Remonstrant congregation was deemed one of the four largest and most important in the Republic, alongside those of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague; that until 1650 it had 35

36 37

A. Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen: kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Assen, 1974), 130; contemporary quotation from Wiebe Bergsma, “Calvinismus in Friesland um 1600 am Beispiel der Stadt Sneek,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 80 (1989): 269. For this phenomenon within Utrecht’s congregation, see Buchelius, Observationes ecclesiasticae, 50. hua, KR 205: List of members, etc. To be precise, the census counted 1,678 members in seven of Utrecht’s eight quarters; either the last quarter was not counted or, more likely, the count has not survived. Van Lieburg, De Nadere Reformatie in Utrecht, 52, 77; from the number of new members must be subtracted the number of members who died or moved away. These figures exclude the Walloon Reformed congregation, which at any rate was small.

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three ministers; and that its schuilkerk on the Rietsteeg had to be expanded.38 Utrecht’s Lutheran congregation likewise was one of the foremost in the land. Its baptismal registry offers a good indication of its size. Between 1645 and 1650, at the height of the congregation’s fortunes, an average of 92.5 baptisms were performed annually. At the prevailing birth rate, the number suggests a Lutheran population of 2,500.39 For the Mennonites we have but a single figure: as of 1611, the largest of the three congregations, the Flemish, had about 150 members.40 Two sources provide information about the number of Catholics in Utrecht: the reports of the apostolic vicars and the municipal government’s list of civil weddings performed. In their reports to Rome, the apostolic vicars regularly estimated the number of Easter communicants in various locales. For Utrecht and its suburbs they offered the following figures: Table 4.1 Number of Catholic communicants reported to Rome

Year

Number

1602 1622 1635 1638

12,000–14,000 over 8,000 9,000 9,000

These figures omit preadolescent children, who did not take communion. Including the latter, Vicar De la Torre claimed there were 15,000 Catholics in 1656. This often-cited figure is the basis for claims that Utrecht, with a total population of about thirty thousand, was half-Catholic.41 Unfortunately, as Rogier and others have shown, the estimates of the apostolic vicars are wholly ­unreliable: they are often inconsistent and sometimes demonstrably false.42 By contrast, the list of civil weddings offers reliable but inconclusive evidence. 38 39 40 41

See note 14. Rommes, “Lutherse immigranten,” 38. hua, Archief der Doopsgezinde Gemeente te Utrecht 192. J.A. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-Reformatie. Numerieke aspecten van protestantisering en katholieke herleving in de noordelijke Nederlanden, 1580–1880 (Assen, 1964), 54–68, 248, 470. See also H. Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland. Omvang en geografische spreiding van de godsdienstige gezindten vanaf de Reformatie tot heden ­(Assen, 1992), 15–32. Though wary of them, Knippenberg still uses the figures from the 1656 mission report. 42 Rogier, Geschiedenis van het katholicisme, 2:380; A.M. van der Woude et al., “Numerieke aspecten van de protestantisering in Noord-Nederland tussen 1656 en 1726,” Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis Bijdragen 13 (1965): 149–80; Mathieu G. Spiertz, “Het aandeel van

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As in Holland, so in Utrecht people who did not want to be married by a Calvinist minister could choose a civil service performed in city hall. Until about 1615 the percentage of couples that took advantage of this option fluctuated wildly; after that it hovered around 25 percent, rising around 1650 by just two or three percentage points. Not everyone who opted for a civil wedding, though, was Catholic; conversely, at least a few Catholics married in the Reformed Church, while others may have had neither form of legal ceremony. Still, if as few as two out of three had a civil wedding, the percentage of Catholics could not have exceeded forty-two. Without better evidence one is left to conclude that between 25 and 42 percent of Utrecht’s population considered itself Catholic in these years. Rovenius’s impressionistic statement of 1616 comes as close to the truth as as we may ever get: “the leading and more distinguished inhabitants are mostly Catholic, [and] about a third of the common people.”43 This figure is much lower than previously estimated but still impressive. In absolute terms, Utrecht’s Catholic community was second in size only to Amsterdam’s; relative to total population it had no equal. In sum, viewed from a Catholic perspective, Utrecht was indeed the center of religious life in the Republic; viewed as a whole, though, it was hardly a “Catholic city.” Based on the evidence above, one might suggest that, as of 1650, Utrecht’s total population broke down roughly as follows: 33 percent Calvinist, 35 percent Catholic, 8 percent Lutheran, 8–10 percent Remonstrant, 1–2 percent Mennonite, and the remaining 12–15 percent unaffiliated with any church. This breakdown was not the same for every social group. Utrecht’s elite, especially its gentry, was known to all contemporaries as largely Catholic, with a disproportionate number of Remonstrants as well. Utrecht’s artistic community, however, was only a little more Catholic than its general population. ­According to Marten Jan Bok, between 1621 and 1650 about 37 percent of Utrecht’s painters (kunstschilders) married in city hall.44 A list of artists with known religious affiliations tends to confirm that in this subcommunity, as in the urban whole, diversity prevailed, not any single religion (see table 4.2).45

43 44

45

de katholieken in de Friese bevolking tussen 1663 en 1796,” Archief voor de geschiedenis van de Katholieke Kerk in Nederland 19 (1977): 147–69. aau 1 (1874): 209. Marten Jan Bok, Vraag en aanbod op de Nederlandse kunstmarkt, 1580–1700 (Utrecht, 1994), 195–98, 233. Bok’s even more dramatic claim that Utrecht’s painters were no more Catholic at all than the general population rests on a miscalculation of marriage rates for the latter. This list is based on the findings of Marten Jan Bok as they appear in the following publications: Ger Luijten et al., Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580–1620, exh. cat. (Zwolle, 1993), 299–327; Albert Blankert and Leonard J. Slatkes, eds., Holländische Malerei in neuem Licht: Hendrick ter Brugghen und seine Zeitgenossen (Braunschweig, 1986), 66–7, 194–95, 209, 218–20, 236–37, 276–78, 328–29; Marten Jan Bok, Vijfendertig

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Confessionalism and Its Limits Table 4.2 Religious affiliations of Utrecht painters Catholic

Civil wedding (Catholic?)

Calvinist

Remonstrant

Abraham Bloemaert Willem Adriaensz. van Capel Jan van Bijlert Hendrick Bloemaert Jacob Jansz. Duck Johannes de Bont Thijman van Galen Aert van der Eem Jan Gerritsz. van Bronchorst

Claes van Roeyen Bernard Zwaerdecroon

Gerrit van Honthorst Carel Hoogh Lumen Portengen Nicolaus Knüpfer Petrus Portengen Marcus Ormea

Mennonite Crispijn de Passe I Roelant Saverijc

Willem Ormea Cornelis van Poelenburch Paulus van Vianen Abraham Willaerts Cornelis Willaertsa

Hendrick ter Brugghenb Joost Cornelisz. Droochsloot Gijsbert Gillesz. de Hondecoeter Claude de Jongh Paulus Moreelse Hendrik Munniks Hans Saverij Johan de Veer Adam Willaerts Joachim Wtewael Peter Joachimsz. Wtewael

a. First marriage in city hall, second in Reformed Church. b. Ter Brugghen was married and had at least four of his children baptized in the Reformed Church. If it is true, as suggested by Blankert and Slatkes (Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes, Nieuw licht op de Gouden Eeuw. Hendrick ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten [Utrecht, 1986], 67), that he disapproved of the Contra-Remonstrants who controlled the church after 1618, his disapproval could not have been strong, since he allowed all the children born in the 1620s to be baptized by Contra-Remonstrant ministers. In any case, Ter Brugghen was firmly Protestant. c. Definite indication only for his parents.

The question arises, finally, how the different religious groups related to one another. On the one hand, the rise of confessionalism was no quiet or friendly process. Like their counterparts throughout Europe, Utrecht’s churches felt locked in a cosmic struggle with one another. The Catholic and Calvinist Utrechtse kunstenaars en hun werk voor het Sint Jobs Gasthuis 1622–1642 (Utrecht, 1984); and Marten Jan Bok, “Bernhard Zwaerdecroon (Utrecht na 1616 – 1654 Utrecht),” Maandblad Oud-Utrecht 66 (1993): 35–38; Marten Jan Bok also provided information on Nicolaus Knüpfer. The list also draws on Albert Blankert, Nederlandse 17e Eeuwse Italianiserende Landschapschilders (Soest, 1978), 61 n. 9; Van Lieburg, De Nadere Reformatie in Utrecht, 152–59; and hua, SA ii 2244. People are listed as “Calvinist” if they (a) were members of the Reformed Church, (b) were married and had their children baptized in it, or (c) are said by a contemporary source to be Calvinist.

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churches adopted particularly militant stances, blasting their rivals from the pulpit and in print. Voetius even sent his students to Remonstrant services to interrupt the sermons and point out the preacher’s errors.46 No one escaped the sounds of this battle, which on occasion found an echo in the voices of ordinary Utrechters. Calvinists like Arend van Buchell, the art lover and scholar, voiced frequent scorn for the “papist superstitions” of their neighbors. In ­general, though, Calvinists looked to the authorities to take action, rather than taking it on their own. Not so the members of other denominations, who displayed an astounding assertiveness. A Lutheran who found himself next to Voetius on a passenger barge accosted the famous theologian, denouncing him to his face as “a seducer, a false teacher, etc.”47 In 1638 a complaint reached the magistrates that Catholics were harassing old women who worked on saints’ days. Catholics who ran hospitals pressured their inmates to observe the same.48 On several occasions, when the city sheriff attempted to break up a Catholic or Remonstrant service, he and his men faced shouts of anger and contempt from the aggrieved worshippers.49 Violence, though, was almost unheard of. In fact, however hostile the religious groups could be to one another as groups, Utrechters tended as individuals to get along well. On this more personal level, the bonds uniting people as neighbors, friends, relatives, and fellow citizens proved at least as strong as the religious divisions separating them. Simon Groenveld has recently suggested that by the 1650s Dutch society was divided into “columns,” as it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Each religious group, he argues, formed a distinct, closed society within the broader one, with its own systems of education and charity and its own subculture.50 Whatever the wider truth of Groenveld’s claim, it certainly does not hold for Utrecht prior to the French invasion of 1672. Few if any social events seem segregated by religion: dances, cockfights, fairs, and celebrations like St. Martin’s Eve brought Utrechters together in whirls of excitement that freely transgressed confessional bounds.51 Only in the aftermath of the invasion did Utrecht’s magistrates create wholly

46 47 48

Van Buchell, Notae quotidianae, 69. Van Lieburg, De Nadere Reformatie in Utrecht, 69. Engelina Petronella de Booy, Kweekhoven der wijsheid. Basis- en vervolgonderwijs in de steden van de provincie Utrecht van 1580 tot het begin der 19e eeuw (Zutphen, 1980), 66; Buchelius, Observationes ecclesiasticae, 45, 47; hua, SA ii 2244, pack dd. 31 Jan. 1616; hua, SA ii 121, 4 Dec. 1615. 49 Buchelius, Observationes ecclesiasticae, 31–32; hua, SA ii 2244, 1 Nov. 1619; hua, SA ii 1, item nr. 80; gup, 3:469; Evers, “De schuilkerk der Remonstrantsche gemeente,” 100–02. 50 Simon Groenveld, Huisgenoten des geloofs. Was de samenleving in de Republiek der Verenig­ de Nederlanden verzuild? (Hilversum, 1995). 51 See e.g. Van Lieburg, De Nadere Reformatie in Utrecht, 42.

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separate systems of charity for Calvinists and Catholics. The magistrates also, for the first time, passed laws regulating mixed marriages.52 Some of the most concrete evidence for the easy intercourse that prevailed, at least before the 1670s, comes from Utrecht’s artistic community. The most important teachers at Utrecht’s drawing academy, founded in the 1610s, were the Catholic Abraham Bloemaert and the Contra-Remonstrant Paulus Moreelse; together the two friends taught this basic skill to a whole generation.53 In the painter’s atelier likewise, master and student often differed religiously: the Catholic Petrus Portengen studied with Moreelse, the Protestants Bijlert and Ter Brugghen with Bloemaert. Portengen’s brother Johan ended up marrying Moreelse’s daughter, an example, hardly isolated, of mixed marriage. The relation between artist and patron frequently crossed confessional lines as well. Bijlert provides some of the most striking examples of this: a member of the Reformed Church whose daughter married one of its ministers, he produced a large number of works for Catholic schuilkerken, including altarpieces.54 That Catholic artists produced on commission for Protestant patrons, including the house of Orange, is well known. Conoisseurs like Arend van Buchell or, in The Hague, Constantijn Huygens embraced artists on the basis of their work, not their creed. It is for art historians to define schools and to trace artistic influence; from a social perspective, however, it is clear that Utrecht’s artists were not divided along religious lines. Neither was the urban community to which they belonged. Despite the variety of their church affiliations and the even greater variety of their personal beliefs, Utrechters formed a single community sharing a common culture. In this respect, the impact of confessionalism remained limited, even in the home of Voetius and Rovenius. Utrecht was not only a diverse city religiously but, like the Republic as a whole, a pluralistic one. More than Catholicism or any one confession, this pluralism set the religious climate for Utrecht’s Golden Age. 52 53 54

gup, 3:570–71, 511–12. Luijten et al., Dawn of the Golden Age, 311; Bok, Vraag en aanbod, 178–89; Marten Jan Bok, “‘Nulla dies sine linie.’ De opleiding van schilders in Utrecht in de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 6 (1990): 58–68. Paul Huys Janssen, “Jan van Bijlert (1597/98 – 1671) schilder in Utrecht” (Ph.D. diss., Universiteit Utrecht, 1994); Van Eck, “From doubt to conviction,” 219. Other Protestant painters who received commissions from schuilkerken include Utrecht’s Ter Brugghen, Gouda’s Wouter Pietersz. Crabeth ii, and Antwerp’s Jacob Jordaens. Thiel, “Catholic elements in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, apropos of a children’s portrait by Thomas de Keyser,” 55 n. 72; Van Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie, 44–45 and 232 n. 19 (see also Blankert and Slatkes, eds., Holländische Malerei in neuem Licht, 249); Manuth, “Denomination and iconography,” 238. For German parallels, see Étienne François, “De l’uniformité à la tolérance: confession et société urbaine en Allemagne, 1650–1800,” Annales e.s.c. 37 (1982): 788.

Chapter 5

A Clash of Values: The Survival of Utrecht’s Confraternities after the Reformation and the Debate over Their Dissolution In 1604 the Utrecht painter Paulus Moreelse received an unusual commission. It was to produce a set of five panels portraying the members of a local organization known as the Kleine Kalende (Small Kalends) Confraternity.1 Group portraits of confraternities had been no rarity in the northern Netherlands prior to the Revolt against Spain, especially in Utrecht, where Jan van Scorel had made a speciality of them.2 After the Revolt, other sorts of groups, like militia companies and trustees of charitable institutions, commissioned countless group portraits, iconic assertions of the active and responsible citizenship of their members. Moreelse’s, though, was one of only two known confraternity portraits painted in the Dutch Republic, and the reasons for its rarity are not far to seek: the Reformation of the 1570s–1580s had led to the abolition of most Dutch confraternities and left the survivors in an anomalous, illegitimate position. First formed in the twelfth century, confraternities were by origin Catholic religious organizations, vehicles of popular lay piety that by the end of the Middle Ages had gained wild popularity and an importance arguably as great as the parish itself. They existed ostensibly for the performance of rituals that by 1581 had been declared illegal throughout the territories in revolt against Spain.3 That any confraternities at all survived the outlawing of Catholic worship and adoption of Calvinism as the official religion of the Republic is on the surface a puzzle. Elsewhere only a few are known to have done so: two in Haarlem, one each in Dordrecht, Gorcum, and Arnhem, scattered singletons in various villages of Utrecht province, and two each in Den Bosch and

1 hua, BA i 182, 1603/04. 2 Centraal Museum Utrecht, De Jeruzalemvaarders van Jan van Scorel (Utrecht, 1979); Anna Catharina Esmeijer and Simon H. Levie, Jan van Scorel: Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 3 Augustus-30 October 1955 (n.p., 1955). 3 For the Reformation in Utrecht, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995); for a general account in English of the Dutch Reformation, see J.J. Woltjer and M.E.H.N. Mout, “Settlements: The Netherlands,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, vol. 2, Visions, Programs, and Outcomes, ed. Thomas A. Brady Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Leiden, 1995), 385–415.

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in ­Maastricht after these southern cities were taken from the Spanish.4 In Utrecht, by contrast, not only the Kleine Kalende but dozens of confraternities survived into the seventeenth century, some of them showing a remarkable vitality and self-assurance. Thus when Utrecht’s government moved aggressively in 1615 to abolish all the city’s confraternities, a loud public dispute erupted. The dispute took a complex and surprising form, though: contrary to what one might expect, it did not pit Catholic defenders of the confraternities against Calvinist critics. Instead of running neatly along confessional lines, the split cut jaggedly across them, and the loudest voices on both sides of it were members of the same moderate religious party, the Remonstrants. Motives on both sides were mixed. More significant than motives, however, was the language of the dispute. In formulating its position, explicating it, and seeking legitimacy for it in the public sphere, each side appealed to values that enjoyed powerful endorsements and wide approval in Dutch society. On one side of the debate stood proponents, both Catholic and Protestant, of what we might call “civic,” “traditional,” or most appropriately “fraternal” values; on the other side stood advocates of a new social discipline and puritanical morality. In their clash, defenders of the confraternities and abolitionists enunciated opposing sets of values – both sets familiar to all, both contested more widely in society. Far 4 haarlem: J.M. Sterck-Proot, “Het Haarlemsche Sint Jacobsgilde na de hervorming,” Haarlem jaarboek 1936: 39–46; J.M. Sterck-Proot, “Het Haarlemsche Sint Jacobsgilde,” Haarlemsche Bijdragen 54 (1937): 290–302; Gary Schwartz and Marten Jan Bok, Pieter Saenredam: The Painter and His Time (Maarssen, 1990), 114, 121. dordrecht: Michiel Roscam Abbing, De schilder & schrijver Samuel van Hoogstraten 1627–1678. Eigentijdse bronnen & oeuvre van gesigneerde schilderijen (Leiden, 1993), 10, 49, 52–3 (see also for information on the other confraternity group portrait, by Hoogstraten; my thanks to Marten Jan Bok for calling it to my attention). gorinchem: Gemeentearchief Gorcum, Archief van de Broederschap der Romeijnen binnen Gorcum. arnhem: Valentijn Paquay, De geschiedenis van de Stichting Sint Nicolai Broederschap te Arnhem, 1351–1993. Gasthuis, preuven, en hulpbetoon (Zutphen, 1993) cited in Nicholas Terpstra, “Ignatius, Confratello: Confraternities as Modes of Spiritual Community in Early Modern Society,” in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., ed. Kathleen Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto, 2001), 163–82. stichtse villages (Houten, Woudenberg, Breukelen, Vreelant, others): D.G. Rengers Hora Siccama, De geestelijke en kerkelijke goederen onder het canonieke, het gereformeerde en het neutrale recht (Utrecht, 1905), 442–49. ’s-hertogenbosch: G.C.M. van Dijck, De Bossche optimaten. Geschiedenis van de Illustere Lieve Vrouwebroederschap te ’s-Hertogenbosch, 1318–1973 (Tilburg, 1973); J.A.M. Hoekx et al., De aloude broederschap van het Hoogheilig Sacrament te ’s-Hertogenbosch, 1400–1850 (n.p., 1980). maastricht: J. van Rensch, “Broederschappen in Maastricht, 1400–1850,” in Hemelse trektochten. Broederschappen in Maastricht, 1400–1850, ed. A.H. Jenniskens (Maastricht, 1990), 7–88. On the rare survival of confraternities in other officially Protestant lands, see Terpstra, “Ignatius, Confratello.”

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from being unique to Utrecht or even the Netherlands, this cultural clash was a typical aspect of campaigns for social and religious reform in Europe of the confessional age. It took particularly clear form, though, in this curious episode, when the magistrates of the “Domstad” called for the abolition of the confraternities and the use of their assets to found a new type of institution, a house of correction. 1

Survival of the Confraternities

At first glance, it seems that the dispute over Utrecht’s confraternities should have pitted Calvinists directly against Catholics. After all, the fundamental purpose of confraternities – their raison d’être – had a distinctly Catholic character: to provide masses for the souls of the deceased.5 Confraternities (geestelijke broederschappen) were voluntary organizations, each one under the patronage of a particular saint or aspect of the divine, such as the Trinity or Holy Cross. People joined in order to gain the protection of that patron, to assure themselves of a good funeral, and to lessen the time they would have to spend in purgatory. Typically, each confraternity had a grave and a chapel with an altar in one of the local churches. When a member died, he or she would be buried in that common grave and a priest would say masses for his or her soul at the altar. Members of the confraternity were encouraged, sometimes required, to attend these rites and to pray for the deceased. In addition, confraternities sponsored regular masses for all the deceased of the confraternity. Some required of their members an intensive routine of prayer and penance; others engaged the group in acts of charity. Once a year, each confraternity celebrated the day of its patron. On this refectiedag, as it was called (or alternately statiedag), the members of the confraternity would march in solemn procession to their chapel, where a special mass was said for all members, living and deceased; then, retiring to a tavern, the group would hold a general meeting at which financial accounts were presented, officers elected, decisions made, 5 For overviews of confraternal organization and activity in different lands, see Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989); Catherine Vincent, Les confréries médiévales dans le royaume de France, xiiie-xve siècle (Paris, 1994); J.J. ­Scarsbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), Ch. 2. Paul Trio reviews the historiography on confraternities in the Netherlands in “Middeleeuwse broederschappen in de Nederlanden. Een balans en perspectieven voor verder onderzoek,” Trajecta 3 (1994): 97–109. Trio’s denial that Dutch confraternities, after ca. 1400, regularly organized funeral processions for deceased members is contradicted by evidence from Utrecht, where fines were levied for non-attendance at such events.

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and the confraternal statutes read; finally, its business complete, the group sat down together for a festive meal – the so-called refectie. Confraternities enjoyed extraordinary popularity in medieval Utrecht, which, as seat of a large bishopric, bulged with churches and clerics. Eager to participate in the rich liturgical life surrounding them, its burghers founded at least sixty-three confraternities. A list compiled in 1615 by the city magistrates counted forty-two divided among the four parish churches, thirteen in various monasteries and convents, and three attached to hospitals. Records have survived testifying to the existence of five more.6 With a population of 20,000 or less, pre-Reformation Utrecht thus had more confraternities than giant Antwerp or Ghent; more than Maastricht, another episcopal center, or Den Bosch; and far more than other northern cities: while Deventer had twenty-nine confraternities, Haarlem, more typically, had only five and Rotterdam not many more.7 With the Reformation, though, came a new form of Christianity that repudiated the power of saints, denied the existence of purgatory, and held the mass to be an abomination. Protestantism condemned the rituals of the confraternities as idolatry and the beliefs on which they were based as superstition. In most parts of Europe that went Protestant, authorities quickly abolished all confraternities. Rotterdam is one Dutch city that conforms to the normal pattern: by 1580, the municipal government had seized all properties belonging to the confraternities there. Donated by wealthy members in years past, these properties had formerly subsidized the groups’ activities, including the masses they sponsored. Now the properties went to the wardens of the local parish church, the St. Laurenskerk. Gouda’s magistrates worked even more swiftly,

6 hua, BA i 375, fol. 2ro-3ro. hua, BA i. On the social composition of the memberships, see Janna Leguijt, “Wanneer een broeder of suster sterft, soe selmen se halen myt dat cruus… Religieuze lekenbroederschappen in het vijftiende-eeuwse Utrecht,” Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1994: 5–32. 7 Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis, 1550–1577, transl. J.C. Grayson (Baltimore, 1996), 28, 54; Paul Trio, Volksreligie als spiegel van een stedelijke samenleving. De broederschappen te Gent in de late middeleeuwen (Louvain, 1993), 52, 78; Jenniskens, ed., Hemelse trektochten, 7–88; Van Dijck, De Bossche optimaten, 74–5; R.R. Post, Kerkelijke verhoudingen in Nederland vóór de Reformatie van +/- 1500 tot +/- 1580 (Utrecht/Antwerp, 1954), 384; Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (The Hague, 1989), 240 note 10; H. ten Boom, De reformatie in Rotterdam 1530–1585 (n.p., 1987), 30. Between the 1520s and 1560s, many confraternities in the Netherlands suffered a decline in membership, apparently due to hard economic times and spreading criticism of their practices; none are known to have died out, though.

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seizing all confraternal assets by 1575.8 When Utrecht’s magistrates attempted a similar confiscation, however, they ran up against fierce resistance. Efforts by the provincial States in 1580 and in 1586 had equally little effect.9 It must be said that among the various Catholic properties which Utrecht’s authorities were trying to seize, those of the confraternities were small potatoes. They were of little value compared even to the benefices of parish priests and vicars, for which the States felt greater concern. The real prize, though, and focus of conflict in Utrecht was the property of the five collegiate churches located in the city: the cathedral, or Dom; St. Jan, St. Marie, St. Pieter, and Oudmunster. Together, these five churches owned about a quarter of all the land in the province, not to mention much of the city’s best real estate. Pressures for confiscation, in other words, did not focus on the confraternities. Nevertheless, one can see already in the late 1570s a pattern of resistance that was to continue for decades. More than greed motivated Dutch city and provincial governments to seize the former wealth of the Catholic Church and its appendages; they had many pressing needs. Of these, the most urgent was to finance the Revolt against Spain, whose costs, direct and indirect, were astronomical. Haarlem’s magistrates, confiscating in 1581 the property of all but two local confraternities, used the wealth thus gained to help restore the damage done to the city by its recent siege.10 In 1598, some Utrechters demanded likewise that their provincial States use formerly Catholic “religious properties” (geestelijke goederen) to defray the costs of war. They proposed this course of action as an alternative to the imposition of a new tax on the city, already hard-struck by the bubonic plague and harvest failures.11 Those who demanded most ardently the seizure of Catholic properties, however, did not want them turned to secular ends. They pointed out that the donors who had originally endowed the confraternities and churches had given these properties to be used to pious ends: “ad pios usus.” The proper way to honor the intent of these donors, they argued, was to continue to use the income from these properties for pious ends – pious now conceived in Protestant 8

Ten Boom, De reformatie in Rotterdam, 210–12; Koen Goudriaan et al., De Gilden in Gouda (Gouda, 1996), 38–40. 9 hua, SA ii 121, Oct. 27, Nov. 13 1578; Apr. 13, June 23, Aug. 22, Dec. 29 1579; March 7, Apr. 21 1580; June 18 1581; July 30 1582. hua, BA i 194. 10 Spaans, Haarlem na de reformatie, 72. 11 Jan den Tex, “De Staten in Oldenbarnevelts tijd,” in Van standen tot staten. 600 jaar Staten van Utrecht 1375–1975, ed. H.L.Ph. Leeuwenberg and L. van Tongerloo (Zutphen, 1975), 69; Izaäk Vijlbrief, Van anti-aristocratie tot democratie. Een bijdrage tot de politieke en sociale geschiedenis der stad Utrecht (Amsterdam, 1950), 70.

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terms. Above all, magistrates and reformers wanted to use these incomes to pay the salaries of the Reformed ministers who had been appointed to replace the old Catholic pastors. The rubric of “pious use” also included what we would call matters of social welfare: caring for the poor, the aged, the sick, and the orphaned. These matters stood high on the agenda of magistrates and devout Protestants equally.12 Even a former Catholic priest agreed that confraternal funds which once had paid for masses should now pay for other, more acceptable pious works. In 1587 Joost Janssoen van der A asked Utrecht’s magistrates to help him extract from several confraternities the money he was formerly paid by them to perform masses. True, since the Reformation he no longer performed the masses, he conceded, but now the confraternities were spending all their money on food and drink for their annual refectiedag meals. These funds ought to be used for “better and more devout purposes,” he argued, and they would be if his former salary were restored to him, seeing as he, the petitioner, was very poor, “too old … to earn his bread with labor, and ashamed to beg.” Alms to a deserving recipient like himself would fulfil the original purpose of the funds’ donors far better than the current annual feasts.13 Utrecht’s confraternities did respond to such demands, albeit grudgingly, and by the 1610s fifteen confraternities were making regular charitable distributions to the poor.14 In essence, though, Van der A’s assertion was correct: since the Reformation, the confraternities were spending most of their money on their annual meals, many of which had already been quite elaborate before the Reformation. Indeed, many confraternities celebrated their refectiedag, or kermis, as it was also called, with a real blow-out party. The kermis of St. Anthony’s Confraternity in the Jacobskerk, for example, lasted for three days in the 1560s and 1570s. Still, the confraternity paid considerable sums for masses, and the procession and solemn mass held on its refectiedag were grand, expensive ceremonies. After the Reformation, though, the only expense the group bore besides those associated with its kermis were the burial fees charged by the Jacobskerk undertakers. Flush, the group extended its annual celebration, beginning in 1580, to five days.15 Every confraternity experienced the same change, and with money to spare, many extended their kermissen, which grew more extravagant than ever before. The Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in the Buurkerk resolved to hold 12 Vijlbrief, Van anti-aristocratie tot democratie, 109–110; A.C. Duker, Gisbertus Voetius, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1897–1914), 2:294–334. On the fate of the geestelijke goederen generally, see Rengers Hora Siccama, De geestelijke en kerkelijke goederen. 13 hua, BA i 293. 14 hua, BA i 220; hua, BA i 375, fol. 2ro-3ro. 15 hua, BA i 301.

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every other year a separate, second feast, on St. Martin’s day.16 Our Lady’s Confraternity in the Geertekerk threw each year one rowdy, three-day bash that often left the group with a big bill for broken glasses.17 In 1586, the shopping list for this event included 119 pounds of meat – just to feed the ten members plus their wives. The St. Jacobsgilde in Haarlem manifests the same pattern: the cost of its annual meals rose from only fl. 7 ½ in 1588 to fl. 99 by 1610; such delicacies as turkey, salmon, lobster, and pastries joined the once sober menu; the group purchased its own wine cellar; and by 1682 it was spending no less than fl.995 for its meals – a sum that exceeded the salary of most Calvinist ministers.18 2

“Friendship between christians”

Not all confraternities had abandoned their Catholic devotional practices. Our Lady’s in the Geertekerk, for example, sought to follow “good old tradition” as far as possible. At their annual meeting, its members recited Ave Marias and prayers for the dead, and had a priest say a collect. The new statutes issued by this confraternity in 1596 expressed sorrow at the outlawing of Catholicism and hope for its restoration.19 Of the five confraternities, however, which issued new statutes in the post-Reformation era, Our Lady’s was alone in reaffirming its commitment to the old faith. Another, the Confraternity of St. Adriaen in the Buurkerk, embraced the new Protestant forms of piety. Following the new rules it adopted in 1593, members concluded their refectiedag with a prayer, asking God to grant them “through Christ out of grace thy Kingdom in eternal life.”20 Among the members of this confraternity was a tailor named Adriaen van Renen, one of the first people to join Utrecht’s Calvinist Church after it was founded in 1578.21 The other three confraternities made no references at all of 16 17 18 19 20 21

hua, BA i 210. hua, BA i 335; see likewise hua, BA i 359, 1582/83 for Our Lady’s in the Dominican Monastery. Sterck-Proot, “Het Haarlemsche Sint Jacobsgilde na de hervorming”; G. Groenhuis, De Predikanten. De sociale positie van de gereformeerde predikanten in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden voor +/- 1700 (Groningen, 1977), 133–47. hua, BA i 335. hua, BA i 242. hua, BA i 241; hua, KR 404. Unless a patronymic or address is given in both lists, a rare occurrence, such identifications are not always certain; in this case, though, a tax roll of 1585 gives grounds for confidence because it lists only one person under this name. hua, SA ii 1313.

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a confessionally-specific nature, and would have been equally hospitable to Catholic or Protestant members.22 In fact, as Utrecht’s magistrates noted in 1615, some confraternities did accept members of both faiths. This was true of the Kleine Kalende, always the most exclusive of Utrecht’s confraternities, recruiting from the leading families of the provincial gentry and urban patriciate.23 The Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in the Buurkerk and numerous others also included Protestants.24 In many cases it seems that memberships were passed down within families and that this practice simply continued. At any rate, what is certain is that, after the Reformation, at least some of Utrecht’s confraternities recruited their members from across the religious spectrum. They became multi-confessional societies. That does not mean, though, that they had become mere banqueting clubs. One confraternity from outside Utrecht offers a revealing example: Our Lady’s in Den Bosch. After Prince Maurits conquered Den Bosch in 1629, Our Lady’s began to spend all its money just as Utrecht’s confraternities had done since 1578: to throw parties and to bury its dead. At first, all its members were Catholic, but after vehement debate the confraternity decided in 1642 to open itself to Protestant members. In a new constitution it declared that its object would henceforth be to prevent religious differences within the ruling elite from developing into political factions. The organization was to serve for the removal of all mistrust that is coming to grow more and more as a result of the separation and distancing of [Reformed Protestants and Roman Catholics] from one another; and in order henceforth to live with one another with greater trust, correspondence, and unity, as inhabitants of one state, brothers of one brotherhood ought to do. 22 23

24

The three were the Holy Cross in the Buurkerk, St. Ewout’s in the Niclaaskerk, and Our Lady’s in the Dominican monastery. hua, BA i 333; hua, BA i 193; hua, BA i 349, fol. 5ro-vo. hua, BA i 173. The name Kalende referred to the Roman Kalends, meaning that the confraternity met on the first day of each month. It is perhaps no coincidence that in Middle Dutch the verb “calanderen” meant “to abandon oneself to boisterous merriment.” J. Verdam, Middelnederlandsch handwoordenboek (The Hague, 1932), 279. Among these were Our Lady of Sorrow’s (ter Nood Gods) and St. Anthony’s in the Jacobs­ kerk, and Our Lady’s in the Dominican monastery. In some cases the difficulty of associating written names with specific individuals in this period prevents a definite assertion. hua, BA i 207; Th.H.J. van Riemsdijk, Geschiedenis van de kerspelkerk van St. Jacob te Utrecht (Leiden, 1882), bijlage LV; hua, BA i 301; hua, BA i 359. These have been compared to hua, KR 1 and 404. For the names of various regents who joined a confraternity, see Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 290.

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One member added a marginal note saying “unity and friendship between Christians stands at the centre. The most important task for the brothers is to see that the enmity between Roman Catholics and Protestants disappears.” Along with this change of constitution the confraternity offered membership to a contingent of highly-placed Protestants: Johan Wolfert Count of Brederode, governor of the city; thirteen members of the city government; and five elders of the Reformed Church there.25 The decision of these men to accept the offer was highly controversial, splitting the Dutch Reformed Church. Opposing the decision were Den Bosch’s minister Lemannus and Utrecht’s renowned theologian Gisbertus Voetius, who wrote a scathing condemnation, accusing the Protestants of “indirect” idolatry and “idolatry-by-participation.” Samuel Maresius, on the other hand, the town’s Walloon minister, professor at its Illustere School, and soon-to-be professor of theology at Groningen, defended the men. A pamphlet war raged for four years. Even the provincial synods split: North Holland’s ruled against those who had joined the confraternity, but Gelderland’s said that only a national synod could decide the matter and that in the meantime it was all right for them to remain in the confraternity.26 In the event, no national synod did convene and the members remained. Indeed, in the following years a system of numerical parity emerged: memberships and offices were split evenly between Catholics and Protestants. In this form the confraternity has survived to the present day, as has Haarlem’s St. Jacobsgilde, which had adopted the same system of numerical parity as early as the 1580s.27 None of Utrecht’s confraternities give any indication that they adopted the system too. Like their counterparts in Den Bosch and Haarlem, though, some brought Protestants and Catholics together, fostering a sense of community and even “brotherhood” among people of different faiths. This brotherhood took varied forms. Protestant and Catholic confraternity members marched together in one another’s funerals, from which “difference of religious conviction holds no one back and makes no one unwilling,” according to a contemporary observer.28 They lay deceased members of both faiths together in common graves and erected common memorials to them. They commissioned artworks representing all the members of the confraternity, Protestant and Catholic, together, and distributed charity to the poor irrespective of their church 25

Van Dijck, De Bossche optimaten, 317–22, 434–35, with the above quotes appearing on 435, 434, and 320. 26 Duker, Gisbertus Voetius, 2:86–131. 27 Sterck-Proot, “Het Haarlemsche Sint Jacobsgilde,” 301. 28 Johannes Gerobulus, Waerachtich Verhael van den Staet der Gereformeerde Kercke die den Sone Gods binnen Utrecht door ’t Evangelium vergadert wert (Utrecht, 1603), unpaginated.

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­affiliation.29 The Kleine Kalende, like Our Lady’s in the Dominican monastery, also continued some version of the traditional Maundy Thursday ceremony. A commemoration of the Last Supper, the latter involved the brothers’ washing each others’ feet and sharing a simple meal of wine and a special bread called mandaatbrood. Viewed from this perspective, even the raucous merrymaking of the kermis takes on a different appearance. For Catholics and Protestants to break bread and to drink together was a way as ancient as civilization itself for them to make peace and forge a united community. The forging of peace and unity, in fact, had always played a prominent role in confraternal life. Since their first formation, confraternities had viewed it as one of their chief missions to foster Christian love among their members. Studying medieval Florence, Ronald Weissman has shown that the medieval confraternities there brought together “members of divergent factions, lineages, occupations, patronage chains, and neighborhoods.” Through a ritual life that stressed the unity of the group, they forged links of “ritual brotherhood” between potential enemies. They were “symbols of and vehicles for promoting civic peace.”30 Since Weissman’s work was published, historians have found confraternities in other medieval cities performing a similar function.31 Utrecht’s confraternities sought likewise to forge a sacral unity among their members. Since their founding, all of them had placed great emphasis on this quality in their statutes, which laid out rules to avoid and to resolve conflicts among members. Our Lady in the Geertekerk, for example, required its members to speak respectfully towards one another: “whoever speaks dishonorable, offensive, or scandalous words, be it man or woman, or speaks mockingly, out of rancor, to any of the brothers or sisters shall … be fined, notwithstanding any apology or agreement.”32 If a conflict arose, the procurators and other members could constitute an ad hoc court whose judgements were binding. Every confraternity in Utrecht reserved the right to expel any member who did not accept its judgement in such a case. In this way the statutes sought to ensure 29

30 31 32

hua, BA i 247; Gerobulus, Waerachtich Verhael. In 1601 a Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament commissioned a stained glass window displaying the motto of the confraternity plus the names and coats of arms of its twelve current members. The window went in the Jacobskerk, where the confraternity had formerly had its chapel but which was currently used for Reformed worship. Van Riemsdijk, Geschiedenis van de kerspelkerk van St. Jacob, bijlage LV. Ronald F.E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1982), 43– 105, quotes from pp. 80 and 55. For one example see Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge, 1995). hua, BA i 335, art. 10.

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that members would “live in perpetual peace, as befits sisters and brothers in God.”33 The rules laid down by Utrecht’s confraternities for their gatherings did more than mechanically keep the peace: they testify to a shared set of values, among which social harmony, as the supreme expression of Christian love, took first place. Second came “honor,” a word that, with its variants, recurs frequently in the statutes. As Our Lady’s in the Dominican Monastery put it, confraternity members were required to be “honorable persons of good repute and name.”34 The Confraternity of Our Lady of Sorrow in the Jacobskerk threatened with expulsion any member, “be he young or old, who is immoral [onzedelic] in word or deed” and fails to heed the admonition of his brothers.35 Even as they held their extravagant annual celebrations the confraternities evinced a sense of propriety: most of them limited, one way or another, how drunk their members could get. St. Adriaan’s in the Buurkerk prohibited any drinking in the morning or by candlelight; St. Ewout’s in the Niclaaskerk imposed a fine of six stuivers on anyone who drank so much “that he – written in reverence – vomits in company.” St. Ewout’s also threatened any member whose word as a businessman proved false: expulsion was the penalty for agreeing to a business transaction with another member and then refusing to complete it.36 Even after the Reformation, then, shorn of their Catholic ritual, Utrecht’s confraternities continued to unite their members through the bonds of charity, mourning, festivity, and shared rules of behavior. As clubs promoting the traditional values of harmony and honor, they lived on even after the Reformation had seemingly rendered them obsolete. Those whose members included Protestants as well as Catholics even extended their social mission to promote peace among the confessions. Thus, as of 1615, at least forty-four confraternities remained active.37 3

The Debate over Dissolution

In that year, though, the proponents of abolition launched a new offensive that, unlike its predecessors, ended in victory. Armed with a new and more powerful rationale, they claimed the city needed the assets of the ­confraternities 33 34 35 36 37

hua, BA i 335, preamble. hua, BA i 349, fol. 3vo. hua, BA i 259. hua, BA i 242; hua, BA i 332. hua, BA i 375, fol. 2ro-3ro.

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to ­finance an expensive new social project: a house of correction. Known in Dutch as a tuchthuis (“tucht” meaning discipline), the latter was in one sense an extension of the welfare and charitable reforms pioneered in the early sixteenth century by civic humanists, who created a moral distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor; in another sense, the tuchthuis embodied a radically new approach to poverty. “Vagabonds” and “sturdy beggars” – poor people who in theory could earn their own living but did not – were to be its chief inmates. Such people, complained Utrecht’s magistrates, were as good as stealing the city’s precious charitable funds; in their idleness, which they passed down like a disease to their children, they shirked their familial responsibilities, flouted society’s rules of behavior, and sought personal gain in the downfall of others rather than in self-improvement.38 The innovation of the tuchthuis, as first conceived by Dirck Coornhert and described in his Boeventucht (1587), was to add rehabilitation to deterrence: instead of whipping or maiming such people, one would reeducate them to become productive, responsible members of society. To do that, though, one had to incarcerate them. By forcing them to perform grueling labor – the men ground Brazilwood to dust in order to produce a dye, the women spun yarn – the tuchthuis sought to instill a work ethic. At the same time, it placed the inmates under the strict moral supervision of a surrogate family, the “binnen-vader” and “binnen-­ moeder,” and forced them to receive religious instruction. Children of the poor could also enter the tuchthuis voluntarily to imbibe the same virtues of hard work, clean living, and fear of God as the inmates proper, and to learn a skill, such as weaving, with which they could later earn their keep. Amsterdam’s, built in the 1590s, was the first of about twenty-seven houses of correction erected in the Dutch Republic, serving as a model for these and others abroad. Treating unemployment as a form of social deviance, these institutions subjected the poor to what was truly a “Great Confinement” and belong to a larger category of new institutions in seventeenth-century Europe promoting social discipline.39

38 39

hua, Stadsarchief Supplement 102. See i.a. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994), 169–77; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979); Thorsten Sellin, Pioneering in Penology: The Amsterdam Houses of Correction in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1944). On Utrecht’s tuchthuis in particular, see A. Hallema, “De stichting en inrichting van het Utrechtsche Tuchthuis,” Jaarboekje van Oud-Utrecht 1929: 136–59. The instructions given to its governing board appear in gup, 3:445–48; instructions to its catechist in hua, SA ii 1044.

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Construction of Utrecht’s tuchthuis cost an exorbitant sum, almost fl.60,000.40 To help pay for the project, the city government once again proposed seizing the assets of the confraternities. This would be to convert money currently being “uselessly … consumed and squandered,” said the government, to a more honorable, laudable, and godly work … so as to keep many poor folks’ children from the beggar’s sack and vagrancy, to bring them up in honest crafts, and in discipline [tucht] and fear of God, and by means of the latter to draw them away from all disorder, evil, and scandalous living; and furthermore, to chastise [tuchtigen] all other evildoers for their evil and ungodly life [and] by good instruction to bring them to knowledge of and repentance for their evil deeds, improvement of their lives, and advancement in the fear of the Lord, [and] also consequently to release them, by God’s mercy, from eternal death into life, etc. This, said the government, was “truly a cause [held] by all the world, or at least by honorable and conscientious people, [to be] more than praiseworthy and godly,” infinitely preferable to the confraternities’ promotion of “gluttony” and “disorder.”41 With this expostulation the magistrates undertook a deft rhetorical manoeuvre, contesting the notion of honor maintained by the confraternities, redefining that civic virtue, and enlisting it on their own side. For the most part, though, the magistrates couched their proposal in the idiom of Dutch Calvinism. Equating moral reform with religious repentance and discipline with “fear of the Lord,” the magistrates’ language echoed that preached in the Dutch Reformed Church, lending a degree of religious sanction to their proposal. Utrecht’s rulers were scarcely, however, the consistent champions of “godly discipline” they represented themselves to be, and to many Calvinists their words must have sounded hypocritical. Until 1605 they had blocked every effort by Calvinist reformers to establish an effective system of ecclesiastic discipline for Utrecht’s Reformed Church, with synods, classes, and consistories able to censure and excommunicate the immoral and unorthodox. Condemned for this reason as “Libertines” by the Calvinist establishment of the Netherlands, the magistrates had moved only tardily to embrace a moderate Calvinism. Even then, they had set strict limits to the application of ecclesiastic discipline, and when the Remonstrant controversy had burst onto the 40 41

Hallema, “De stichting en inrichting van het Utrechtsche Tuchthuis,” 150. This amount was some five to twelve times as much as what other Dutch cities spent building their tuchthuizen. hua, BA i 375, fol. 1ro-vo; hua, Stadsarchief Supplement 102.

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public stage in 1610, they had sided nearly to a man with the followers of Jacob Arminius against the more precisian Contra-Remonstrants. They had been equally reluctant to extend Calvinist influence beyond the ecclesiastic sphere to the social and cultural. Popular pre-Reformation festivities like Three Kings’ and St. John’s eve were still celebrated with abandon; Catholics, who outnumbered Calvinists, attended mass with impunity.42 If Utrecht’s magistrates endorsed tuchthuis discipline in 1615, they did so for two reasons. First, while it was Calvinists first and foremost who championed the values of “discipline and order” in the Netherlands, those values had a wider, non-denominational appeal. In the confessional age that stretched from roughly the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, they had the endorsement of reformers of all ecclesiastic stripes, who went as far as to equate them with piety and morality themselves. Nor were they purely religious values; rather, they marked a point where the perspectives of pious reformers and practical rulers often converged.43 Second, Utrecht’s magistrates recognized in the call for discipline the most effective way to legitimize and rally support for abolishing the confraternities, and that – tuchthuis aside – they were determined to do, for they had grown convinced that the confraternities were a threat to their rule. The origins of that conviction went back five years to a popular uprising that shook the foundations of Utrecht’s political system. On January 21st 1610, Utrecht’s civic militia – over 4000 armed men, most of them guild craftsmen – mustered on the square in front of city hall and forced the entire magistracy to step down. Their complaints had mostly to do with the domination of Utrecht’s government, both city and provincial, by members of the gentry. Turning the government to their own financial interest, the gentry had allowed brewing and other industries to develop in the countryside, undercutting the urban economy; they had granted themselves lucrative tax farms, prebends, and offices; and they had turned a blind eye to peculation of public funds. Holding impromptu elections, the militia chose a new magistracy which it hoped would better represent the interests of ordinary burghers, and went on in the following weeks to formulate a series of proposals for larger, structural reforms of government. Far from unprecedented, the episode was one in a series of clashes going back to the Middle Ages that pitted craftsmen against ­patriciate and 42 Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines; gup, 3:473–81; Llewellyn Bogaers, “Een kwestie van macht? De relatie tussen de wetgeving op het openbaar gedrag en de ontwikkeling van de Utrechtse stadssamenleving in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw,” Volkskundig Bulletin 11 (1985): 102–26. 43 On “discipline and order” in the confessional age, see i.a. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 28–67, and the works cited there on pp. 6–8 by Ernst Walter Zeeden, Wolfgang Reinhard, Heinz Schilling, and Ronnie Po-chia Hsia.

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gentry in Utrecht. Religious divisions, however, added a new element in 1610. Since the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce the previous year, hopes had risen among Utrecht’s Catholics for an improvement in their position, and many of them took part in the uprising, seeing it as an opportunity to press their demands. During the shouting and turmoil of January 21st they called for use of a church; a month later they instigated another demonstration, while behind the scenes they saw to it that the reform proposals of the citizenry omitted the requirement, standard since the 1580s, that magistrates be supporters of the Reformed religion.44 Backed by forty companies of soldiers under the command of Frederick Henry, the States General restored the city’s original government at the end of March. Those who returned to office showed a hyper-sensitivity to the threat of rebellion. One of their first acts was to reorganize completely the civic militia, purging it of rebels and placing it under direct magisterial command.45 In the following years, they and their successors persecuted local Contra-­ Remonstrants (some of whom were implicated in the events of 1610) with a special ferocity born of fear. More generally, they held in suspicion any movement or organization that might serve as a vehicle for political ­opposition – i­ ncluding the confraternities, who according to rumor had held special ­meetings in 1610 and provided the uprising with some of its leadership.46 Those rumors did not go uncontested. The man chosen in October 1610 to lead the restored regime, for one, did not believe them – and as a member of the Kleine Kalende he thought he should know. Adolph de Waell, Lord of Moersbergen, was one of Utrecht’s most powerful men in the 1610s. From a distinguished local family, he sat in the provincial States as member of the nobility, on the provincial court (Hof) as extraordinary councillor, and represented the Sticht often in the States General. Religiously, Moersbergen was a Remonstrant, like most of Utrecht’s governing elite. Politically he was a close ally of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, and was to pay a high price for the association in 1618. In October 1610, however, in the wake of the uprising, Moersbergen was the man of the hour: anxious to regain their hold over the city government, the States chose him to serve as first burgomaster, a post he occupied for three years.47 During his tenure, no actions were taken against the confraternities. 44 45 46 47

D.A. Felix, Het oproer te Utrecht in 1610 (Utrecht, 1919); Jan den Tex, “De Staten in Oldenbarnevelts tijd,” in Van Standen tot Staten, ed. Leeuwenberg and Van Tongerloo, 51–89. gup, 3:588–91. hua, Stadsarchief Supplement 102. gup, 2:1049, 3:180–81, 200, 304–05; B. Olde Meierink et al., eds., Kastelen en ridderhofsteden in Utrecht (n.p., 1995), 313–14.

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Proposals for their abolition were revived under his successor, but Moersbergen convinced him not to proceed. He was thus shocked to return to Utrecht in December 1615, after a lengthy trip away, to discover that in his absence the magistracy had taken decisive action, seizing all the confraternities’ properties. He quickly assumed the role of their defender, taking his case before the provincial States and seeking to have the action reversed. Himself no Catholic, Moersbergen did not rest his defence on the confraternities’ ties to Catholicism, nor could such a defence have garnered support or legitimacy in the officially Calvinist Republic. Rather, against the “godly discipline” championed by the magistrates, he portrayed the confraternities as bearers of an equally hallowed set of values rooted in fraternal love and civic tradition. In a speech of 1615 before the States of Utrecht, Moersbergen made two chief arguments.48 The first was that the confraternities were beneficial to the Republic, promoting peace and social harmony. Addressing the rumors, Moersbergen acknowledged that some people believed the confraternities “served to nourish mutiny, giving [people] an excuse to gather together and form factions.” Citing official documents, however, including confessions extracted from its ringleaders, he asserted that the confraternities had played no role whatsoever in the 1610 uprising. Indeed, he declared that the confraternities did not generally talk politics at all at their gatherings. Furthermore, he knew of no “disorders” caused by them, unless one wished to call it gluttony or disorder that honorable [eerlijck] noblemen, burghers, and other qualified persons gather together once a year and sometimes [once every] two or three years, have a merry meal with one another, [and] sort out and resolve in a friendly spirit all questions and differences that have arisen or might arise among them. That the confraternities served as a forum for the resolution of disputes, Moersbergen argued, was of great political value. He noted that the confraternities had always included among their members many members of government as well as other notable citizens. “Now, what can be more useful for our state,” he asked, “than that the most qualified people [die gequalificeerste] live with one another in peace and unity?” By preventing disunity and resolving differences among people “of quality,” he suggested, the confraternities helped to discourage factions. 48

Unless otherwise noted, the following summary of Moersbergen’s arguments and the city government’s rebuttal is based on hua, Stadsarchief Supplement 102, from which all quotations come.

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Moersbergen went on to cite a row of classical precedents for the civic value of confraternities. Good King Numa, he claimed, was the first to establish confraternities in Rome, which the tyrant Tarquinius eventually abolished. Lycurgus in Sparta and Solon in Athens both viewed confraternities as beneficial. Citing the precedent of a modern Republic, Moersbergen claimed that the Swiss had always encouraged such confraternities. Rhetorically he asked, “what joins, softens, and civilizes men’s hearts like a friendly and amiable collation or gathering?” Praise for such gatherings, he concluded, can also be found in the Bible, citing as examples the festivals and feast days of the Israelites. The argument was not original. In fact, Moersbergen seems to have cribbed it straight from Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), by the French political theorist Jean Bodin. Often caricatured as a blueprint for absolutism, Bodin’s treatise makes a case for the utility not just of confraternities but of all sorts of corporate associations – guilds, communes, “colleges,” estates, parlements. Such associations are “indispensible to the commonwealth,” argues Bodin, because “friendship and goodwill among men … cannot endure unless fostered” by them. Wise princes and lawgivers, he says, have always appreciated how they bring “into agreement among themselves” the “parts and members of the body politic” and thus make it “easier to regulate the commonwealth as a whole.” Only tyrants find them a threat. Moersbergen pulled every one of his examples, from Numa to the Swiss to the Israelites, from Bodin’s treatise.49 Moersbergen’s second argument was that the government had no right to confiscate the confraternal endowments. In the first place, private property had to be respected. It was the duty of the government “to maintain everyone in his property and rights.” If need be, let the government regulate the activity of the groups, but it lacked the authority to impound private property. In the second place, confraternities enjoyed protection under the Union of Utrecht itself, the founding document of the Republic. Moersbergen cited article 25 of the Union, which obliged the subscribing authorities to “maintain all militia companies, broederschappen and colleges that are in any cities or towns of this union.”50 By seizing their properties, Utrecht’s magistrates would be violating privileges which they had sworn to uphold – the very ones in whose defence the Revolt against Spain had been fought – and in the process undermining the very “fundament of our state.” 49 50

Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, ed. Kenneth D. McRae (Cambridge, 1962), 361–86; Anthony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca, 1984), 129–31. S. Groenveld and H.L.Ph. Leeuwenberg, eds., De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte (The Hague, 1979), 38.

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The magistrates’ response was sharp. In a rebuttal delivered to the provincial States, they disputed Moersbergen’s first point on historical as well as contemporary grounds. The confraternities had not been founded to promote peace and unity among burghers but “to celebrate the blind papal religion and to establish a semi-monastic order.” None of them, said the magistrates, had shaken entirely free of Catholic “idolatry and superstition”; they represented still a “gross remnant of papistry and a great feeding ground for the same.” Moersbergen’s classical examples the magistrates dismissed as ungodly. Like Catholicism in general, they said, the confraternities had their origins in heathendom mixed with Judaism. “We ought not … to learn from the heathens how to maintain friendships with eating, drinking, and carousing. Rather, following the precepts of our common teacher [Christ], we ought each to lead the other in sobriety and moderation.” The festive meals of the confraternities amounted to “great … disorders,” encouraging “drunkenness,” “debauchery,” and “unchristian excess.” For a Protestant like Moersbergen to partake of them was like “joining the papists in celebrating Bacchus and Carnival but rejecting Lent” (as in fact many Utrechters did). The waste of so much money on them was a scandal “crying to heaven” and a “disgrace to the Christian reformed religion.” In practice, said the magistrates, the confraternities did not succeed in resolving disputes anyway; on the contrary they were seedbeds of faction, conflict, murder, and mutiny. It was no coincidence, suggested the magistrates, that Utrecht had so many confraternities and that it had experienced so much unrest in the period they were founded. The magistrates may have been referring to the vicious factionalism that divided Utrecht’s patriciate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries into groups known as Fresingen and Lichtenbergers; alternately they may have had in mind the struggles of that period between patricians and craftsmen.51 As for 1610, the magistrates doubted highly that the confraternities had played no role in the uprising, and even if it were true, they said, just as the militia companies had done in the past, so the confraternities provided a natural forum for political discussion and organizing and thus were a dangerous source of “disorder.” Social discipline, in other words, required the suppression of autonomous burgher associations. As for property rights, the magistrates emphasized that the endowments in question had been established ad pios usus. The city government, they claimed, had always functioned as “superintendent” over pious institutions like the confraternities, and as such had “direct authority and power” over them. Moersbergen himself admitted that the government had the authority to impose 51

See J.E.A.L. Struick, Utrecht door de eeuwen heen (Utrecht, 1984), 59–69, 74–8, 80, 84–6, 91–109; Vijlbrief, Van anti-aristocratie tot democratie.

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order on the confraternities. In fact, reasoned the magistrates, if they wanted to do the job properly, they should reform the confraternities in a manner consistent with their original purpose. That would mean requiring their members to attend Reformed sermons instead of mass and to sing psalms instead of Ave Marias. Moersbergen hardly wanted them to do that, nor was it practical. The important thing was to use these endowments to pious ends, and assigning them to the house of correction fulfilled that mandate. Finally, the magistrates denied any attempt to curtail Utrechters’ “privileges, freedoms, old usages, and long-standing customs.” Article 25 of the Union, they argued, does not refer to broederschappen of the religious sort, nor does it deny governments the power to divert their wealth to more godly purposes. Many Dutch cities, they noted, had already abolished the confraternities along with other Catholic institutions. 4

Language and Conflicting Values

In the event, Moersbergen argued in vain. Utrecht’s city government did seize the confraternal endowments and, jointly with the provincial States, built its house of correction.52 Some confraternities survived this blow, but for most it meant the end.53 The debate between Moersbergen and the magistrates thus formed the climax of a conflict dating back to the beginning of Utrecht’s Reformation. In one sense, the government’s action represented a long-delayed victory for that religious revolution. Yet from beginning to end, the conflict did not pit religious confessions directly against one another. In the end, the most powerful supporter of the confraternities was a Protestant. For him, the conflict was one primarily of values and sensibilities. Not that we should take Moersbergen’s arguments at face value. Moersbergen glossed over the cost and minimized the raucousness of the confraternities’ parties, casting what was sometimes a veritable debauch as an exercise in civility. He also deemphasized the Catholic heritage of the confraternities and the continued devotion of some to the old faith. While many had adjusted to the Reformation, finding a continuity of social purpose, they were all, in the final analysis, “remnants of papistry”; that in itself made them repugnant to 52

53

Expensive and underfunded, it went bankrupt and closed in 1633, to be reopened only in 1661. Conflicts between the city and provincial governments, both of which sought control of the institution, contributed to its difficulties. Hallema, “De stichting en inrichting van het Utrechtsche Tuchthuis.” Five still survived in the Jacobskerk as of 1635, according to hua, BA ii 408.

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some of Utrecht’s hard-line Calvinists. Himself a Remonstrant, Moersbergen did not belong to the latter group, though, as we have seen, some orthodox Calvinists – even elders and ministers, in the Den Bosch case – did not view membership in a confraternity as incompatible with their beliefs.54 As for the magistrates, their very selective support for “godly discipline” was notorious. By 1615 most had declared their allegiance to the same Remonstrant party to which Moersbergen belonged. The two sides in the dispute over Utrecht’s confraternities thus did not correspond to the opposing parties in the Remonstrant Controversy then raging. Over time, the confraternities – or at least their great number – may have come to seem increasingly anomalous in a Protestant republic, but religious motives for abolition seem to have been no stronger per se in 1615 than decades earlier. Of course the building of the tuchthuis gave the magistrates a strong financial motive for seizing the wealth of the confraternities. Yet the city government never gave that wealth to the tuchthuis, either as outright gift or by assigning its annual yield to it. Instead it melded the confraternal endowments together into a single, legally distinct fund from which it drew the revenue itself; moneys from it went to the tuchthuis at best indirectly. Financial need may have added impetus, then, but the strongest, most decisive motive for seizing the endowments was political. Utrecht’s magistrates were haunted by the popular uprising of 1610 and wished to eradicate what they viewed as potential cells of resistance to their authority. “It is essential,” they wrote, “that all avenues of insurrection be blocked.” Ultimately, though, the motives of the two contending sides matter less than the language in which they couched their debate. In a silent assessment of their audience, each side put forward those arguments it deemed most likely to persuade, or at least to gain acceptance as legitimate. Each side, that is, appealed to values that enjoyed broad sanction in Dutch society. Thus the debate opens a window onto the wider expanses of Dutch culture, where the same two sets of values coexisted in uneasy tension. On one side, the supporters of Utrecht’s confraternities articulated a worldview rooted in custom and protected (or so they hoped) by privilege. It was a view that attached supreme value to brotherly love – to social harmony among honorable burghers. According to this side, confraternities served a high purpose in fostering such unity. Even after the Reformation, their 54

Similarly, numerous prominent Calvinists held canonries in Utrecht’s collegiate churches. Those who held such were barred from serving as elders or deacons in the city’s regular Reformed congregation, though not in the Walloon congregation. D.J. Roorda, “Prins Willem iii en het Utrechtse regeringsreglement. Een schets van gebeurtenissen, achtergronden en problemen,” in Van standen tot staten, ed. Leeuwenberg and Van Tongerloo, 102.

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religious ­rituals curtailed, the confraternities united their members through the bonds of mourning, morality, charity, and conviviality. These bonds had always cut across factions and rivalries; now, in some cases, they extended also across confessional lines, uniting people of different faiths. They could only strengthen a pluralistic, republican regime such as Utrecht’s, Moersbergen argued. The abolitionists, by contrast, posed as champions of a new set of values. They condemned the confraternities as remnants of Catholicism but equally as sources of “disorder.” No schools of civic life, they claimed, the confraternities taught vice and rebellion as well as idolatry; their festive meals violated standards of moderation and sobriety embraced by all good Christians. As a counterpoint to their unruly dissipation Utrecht’s magistrates held up as exemplary that new institution, the tuchthuis. What it taught its inmates, they said, all Utrechters should learn: the virtues of hard work, piety, obedience, and discipline. Looking back on the Dutch Golden Age, we tend today to associate these virtues primarily with Calvinism, and certainly Utrecht’s magistrates adopted the language of the dominees in blasting the confraternities. Yet reformers of all denominations promoted the same virtues. As modern historians have copiously documented, a call for “discipline and order” swept much of Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. Church leaders and devout lay people took it up, equating these qualities with true piety; rulers took it up, seeking to control their subjects more effectively. To the extent their reforms succeeded, the result was what historians call the “confessionalization” of European society, affecting Calvinist, Catholic, and Lutheran lands equally. Even in Catholic lands, the process brought great change to the old confraternities. Catholic reformers did not abolish the latter, but they did restrict their festivities, subject them to clerical control, and use them to promote a new, more rigorous brand of Catholic piety. The raucous merrymaking of the confraternities had Catholic critics, just as it had Protestant partakers. In every Christian denomination, however, confessionalization also had its opponents who, like Moersbergen and his confrères, valued civic harmony over godly discipline and found a bona fide morality already embedded in the customs of their forebears. Such opponents were nowhere more numerous or powerful than in the Netherlands, where in the sixteenth century they had rebelled against their sovereign rather than submit to the “Spanish Inquisition” and where, in the Golden Age, they stymied every effort of Calvinist reformers to found a theocratic “New Israel.” In the dispute of 1615, Utrecht’s magistrates threw their weight behind the call for discipline, but only, one may surmise, due to the unusual political circumstances. In the broader life of Utrecht and the Dutch Republic such calls fared less well. Confraternities disappeared,

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by and large, but kermissen did not; ministers preached moderation, but the banquet, as Frans Hals’ exuberant militia portraits witness, remained a centerpiece of civic culture. It was a tension the Dutch never fully resolved.55 55

See Simon Schama, “The Unruly Realm: Appetite and Restraint in 17th Century Holland,” Daedalus 108 (1979): 103–23; Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987).

Chapter 6

Possessed by the Devil? A Very Public Dispute in Utrecht No phenomenon reveals the otherness, the alien quality of early modern culture as dramatically as reputed cases of demonic possession. Previously a rare and rather marginal phenomenon, demonic possession became a new plague in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Physically the affliction manifested itself in recurrent fits, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, difficulty eating and drinking, bug-eyes, and extreme contortions of the body. Verbally demoniacs sometimes ranted incoherently; other times, their words were offensively clear to those around them. Speaking with the supposed voice of the devil, demoniacs uttered blasphemies and obscenities, denied fundamental Christian dogmas, and mocked figures of authority. Defying all norms and ­conventions – social, cultural, even physical – demoniacs were disturbing ­figures in their own age and, to this day, exercise a certain fascination by virtue of their strangeness. Explaining the behavior of reputed demoniacs has always posed a challenge. Modern historians offer a variety of explanations, ranging from the psychohistorical approach of John Demos, who argues that demoniacs were mentally ill, to the purely cultural analysis of Carol Karlsen, who, inspired by anthropology, sees demonic possession as a “status reversal ritual.”1 Even in the early modern period itself, reputed demoniacs could be ambiguous figures to their contemporaries, who had at their disposal a range of possible interpretations for the behavior of the afflicted, with genuine possession being only one. Of the other possibilities recognized by contemporaries, illness was perhaps the most common: some apparent demoniacs were diagnosed as melancholic, epileptic, or hysterical while others were thought to be mad and were locked up in a madhouse or consigned to family care. These two alternative ­diagnoses were 1 John P. Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford, 1982), 97–131; Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987), 222 ff., esp. 248, and 341 note 66. H.C. Erik Midelfort, “Sin, Melancholy, Obsession: Insanity and Culture in 16th Century Germany,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (New York, 1984), 113–45, seeks a middle way between the psychohistoric and the purely cultural, calling possession a distinctive form of madness, a “cultural idiom” that shaped the behavior and psychic experience of the mad.

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problematic, though, since it was believed that a devil might choose a person who was mad or ill to possess, seeking in this way to hide his own presence.2 A more cut-and-dried matter was fraud: some people who claimed to be demoniacs were judged to be pretending for the sake of gain. Such gain might take the form of alms; less tangibly, reputed demoniacs might enjoy the enormous amounts of sympathy and attention they received. A fourth possibility was that the demoniac was indeed possessed, but by a good spirit – ­perhaps even by the Holy Spirit – rather than a devil. This interpretation was put forward with some frequency by the demoniacs themselves, who suggested that they were in fact instruments of God, the bearers of a divine message, usualling calling for repentance and conversion.3 Finally, it happened on rare occasions that observers suspected the apparent demoniac to have submitted voluntarily to the devil, rather than having been occupied forcibly by it. In that case the person was actually a witch, guilty of a heinous spiritual crime. How then did contemporaries judge whether an apparent case of possession was genuine? As historians have long realized, early modern elites were agreed upon a set of four criteria. Three of the four amounted to the same thing: testing whether the reputed demoniac had superhuman powers attributable only to a devil. The first expected power was the ability of the demoniac to “speak in tongues,” that is, to speak and understand a language the demoniac had never learned. Thus people with little education were often tested to see whether they could understand Greek or Latin. The second power was clairvoyance, the ability to know things about distant or secret events. The third was extraordinary strength, that is, strength beyond what was considered physically possible for the person being tested. If an adolescent girl, for example, manifested a strength expected only of a burly adult male, she satisfied this criterion. Other physiological symptoms could prove genuine possession as well if they were equally unnatural. Finally, demoniacs were expected to express horror and revulsion at sacred things: for Protestants chiefly the words of the Bible; for Catholics the consecrated host, holy water, the agnus dei, and other objects. This last criterion was believed to offer some of the clearest proofs of possession, for example, alternating holy water and ordinary water to see whether the demoniac reacted only to the first. 2 D.P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1981), 11–2. 3 Walker, Unclean Spirits, esp. 17, 21–2, 29, 54, 58, 77; H.C. Erik Midelfort, “The Devil and the German People: Reflections on the Popularity of Demon Possession in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in Religion & Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Steven Ozment (Kirksville, 1989), 99–119.

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Historians disagree in their interpretations of such testing. Some see it as having a systematic or even proto-scientific character. Erik Midelfort, for example, notes that such tests involved the collection of empirical data and the keeping of individual case histories. In their use of such methods, Midelfort argues, clerics were remarkably “ahead” of medical doctors.4 Similarly, Cecile Ernst credits exorcists with having written the first extensive psychiatric case studies.5 In an intruiging parallel, Michael MacDonald has found that in England, healers who drew upon astral magic for their diagnoses and cures of the sick tended to work more systematically and keep more careful records than strict Galenists.6 Other historians, by contrast, emphasize how such tests yielded results that reflected the interests and preconceptions of the testers. D.P. Walker, for example, has shown how Catholic priests in France used tests for possession as vehicles of confessional polemics. When a French demoniac showed horror and revulsion at a relic, priests trumpeted this reaction as proof that, contrary to the assertions of Huguenots, a sacred power really did inhere in the relic. In this way, priests used demoniacs to sway public opinion and convert wavering Protestants back to Catholicism.7 Their pious enthusiasm inclined them to accept uncritically the genuineness of a possession. Similarly, Robert Mandrou has spied a conflict in France between credulous Catholic clerics and sceptical medical doctors, with the latter group tending as much as possible to seek natural causes for the behavior of reputed demoniacs. In so doing, doctors were expanding the boundaries of their own competence.8 Piety, however, did not necessarily lead to credulity; it could equally prejudice the results of tests for possession in the direction of disbelief and skepticism. Such was obviously the case for those Anglican ministers who believed that by the sixteenth century the “age of miracles” had long past.9 More surprisingly, the same assertion holds also for the representatives of certain movements or tendencies within Catholicism, or so, at least, Alison Weber has argued in regard to the Spanish

4 Midelfort, “Sin, Melancholy, Obsession,” 124, 135. 5 Cecile Ernst, Teufelaustreibungen. Die Praxis der katholischen Kirche im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Bern, 1972), 8, 129–33. 6 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 28–30, 163–64. 7 Walker, Unclean Spirits, esp. 4. 8 Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au xviie siècle. Une analyse de psychologie historique (Paris, 1980), 153–312. 9 Walker, Unclean Spirits, 61–73; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), 484–86.

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theologian Diego Pérez de Valdivia, and Fernando Cervantes has claimed the same for officials of the Inquisition in Mexico.10 Whichever of these interpretations contains more truth, they are all problematic in suggesting that only a small elite group was involved in evaluating and labeling the possessed. Without exception, they portray clerics as playing the lead role in this social drama, with doctors their only serious rivals. Mandrou concedes an important role to French magistrates beginning only in the second half of the seventeenth century; other historians, concerned with the earlier period, attribute no important role to them at all. More seriously, non-elites appear in their accounts purely as spectators, in Walker’s vision the passive objects of propagandistic manipulation. Communities seem ready to accept whatever determination the learned experts make. Even the possessed abandon their own assertions of a “good” possession when taught better by their superiors. What follows is a narrative that does not conform at all to this social dynamic. It concerns a pair of apparent demoniacs, Mayken Huberts and Clara ­Gelaudens, who lived in the Dutch city of Utrecht. Their behavior in 1603 prompted a vehement dispute over the genuineness of their purported possessions, and of other demoniacs’ possessions as well. Over the course of this ­dispute, large and varied segments of Utrecht’s population weighed in with opinions and emotions. Catholics and Calvinists, neighbors, deacons, magistrates, the provincial estates, and crowds of Utrechters all became involved – not to mention the possessed themselves, who stubbornly defended their views. The ­result was a complex interaction in which groups from diverse social strata struggled to influence one another, each claiming to understand the phenomenon of possession better than the others. Ultimately, then, the following narrative reveals less about demonic possession per se than about the nature of public discourse in an early modern city. To be sure, such isolated microhistories have limited value in the quest to determine what was normal in early modern European society. Nevertheless, by revealing realities hitherto unrecognized, however limited in time or place, they can offer a crucial corrective to historians’ generalizations. What this microhistory suggests is, first, the prominent role of non-elites – especially relatives and neighbors of the possessed – in interpreting and labeling abnormal behavior. This point was made over a decade ago by Michael MacDonald 10

Alison Weber, “Between ecstasy and exorcism: religious negotiation in sixteenth-century Spain,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 221–34; Fernando Cervantes, “The Devils of Querétaro: Scepticism and Credulity in Late Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” Past and Present 130 (1991): 51–69.

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in his study of insanity in England; that it applies also to demonic possession has not previously been recognized. This point suggests in turn a broader one: under certain circumstances non-elites could wield considerable cultural authority. In particular, when a community’s elites were divided or uncertain, as they were about possession, a terrain opened up in which diverse segments of the community, including women and the poor, could maneuver effectively for influence. They wielded this influence by shaping what one might call, with certain caveats, “public opinion.” Finally, the course of the Utrecht dispute suggests that this public opinion could sometimes be a potent force, demanding a response from elites and circumscribing the courses of action available to them. Historians have long recognized the power of such opinion to force action upon the authorities in exceptional situations, such as grain riots and tax rebellions; they have been slower, however, in recognizing discursive conflict as an ongoing part of social life in the early modern period.

…

Although it climaxed in 1603, the dispute in Utrecht about demonic possession went back at least to 1595. In that year an anonymous pamphlet appeared from the press of Salomon de Roy, a Utrecht publisher, entitled Short and true account of the wonderous attack and deliverance of David Wardavoir, velour-maker, [which] occured in Utrecht, put into verse for the consolation of all persons being assailed.11 This pamphlet told the story of a poor man who successfully fought off a series of demonic attacks through his firm faith in Jesus Christ. Its author compared the tormented David to two Old Testament figures: “Like Job did he patiently suffer/ And like David against the hellish Goliath come into the field/ defeated the same with God’s Word and fiery prayers.” Each stanza of the verse narrative ended with a moral printed in Roman letters to make it stand out: “Through a firm faith all Satan’s tricks are dispelled,” says one; “The devil is always defeated through God’s Word,” says another; “Man can accomplish nothing without God’s grace,” a third. Satan threatens David with death, tempts him with wealth and power, pulls all his hair out, invites him to kill himself, even takes the form of Christ and tries to mislead him. But like the good “Christian knight” that he is, David fights off Satan with “the shield of faith” and “the sword of the spirit,” accepting nothing and refusing to worship the Evil One. The only aid David receives in this battle is from his “brothers” 11

Cort ende warachtich verhael vande wonderlicke aenvechtinge en[de] verlossinge van David Wardavoir, Trijp-wercker/ geschiet binnen Utrecht. In dichte gestelt tot vertroostinghe van alle aengevochte personen (Utrecht, 1595).

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in faith, who read Scripture to him day and night. When the battle is over and David has won, these brothers sing psalms of praise to God, and the author of the pamphlet calls upon his readers to reform their lives and abandon Satan. As its preface makes explicit, this pamphlet was a piece of Reformed polemics with two chief purposes. One was to refute the claims being made by Dutch Catholics that priestly exorcism had actually cured David. According to the author, David’s case had become known far and wide; Catholics in Amsterdam were even singing songs about it, and their mouths had to be stopped. The second purpose was to present an efficacious Reformed alternative to Catholic exorcisms. David, says the author, should serve “as a mirror and example, [for] he was delivered not through conjurations, as is the usage among the exorcists, but by God’s grace through a constant faith.” This was a controversial message in the context of Utrecht’s religious scene, for like the rest of the Dutch Republic, Utrecht was a community divided in its beliefs. To be sure, the Republic was officially a Reformed nation and had been so since the Revolt against Spain. Nevertheless, its inhabitants included Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, and a host of sectarians as well as Calvinists. They also included a great many people with no strong ecclesiastic affiliation at all. This extreme religious pluralism distinguished the Republic from the rest of western Europe.12 Although it never led to violent conflict, it did make for a lively competition among the churches, for recruits and for legitimacy. This competition had a direct impact on cases of demonic possession in the Netherlands, just as it did in France and England. In France, Catholics staged elaborate exorcisms before great crowds to advertise the power of their priesthood.13 In the Republic, as in England, elaborate public exorcisms were not possible since Catholic worship was formally outlawed and had to be conducted behind a veil of privacy. Nevertheless, Catholic exorcists were active in a host of

12

A. Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge, 1991), 231–318; H.A. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid. Een verhandeling over de verhouding van kerk en staat in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden en de vrijheid van meningsuiting in zake godsdienst, drukpers en onderwijs, gedurende de 17e eeuw (Groningen, 1972); Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, ed., Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiende eeuw tot heden (Hilversum, 1989), 9–129; Heinz Schilling, “Religion und Gesellschaft in der Calvinistischen Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande. ‘Öffentlichkeitskirche’ und Säkularisation; Ehe und Hebammenwesen; Presbyterien und politische Partizipation,” in Kirche und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in deutschen und niederländischen Städten der werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Franz Petri (Cologne, 1980), 197–250; S.B.J. Zilverberg, Dissidenten in de Gouden Eeuw. Geloof en geweten in de Republiek (Weesp, 1985). 13 Walker, Unclean Spirits, 19–42, 75–7; Ernst, Teufelaustreibungen, 32–80, 85–113.

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locales, including Utrecht and its surrounding countryside.14 In this context, cases of possession inevitably became laden with confessional polemics; they became occasions for the various churches to prove the unique blessings and powers bestowed upon them by God. Polemics aside, however, Dutch Protestants often suffered from a gnawing uncertainty about the efficacy of their own Protestant treatments of possession. For this reason too, the story of David Wardavoir carried a pointed, controversial message. As Keith Thomas has suggested, Protestant churches of ­every cast put their members in a difficult bind: on the one hand, none of them denied the possibility of demonic possession; on the other, they all refused to offer their members the strong counter-magic that the Catholic Church offered people for use against possession and witchcraft. Protestant ministers instead treated the possessed through a regimen of fasting and prayer. At the same time, the ministers acknowledged that this regimen had no automatic efficacy. “A clergyman,” Thomas notes, “could no longer command a spirit to depart; he could only entreat God to show his mercy by taking the devil away.”15 This acknowledgement of clerical impotence flowed directly from fundamental tenets of Protestantism, yet clearly it left popular demand unsatisfied. In England, Thomas shows, many members of the established Anglican church had recourse to soothsayers and white witches when suffering from an affliction or difficulty. That Dutch Calvinists did the same is reflected in the records of Amsterdam, which show that the Reformed consistory disciplined ninetyone church members for this offense between 1578 and 1700.16 On occasion, when confronted by an obdurate demon, Dutch Calvinists even had recourse to Catholic priests. In 1603, for example, Utrecht’s magistrates removed a possessed girl from the municipal orphanage and sent her to a convent in the city. What was this but a tacit admission by a Protestant authority “that the Catholics could cure people of this sort” better than their own ministers?17 A similar occurrence took place in Doesburg in the latter half of the seventeenth

14

hua, osa 73, vol. 1, fo. 122; hua, SA ii 2236, fo. 23v (21 Feb 1607); H.L. Ph. Leeuwenberg, “Tussen pastoor en predikant. Een inquisitieproces tegen een plattelandspastoor in het Sticht 1573–1574,” in Utrechters entre-deux. Stad en Sticht in de eeuw van de reformatie, 1520–1620, ed. H. ten Boom et al. (Delft, 1992), 151, 162 ff. 15 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 479. 16 Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur. De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam, 1578–1700 (Hilversum, 1990), 137, 205–27. 17 R. Fruin, ed., Uittreksel uit Francisci Dusseldorpii Annales 1566–1616 (Werken uitgegeven door het Historisch Genootschap, ser. 3, vol. 1) (The Hague, 1893), 226.

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c­ entury: a Calvinist couple sent their daughter to a convent after she claimed to be able to see and convey messages from the wandering spirits of the dead.18 Confessional polemics and Protestant uncertainties shaped the climate of opinion about demonic possession throughout the Dutch Republic. In Utrecht, however, a unique factor exacerbated Protestant uncertainties and created an explosive situation – the presence from 1599 of a Reformed minister named J­ohannes Bergerus. Claiming to see devils active all around him, Bergerus heightened Utrechters’ fears of demonic activity. At the same time he presented himself as the answer to Protestant uncertainties, proclaiming his own immense powers to cure the possessed. So central a role did he play in what follows that a few words are necessary about his life and character. Originally from Bavaria, Johannes Mauritius Bergerus had been a Franciscan monk and a Lutheran pastor before becoming a Reformed minister.19 Before coming to Utrecht, he had ministered to a series of small congregations in the Dutch province of Groningen. Each of these posts he had lost by committing some egregious impropriety: womanizing, lying, neglecting his duties, using abusive language, disobeying his classis (the regional organ of church government, equivalent to the Scottish presbytery). Aggravating his offenses, Bergerus also had a blind faith that he could get away with anything. His last post in Groningen he simply abandoned, writing scurrilous verses about members of the congregation on the walls of the pastor’s house before departing in the middle of the night. Eventually the Groningen provincial synod disciplined and barred him from the ministry. Not one to give up, however, Bergerus then left the north for Zutphen, in Gelderland, where he convinced a minister to write him a misleading attestation. With it he set out in search of a new post.20 Utrecht’s authorities knew that Bergerus’s attestation was faulty. They also received a full description of Bergerus’s earlier behavior from the president of the Groningen synod. That they appointed him anyway reveals much about the state of Utrecht’s Reformed church. Since the beginning of Utrecht’s Reformation in the 1570s, Calvinist reformers had faced stiff opposition from a group of people known as Libertines. These Libertines were not members of a rival denomination but claimed to be Reformed Protestants. Nevertheless, like the 18 19 20

Willem Frijhoff, “Beeldvorming over toverij in oostelijk Gelderland, zestiende tot twintigste eeuw,” in Nederland betoverd. Toverij en hekserij van de veertiende tot in de twintigste eeuw, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Willem Frijhoff (Amsterdam, 1987), 241. J.P. van Dooren, “Kerkelijke toestanden in de provincie Utrecht omstreeks 1600,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis N.S. 49 (1969): 186 n. 1. hua, osa 73, vol. 1, fos. 8–9, 21–6; J. Reitsma and S.D. van Veen, eds., Acta der provinciale en particuliere synoden, gehouden in de noordelijke Nederlanden gedurende de jaren 1572–1620, 6 vols. (Groningen, 1892–97), 1:275–76, 286, 290, 4:79, 86–7, 91.

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so-called Libertines of Geneva, they opposed the use of ecclesiastic discipline to enforce Calvinist norms of morality and orthodoxy. Such Libertines could be found throughout the Netherlands, but nowhere did they have more power than in Utrecht. In the 1590s they dominated the city completely.21 Ensconced in both the city council and the Reformed consistory, they appointed Bergerus despite his known record. Utrecht’s Calvinists protested the appointment vehemently. Led by the deacons and sextons, they held meetings, submitted remonstrances, and mobilized their brethren in other cities to bring pressure to bear on Utrecht’s rulers. All their efforts, however, had no effect. In his new post, Bergerus not only continued his prior pattern of scandalous behavior; he added a new element to it (or at least one not mentioned in connection to his earlier career): the exorcizing of the possessed. As far away as Amsterdam and Delft, Calvinists became aware of this and were horrified. In 1602 a minister in Amsterdam heard from a Utrecht friend that Bergerus was busy healing the possessed and boasting of his successes from the pulpit. “He [Bergerus] prays, he reads, he rails at the devil to the point that he sweats: ‘den schelm die moest heraus’,” Bergerus shouts (the author capturing the authentic Germanism of the man from Bavaria). Bergerus boasts that “he has punched the devil in the maw with his fist.”22 The annals of Franciscus Dusseldorp, a Catholic priest then living in Utrecht, offer additional information. Dusseldorp exultingly recounts Bergerus’s unsuccessful attempts to exorcize one woman. It “seemed to persons standing near as if he [Bergerus] cast out a devil, which he removed like tadpoles coming out from the woman’s mouth, yet to no effect, for the next day that woman was tortured by the demon more severely than ... ever.” After a second unsuccessful attempt, the priest recounts, Bergerus tried a different approach. In November 1602 some peasants captured a wolf and brought it to the provincial estates to claim a bounty. Bergerus convinced the estates to let him have the heart and right eye of the wolf to use “as a remedy for people possessed by the devil, as he himself said.” Obviously, Dusseldorp was a hostile witness, and the details of his description of Bergerus’s exorcisms cannot be confirmed. Nevertheless, at no point do other sources contradict Dusseldorp’s account of the dispute, and on many points they accord with the latter perfectly. Taken together, the surviving documents make two things clear: first, that Bergerus was not using the exorcism rite of the Catholic Church, an elaborate ritual that included the invocation of 21 22

Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578– 1620 (Oxford, 1995). H.Q. Janssen and J.J. van Toorenenbergen, eds., Brieven uit onderscheidene Kerkelijke ­Archieven, wmv series iii, vol. iv (Utrecht, 1880), 147.

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saints, the sprinkling of holy water, the lighting of candles, and the wearing by the demoniac of a priestly vestment, the stole; neither was Bergerus confining himself to fasting and prayer. In fact, Bergerus’s attempts at exorcisms constituted just one part of a larger “medical” practice of sorts, one that relied heavily on what the deacons of the Reformed church denounced as “godless and superstitious remedies ... having no basis in nature or reason but much more in magic.”23 One such remedy, for bewitchment, ran as follows: “Take thricethree teeth of a dead-man’s head, pulverize them and make a fumigation from them, and vomit; take the witch’s excrement and put it in one of your shoes and put it [i.e. that shoe] on the other, wrong foot.” When eventually Bergerus was disciplined and removed from office, he himself admitted to the main part of this prescription.24 Other remedies ascribed to Bergerus (though denied by him) included a sort of paralysis-inducing poison and burying some herbs in the earth to cure epilepsy – a clear instance of sympathetic magic. Anathema to Utrecht’s Calvinists, scorned even by his fellow Libertines, one may surmise that Bergerus was using magic to shore up his very precarious status. His boasted expertise at curing the bewitched and the possessed gave him a unique power and special following among the Reformed. He presented an alternative, both to the Reformed treatments whose efficacy was so uncertain and to the Catholic rituals that were so clearly unorthodox.25 To the Catholic priest who followed his doings, though, Bergerus’s practices were simply “ludicrous” and only highlighted the very weakness of the Protestant side that Bergerus was attempting to counteract. The enthusiasm of many Protestants for Bergerus’s exorcisms was an implicit admission that they recognized the power of casting out demons as a mark of the true church. Their sorrow, when Bergerus failed, openly showed “how great a sign they themselves [the Reformed] considered ... the power of the church against demons ... however 23 24 25

hua, KR 2, 16 Jan 1605. hua, KR 2, 23 Jan, 13 Feb 1605. In this respect a certain parallel exists between the activities of Bergerus and those in England of John Darrell, a Puritan minister who performed numerous widely-publicized exorcisms in the 1590s. Not that Darrell used such colorful and controversial means of dispossession as Bergerus; for the most part he confined himself to fasting and prayer. Nevertheless, Darrell’s activities, like those of Bergerus, were meant to provide an efficacious Protestant alternative to Catholic exorcisms. Indeed, the activities of Darrell and a few other Puritan ministers offered the only ecclesiastic alternative to Catholic exorcism available in England since the Anglican episcopacy refused to sanction any form of dispossession at all. In this context, Darrell’s claim to cast out demons may also have been an attempt to shore up the status and authority of the Puritan party, which had recently suffered an important defeat within Church of England politics. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 483–84; see also Walker, Unclean Spirits, 52–73.

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much they strove to make light of it in favor of the preaching of the word.”26 Once the two churches were competing on the same ground, there would be no question that the magic of the Catholic Church was stronger. Bergerus’s fellow ministers understood this point. Not only did they regard Bergerus’s activities as a scandal, bringing Utrecht’s church into disrepute; they also saw such activities as undermining their attempts to wean their flock away from a reliance on magic. Bergerus undermined their efforts to associate magic with Catholicism and thus to stake out for their own church a religious high ground, an enlightened dependence upon God’s grace alone. Bergerus’s colleagues responded to this quandary not only by denouncing Bergerus’s activities, but by calling into question the genuineness of the possessions he was claiming to cure. Utrecht’s senior and most influential minister, Johannes Gerobulus, denounced both the possessed and their exorcizers from the pulpit as frauds. Three other ministers adopted an equally skeptical attitude. Not that they denied the reality of possession altogether: in the same year one woman appeared on the books of the deaconry as receiving alms because she was “being assaulted by Satan.”27 Nevertheless, Bergerus’s activities clearly made his colleagues in Utrecht more outspokenly skeptical about possession than they would have been otherwise.28 Into this highly-charged atmosphere entered our two women, Clara and Mayken, whose claims to demonic possession brought the wider dispute to a head in the autumn of 1603.29 Clara and Mayken were sisters-in-law, married to brothers who earned a precarious living as linen weavers; the two couples lived together in the poorest neighborhood of the city. Like so many other cases of possession previously studied, those of Clara and Mayken display interesting psychological dimensions. Both women showed signs of depression: Mayken admitted a temptation to commit suicide, and she and Clara both thought they heard voices telling them to kill their children. (It is interesting to note that both women dated the beginning of their affliction to when they were pregnant.) Both women, who attended Reformed sermons on a regular basis, 26 27 28

29

Fruin, ed., Dusseldorpii Annales, 308. hua, SA ii 1315, 1603/04. Unfortunately, the state of research makes it impossible to compare Utrecht’s ministers in this regard to those of other Dutch cities. For one minister’s impression of his colleagues, see G.J. Stronks, “De betekenis van De betoverde weereld van Balthasar Bekker,” in Nederland betoverd, ed. Gijswijt-Hofstra and Frijhoff, 208–09. The Calvinist ministers of Geneva, at least, as well as English Puritan ministers, accepted a great many possession cases as genuine. E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, 1976), 59–60; Walker, Unclean Spirits, 52–73; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 483–87. Except where noted, the following account is based on hua, SA ii 2244, packet #33.

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also seem to have been rebelling unconsciously against their own piety. Clara, for instance, was sitting at home singing a psalm with her husband when “her tongue was pulled back down her throat by the enemy” so that she could not speak; instead she started to laugh and puff up her cheeks. When a stranger came to the door of Mayken’s house one winter evening, Mayken greeted him saying “friend, God give you and all Christian people who have been washed in the blood of Christ a good evening.” When Mayken and her husband realized (from the red face, leather clothes and pout as they explained later to the city court) that the stranger must have been a devil, the couple fell immediately to prayer. Even so, Mayken would later complain that she had been unable to “say her prayers” for five years. Clara and Mayken gained widespread recognition as genuine demoniacs long before Utrecht’s clergy or magistrates became involved in the case. Clara herself, it seems, was the first to suggest that their ailments had a demonic origin. Mayken’s husband, Henrick Toenisz van Weerden, recounted in 1603 how his wife had first “gotten the passion” six years before, but that he had always thought his wife had simply had “a falling sickness” (i.e., epilepsy). In 1602, however, his wife was reading aloud a work of religious edification to Clara when the latter interrupted her, saying “if you ... had had such faith, my comrade would not have had any power over you, and would not have been in you for so long; he has now been in you for five whole years.” Family and neighbors soon adopted Clara’s diagnosis, defending it with an ardent conviction when questioned later by the authorities. A lodger with the family, for example, swore to the city sheriff that he had seen both sisters lying stiff, without breathing, for five and more hours in a row. In his own presence and that of three neighbors, he said, Clara one time had lain on the ground “as stiff as a piece of wood and spun around like a whetstone.” He could not conceive of an explanation, he said, other than demonic possession. Indeed, he had once heard the devil even speak to him directly through the mouth of Clara, taunting him, saying “bird, go whither you will, I’m going get you before you reach home, you’re going to shit in your pants.” Recognition as genuine demoniacs brought the women sympathy and aid: as of October 1603 their families were receiving weekly alms from the municipality. Though the amount of these alms is not noted in the surviving sources, it was probably comparable to the fifteen stuivers per week received by another female demoniac from Utrecht’s Reformed deaconry – a substantial amount, certainly equal to whatever a weaver’s wife might have contributed to the family budget had she been fit to work.30 Such recognition, however, also brought fear. Complaints reached the magistrates that the women were roaming the 30

hua, SA ii 1315, 1603/04.

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streets terrifying people, including pregnant women, who, it was said, might miscarry as a result. To satisfy public demand, the magistrates ordered Clara and Mayken’s husbands to keep them indoors, on pain of forfeiting their alms. About a week later minister Gerobulus preached his sermon against the false possessed. This challenge elicited a violent response from the two women. Immediately after the sermon they ran to the minister’s house, dashing their heads and hurling their whole bodies against its door. Later they returned several times to repeat the act, saying they were ordered to do so by a great man. They also went to the Stadsplaats, the focus of civic activity in Utrecht located in front of city hall; there they made a great ruckus, shouting especially at two other sceptics, Jonker Johan van Zuylen, the city sheriff, and minister ­Johannes Lindenius. Van Zuylen responded by locking up the women in jail. This act, however, only provided the women with an excellent public forum, for the jail was part of city hall and through its windows the two women could be heard laughing and barking and singing. Crowds formed in front of the jail for three days in a row. Alarmed, the magistrates decided to put the women in the jails’ torture chamber, where presumably they would not be heard. According to Dusseldorp, the women hereupon made a ferocious, supernatural wailing that terrified the magistrates so much that they quietly released the women.31 An account by the sheriff merely notes the release, offering no explanation for it. Consciously or not, Clara and Mayken had aggressively manipulated public opinion, creating a wave of support – and fear – strong enough to overwhelm the ministers’ skepticism. With the skeptics on the defensive, their husbands now filed an extraordinary petition with the municipal court. In this petition they accused minister Lindenius of blasphemy and slander for having denied the reality of their wives’ possessions. By calling them frauds, they claimed, Lindenius had damaged the honor and reputation of their wives. The husbands asked the court to order Lindenius to stop his pronouncements and to assess him the hefty fine of twenty-five gold reals if he failed to do so. They further asked the court to appoint a committee to investigate the entire matter. The husbands wanted “the truth of their wives’ grievous passions [passien] discovered, and those who grievously slander us properly punished.” This action for slander was unique. On the one hand, early modern historians have noted many cases in which persons accused of witchcraft sued their accusers for defamation of character. This was one of the few effective defenses against such an accusation, and its use is documented in England, 31

Fruin, ed., Dusseldorpii Annales, 326.

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New E ­ ngland, Scandinavia, and Spain as well as the Netherlands.32 It is unheard-of, by contrast, for the supposed victims of occult forces to bring a defamation suit, as they do here, against the skeptics – against those who denied the reality of their bewitchment or possession. The suit was doubly bold for being brought by poor lay folk against a minister who would ordinarily be assumed to have a far deeper understanding than they of matters demonic. To make their suit all the more effective, the husbands rallied the support of their neighbors. No fewer than eleven male neighbors signed at the bottom of the husbands’ petition, testifying to its accuracy and supporting it. In the face of such pressure, the city council convened. Granting the husbands’ request, it authorized the court to investigate the matter carefully but to use “all civility and politeness.” One aspect of the petition the court completely ignored – a request by the husbands that minister Bergerus assist the court in its investigation. Though this heavy-handed maneuver failed, one can still appreciate the husbands’ cunning in trying to make sure that the court’s technical expert be someone who believed firmly in possession. Indeed, as the husbands knew, Bergerus was an enthusiastic supporter of their suit. He himself had tried to cure the women using his wolf’s eye, a tomcat’s heart, and other magical objects. When the husbands filed their suit, it was accompanied by a statement from Bergerus that read: “I, Berger van Ebersbergh, testify, as minister of God’s Word in this city of Utrecht, that with great effort I have visited and comforted the above-named persons in their afflictions multiple times, both day and night; and [I] have only been able to conclude that the temptations and torments they suffer are from the Evil Spirit. Those who say otherwise must prove such with good argument.” Thus like the plaintiffs themselves, Bergerus sought to place the burden of proof squarely on the sceptics. In so doing, he threw down the gauntlet to his fellow ministers. In one sense this alliance between the possessed women and Bergerus is hardly surprising: after all, both wanted to convince magistrates and public 32 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 446; Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, 45–6, 63, 79–80, 91; Hans de Waardt, “In de grond een familiezaak. Veten en toverij in Nijkerk in 1550,” in Nederland betoverd, ed. Gijswijt-Hofstra and Frijhoff, 38; E. William Monter, “Scandinavian Witchcraft in Anglo-American Perspective,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford, 1990), 429; Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft & the Spanish Inquisition (1609–1614) (Reno, Nevada, 1980), 220; Hans de Waardt, “Vervolging of verweer. Mogelijke procedures na een beschuldiging van toverij in het gewest Holland voor het jaar 1800,” in ibid., 61, 67; Willem de Blécourt, Termen van toverij. De veranderde betekenis van toverij in Noordoost-Nederland tussen de 16de en 20ste eeuw (Nijmegen, 1990), 75–80.

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that the possession was genuine. From a different perspective, however, the alliance seems quite remarkable since it brought together some devout lay people – people who were oppressed, even, by their piety – with a minister notorious for his immorality. Bergerus was a “Libertine” in the worst sense of the term: not just an opponent of ecclesiastic discipline, but a licentious flouter of public norms. Perhaps Bergerus encouraged people to see demonic activity around them, not only through his utterances and magical practices but through his very presence in the ministry. To the pious and strictly orthodox, he may subconsciously have represented the evil within – within Utrecht’s church but also within themselves. Mayken, in fact, claimed to have seen the devil three times in her parish church, once in the very form of Bergerus! So the court took testimony from Bergerus but did not use him as its chief expert. Instead it requested three other ministers, among them the sceptic Lindenius, to visit Mayken at her home and examine her. The ministers relied on one of the standard tests for possession, the ability to speak in tongues. Lindenius spoke in Latin to a colleague, who then asked Mayken to translate. She refused to, although she asserted that she knew what had been said. Shifting immediately to the offensive, Mayken then accused Lindenius of being a Mennonite. This she supposedly knew through clairvoyance since she denied ever attending a Mennonite gathering. Understandably, the ministers rejected the assertion. Thus, from their perspective Mayken had failed the test. Indeed, the ministers reported to the city court that they had found evidence of fraud: just before Mayken went into her “passion,” they saw her husband wink and heard him mumble something to her. To the ministers, this behavior constituted proof positive that the couple was conspiring to fool everyone. From start to finish the magistrates showed great uncertainty about how to diagnose or handle the women. They had jailed Mayken and Clara, only to release them; they had ordered the court to investigate, but to do so with civility and politeness. The estates had even given Bergerus his wolf parts. What the magistrates really wanted, however, was for the husbands of the demoniacs to keep their wives indoors where they would cease to “scandalize” their neighbors. Thus order would be restored and the magistrates would have satisfied public demand. Unfortunately, the husbands proved incapable or unwilling to do so. On this score too the magistrates showed great uncertainty. For a time they jailed Mayken’s husband, deeming him culpable for not keeping her indoors; then they released him, apparently convinced by his expressions of helplessness and terror. Now, having heard the ministers’ testimony, the court summoned Mayken and examined her itself. The questions that the court put to Mayken were probably drafted for its use by one of Utrecht’s skeptical ministers. They came headed by a ­denunciation

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of Mayken and Clara for having blasphemed against God, profaned his holy ministry, and fooled “many pious simple folk, who out of kindness and innocence have contributed to [their deceit].” By implication, the questions raised three possibilities: that Mayken was truly possessed, that she was faking, or that she was a witch. To distinguish between the first two, the court asked Mayken whether she was ever clairvoyant or could speak in tongues. It also sought to ascertain whether anyone besides Satan had taught her to behave and speak as she did “in her passion (as they say).” The parenthetical phrase shows Utrecht’s elites uncomfortably adopting the popular terminology for Mayken’s affliction. Although the court did not call in a doctor to examine her, it asked at length about Mayken’s physical state. It expected her, if she was not a fraud, to show disturbed eating and sleeping patterns, among other symptoms. Finally, eight questions explored the possibility that Mayken was a witch. Not only did the court ask whether she had concluded any contracts with the devil; it also asked “whether Satan had presented or shown to her any licentiousness in word or deed, or any appearance of physical presence or co-mingling.” This question is notable, given how rarely references to sex with the devil appear in Dutch witchcraft trials. Whoever drafted the court’s questions suspected Mayken of being evil. Unfortunately, Mayken’s answers did not resolve the magistrates’ doubts any which way. At this point, the magistrates questioned Mayken’s husband about his winking and mumbling, which he denied. This proved the turning point. After the ministers who had examined Mayken confirmed their observation of the wink, the court became distinctly hostile towards the plaintiffs and at one point threatened Mayken’s husband with torture to elicit a confession from him. Clearly it was leaning toward a judgement of fraud. Nevertheless, in the end the magistrates convicted no one. Instead, they ordered the husbands once again to keep their wives indoors and threatened to put the women in the madhouse if they were found once more on the street. As the verdict suggests, madness too was a possible diagnosis – or, to put it more accurately, treating the women as mad was another possible manner of handling them. And so the case ended. What happened later to Mayken and Clara we do not know, for they are not mentioned again in any surviving source.

…

What, then, does this tale tell us? First of all, that demonic possession was a highly-charged, emotional issue about which many different social groups – not just the elites – had opinions and concerns. Inquiries by magistrates and tests applied by experts to determine the genuineness of a possession were

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not conducted in a social vacuum. They were part of a struggle to shape public opinion, a struggle in which experts and elites could not take their authority for granted, but rather needed to assert it.33 As previous historians have shown, demonic possession was an issue laden with confessional connotations, and yet official church dogmas offered few fixed reference points concerning it. Protestant and Catholic leaders both believed in the possibility of possession; in a particular case, though, either could be believers or skeptics, a situation that encouraged uncertainty and divisions. The dispute in Utrecht highlights the social consequences: the failure of Utrecht’s to promulgate a uniform, official credo opened up a terrain in which diverse segments of the urban community were able to maneuver for influence over others. Public opinion became a potent force, one that the magistrates felt compelled to respond to, for whoever shaped it had real power. Not only do our sources reflect this struggle to shape public opinion; they themselves were written as instruments of its conduct. This struggle was so consuming that it seems to have determined Utrechters’ behavior and judgements more than any other factor. In other words, in the absence of firm dogmatic anchors, the positions people took on demonic possession seem to have depended primarily upon how they wished to position themselves vis-a-vis others in the community. That held most obviously for the rival religious leaders – Bergerus, his colleagues, and their Catholic counterparts. The same observation holds also for Mayken and Clara. Through their possession, the two sisters-in-law gained an authority not otherwise accorded to women – and poor ones at that. Speaking with the voice of the devil – a male voice – they could directly challenge their own ministers and dramatize the presence of evil within Utrecht’s Reformed church. For their husbands what seems to have mattered most was the honor and reputation of their families. Their standing in the community, as well as the alms they received, depended on those qualities. Meanwhile, to the neighbors the entire episode constituted primarily a “scandal,” that is, a rupture in harmonious social relations caused by the offensive action of an individual (or in this case, of two individuals). Their chief concern was to see the scandal “removed,” which could be accomplished simply by preventing the demoniacs from frightening people. However they were diagnosed, if Mayken and Clara continued to move about freely

33

The only previous study to focus on the interpretation of an apparent possession by nonelites is Anita M. Walker and Edmund H. Dickerman, “‘A Woman under the Influence’: A Case of Alleged Possession in Sixteenth-Century France,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 535–54.

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­behaving like demoniacs, nothing from the neighbors’ perspective would really be resolved. As for the magistrates, the ruling they eventually made was intellectually ambiguous since it left unclear whether they deemed the women lying, mad, or genuinely possessed. Perhaps they were unable to reach a definitive judgement. Ultimately, though, such a judgement concerned the magistrates less than resolving the dispute and bringing to an end a dangerous series of public clashes of opinion. Not that they could fashion unanimity: the term “public opinion” is a convenient shorthand, but at no time was there one universallyaccepted opinion about these possessions.34 What the magistrates could and did do was restore order, reduce the level of tension within the community, and, most importantly, assert their own role as final arbiters of conflict and dispensers of justice.

34

In this respect and others, I am using the term “public opinion” in a looser sense than the one that emerged in the late eighteenth century in association with what Jürgen Habermas has called the “bourgeois public sphere.” See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), esp. 89–102. One of the chief contentions of this essay, however, is that, within urban communities such as Utrecht, such a thing as public opinion did exist and have political force well before the eighteenth century.

Chapter 7

Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe In Amsterdam’s oldest neighborhood, on the corner of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal and the Heintje Hoekssteeg, stands a unique museum. Despite the banner hanging in front, tourists – on foot or in boat – often pass right by it, mistaking it for an ordinary house. Tall and thin, in the manner typical of Dutch residential architecture, the building dates from circa 1629 and was extensively rebuilt in 1661–63, when its owner, a stocking merchant named Jan Hartman, had a figure of a hart set in the front façade and renamed the building after himself. A drawing from around 1805 shows how it looked, with three bays and a neck gable (figure 7.1). Its exposed right flank reveals the unusual depth of the structure, which consists of a canal house plus two “rear houses” facing the alley, all under a single roof and connected internally. Rows of windows indicate five stories; steps lead down to a basement door, while a staircase parallel to the front façade gives access to the main door. Entering, modern visitors to the Amstelkring Museum find themselves in a well-preserved seventeenthcentury merchant’s house. Hartman used the airy front room, with its double tier of windows and high ceiling, to display his wares, the one behind it to keep his books. Following the museum’s suggested route, visitors work their way upward, passing through a series of domestic chambers, among them the Sael (sitting room), a pristine model of neoclassicism and monument to Hartman’s social pretensions. Only when they reach the third floor do they see what inspired a group of prominent Dutch Catholics in 1887 to purchase the building and make it a museum. There they find themselves suddenly in a church. It was named “Our Lord in the Attic” (Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder) in the nineteenth century; before it was simply called the Hart, or the Haantje. Invisible from the street, this place of Roman Catholic worship could accommodate over two hundred congregants. To reach it, worshippers entered a side door facing the alley and then climbed some thirty stairs. Narrow and deep, its main hall occupies almost the entire third floor; large rectangular holes in the fourth and fifth create two sets of galleries (figures 7.2, 7.3). Along the side walls are two pews reserved for promenent men. At one end of the hall stands the main altar, on it a rosewood tabernacle, behind it an altarpiece set in a high baroque

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_009

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FIGURE 7.1 House called “The Hart,” corner of Oudezijds Voorburgwal and Heintje Hoekssteeg, Amsterdam, exterior view. It is the furthest right of the three houses. Detail from J. L. van Beek after C. van Waardt, De Bloei der R.C. Kerk te Amsterdam. Etching, ca. 1805 Courtesy of Stadsarchief Amsterdam

frame rising two stories high. The painting, which dates from circa 1716, is a Baptism of Christ in the Jordan by Jacob de Wit; formerly it hung for only part of the liturgical year, taking turns on display with several other altarpieces. Inside the base of the frame’s left column nestles a small pulpit, built in the late eighteenth century, pivoting out into the left aisle for use. Behind the altar frame is a door to an ancillary chapel; opposite it, on the first gallery level, an organ.1

1 Marco Blokhuis et al., eds., Vroomheid op de Oudezijds: Drie Nicolaaskerken in Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1988), 37–99; Amstelkring Museum – Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder (Amsterdam, 1977); R. Meischke, “De huiskerk ‘Het Hert’ aan de O.Z. Voorburgwal,” Maandblad Amstelodamum 43 (1956): 149–60; P.M. Grijpink, “Kerk van den H. Nicolaas, bijgenaamd het Hert, te Amsterdam,” Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis van het Bisdom Haarlem 31 (1908): 258–86.

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Cross-sectional drawing of The Hart (Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder), with clandestine church beginning on the third floor Courtesy of Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder

The Hart is one of the best preserved examples of what the Dutch call a schuilkerk, or clandestine church. In its day, it had counterparts throughout the northern Netherlands. In Amsterdam alone, Catholics had twenty of these illegal places of worship in 1700 and Mennonites six, while at least four other groups had one each. In Utrecht there were fifteen: eleven Catholic, two

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FIGURE 7.3

167

Clandestine church in The Hart, called “Our Lord in the Attic” (Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder). Modern photograph taken from the main floor Courtesy of Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder

Mennonite, one Lutheran, one Remonstrant. As early as 1620 Haarlem had eleven: seven Catholic, three Mennonite, and one Lutheran.2 In certain towns, 2 Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam, in zijne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen, vorregten, koophandel, gebouwen, kerkenstaat, schoolen, schutterye, gilden en regeeringe, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1760–67), vol. 3, book 3; Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (’s-Gravenhage, 1989), 91–104; see also Ch. 4 above.

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groups perceived as foreigners had splendid places of worship that were not at all clandestine, such as Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, built in 1675, or the eighteenth-century Lutheran church in Middelburg, whose congregation consisted largely of German immigrants.3 Non-Calvinists of native descent, though, worshipped overwhelmingly in schuilkerken. In the Generality Lands – the southern strip of territory captured by the Dutch army that belonged to no one of the seven provinces – the large majority of the population, being Catholic, relied on schuilkerken for services. Historians have long recognized that schuilkerken played a crucial role in the religious life of the Dutch Republic. For political reasons, the Calvinist, or Reformed Church emerged from the Revolt against Spain as the official church of the Republic, with unique powers and privileges.4 Religious dissenters, however, enjoyed a de facto tolerance that made Dutch society religiously the most diverse and pluralistic in seventeenth-century Europe. The schuilkerk was the chief accommodation, or arrangement, whereby dissenters worshipped in what was officially a Calvinist country. Behind closed doors, they operated churches with permanent clergy and regular services, in violation of hundreds of placards; what harrassment they suffered from authorities was sporadic and local, and in any event dropped sharply over time. Also, as scholars have recently emphasized, the secrecy in which these churches operated was never very strict. On the contrary, neighbors and even strangers knew about their existence; indeed, magistrates often had a significant if informal say in the appointment of their pastors. For this reason, a few scholars reject the very use of the term schuilkerk, which, as Sebastien Dudok van Heel points out, goes back only to the nineteenth century, when Catholics, caught up in their emancipation movement, exaggerated the oppression under which their ancestors lived.5 3 Peter van Rooden, Religieuze regimes. Over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland, 1570– 1990 (Amsterdam, 1990), 25. 4 The most recent account in English appears in Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995); the most influential remains Pieter Geyl, The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609 (London, 1958); see also esp. Alastair Duke and Rosemary L. Jones, “Towards a Reformed Polity in Holland, 1572–1578,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 89 (1976): 373–93. 5 For examples of magisterial involvement see Spaans, Haarlem na de reformatie, 92, 96–97. Dudok van Heel proposed to use the term “huiskerk” instead of “schuilkerk,” and some scholars have followed him. Van Eck has championed the continued use of “schuilkerk.” Contrary to his assertion, “huiskerk” was indeed one of many terms contemporaries used in the ­seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with “huiskapel” and “kerkhuis.” S.A.C. Dudok van Heel, “Amsterdamse schuil- of huiskerken?,” Holland 25 (1993): 1–10; Xander van Eck,

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If historians have described the Dutch schuilkerk often enough, though, they have never explained it fully. Like those of other countries, historians of the Netherlands have paid far more attention to theories of religious tolerance than to its practice. They have dissected the arguments offered by major proponents of tolerance, such as Dirck Coornhert and Pieter de la Court, and summarized the statutes and resolutions that set government policy toward the various churches and religious groups. Such intellectual and politico-legal approaches continue to dominate the historiography of religious tolerance in early modern Europe. With their focus on ideas and intentions rather than behavior and actions, they have left much unknown about the concrete arrangements and accommodations that made it possible, in certain communities, for people of conflicting beliefs to live peacefully alongside one another. Whereas scholars like Natalie Davis, Barbara Diefendorf, and Denis Crouzet have offered new insights into religious violence by treating it as a form of patterned behavior enacted on the popular, local level, the historiography of early modern Europe has so far produced few studies that treat tolerance similarly.6 The schuilkerk offers an opportunity to do so. It raises a host of questions about the sensibilities, social interactions, boundaries, and complicities involved in confessional coexistence. If schuilkerken were not genuinely clandestine, why the pretence of secrecy at all? Under what restrictions did they operate, and how were those restrictions set? Why did magistrates so often Kunst, twist en devotie. Goudse schuilkerken 1572–1795 (Delft, 1994), 3–4, 225 n. 8; Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, 29 vols. (1882–1998), 6:1251–2, 7/1:2341. R. Schillemans reviews the question in “Zeventiende-eeuwse altaarstukken in de amsterdamse staties: een inventarisatie,” in Putti en cherubijntjes: Het religieuze werk van Jacob de Wit (1695–1754), ed. Guus van den Hout and Robert Schillemans (Haarlem, 1995), 53–71. 6 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), 152–87; Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth Century Paris (New York, 1991); Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525-vers 1610) (Seyssel, 1990). The most prominent exceptions to the last generalization are Étienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen, 1991); Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia, 1993); Paul Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt: Das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den paritätischen Reichstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl von 1548 bis 1648 (Wiesbaden, 1983); Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg 1529–1819 (Cambridge, 1985); Peter Zschunke, Konfession und Alltag in Oppenheim: Beiträge zur Geschichte von Bevölkerung und Gesellschaft einer gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden, 1984); and, inconsistently, Ole Grell and Bob Scribner, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996).

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condone them, and why did neighbors of other faiths not react violently to their presence? What was the relationship between official (in)action and popular opinion? And why did dissenters settle for such cramped, inconvenient, inglorious places of worship, leaving the position of the official church essentially unchallenged? These questions gain additional urgency when one realizes that the Dutch schuilkerk had thousands of counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Such edifices went by a variety of names: house churches, prayer houses, meeting houses, mass houses, house chapels, oratories, assembly places. Little studied by historians, they could be found in France, Austria, the British Isles, and the Holy Roman Empire. There, as in the Dutch Republic, they served as a mechanism – not the only, but a crucial one – for the accommodation of religious dissent at the local level. Examining them alongside the Dutch schuilkerk offers insight, therefore, into a phenomenon that transcended national boundaries – into a particular way that religious tolerance was constructed and practiced in ­Europe in the era between Reformation and French Revolution.7 As these architectural artefacts attest, one way tolerance worked in that era was through a new distinction between public and private worship. This distinction came, in one sense, to be set literally in stone, embodied in the architecture of buildings. In a more important sense, though, its boundaries were constantly being negotiated. Parties to this process included not just governing authorities and religious dissenters but also neighbors and fellow citizens, to whose opinion both authorities and dissenters were sensitive. Defined chiefly in symbolic and visual terms, the resulting boundaries were fundamentally different from the legal ones distinguishing public from private in the modern world. Examining them sheds new light on the broader distinction, much discussed by scholars, between public and private life in the early modern era. On the one hand, the schuilkerk testifies to an equation of the private sphere with the family home. On the other, it raises questions about the rise postulated by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas of an “authentic, bourgeois” public sphere in the eighteenth century. Ultimately, I shall argue, the early modern distinction between public and private was as much cultural fiction as it was social reality. The schuilkerk and its equivalents were bona fide churches, places where large assemblies took place, not without the knowledge of magistrates and neighbors. Both the religious dissenters who attended their services and the orthodox who tolerated them were engaging in a pretence. Nevertheless, this pretence provided a ­crucial detour, as it were, around one of the chief obstacles to religious p ­ luralism: the 7 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

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central role of religion in defining communal identity. By containing religious dissent within spaces demarcated as private, schuilkerken preserved the monopoly of a community’s official church in the public sphere. By maintaining a semblance of religious unity, they neutralized the threat posed by dissent to the identity and thus to the very integrity of communities.

...

In a Europe divided into competing confessions, the schuilkerk addressed an urgent dilemma: the vital role that religion continued to play in shaping collective identity and social life. However many changes the Reformation and Counter-Reformation brought, they did not end the close intertwining of civic and sacral community that had characterized the late Middle Ages. In large, nuclear villages, parish and commune were often one and the same in terms of membership, territory, and leaders. Physically and symbolically, the parish church, with its surrounding cemetery, usually stood at the center of the village; dances, markets, feasts, and assemblies all typically took place in or in front of them. Time itself marched to the beat of the church, with saints’ days or sabbaths setting the rhythm of work and leisure. The same was true in cities, although there the rhythm could vary among neighborhoods and parishes within the larger whole. As units, though, most cities retained a strong sense of collective responsibility to God. Those of the Holy Roman Empire provide a case in point. As late as 1700, the statutes of most included a wealth of religious and moral injunctions. A typical example is the 1650 constitution of Nördlingen, a Lutheran town; its very first article forbade cursing and blasphemy, urging burghers to “warn, pray for, and admonish one another” not to engage in such, “for the honor of God’s will, for the better appeasement of His righteous and well-deserved wrath, and for the laudable establishment of Christian discipline and civic honor in our city and commune.”8 Most German cities made orthodoxy a prerequisite for full citizenship. Moreover, as Étienne François has found, it was the most autonomous and communal cities that equated civic and sacral life most closely, and as a result were most intolerant.9 This equation manifested itself most clearly in times of real or impending disaster – of war, plague, famine, or political crisis. These were moments of special peril for religious dissenters, who might be blamed either as concrete 8 August Friedrich Schott, Sammlungen zu den deutschen Land- und Stadtrechten, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1772–1773), 1: 204; see also Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate 1648–1871 (Ithaca, 1971), 42. 9 Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen, 11–15; Étienne François, “De l’uniformité à la tolérance: confession et société urbaine en Allemagne, 1650–1800,” Annales e.s.c. 37 (1982): 792.

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agents or as spiritual causes. Popular opinion saw in their opposition to the dominant church an enmity extending to the community and to the entire ­established order which that church embodied spiritually. This made them notoriously vulnerable to accusations of conspiracy and sedition. To avert impending disaster, entire cities turned to fasting and prayer, if Protestant, or mounted elaborate processions, if Catholic. Both viewed such disasters as expressing God’s wrath, which would descend upon any community that tolerated heresy or vice in its midst. The 1656 debates in England’s parliament about the Quaker James Naylor are typical in their language, drawn from the Old Testament, and their reasoning: the only way to “divert the judgement from the nation,” pronounced horrified MPs, was to crush the heresy and thus “vindicate the honour of God.”10 Neither Reformation, nor time, nor the fragmentation of English Protestantism had eradicated the legislators’ sense of belonging to a corpus Christianum. In this sense, people continued to view their salus – their welfare, both spiritual and material – as a collective affair, to be won or lost by all together. So long as this mentality prevailed, toleration could only be grudging. It was a mentality that construed all religious deviance (however defined) as undermining the integrity of the entire community and its standing before God. Calvinists quoted frequently and with intense feeling the words of the Apostle Paul: “Do not share in another man’s sins” (1 Timothy 5:22). In their view, and equally that of their rivals, to admit a heretic to one’s company was to share in the heretic’s sin. One of the most widely used religious metaphors of the early modern era likened evil to a contagious disease infecting the entire body social in which it resided. The usual remedy: cut off the infected part. Thus in the 1560s, Catholic crowds in Paris needed no specific provocation to attack suspected Huguenots; their very presence was viewed as a mortal threat to the city.11 Likewise, in the course of the Dutch Revolt against Spain, Protestant troops claimed repeatedly that military victory hinged upon the eradication of Catholicism. Justifying a rampage in Delft, one group of soldiers argued that “Prince [William of Orange] could not be victorious as long as [Catholic priests] persisted with their idolatry in the town.”12 10 11

12

Blair Worden, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate,” in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W.J. Sheils (Oxford, 1984), 224. Barbara Diefendorf, “Prologue to a Massacre: Popular Unrest in Paris, 1557–1572,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 1071–2. On the concept of the “body social,” see the classic article by Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,” Past and Present 90 (1981): 40–70. Recent research, though, does not support Davis’s association of the concept with only Catholic, not Protestant notions of community. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578– 1620 (Oxford, 1995), 60; Duke and Jones, “Towards a Reformed Polity,” 379.

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In the broader context, however, such extreme aggression was not the rule. All deviance did not offend equally; rather, the more public the act, the greater the “offense” or “scandal” it caused. This was as true of heretical behavior as it was of moral transgressions, which Europe’s churches handled quite differently depending on their public or private character.13 Public acts of worship were simply hard to avoid or ignore. By taking place in spaces designated as stages for social interaction – street, square, commons, churchyard – they invited reaction. Indeed, they forced witnesses to respond in an equally public manner, making evasion or neutrality almost impossible. Also, contemporaries endowed public rituals with representative powers, as enacting the will not just of individual participants but of the entire community in whose space they occurred. Every member of the community was believed, in the words of Olivier Christin, “to participate at least passively, as citizens, in the collective rite.”14 So, when a religious group enacted its beliefs in a public space, it was claiming possession not just of that space but of the entire community, appropriating the authority to speak and act for everyone, and making those of other faiths accomplices in rituals they rejected or even abhorred. Consequently, public devotions were far more provocative than private ones, and far more likely to become flashpoints for confessional conflict. Catholic processions offer many obvious examples, and the crisis that struck the German city of Donauwörth in 1606–07 illustrates neatly the close tie between their public character and their explosive potential. It began when the city’s small Catholic minority resolved to alter the pilgrimage procession to the village of Auchsesheim held annually on the Feast of Saint Mark. The practice had been instituted in 1573 by the monks of Holy Cross Abbey, in the northern part of town. For thirty years the marchers had always kept to backstreets, eschewing all pomp and noise until they got out of the city, and the event had always passed peacefully. In 1603, however, the monks attempted to fly the banners of their abbey. When the town’s Lutheran magistrates stopped them from doing so, the monks complained to the Imperial Aulic Council in 13

14

On Catholic popular sensibilities on this point, see Wietse de Boer, The conquest of the soul: confession, discipline, and public order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden, 2001); on Lutheran ones, David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture & Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), 116–17; on Calvinist ones, Heinz Schilling, Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and The Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Kirksville, Mo., 1991), Ch. 2. For a similar distinction in secular law (that of Augsburg), see Bernd Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden: Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsstadt Augsburg zwischen Kalenderstreit und Parität (1584–1648) (Göttigen, 1989), 378. Olivier Christin, La paix de religion: l’autonomisation de la raison politique au xvie siècle (Paris, 1997), 111 (speaking only of processions).

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Vienna, which in 1605 ruled in their favor. After that, the magistrates felt their hands tied. Ordinary townsfolk, though, did not. On St. Mark’s Day, 1606, Donauwörth’s Catholics unfurled their banners, hefted crosses, and set off through the city’s chief arteries, chanting litanies as they marched. Lutherans responded by attacking the procession as it attempted to re-enter through a city gate. Ripping banners and smashing crosses, they diverted the marchers from their planned route, forcing them to traverse some of the city’s foulest alleys on their way back to the abbey where they began. Supported by Emperor Rudolph ii, Donauwörth’s Catholics tried again the next year. The city council pled vainly with both sides for restraint. This time the procession never made it out of the abbey, which troops of guildsmen armed with clubs and arquebuses had surrounded. Two men were beaten simply for refusing to participate in the siege. As in 1606, rioters directed their ­violence chiefly against symbols and routes – in other words, against the heightened publicity of the procession – demanding not that it be cancelled but that it revert to “traditional” form. Rudolph responded by placing an imperial ban on the city, licensing Maximilian of Bavaria to occupy and re-­Catholicize it at sword-point.15 Such flashpoints, as the episode suggests, were capable of being at least partially defused. From the seventeenth through the entire eighteenth century, Dutch Catholics made regular group pilgrimages to Kevelaer, Uden, Handel, and other sites outside the United Provinces without provoking a violent response from the country’s dominant Calvinists. They simply did what Donauwörth’s Catholics refused to do: hide banners and crosses and refrain from song until outside Dutch territory.16 Funeral processions and holiday celebrations might similarly be arranged so as to lessen the chance of a clash. But such piecemeal approaches had limited potential. So long as sacral acts occurred within communal space, they remained offensive to those of other religions. One solution was for dissenters to practice their faith, but only outside the physical boundaries of the community. Although this practice left the 15

16

Arturo da Carmignano, “La part de S. Laurent de Brindes dans le Ban de Donauwörth (1607),” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 58 (1963): 460–86; Felix Stieve, Der Ursprung des dreissigjährigen Krieges, 1607–1619 (Munich, 1875), 20, 41–5, 77–81. Bavaria’s seizure of Donauwörth became a turning point for imperial politics, completing its polarization along religious lines by leading to the formation first of the Protestant Union, then of the Catholic League. Marc Wingens, Over de grens. De bedevaart van katholieke Nederlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Nijmegen, 1994); P.J. Margry, “Processie versus stille omgang. Het probleem van de openbare godsdienstuitoefening buiten gebouwen en besloten plaatsen in Holland,” Holland 25 (1993): 174–196.

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c­ ommunity mixed in its sentiments, it preserved it, with regard to worship, as an exclusive enclave of the normative religion. Dissenters might, in a pinch, simply hold their services in the open air just outside of town. The “hedgepreaching” that swept the Netherlands in June 1566 is the largest-scale instance known of this practice. Magistrates forbade Protestant sermons within the city walls but tacitly allowed them in the adjacent rural parts of the city’s jurisdiction. Urban dwellers flocked to these sermons by the hundreds and even ­thousands, passing through the city gates in a regular mass exodus. Hedge preaching alone soon failed to satisfy Dutch Calvinists. At a crucial time, though, it gave their movement space in which to grow, and, as long as it lasted, no violence occurred.17 The same arrangement had a much longer history elsewhere. Since in the best circumstances open-air services were rudimentary, the form of Auslauf, as German-speakers called it, that most widely prevailed involved travel to a nearby locale where one’s faith was exercised in a church or other suitable building. For over fifty years, beginning in the 1570s, Viennese Protestants trekked out to Inzersdorf, Vösendorf, and above all to Hernals to worship. At Schloss H ­ ernals, seat of the powerful Jörger family, a Lutheran minister ­conducted services ­either in the great hall of the castle or in its freestanding chapel ­(Figure  7.4).18 Auslauf was even more stable and institutionalized in the Empire, where in 1648 the Peace of Westphalia granted those who lived as dissidents in one G ­ erman territory a constitutional right to attend services in amenable neighboring ones. With this clause the Peace formalized and extended a practice that had grown common decades earlier in the territorial patchwork of the German southwest. Calvinists in the Bishopric of Speyer, for example, had been commuting every Sunday to neighboring villages in the Calvinist Palatinate since at least the 1590s. Catholics in the Palatinate made the same trip in reverse. For Lutherans who lived in the Catholic imperial city of Weil der Stadt, all roads led to orthodoxy: their town, with its tiny territory, was surrounded by the Lutheran Duchy of Württemberg, where the urbanites became regular visitors as early as the 1570s.19 17 18

19

See, among others, Phyllis Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands, 1544–1569 (Cambridge, 1978). Josef Karl Mayr, “Wiener Protstantengeschichte im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für die Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich 70 (1954): 41–133, quotation on 103; Grete Mecenseffy and Hermann Rassl, Die evangelischen Kirchen Wiens ­(Vienna, 1980), 25–6; Grete Mecenseffy, Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich (Graz, 1956), 56, 84, 140. Marc Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, 1992), 132 note 54, 136–37.

FIGURE 7.4

Auslauf to Schloss Hernals, outside Vienna. Worshippers are depicted traveling from the city to services at the castle. Engraving ca. 1620 by Matthias Merian the Elder, in Topographia provinciarium austriacarum, Austriæ Stÿriæ, Carinthiæ, Carniolæ, Tyrolis, etc. (Frankfurt am Main, 1659) Courtesy of the Library of Congress

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Such Sunday commuting had practical advantages that kept some groups contented for long periods: by utilizing the ecclesiastic infrastructure at hand nearby, they avoided having to provide for themselves a place of worship, a priest or minister, and the appurtenances necessary for services. The primary appeal of the practice, though, lay in its power to accommodate religious diversity while maintaining the monopoly over religious life enjoyed by the established church of a locale. It removed dissenting worship from the communal space where it constituted a threat. To be sure, the practice did not avert all violence. An incident in Paris is particularly revealing. To placate the city’s militant Catholics, and in recognition of the city’s symbolic import as capital, in 1598 the Edict of Nantes forced Protestants to worship no closer than five leagues from the city. When Henry iv eased this restriction in 1606, permitting them to worship in nearby Charenton, his decision precipitated a riot: the following Sunday a Catholic crowd attacked the Huguenots as they returned to town through St. Anthony’s Gate. As in Donauwörth the same year, the ­violence occurred precisely where Huguenots penetrated the sacral space of the city. Until then, keeping heresy at a sufficient distance had assuaged popular sentiment.20 Worship outside the physical boundaries of the community could be ­arranged other ways as well. In the Empire, entire satellite communities populated by religious dissenters grew in the vicinity of certain major urban centers, like Altona near Hamburg and Mülheim near Cologne.21 It took geographic and juridical happenstance, though, to make this sort of arrangement work. It was most practical where jurisdictions were small and fragmented, while for the elderly, the sick, and the poor it could be a real hardship. But if dissenting religious practices were tolerable as long as they occurred outside communal 20

21

Élie Benoist, The History of the Famous Edict of Nantes: Containing an Account of All the Persecutions, That have been in France From its First Publication to this Present Time, 2 vols. (London, 1694), 1:419–20. Elsewhere in France similarly, how far out of town Huguenots had to travel in order to worship depended on how much power they wielded in a locale. Penny Roberts, “The Most Crucial Battle of the Wars of Religion? The Conflict over Sites for Reformed Worship in Sixteenth-Century France,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 89 (1998): 247–67; Elisabeth Labrousse, “Calvinism in France, 1598–1685,” in International Calvinism 1541–1715, ed. Menna Prestwich (Oxford, 1985), 286. François, “De l’uniformité à la tolérance”; Heinz Stoob, Forschungen zum Städtewesen in Europa (Cologne, 1970), 269–70. The specialized literature on Altona and Mülheim, especially the former, is large. Besides Whaley, Hamburg, see esp. Franklin Kopitzsch, Grundzüge einer Sozialgeschichte der Aufklärung in Hamburg und Altona (Hamburg, 1982); Clemens von Looz-Corswarem, “Köln und Mülheim am Rhein im 18. Jahrhundert. Reichsstadt und Flecken als wirtschaftliche Rivalen,” in Civitatum Communitas: Studien zum europäischen Städtewesen, ed. Helmut Jäger, Franz Petri, and Heinz Quinn (Cologne, 1984), 543–64.

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space, the question arose what the boundaries of that space precisely were. Crucially, the post-Reformation period saw the emergence of a new sort of boundary, internal rather than external, delimiting that contested space: a line was drawn around the family home separating it from the public areas surrounding it. Public and private, communal and family spheres grew more distinct, and within the latter, by common consent, dissenters were allowed greater freedom of worship.

...

In the Dutch Republic, this distinction between public and private supplied the key to religious toleration. It was a cultural distinction, not a legal one; it does not appear as such in the Union of Utrecht (1579) or in other defining documents of the polity.22 These drew a different contrast, rather, between freedom of conscience and freedom of worship. By virtue of Article 13 of the Union, all Netherlanders enjoyed freedom of conscience – but that is the only religious freedom the law ever guaranteed them.23 What did it entail? First, that people could believe as they wished; magistrates had no authority to examine or judge religious convictions. Second, no one could be required to attend Calvinist services; the Dutch Reformed Church would not assume the role of “established” church, with membership in it required by law. In theory, that was all freedom of conscience guaranteed. It made no provision for dissenters’ acting on their beliefs by worshipping God in their own manner. In practice, though, much more ensued. The distinction between conscience and worship was recast into one between private and public piety, and the line between the two drawn not around the conscience but around the family house. Although never established, the Reformed Church played a unique role in Dutch society. Secular authorities sanctioned its teachings, paid its ministers, and watched over its meetings. The Church provided pastoral care to the Republic’s soldiers and sailors, as it did to orphans and residents of other public institutions. It enjoyed exclusive use of the old parish churches and had an 22 23

On the role of the distinction in Dutch culture more generally, see Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Adele Seeff, eds., The public and private in Dutch culture of the Golden Age (Newark, 2000). S. Groenveld and H.L. Ph. Leeuwenberg, eds., De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte (The Hague, 1979), 34–5; see H.A. Enno van Gelder, Vrijheid en onvrijheid in de Republiek. Geschiedenis der vrijheid van drukpers en godsdienst van 1572 tot 1798 (Haarlem, 1947); H.A. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid. Een verhandeling over de verhouding van kerk en staat in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden en de vrijheid van meningsuiting in zake godsdienst, drukpers en onderwijs, gedurende de 17e eeuw (Groningen, 1972).

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important say in educational, charitable, and marital matters. On Sundays its ministers read mundane announcements from their pulpits, and in times of crisis led the community in penitential prayer. In their sermons, they called not just church members but the entire nation to account for its sins. The official spiritual organ of society, yet unestablished, the Dutch Reformed Church required a new label: Netherlanders called it the “public church.” It monopolized public religious life in their land.24 It was forbidden for non-Calvinists to challenge that monopoly. As individuals, they might manifest their piety in daily interactions with friends and neighbors, but as groups they could not assume a public profile.25 They could not worship in buildings that looked like churches, nor could they organize open-air services. Indeed, Dutch law defined any worship that involved a gathering of different families as a public event, a “conventicle,” and proscribed it. But within the confines of their own home, it permitted individuals and single families to do as they pleased. Catholics, for instance, could say prayers or recite the hours to themselves, and for this purpose they could use any devotional paraphernalia they desired, including books, paintings, and furniture. N ­ either the production and sale nor the purchase and ownership of such ­objects was illegal. Indeed, an early seventeenth-century Catholic chronicler reported “that almost every house belonging to a Catholic had a small room used as a place of prayer, [outfitted] with a pretty little altar and devout images, where [the family] went to read and pray….”26 Thus “freedom of conscience” really meant freedom of private, domestic worship. It meant, as the States General explained in a letter of 1644, that “for the sake of conscience every inhabitant could remain unmolested in his private home and family.”27 In this context, “family” meant not a unit of kinship so much as a household – a co-resident

24

25 26 27

See Heinz Schilling, “Religion und Gesellschaft in der calvinistischen Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande. ‘Öffentlichkeitskirche’ und Säkularisation; Ehe und Hebammenwesen; Presbyterien und politische Partizipation,” in Kirche und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in deutschen und niederländischen Städten der werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Franz Petri (Cologne, 1980), 202–22; Arie Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. Kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldebarnevelt (Assen, 1974), Ch. 2; Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 264–72. On daily interactions see Willem Frijhoff, “Dimensions de la coexistence confessionnelle,” in The emergence of tolerance in the Dutch Republic, ed. Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Jonathan I. Israel, and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden, 1997), 213–37. Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis van het Bisdom Haarlem (1873): 319. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid, 113. Compare the terms of the French Edict of Amboise (1563): “chacun pourra vivre et demeurer par tout en sa maison librement, sans être recherché ni molesté, forcé ni contraint pour le fait de sa conscience.” André Stegmann, ed., Édits des guerres de religion (Paris, 1979), 34. See also Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 264–72.

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group that could include servants, apprentices, wards, and even long-term guests, as well as relatives.28 Such freedom of conscience did not license dissenters to meet in groups larger than a single family – to have, in other words, a church. In practice, however, domestic devotions served as a cover for something much more robust and elaborate, namely the schuilkerk. At their simplest, clandestine places of worship resembled the prayer-room described by our chronicler. In Leiden, the Catholic sisters Van Santhorst described theirs as a cramped attic room with some candles, a picture of the Virgin, and a chest that doubled as an altar; whenever a priest came around to perform a mass, they would send word to their Catholic neighbors to attend.29 In the early years of the Republic, such places of worship were legion: in 1619 Catholics in The Hague met in some fifty different houses, most with room for only a few worshippers at a time; in 1641, Leiden’s 3,500 Catholics met in thirty.30 Such dispersion maximized i­ nvisibility but made it exceedingly difficult for a small number of priests to serve the entire membership. So while the number of places of worship a denomination had in any particular locale varied with the number of its members there, it was also an inverse indicator of the degree of security it enjoyed. The trend over the seventeenth century was for consolidation to reduce the number of places of worship, as ad hoc prayer-rooms and one-room chapels were replaced by larger, permanent schuilkerken with resident pastors. Catholics called these “stations,” replacements for the parish churches lost with the Reformation. In the cities, such schuilkerken typically resembled the Hart, an adapted attic able to accommodate large numbers of people, with galleries creating multiple levels and proper accoutrements for worship.31 A report prepared in 1643 by the provincial court of Holland noted that such “formal chapels” usually had “very expensive altars, galleries [supported] on pillars, vaulted roofs, pews, organs, musicians and all sorts of musical instruments and, in sum, everything that might be asked of a chartered chapel.” They were “of so large a size and capacity that if the exercise of their religion were allowed publicly,

28 29 30 31

See Naomi Tadmor, “The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 151 (1996): 111–40. On the Dutch family see, among others, Donald Haks, Huwelijk en gezin in Holland in de 17de en 18de eeuw (Utrecht, 1985). Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis van het Bisdom Haarlem 6 (1878): 73–4. W.P.C. Knuttel, “Vergaderplaatsen der Katholieken te ’s-Gravenhage in de zeventiende eeuw,” Archief voor Nederlandsche Kerkgeschiedenis 5 (1895): 106–110, 109; Israel, The Dutch Republic, 390. Analysis of the architectural forms of Amsterdam’s schuilkerken appears in R. Meischke, “Amsterdamse kerken van de zeventiende eeuw,” Bulletin Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond 12 (1959): kol. 85–130.

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FIGURE 7.5

181

Aerial photograph of the schuilkerk Vrijburg, the former Remonstrant Church in Amsterdam, built 1629–31, located between rows of houses. Size approximately 18 by 20 meters Courtesy of AVIODROME Lelystad

they [the Catholics] could not ask for them to be larger or more decorous.”32 Recent reconstructions of schuilkerk interiors in Gouda and Amsterdam show that the report, while wishful in its thinking, was not indulging in hyperbole: by the middle of the seventeenth century such interiors tended already to be richly decorated.33 In cities, warehouses too provided readily adaptable space; in r­ ural districts, converted barns offered enough room for huge assemblies. Most schuilkerken, though, were located inside houses. Some schuilkerken were actually separate structures newly built to function as churches. Typically they were erected between rows of houses on ground 32 33

Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid, 118. Van Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie; Schillemans, “Zeventiende-eeuwse altaarstukken.” See Xander van Eck, “‘Haar uitstekend huis, en hoge kerke.’ Enkele gegevens over de bouw, inrichting en aankleding van schuilkerken der jezuïeten in Goude en andere Noordnederlandse steden,” in Cat. tent. Utrecht, Jezuïeten in Nederland (Utrecht, 1991), 41–52; P. van Dael, “Rooms-katholiek kerkzilver in de zeventiende eeuw: functie en vorm,” in Guus van den Hout et al., Kerkzilver uit de gouden eeuw (Amsterdam, 1993), 7–20; R. Schillemans, "Schilderijen in Noordnederlandse katholieke kerken uit de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw," De zeventiende eeuw 8 (1992), 41–52.

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FIGURE 7.6

Keizersgracht 102–108: the row of houses in front of Vrijburg. Pen drawing by A. Schoemaker, ca. 1630. Access to the church was via the two doors with rounded arches, which opened onto passageways leading back Courtesy of Stadsarchief Amsterdam

formerly occupied by their back gardens. One, named Vrijburg, still stands. Used by Amsterdam’s Remonstrants, it was built in 1629–31 behind a row of houses facing the Keizersgracht (figures 7.5, 7.6). A large brick-faced structure with a wooden frame, it had an elegant neoclassical interior with nave, side aisles, and two sets of galleries supported on columns. Eventually the congregation bought most of the houses immediately surrounding it, using one as a parsonage and renting out the others.34 Some Catholic congregations, like St. Jan Baptist in Gouda or St. Marie in Utrecht, built entire ecclesiastic complexes by accumulating real estate in this manner, providing housing not only for their pastor but for women known as geestelijke maagden, or kloppen, who lived together in the manner of a non-cloistered religious order and provided crucial services to the Catholic community.35 34 35

Vrijburg. Geschiedenis en toekomst van een Amsterdamse schuilkerk (Amsterdam, 1980). Marit Monteiro, Geestelijke maagden. Leven tussen klooster en wereld in Noord-Nederland gedurende de zeventiende eeuw (Hilversum, 1996). Much information on the number and fate of Catholic stations in the Netherlands can be gleaned from the reports sent to Rome by the apostolic vicars who headed the Holland Mission and by other church leaders; a great number of these were published in the late nineteenth century in Archief voor de geschiedenis van het Aartsbisdom Utrecht.

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Grand or humble, what all schuilkerken had in common was invisibility: they could not be identified as churches from any public thoroughfare. Their outsides lacked all the symbolic markers of a church: crosses, bells, icons, tower, splendor. The degree of difference between a schuilkerk and a proper church varied by denomination, depending on its attachment to such symbols: for ­Baroque Catholicism it could not have been greater, while at the other extreme Mennonites preferred very simple, plain structures. Schuilkerken, though, not only lacked public presence as churches, they hid behind the façade (literally) of a different sort of structure. They did the same legally as well, appearing in deeds and mortgages as houses or barns or warehouses, and remaining the property of a private individual, usually an eminent member of the congregation.36 The congregation did not exist as a legal entity, nor did the larger ecclesiastic organization to which it belonged. Its physical disguise, though, not its legal one, was the most essential mark of a schuilkerk and the key to its functional success. It avoided causing “offense” or “scandal” by not signalling its presence through visual and auditory symbols. Dutch authorities who informally authorized schuilkerken always insisted on such self-effacement. A ­committee of Amsterdam regents was unusually specific when in 1691 it set conditions under which one of the city’s Catholic congregations could abandon its old schuilkerk for a newly-built one. The former had grown so delapidated that it threatened to collapse under the weight of the crowds squeezing into it.37 Fearing disaster, the regents approved the move on condition that the pastor of the congregation, the Franciscan friar Egidius de Glabbais, agree to eleven points, including: (4) To avoid giving any offense, [Glabbais] promises that the entrance to the new permitted assembly place shall no longer be on the Joodebreestraat but behind, on the Burgwal, where it is less offensive 36

37

Ownership of some schuilkerken (more in the eighteenth than the seventeenth century) was in the hands of their pastors, but this could lead to disputes and heavy estate taxes due when the latter died. Some, like the Hart, were owned for a time by persons of a different religion. Unlike urban churches, many rural ones were owned corporately, for example by a board of churchwardens. I.H. van Eeghen, “De eigendom van katholieke kerken in Amsterdam ten tijde van de Republiek,” Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis van het Bisdom Haarlem 64 (1957): 222–8. In 1690 a schuilkerk in The Hague did actually collapse during a service, with loss of life, a fact the regents had in mind when approving the move. Their ad hoc architecture made some schuilkerken positively dangerous. One in London collapsed in 1623. See Dalmatius van Heel and Bonfilius Knipping, Van schuilkerk tot zuilkerk. De geschiedenis van de Mozesen Aäronkerk te Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1941), 117–19; Alexandra Walsham, “‘The Fatall Vesper’: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London,” Past and Present 144 (1994): 36–87.

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(5) [Glabbais] [p]romises not to tolerate any sleds being parked in front of the assembly place (6) [Glabbais is] [t]o see to it that at the end of services no one stands around in front of the assembly place waiting for another person, nor shall [he] in any manner tolerate any poor people waiting around for alms in front of the assembly place (7) The undersigned shall take great care that his services begin and end at such times that no offense will be given by [Catholics and Reformed Protestants] meeting each other when coming from and going to church (8) The undersigned shall see to it that Catholics not pass through the street in a troop, nor with rosary, church book, or other offensive objects apparent, when going to or coming from the permitted assembly place.38 All these stipulations were directed toward stripping the church of any presence as church in the public sphere. Such invisibility, though, was never more than superficial. In a society that exalted and demanded intimate relations between neighbors, unusual comings and goings could scarcely escape notice, no matter how hard one tried to conceal them. And many congregations felt secure enough that they did not try too hard; at times, passers-by in the street even could hear music emanating from services indoors.39 When compiling information for their many remonstrances to secular authorities, Calvinist ministers never had difficulty ascertaining the precise location of the schuilkerken in their community. And their remonstrances offered no surprises to authorities. In fact, everyone either knew where they were, or could find out easily enough. Guidebooks, such as Philip von Zesen’s Amsterdam (1664), even indicated their locations for the benefit of tourists, on whose itinerary they regularly figured. Jan Wagenaar gave a complete rundown of them in his 1765 description of the city.40 Nevertheless, the pretence of privacy and domesticity embodied in the schuilkerk offered a 38

39

40

saa 5024, inv. nr. 2: Resolutiën van Burgemeesters 1649–1698, fol. 279 r-v (1691). See Heel and Knipping, Van schuilkerk tot zuilkerk, 109–19, 336–38. A similar contract was drafted in 1694 for a schuilkerk on the Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal; Van Eeghen, “De eigendom van katholieke kerken in Amsterdam,” esp. 217, 235. See for example the complaint of Amsterdam’s Calvinist consistory in July 1676 about the Jesuit station on the Raamgracht, where music was made “met open deuren,” that is, with the hoist-doors in the front façade open: H. Zantkuyl, “De schuilkerk der Jezuieten op de Raamgracht,” Amstelodamum 46 (1959): 33. In 1656 the consistory complained of the Catholic schuilkerken generally that “one can hear from outside, on the street, and from neighboring houses [the] organs, viols, and other instruments” played in them; Van Eeghen, “De eigendom van katholieke kerken in Amsterdam,” 269. Christian Gellinek, ed., Europas erster Baedeker: Filip von Zesens Amsterdam 1664 (New York, 1988), 180, 191–95, 293–95, 359–61; Wagenaar, Amsterdam, vol. 3, book 3; see likewise

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working solution to the dilemma posed by religious diversity. Keeping dissent out of sight, stripped of any symbolic presence, preserved the monopoly of the Reformed Church over public religious life. It thus maintained a semblance, or fiction, of religious unity. The arrangement did subject dissenters to burdens and harassments. They still had to pay “recognition fees” to local law enforcement officials, the price the latter charged for going along with the fiction. It also did not spare them from having their services raided by zealous, anxious, or extortionate officials. Particularly when the war against Spain went poorly, fears rose of a fifth column of Catholic traitors, prompting officials to crack down on Catholic worship. After the conclusion in 1609 of the Twelve Years’ Truce, though, such crackdowns became less frequent, and after the Peace of Westphalia ended the long conflict in 1648, they were rare indeed. As a mechanism for the practice of religious tolerance – not the only, but the most important such mechanism in the Republic – the schuilkerk worked.

...

While the schuilkerk is a well-known Dutch phenomenon, few scholars have paid attention to its many counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Regardless of the religious groups involved, the formula for tolerance it embodied proved capable of application wherever local communities struggled to reconcile an official orthodoxy with religious diversity. Catholic majorities might tolerate Protestant minorities through this formula just as easily as the reverse. In Catholic Cologne, for example, Lutherans worshipped from the late sixteenth century onward in a “secret, oppressed house-church,” as did Reformed Protestants.41 The latter, in fact, had two and sometimes three congregations – for German-, Dutch-, and French-speakers. The existence of these groups was an open secret. When the writer P. de Blainville, visiting Cologne in 1705, attended a service, he “was completely amazed to see such a crowd of people there, for the hall was entirely full, above and below – as many people there as was room for, their number reaching at least five to six hundred.”42 Yet discretion remained crucial: riots broke out in 1708 when Brandenburg’s ambassador sent written invitations to Protestants to attend services in his home. They broke out again in 1787, when the city council gave permission for Protestants to build

41 42

Wegwijzer door Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1713). Von Zesen included synagogues and Protestant schuilkerken, but not Catholic ones. Leo Schwering, “Die religiöse und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des Protestantismus in Köln während des 17. Jahrhunderts. Ein Versuch,” Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 85 (1908): 14. Looz-Corswarem, “Köln und Mülheim,” 548. Blainville was probably a pseudonym.

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a big new “prayer- and school-house.”43 Elsewhere in the Empire, clandestine churches accommodated groups other than the three recognized confessions. Remonstrants in Glückstadt received official permission in 1624 “to exercise and practice their religion … behind closed doors.” Mennonites in Königsberg were told in 1722 by the Prussian government they “could hold their gatherings for their worship in a private house, but only in complete quiet, without [causing] rumor.”44 Perhaps the most extraordinary case of reliance on clandestine churches was Ireland, where the religion of the majority of the population was illegal. Except in the 1640s-50s, when persecution peaked, Irish Catholics were widely able to operate semi-secret chapels which the English called “mass houses.” In the countryside these were mostly cottages, barns, or sheds, built of mud, thatchroofed, and often still used for their original purpose. In cities they were more commodious. The interior of the Jesuit chapel that operated in Dublin in the 1620s made a grand impression on visiting Englishman Sir William Brereton: the pulpit in this church was richly adorned with pictures, and so was the high altar, which was advanced with steps, and railed out like cathedrals; upon either side thereof was there erected places for confession; no fastened seats were in the middle or body hereof, nor was there any chancel; but that it might be more capacious, there was a gallery erected on both sides and at the lower end.45 Such galleries, making the most of a restricted space, were a feature common to urban schuilkerken across Europe. The eighteenth century witnessed a proliferation of Irish mass houses and general improvement in their quality, yet care was still taken to keep them unobtrusive. Most of those in Dublin were converted stables or warehouses located on narrow lanes behind other buildings.46 In County Cork, the magistrates of Cloyne and Charleville blocked the 43

44 45 46

Looz-Corswarem, “Köln und Mülheim,” 562; Al. Meister, “Der preußische Residenten­ streit in Köln, ein Versuch zur Einführung des reformierten Gottesdienstes,” Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 70 (1901): 1–30; E. Heinen, “Der Kölner Toleranz­ streit (1787–1789),” Jahrbuch des kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 44 (1973): 67–86. Walter Grossmann, “Städtisches Wachstum und religiöse Toleranzpolitik am Beispiel Neuwied,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 62/63 (1980–1981): 221; Erich Randt, Die Mennoniten in Ostpreussen und Litauen bis zum Jahre 1772 (Königsberg, 1912), 18. C. Litton Falkiner, Illustrations of Irish History and Topography, mainly of the seventeenth century (London, 1904), 382. “Report on the State of Popery, Ireland 1731,” Archivium Hibernicum 1–4 (1912): 10–27, 108–56, 124–59, 131–77; John Brady and Patrick J. Corish, The Church under the Penal Code (Dublin, 1971), 58–69; Patrick J. Corish, The Catholic community in the seventeenth and

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erection of mass houses “within view of the churches in those towns.” A Kildare rector had a mass house torn down because it stood “in the direct road to my church, and not far from it.”47 Like the 1691 Amsterdam instructions, these actions demonstrate that location as well as appearance determined how public or private a clandestine place of worship was perceived to be. They highlight again, though, the special power of the visual: even disguised, a mass house in plain sight of a church was viewed as a challenge to the latter. In addition to close parallels like the mass house, three variants on the schuilkerk also emerged outside the Netherlands. All three were obscured by an architectural façade, located within residential space, and built on a foundation of domestic devotional practices. At the same time, they differed from ordinary schuilkerken as the domiciles in which they were situated differed from the homes of ordinary burghers and peasants. One was the manorial chapel. Well before the Reformation, Europe’s landed elites had developed a tradition of domestic worship. Medieval custom and canon law had permitted them, and with them their households, to worship at home on condition that they attend their parish church on major festivals.48 After the Reformation, some elites extended this seigneurial privilege in an unprecedented way, using it as a vehicle for dissident devotions. In England and Scotland, “recusant” gentry and peers established Catholic chapels in their manor houses. These illegal chapels were served by missionary priests who resided on the manor semi-permanently. As of 1701, Bishop Leyburn counted two hundred nineteen peers and gentry who kept such resident chaplains.49

47 48 49

eighteenth centuries (Walkinstown, Dublin, 1981), 29; S. J Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), 151, 289; Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (New York, 1998), 65. On Dublin’s mass houses, see Patrick Fagan, The Second City: Portrait of Dublin, 1700–1760 (Dublin, 1986), 109–33; Nuala Burke, “A Hidden Church? The Structure of Catholic Dublin in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Archivium Hibernicum 32 (1974): 85. Current “revisionist” historiography paints less black a picture of conditions for Catholics in eighteenth-century Ireland than did earlier writings; it emphasizes that the penal laws were directed against Catholic wealth and power far more than against Catholic worship. See David George Boyce and Alan O’Day, The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the revisionist controversy (London, 1996). The new consensus is captured by the title (and contents) of T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan, eds., Endurance and emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the eighteenth century (Blackrock, Co. Dublin, 1990). In Ulster, however, open-air services remained the rule well into the eighteenth century. “Report on the State of Popery,” 2 (1913): 127 and 4 (1915): 159. See Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power, 289. J.C.H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976), 41–2. John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), 34.

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The latter provided pastoral care first and foremost to the manor’s household, usually a larger unit than non-elite households, but recusant elites commonly invited tenants and other dependants to attend their services as well. These were the only Catholic services conducted in some regions, especially in the rural south of both countries. Carved out of residential rooms, the chapels themselves tended to grow larger and less hidden over time. In the early seventeenth century, they usually sheltered in some cramped attic. By 1700, the norm was for a suite of commodious second-floor rooms to serve as chapel, sacristy, and lodgings for the priest. By 1750, the chapel had completed its descent to ground level.50 As John Bossy has shown, reliance on manorial chapels had far-reaching consequences for the social character of English Catholicism. Among others, it left priests captive to the needs and desires of the gentry, on whom they depended for lodgings, funds, protection, and places to conduct services. In this way it shifted fundamentally the balance of power between clergy and laity. By the same token, it gave female members of the gentry – the women who ran such recusant households – an unusual leadership role within the Catholic community, at least until the 1620s. Other scholars have noted a similar empowerment of women in the early phases of Scottish and Irish recusancy. In the Dutch Republic, it took a few decades for the Catholic Church hierarchy to establish effective control over schuilkerk congregations, and priests always remained dependent on the financial and practical assistance of kloppen. Such shifts in power away from the usual wielders of religious authority tended, however, to be reversed or at least mitigated over time.51

50

Roderick O’Donnell, “The Architectural Setting of Challoner’s Episcopate,” in Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England, ed. Eamon Duffy (London, 1981), 55–70; Aveling, Handle and the Axe, esp. 121, 141–43, 228; John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (New York, 1976), Chs. 2, 3, 6, 7, 10; John Bossy, “English Catholics after 1688,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), 369–87, 375; Bryan Little, Catholic churches since 1623: A study of Roman Catholic churches in England and Wales from penal times to the present decade (London, 1966), 21–44. On Scotland see esp. Peter F. Anson, Underground Catholicism in Scotland, 1622–1878 (Montrose, 1970); Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 40, 104, 113–17. 51 Bossy, English Catholic Community, 49–59, 110–21, 149–81; Alasdair F.B. Roberts, “The Role of Women in Scottish Catholic Survival,” The Scottish Historical Review 70 (1991): 129–50; Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 117–19; Ute Lotz-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland: Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. und in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahr­ hunderts (Tübingen, 2000), 296–300; Monteiro, Geestelijke maagden, 75–121. Compare Rona Johnston Gordon, “Patronage and Parish: The Nobility and the Recatholicization of Lower Austria,” in The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe, ed. Karin Maag, 211– 27 (Aldershot, 1997), 223; Liliane Crété, Les Camisards (Paris, 1992), 46–8; Renee Levine

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Unlike British recusants, the Calvinist nobility of France had a legal right to their chapels, known as églises de fief. Compared to those in Britain, these chapels played only a secondary role in sustaining religious dissent, for outside regions like the Cévennes French Calvinism was primarily an urban movement. Until its Revocation in 1685, the Edict of Nantes, like earlier toleration edicts, permitted Huguenots to have public places of worship in the suburbs of certain cities. The Edict underlined the public quality of worship in them by specifying that “the people may be summoned [to services], even by the ringing of bells.” The Edict also, though, extended to Huguenot nobles the right “to have in … their houses … the exercise of the said [Reformed] religion as long as they are resident there, and in their absence, their wives or families….”52 Nobles with powers of high justice could invite as many people as they wished to these domestic services. Nobles without such powers were limited in theory to a maximum of thirty guests, but in practice they often ignored the restriction, welcoming tenants, clients, friends, and others.53 In the Middle Ages, Europe’s nobles had modeled their chapels after those of their rulers. In the early modern era, most rulers still had court chapels, and in those exceptional lands where their religion differed from the official one, these too became protected centers of religious dissent. They constituted a second variant on the schuilkerk. In England it was not kings, strictly speaking, but their consorts who had the first such private chapels. Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, had two, both designed by Inigo Jones: Somerset House Chapel and, at St. James’s Palace, Marlborough House Chapel.54 In the Holy Roman Empire, the Peace of Westphalia allowed a Lutheran ruler of a Reformed territory, and vice-versa, “to have court preachers of his confession … with him and in his residence.”55 When in 1697 Friedrich August I of Saxony converted Melammed, Heretics or daughters of Israel? The crypto-Jewish women of Castile (New York, 1999). 52 English translation in Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry iv: The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Early Seventeenth Century (London, 1973), 353, 362, 320, 321. 53 For examples, see Janine Garrisson, Les Protestants au xvie siècle (n.p., 1988), 39; Roberts, “The Most Crucial Battle,” 307–08. On the role of these manorial chapels, see Jean Quéniart, La Révocation de l’édit de Nantes: Protestants et catholiques en France de 1598 à 1685 (Paris, 1985), 30–1, 103, 123; Louis Pérouas, Le diocèse de La Rochelle de 1648 à 1724. Sociologie et pastorale (Paris, 1964), 304, 312–13. 54 Aveling, Handle and the Axe, 223–30; Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1996), 58; Little, Catholic Churches Since 1623, 21–3; Miller, Popery and Politics, 25. 55 Konrad Müller, ed., Instrumenta Pacis Westphalicae – Die Westfälischen Friedensverträge: vollst. lateinischer Text mit Übers. der wichtigsten Teile und Regesten (Bern, 1975), 47 Latin, 133 German.

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to Catholicism, he extended this provision to the Protestant-Catholic divide, arranging for Catholic services in his various residences. Prince Karl Alexander of Württemberg did likewise, establishing private Catholic chapels in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg when in 1733 he succeeded to the Lutheran Duchy. Württemberg’s Estates, which paid for construction of the two chapels, stipulated that Catholic services be held nowhere else and that no “symbols and activities associated with public worship” accompany them.56 Embassy chapels constituted a third variant on the schuilkerk. In the wake of the Reformation, a new rule of diplomacy emerged allowing ambassadors serving in lands whose religion differed from their own to maintain within their residence a chapel for their family’s use. Because ambassadorial residen­ ces, following the early modern norm, served both as lodgings and work-place, such chapels came to be called embassy chapels. Their legitimacy, though, remained rooted in the domestic: in theory, they and their chaplains could serve only the ambassador and his household. Fuss was rarely made if compatriots of the ambassador – merchants abroad on business, for example – also attended services. Whether foreigners from other countries might do the same was a more sensitive point. But by far the most contentious issue was whether native dissidents could attend embassy services, and whether such services could be conducted in the local language by native clerics. In London this issue provoked repeated clashes, some of them violent, in the streets surrounding the Spanish, French, and Venetian embassies. In several of these incidents, local officials tried to arrest natives emerging at the end of services, setting off diplomatic protests and embarrassing the royal government. Yet despite occasional skirmishes and a more constant tension, London’s embassy chapels functioned effectively as places of worship and points of protection for English Catholics (figure 7.7).57 So it went on the continent as well. The Dutch alone sponsored embassy chapels in twelve different capitals, while for ­Emperor Leopold I, the 56

57

As paraphrased in Paul Friedrich Stälin, “Das Rechtsverhältnis der religiösen Gemeinschaften und der fremden Religionsverwandten in Württemberg nach seiner geschicht­ lichen Entwicklung,” Württembergische Jahrbücher für Statistik und Landeskunde (1868), 160. On Saxony see Eduard Hegel, “Zum Verhältnis der Konfessionen in Deutschland am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Zwischen Polemik und Irenik: Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis der Konfessionen im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Georg Schwaiger (Göttingen, 1977), 13–4. O’Donnell, “Architectural Setting,” 65–9; Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986), 191–92; T.G. Holt, “The Embassy Chapels in Eighteenth Century London,” The London Recusant 2 (1972): 19–37; William Raleigh Trimble, “The Embassy Chapel Question, 1625–1660,” Journal of Modern History 18 (1946): 97–107; Alfred van der Essen, “Les Catholiques londiniens et l’ambassade d’Espagne, 1633–37,” Scrinium Lovaniense series 4, 24 (1961): 475–85; John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven, 1991);

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FIGURE 7.7

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The Sardinian Embassy Chapel, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Designed by Jean Baptist Jacque, 1760. Etching from R. Ackermann, The Microcosm of London, vol. 1 (London, 1808) Courtesy of the Library of Congress

whole point of maintaining ambassadors in ­various Protestant cities was “that Catholic services might be held to comfort the Catholics of that area, and to promote the further growth of this religion.”58 In the eighteenth century there emerged a new legal principle, “extraterritoriality,” that legitimized embassy chapels. It stipulated that one was to “assume or pretend that the ambassador and the precincts of his embassy stood as if on the soil of his homeland, subject only to its laws.” By this principle, an embassy chapel did not violate the religious laws of its host country because it did not stand on the host country’s territory. But, as the legal historian Edward Adair has shown, neither court rulings nor treaty stipulations nor established legal Albert J. Loomie, “London’s Spanish Chapel before and after the Civil War,” Recusant History 18 (1987): 402–10. 58 Whaley, Hamburg, 54; O. Schutte, Repertorium der nederlandse vertegenwoordigers residerende in het buitenland 1584–1810 (’s-Gravenhage, 1976), 47–57, 82–4, 121–22, 148–49, 157–58, 201, 257–58, 278–80, 296–69, 315–18, 354, 336–41, 403–05, 432–33, 461–2.

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FIGURE 7.8

Attic synagogue in Traenheim, Alsace, interior view. Size 5.5 by 4.5 meters. The space was adapted to serve as synagogue in 1723 despite the vociferous objections of the local pastor. Modern photograph by Bernard Keller courtesy of Michel Rothe

principles lent protection to embassy chapels at the time of their proliferation. Extraterritoriality was an ex post facto justification, developed in no small part to rationalize the already established practice of tolerating embassy chapels. Indeed, the embassy chapel question was “the largest single factor in preparing men’s minds to accept this extraordinary fiction.”59 The schuilkerk formula proved applicable to Jews as well as dissenting Christians. Operating under the cover of domesticity, scores of clandestine ­synagogues functioned in Alsace from the late seventeenth century. These synagogues consisted initially of rooms in private homes. Often upstairs, the rooms were usually richly appointed, with separate spaces for men and women. A rare survival, the remains of one dating from 1723 can still be seen in Traenheim ­(Figure 7.8). The private character of these “oratories” was underlined in 1701 by the intendant of Alsace, Le Pelletier de la Houssaye. I­ nvestigating a complaint made by an abbé that the Jews of Reichshoffen were practicing their religion publicly, the intendant found precisely the opposite: 59

Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston, 1971), 272, 280–81; E.A. Adair, The E­ xterritoriality of Ambassadors in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1929).

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The worship which the Jews established in Reichshoffen perform is not as public as one would have you believe. There is no synagogue per se, only, by a custom long established in this province, when there are seven Jewish families in one locale, those who compose them assemble, without scandal, in a house of their sect for readings and prayers.60 As the Jewish population rose, oratories multiplied and a certain number of houses were renovated internally to function as community centers, incorporating a synagogue and school. They continued, though, to look externally like the houses in their neighborhood.61 As elsewhere, though, so in Alsace the line between public and private was more a matter of perception and negotiation than of bricks and timber, as a conflict that erupted in 1725 shows. The Jews of three villages, Biesheim, Wintzenheim, and Hagenthal, were accused of building illegal new synagogues. They claimed in response to have merely enlarged or “moved” their existing places of prayer. In the end, the Conseil Souverain of Alsace ordered that the structures be demolished.62 In Hamburg, negotiations between Christians and Jews involved threats of violence as well as appeals to authority.63 Worshipping initially in private homes, Hamburg’s Sephardic community dated to the 1580s. In 1650 it received permission to hold prayer gatherings of up to fifteen families, although, in order to avoid notice, only four or five families were to enter or leave at a time. This license emboldened the community, which began to consider building a larger, more formal place of worship. Its intentions evoked howls of protest from Hamburg’s Lutheran clergy, who stirred up popular sentiment with antisemitic sermons. In 1672, the community went ahead anyway with plans to enlarge an existing prayer house. Immediately, however, riots threatened to break out, and the captains of the city’s militia warned the government that their men could not be counted on to suppress them. Taking preemptive action, the senate soon closed the synagogue, forcing the Sephardim to content themselves once again with small unofficial prayer houses.

60 61 62 63

Freddy Raphaël and Robert Weyl, Juifs en Alsace: culture, société, histoire (Toulouse, 1977), 134. Michel Rothé and Max Warschawski, Les synagogues d’Alsace et leur histoire (Jerusalem, 1992); Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1989), 102–03, 169, 237. Raphaël and Weyl, Juifs en Alsace, 135–37. This paragraph and the following one draw heavily on Whaley, Hamburg, esp. 75–9, 91–2, 99–103. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 9–11.

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A similar drama unfolded in the eighteenth century with the city’s Ashkenazic community. A Judenreglement issued by the senate in 1710 forbade the Ashkenazim to have any “public buildings” but permitted them to worship privately “as long as they refrained from ostentatiously provoking their neighbours by using ceremonial horns or trumpets [a reference to the shofar] or by publicly displaying liturgical lanterns.”64 This almost transparent cloak sufficed to keep the peace, and by 1732 the growing community had fourteen clandestine synagogues. In 1746, however, the building of a large new synagogue provoked disturbances. Hamburg’s senate had tacitly approved the construction, and a strategically unobtrusive site had been chosen in a narrow alley on the periphery of town. Inevitably, though, the work of construction attracted attention. When formal remonstrances by the citizenry failed to sway the senate, an angry crowd gathered around the half-completed building, threatening to demolish it. Cowed, the senate ordered its dismantling.

...

By giving Jews permission to build a larger clandestine synagogue, Hamburg’s senate was colluding with a religious minority to redraw the line between private and public worship. By mobilizing and threatening violence, Hamburg’s Lutheran crowds restored the line to its earlier position. As was typical, the negotiation involved not just religious dissidents and local authorities but also orthodox citizens and clergy. In rural areas and less autonomous cities, such negotiations involved other actors as well: princes, estates, nobles. Such popular mobilization as occurred in Hamburg, though, marked a failure of official policy. Rulers generally sought to preempt it and the challenge it entailed to their authority by regulating carefully the activity of dissenting religious congregations. Silently gauging what the orthodox of their community might, if only grudgingly, assent to, they set boundaries to the private sphere within which those congregations operated. For example, Amsterdam’s regents sought to ensure that Glabbais’s Catholic congregation would “avoid giving any offense” to Calvinists; Prussia’s government stipulated that Mennonite worship had to be conducted “in complete quiet, without [causing] rumor”; in approving Jewish worship, the Alsatian intendant noted that it caused no “scandal.” This vocabulary reveals the sensitivity of officials to popular opinion. It signals a negotiation conducted, in the usual course of events, discursively rather than physically. The points in dispute in these negotiations indicate the criteria early modern Europeans applied to distinguish public from private worship: how many 64 Whaley, Hamburg, 92.

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people attended the services; what sort of persons attended; when services were held; the size of the chapel; its location and appearance; the presence of beggars or parked vehicles outside it; the number of people entering or leaving at a time, and how they conducted themselves; whether bells rang or ­invitations were sent to announce services. Some of these criteria have the same valence in modern western culture as they did in early modern, but others do not. Invitations are today deemed markers of a private, not public, function, and b­ ecause hundreds of people might be attending does not make it any more public. Similarly, churches today look like churches, synagogues like synagogues, and mosques like mosques, yet they remain private organizations. They are ­considered private above all because of their status as ­non-­governmental, voluntary associations, a status they share with business corporations and similar bodies. Some intellectuals formulated such a definition of privacy as early as the seventeenth century. Among the first, Roger Williams argued in 1644 that a church or any other “company of worshippers” was “like unto a body or college of physicians in a city; like unto a corporation, society or company of East India or Turkey merchants, or any other society or company. …[t]he essence or being of the City, and so the well-being and peace thereof, is essentially distinct from these particular societies….”65 John Locke similarly emphasized the voluntary, associative nature of churches. Yet even most Enlightenment philosophes saw a need for some sort of religious establishment, civil if not Christian. Eighteenth-century practice, more even than theory, shows the continued functioning of an older definition of private worship, based on symbols and other sensory signals, especially visual ones. Throughout that century, schuilkerken and their equivalents continued to function, new ones to be built, and contests to occur over the boundaries of the private sphere they constituted. Britain formed a partial exception. In the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Protestant dissenters there enjoyed increasing social acceptance, and the Toleration Act of 1689 offered licenses for their meeting-houses, which formerly had remained clandestine. Some of their new places of worship, with imposing façades and central locations, made bold public statements.66 For British 65 66

Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience Discussed (1644), quoted in Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Prerevolutionary England (New York, 1997), 417. Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, An Inventory of Nonconformist Chapels and Meeting-houses in Central England (1986-); Martin S. Briggs, Puritan Architecture and its Future (London, 1946), 11–37; H. Lismer Short, “The Architecture of the Old Meeting Houses,” Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society 8 (1944): 98–112, 109–12; Davies, Worship and Theology, 2:60–7. For a description of London’s Dissenting chapels, see Geoffrey S. Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, 1973), 161–74.

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Catholics, by contrast, change occurred only within parameters set long before: their places of worship grew grander and less secret too, but retained the essential quality of a schuilkerk, invisibility. The impact of Catholic emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century was correspondingly dramatic, as a Scottish comparison reveals (Figure 7.9). Constructed in the 1750s, St. Ninian’s Chapel, Tynet, was “a small little house wher a poor woman had lived for some time, to which Tynet proposed making an additione as a cot for his sheep, but in effect for our use….” St. Gregory’s, Preshome, built on the eve of emancipation, had a western façade in the Italian Baroque style that p ­ roclaimed its identity as Catholic church. Its pedimented gable, complete with urn finials, was inscribed “deo 1788.”67 Exceptions can be found outside Britain as well, but what is striking overall is the continued vigor of the schuilkerk tradition. In the short run, at least, Enlightenment influence produced a broadening of toleration within that tradition more often than its repudiation. Emperor Joseph ii’s Patent of Toleration (1781), hailed as a milestone in the rise of tolerance, offers a telling example. The freedom it granted Austrian Protestants was to have “private religious exercise” (exercitium religionis privatum). This differed from “public” religious exercise, the edict specified, in the appearance of the building where it was conducted. Protestant churches were to have “no chimes, no bells, towers or any public entrance from the street as might signify a church.”68 However revolutionary it was in granting full citizenship to religious dissenters, the edict remained conservative with regard to the spatial accommodation of their worship. It allowed Vienna’s Protestants, the largest group in the land, merely to trade one schuilkerk for another – or three, to be precise, for two. Protestant worship had been thriving in the capital for well over half a century under the auspices of the Danish, Swedish, and Dutch embassies.69 Upon issuance 67

68

69

George Hay, The Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, 1560–1843 (Oxford, 1957), 154–55, quotation on 154; Anson, Underground Catholicism, 158, 203–04. Even after Emancipation, Catholic chapels in Britain were forbidden to have towers or bells. Some continued to be of the schuilkerk variety, for instance in Monmouth, Wales; Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 163. Peter F. Barton, ed., “‘Das’ Toleranzpatent von 1781. Edition der wichtigsten Fassungen,” in Im Zeichen der Toleranz. Aufsätze zur Toleranzgesetzgebung des 18. Jahrhunderts in den Reichen Joseph ii., ihren Voraussetzungen und ihren Folgen: eine Festschrift, ed. Peter F. Barton (Vienna, 1981), 165, also 168, 170. Karl von Otto, “Evangelischer Gottesdienst in Wien vor der Toleranzzeit,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für die Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich 7 (1886): 120–31; Gustav Reingrabner, “Eine evangelische Predigt aus der Zeit vor dem Toleranzpatent, gehalten in der dänischen Gesandtschaftskapelle in Wien,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für die Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich 95 (1979): 49–52; Christian Stubbe, “Vom dänischen Gesandtschaftsprediger Burchardi in Wien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des evangelischen

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FIGURE 7.9

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Clandestine church versus public church: St. Ninian’s, Tynet, and St. Gregory’s, Preshome, in Scotland. Modern drawings by Peter F. Anson Courtesy of Sancta Maria Abbey – Nunraw, Haddington, Scotland

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FIGURE 7.10 Aerial view of the Evangelical Lutheran and Reformed churches on the Dorotheergasse, Vienna, constructed in the 1780s. Detail from engraving by Joseph Daniel Huber, 1785 Courtesy of Wien Museum

of the edict, the two Lutheran congregations merged and, together with the Reformed, purchased an abandoned convent belonging formerly to the Poor Clares. The complex had to be modified extensively to meet the terms of the edict. An aerial view shows the results (figure 7.10): the convent church, used by the Lutherans, is hidden from street view by a new row of two-story houses; access to it is from a courtyard reached via the entrance to a house to the right of the church. The Reformed “Bethaus” is just further to the right. Only in the 1880s did either Bethaus take on the external appearance of a church.70 Exercitium religionis privatum: Joseph ii’s government borrowed the term from a document that predated the Enlightenment by half a century, the Treaty of Osnabrück (1648), part of the Peace of Westphalia. There it stands as one of three recognized types of religious worship. One is called “domestic devotion” (devotio domestica): Lutheran subjects of Catholic princes, and vice-versa, “are to be patiently endured and not hindered from applying themselves to their devotions with a free conscience privately at home, without investigation or

70

Gottesdienstes in Wien vor dem Toleranzpatent,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für die Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich 53 (1932): 52–60. Permanently, that is; in 1815 a street entrance was added for Archduchess Henriette von Nassau-Weilburg, removed in 1830 upon her death. Note also that by special permission of Joseph ii the Lutheran church retained two of its original three towers. Mecenseffy and Rassl, Die evangelischen Kirchen Wiens, 54–67.

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disturbance.”71 The treaty also permits the three major confessions to operate proper churches wherever they were doing so in 1624 – to have what it calls exercitium religionis publicum. But it also recognizes an intermediate category of worship that people could likewise continue (or resume), exercitium religionis privatum, which it describes as led by clergy and practiced not “in churches at set hours” but rather “in their [the worshippers’] own houses or in other houses designated for the purpose.”72 In other words, exercitium privatum was worship in a schuilkerk. With this tripartite distinction the diplomats in Westphalia acknowledged that much more than family prayers went on in private “houses.” Joseph’s government was even more explicit, describing “churches” that lacked the external signs of a church. How paradoxical: an institution whose sole value lies in its invisibility is acknowledged in epochal documents and written into the very constitution of the Empire. The paradox, though, reflects two crucial truths about the schuilkerk: first, that its physical, not legal, invisibility was chiefly responsible for its effectiveness; and, second, that the pretence to privacy and domesticity it embodied was a very thin one. Indeed, the distinction in early modern Europe between public and private worship was as much cultural fiction as it was social reality. It was a story that enabled Europeans to accommodate dissent without confronting it directly, to tolerate knowingly what they could not bring themselves to accept fully. It preserved a public semblance of religious unity, and thus contained the threat of religious conflict. It allowed people to go on living as if civic and sacral community were still one and the same. This was patently a fiction, and recognized as such. The Dutch spoke of “looking through the fingers”; the metaphor captures the self-imposed character of the blindness as well as its incompleteness. “Turning a blind eye” to dissent carried a similar sense. Even more common was the term “connivance,” used from Ireland to Prussia.73 This language captures a tolerance that was grudging and partial, but self-conscious. For their part, dissenters participated in the fiction by refraining from challenging the monopoly over public religious life enjoyed by the official church of their community. Their ­assertiveness 71 72

Müller, ed., Instrumenta Pacis Westphalicae, German text 149, Latin 37. “in aedibus propriis aut alienis ei rei destinatis,” Müller, ed., Instrumenta Pacis Westphalicae, Latin text 18, German 107. The distinction between devotio domestica qualificata and ­inqualificata developed later; see J.B. Sägmüller, “Der Begriff des exercitium religionis publicum, exercitium religionis privatum und der devotio domestica im Westfälischen Frieden,” Theologische Quartalschrift 90 (1908): 255–79, which goes so far, erroneously, as to equate religious tolerance solely with exercitium religionis privatum. 73 Fagan, The Second City, 112; Heinrich Pigge, Die religiose Toleranz Friedrichs des Grossen nach ihrer theoretischen und praktischen Seite (Mainz, 1899), 318–19.

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usually took a different form: expanding the private space within which they worshipped. The distinction between public and private worship that emerged in early modern Europe was not an isolated phenomenon. It formed part of a broader distinction between public and private spheres that has received much scholarly attention of late. Some of this attention flowed out of an interest in the history of mentalité; some of it was inspired by Jürgen Habermas’ The ­Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which offered historians a thought-­ provoking paradigm for the rise of modern political culture.74 Within and among these historiographic strands, general agreement exists that the centuries between Reformation and French Revolution saw the sundering of a onceundifferentiated communal sphere into separate public and private spheres.75 There is agreement too that religious developments contributed to this fundamental remapping of social space. The schuilkerk reveals one specific way in which they did. Europe’s new religious divisions threatened to destroy the cohesion of communities; distinguishing public from private worship was a way to save it. By redefining freedom of conscience to mean freedom of devotion for families within their homes, Europeans designated the family home as something it had never previously been, a space safe for practices otherwise forbidden. The schuilkerk then simply exploited the potential of the space. The line separating private sphere from public received reinforcement every time the orthodox turned a blind eye to schuilkerk services. Scholars offer different descriptions of the new private sphere. Reinhard Koselleck, on whose ideas Habermas drew, sees the repressive forces of absolutist government restricting severely its size. He equates it with the realm of conscience, the mental world of the individual where people enjoy full autonomy and privacy.76 An alternate definition equates the private sphere with the family home, which scholars portray as an effective refuge, at least by the eighteenth century, from the demands of society and a hothouse of emotional 74 75 76

English transl. Cambridge, 1989; original German edition 1962. Some of this vast literature is reviewed in Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and Theory 31 (1992): 1–20. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford, 1988), esp. 11, 17–22. On this point Olivier Christin follows Koselleck, as does a recent study of Leiden by Christine Kooi. Christin, La paix de religion, 209; Christine Kooi, Liberty and religion: church and state in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (Leiden, 2000), Ch. 6. While most historians today emphasize the limitations on the power of absolutist rulers, Koselleck conflates the reality of absolutist government with its most radical, Hobbesian theory.

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intimacy. Yet another definition sees individuals carving out “private” lives outside the home, in the activities and friends they freely embraced. These three definitions jostle against one another inconsistently in the third, early modern volume of Philippe Ariès’ History of Private Life.77 Europe’s schuilkerken testify to the widespread operation, beginning as early as the sixteenth century, of the second definition. Although other structures served also as disguises, most schuilkerken were tolerated by pretending they were family homes. The Edict of Nantes, Peace of Westphalia, and other official documents spoke of them explicitly as located inside houses. Several of the terms used to denote them – house church, prayer house, meeting house, mass house, house c­hapel  – ­emphasized likewise their domestic character. Schuilkerken also shed light on the nature of the public sphere. Habermas saw emerging in the eighteenth century a new, “authentic, bourgeois” public sphere, in which individuals engaged in rational discussion and debate, first about literary matters, then politics. Did schuilkerken help give birth to such a sphere? On first consideration, the hypothesis seems plausible. James Van Horn Melton has found “structural similarities” between Pietist conventicles and the salons, coffee houses, and other social forums in which Habermas sees the new sphere crystallizing.78 Schuilkerken bear some resemblance to those conventicles. Other historians, most notably Dale Van Kley, have made a compelling case for the role of religious controversy in stimulating public debate and appeals to “public opinion” of the kind Habermas describes.79 Obviously schuilkerken were forums for the expression of religious dissent. Yet there are 77

78 79

Eng. transl. Cambridge, Mass., 1989, French edition 1986. The second definition was classically formulated in Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977); the third is artfully developed in Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley, 1993). James Van Horn Melton, “Pietism, Politics, and the Public Sphere in Germany,” in Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe, ed. James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley (Notre Dame, 2001), 294–333. Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime, 1750–1770 (Princeton, 1984); Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, 1996), 191–248; David Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford, 1994); D. Carrol Joynes, “The Gazette de Leyde: The Opposition Press and French Politics, 1750–1757,” in Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, ed. Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (Berkeley, 1987), 133–69; Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of the Revolution: Jean Luzac’s Gazette de Leyde (Ithaca, 1989); Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in ­Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Rosemary Morris (University Park, Penn., 1995), Ch. 2; Peter R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London, 1996). Focusing on France, these scholars locate the origins of a “politics of contestation” not in inter-confessional debate but rather in the Jansenist controversy.

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good reasons not to conflate the schuilkerk or religious dissent generally with the phenomenon that concerned Habermas. Schuilkerk congregations may indeed be regarded as components of a civil society separate from the state, but with members of widely different social status and degrees of education, they did not form a unitary, enlightened public. Affiliated with every Christian denomination and both branches of European Jewry, they shared no common set of beliefs or practices. Some engaged in “rational-critical debate”; others gathered principally to enact rituals. Some allowed women and lay men to play leadership roles, but over time clerical authority tended to rise, not fall. Nor were such congregations hosted only in “bourgeois” homes. Habermas contrasted his modern public sphere to an earlier one characterized by “representative publicness.” In the latter, self-display and self-­ representation to others were what gave a person or thing its public quality. Such publicness, he argues, was achieved through the use of insignia, clothing, demeanor, rhetoric, festivities, and other symbolic vocabularies. It was in itself an assertion of status and power.80 Although brief and merely suggestive, Habermas’ description of “representative publicness” does seem to capture the difference between public and private worship in early modern Europe. Symbolic self-representation to an external audience was precisely what distinguished an ordinary parish, or cathedral, or monastic church from a schuilkerk, and the publicness of the former was indeed an assertion of the status and power that distinguished a community’s official faith from that of dissenters. Contrary, though, to Habermas’ claim that this sort of publicness yielded to a new, modern one in the eighteenth century, the continued operation of schuilkerken suggests that “representative publicness” survived to the very end of the old regime and, fragmentarily, even beyond. While the trend was for them to grow in size and lose their concern about secrecy, schuilkerken always maintained at least a superficial invisibility. Their privacy, in the final analysis, was a widely acknowledged fiction, and an increasingly thin one at that. Yet as late as the 1780s that fiction was still being maintained. As a concession to popular opinion – the prejudice of the orthodox – it bears a striking resemblance to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that President Bill Clinton introduced for gays and lesbians in the U.S. military. Such pieces of social hypocrisy belie both the rationality and openness that Habermas attributed to the “authentic” 80

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Berger (Cambridge, 1989), 5–14. The contrast between the two types of public sphere is usefully emphasized by Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 153–82.

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public sphere. At the same time, they reveal how “unstable and elusive,” in Melton’s words, the boundaries between public and private really were, and still are.81 Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this article were presented to groups at the Folger Shakespeare Library; the University of Maryland, College Park; Harvard University; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Catholic University of America; the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Madison, Wisconsin; and the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. The author is grateful for all the comments and suggestions received on those occasions. He is grateful also to the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the University of Iowa for their financial support of this research. 81

James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001), 15; see likewise Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life.” Habermas himself presented his modern public sphere ambiguously as both normative ideal and social reality, as Keith Baker and Geoff Eley, among others, have pointed out; see their contributions to Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

Chapter 8

“Dutch” Religious Tolerance: Celebration and Revision When foreigners visit the Netherlands today, certain items seem invariably to stand on their touristic agenda: the Rijksmuseum, Anne Frank’s house, a boatride through the canals. One of the more remarkable items is a walk through Amsterdam’s red light district, where, on a typical summer evening, in addition to the clientele, thousands of foreigners throng – men, women, couples, even families. Such districts are not usually on the itinerary of respectable tourists, but in Amsterdam a promenade there serves a purpose: foreigners are invited to wonder at the tolerance – or, if you prefer, permissiveness – that prevails in the Netherlands. In the same district but during the daytime, the Amstelkring Museum extends essentially the same invitation. The museum preserves Our Lord in the Attic, one of the roughly twenty Catholic schuilkerken, or clandestine churches, that operated in Amsterdam in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Nestled within the top floors of a large but unremarkable house named The Hart, Our Lord does not betray its existence to the casual passer-by – it has no tower, no stained-glass windows, no crosses on the outside – and, but for the museum banner that hangs today on the building’s front façade, one could easily pass by it unawares. In its day, though, its existence was an open secret, like that of the other schuilkerken. Its discreet architecture fooled no one, but did help to reconcile the formal illegality of Catholic worship with its actual prevalence. Today, the museum’s guidebook (English version) presents the church as “a token of the liberalism of the mercantile Dutch in an age of intolerance.”1 Around the world, Dutch society is famous for its tolerance, which extends to drug use, alternate lifestyles, and other matters about which most industrial lands feel a deep ambivalence. But whence comes that tolerance, that “liberalism”? The guidebook hints at two answers. One is that tolerance promotes commerce and thus is profitable; the other is that the Dutch are simply a “liberal,” i.e. tolerant, people. Tolerance is represented as smart economics, but also as a national trait – a virtue by most people’s account, a vice by others’, but either way as something rooted in the history, customs, and very character of the Dutch people. The Dutch, in other words, do not just practice tolerance: 1 Amstelkring Museum: Our Lord in the Attic (n.p., 1970), first page.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_010

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by their own account and others,’ they are tolerant; it is considered one of their defining characteristics.2 This is nothing new: “Dutch” tolerance was already proverbial in the Golden Age, though the tolerance then under discussion extended only to religions. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, in the crucible of their revolt against Spain, the Dutch – with Hollanders in the vanguard – began to define themselves as an especially, even uniquely tolerant people. That identity was cemented in the Golden Age, when Calvinists, Catholics, Mennonites, and a host of other religious groups lived peacefully alongside one another.3 In our own century, the same notion of Dutchness has expanded beyond the religious, just as the concept of tolerance itself, rooted in the religious dilemmas of early modern Europe, has come to be applied to all forms of “otherness.” Logically, the argument that the Dutch practice tolerance because they are tolerant is nothing but a tautology, unless one believes in national character as an autonomous, causal force in history, which few scholars do today.4 As a cultural construct, though, the argument continues to function as a powerful expression of national identity. In that capacity it provides a standard of behavior against which the Dutch judge their society and government – ­severely sometimes, for example as concerns policy toward the ethnic minorities come in recent decades to live in the Netherlands. It also provides a framework for the interpretation of Dutch history. But here the problems begin, for the essentializing of “Dutch” tolerance has for centuries involved mythologizing, encouraged anachronism, and served partisan causes. In this way it has long 2 Hans Bots, “Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht. Het beeld van de Nederlandse tolerantie bij buitenlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 107 (1992): 657; W.W. Mijnhardt, “De geschiedschrijving over de ideeëngeschiedenis van de 17e- en 18-eeuwse Republiek,” in Kantelend geschiedbeeld. Nederlandse historiografie sinds 1945, ed. W.W. Mijnhardt (Utrecht/Antwerp, 1983), 165; B. van Heerikhuizen, “What is typically Dutch? Sociologists in the 1930s and 1940s on the Dutch national character,” Netherlands Journal of Sociology 18 (1982): 103–26; R. van Ginkel, “Typisch Nederlands … Ruth Benedict over het ‘nationaal karakter’ van de Nederlanders,” Amsterdams sociologisch tijdschrift 18 (1991): 43, 52; Ernest Zahn, Regenten, rebellen en reformatoren. Een visie op Nederland en de Nederlanders (Amsterdam, 1989), 37–42; Herman Pleij, Hollandse welbehagen (Amsterdam, 1998), 37–42; other references below. 3 On the complex relations between social practice and cultural identity, and problems of terminology, see Willem Frijhoff, “Identiteit en identiteitsbesef. De historicus en de spanning tussen verbeelding, benoeming en herkenning,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 107 (1992): 614–34. 4 See, for the Netherlands, Rob van Ginkel’s careful examination of twentieth-century ideas and discussions concerning Dutch national “identity” and “character”: Rob van Ginkel, Op zoek naar eigenheid. Denkbeelden en discussies over cultuur en identiteit in Nederland (The Hague, 1999).

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obscured our understanding of religious life in the Dutch Republic. Today it does the same, but in a twofold manner: not just by propagating but also by provoking reactions, some of them exaggerated, against such mythologizing, anachronism, and partisanship. The mythologizing began early. In the sixteenth century, Netherlanders justified their Revolt against Spain most frequently as a conservative action in defence of their historic “privileges,” or “liberties.” As Juliaan Woltjer has pointed out, only some of those privileges had a firm basis in law or fact, and what they entailed was not always crystal clear. Even the famous jus de non evocando, perhaps the most frequently cited of all, was capable of varying constructions: while most people agreed that it guaranteed a burgher accused of a crime would not be tried by a court outside his province, opinions differed as to whether it assigned to local municipal courts sole and final jurisdiction in such cases. Either way, the privilege conjured up a time when cities and provinces had enjoyed judicial autonomy, and therein lay the true power of the privileges generally: to evoke an idealized past against which the present could be judged.5 However vague their positive content, no one mistook the privileges’ negative import as an indictment of, and justification for resistance to, the Habsburg government’s unwelcome initiatives and innovations. Foremost among the latter were the efforts of Philip ii to introduce what the Dutch, with great effect if little accuracy, called the “Spanish Inquisition”: an institutional structure for suppressing Protestantism, reforming the Catholic Church, and imposing Tridentine orthodoxy on the people of the Netherlands. Such a program entailed “gewetensdwang,” the forcing of consciences, on a massive scale. But if gewetensdwang was new and contrary to the privileges, was its opposite, freedom of conscience, then part of a hallowed past? That was at least the vague implication, made more plausible by the fact that believers in the old Catholic faith as well as converts to Protestantism resisted the government’s religious policies. Still, given that the variety of religious beliefs spawned by the Reformation was scarcely older than the placards outlawing them, it took some legerdemain to construe the privileges as guarantors of freedom of conscience. Nevertheless, a few writers of the period did so explicitly. Two anonymous pamphlets dating from 1579 appealed to the Joyous Entry of Brabant, the oath taken since 1356 by each new Duke of Brabant by which he swore to “do no violence or abuse to any person in any manner.”

5 J.J. Woltjer, “Dutch Privileges, Real and Imaginary,” in Britain and the Netherlands 5 (1975), ed. J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann, 19–35; James D. Tracy, Holland Under Habsburg Rule 1506–1566: The Formation of a Body Politic (Berkeley, 1990), 147–75.

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This word in any manner, expressly highlighted [wtstaende] in the Joyous Entry, excludes any kind of violence or abuse, be it to property, body, or soul, so that the king is bound by virtue of the Joyous Entry to leave every person in possession of their freedom, not only of property or body but also of soul, that is, of conscience.6 That this interpretation might seem rather far-fetched did not escape the author of either pamphlet, but in its support both cite a treaty between Brabant and Flanders concluded in 1339 (and published, as a timely reminder, in 1576), in which the vague phrase “in any manner” is glossed to mean “in soul, body, or property.” Contrary to what some people think, says one of the pamphlets, it is a wonder to see “how careful our ancestors always were to preserve and to retain the enjoyment of this right,” freedom of conscience, which until the arrival of the Inquisition we always enjoyed.7 Even more remarkably, both pamphlets go on to equate freedom of conscience explicitly with freedom of worship. Not even the Inquisition could stop people from believing what they wished; the freedom which it took from us, therefore (so the argument went), must have been the right to profess our beliefs publicly and to worship God in accordance with them. Thus by anachronism religious tolerance took on the aura of an ancient custom. Once gained, that aura did not readily fade. Eighteen years later, Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft, burgomaster of Amsterdam, thought it entirely plausible to tell his fellow regents that it was “in accordance with the ancient manner of governing this land and this city” that they “bear with each others’ mistakes in matters of faith and not disturb any person on account of religion.”8 In 1659, Pieter de la Court represented what he perceived as a decline in religious tolerance as a departure from the “original maxims” of his province.9 Some of its apologists, however, represented the Revolt as a fight not just for specific “freedoms,” plural, but for “freedom,” singular and abstract. Jacob van 6 Anon., Een goede Waerschouwinghe voor den Borgheren, ende besonder dien vanden leden van Antwerpen/ Datsy hen niet en souden laten verlocken met het soet aengheuen vande bedriechlycke Artijkelen van peyse/ onlancx ghecomen van Cuelen (n.p., 1579), fo. 15r. 7 Anon. [“eenen goede[n] liefhebber des vreedts”], Een Goede vermaninge aen de goede borghers van Bruessele/ dat sy souden blijuen in goede eendracht/ ende niet treden in partijschap teghen malcanderen om eenighe saecken (Ghent, 1579), fo. 14. Cf. Anon., Letteren van Verbande tuss. Brabant ende Vlaenderen, ghedaen ende besloten int Jaer 1339 (Delft, 1576); P.A.M. Geurts, De Nederlandse opstand in de pamfletten 1566–1584 (Utrecht, 1978), 155–56, 250–51. 8 Gerard Brandt, Historie der reformatie, en andre kerkelyke geschiedenissen, in en ontrent de Nederlanden, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1671–1704), 1:833. 9 Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland (New York, 1972), 69.

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Wesembeeke, Pensionary of Antwerp, played a crucial role in developing this argument. In 1566 he described the people of the Netherlands as “having always been not just lovers, in the manner common to other peoples, but special and extremely ardent advocates, observers, and defenders” of their “ancient liberty and freedom.”10 William of Orange, for whom Wesembeeke worked for a time as propagandist, took up the theme, characterizing Netherlanders “as exceptional lovers and advocates of their liberty and enemies of all violence and oppression.”11 Both men attributed a religious dimension to the liberty so cherished, Wesembeeke speaking reverently, for example, of the “anchienne liberté au spirituel” of the Netherlands.12 Thus the Dutch devotion to religious freedom was given a basis in national character as well as custom. That character took on sharper profile over the course of the Revolt, especially after the return of the southern provinces to the Spanish fold. ­Northerners – Hollanders in particular – increasingly appropriated to themselves the special love of freedom once more widely conceded.13 One way they did so was though the myth of the Batavians, which had been circulating since the 1510s but gained enormous cultural prominence from the 1580s. Histories, dramas, and paintings celebrated this ancient Germanic tribe, known chiefly from the writings of Tacitus, as ancestors of the contemporary Hollanders and founders of their polity. Virtuous, industrious, pious and clean, paragons of a simple decency, the Batavians appear in works like Hugo Grotius’s Liber de antiquitate reipublicae Batavicae (1610) above all as fiercely independent. The tale of their struggle for autonomy from Rome was taken to prefigure the Hollanders’ own struggle with Spain and predict its happy outcome.14 In another work, the Parallelon Rerum-Publicarum Liber Tertius (written around 1601), Grotius compared the formerly-Batavian-now-Hollandic people to the ancient Athenians and Romans. The former emerge as superior in most every respect to the 10

Ch. Rahlenbeck, ed., Mémoires de Jacques de Wesembeke (Brussels, 1859), 12. Cf. Martin van Gelderen, ed., The Dutch Revolt (Cambridge, 1993), xiii. 11 Quoted in Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590 (Cambridge, 1992), 121; cf. Catherine Secretan, Les privilèges, berceau de la liberté (Paris, 1990), 28. 12 Secretan, Les privilèges, 28. 13 See E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema, eds., Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijf­ tiende tot de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam, 1999). 14 Hugo de Groot, De Oudheid van de Bataafse nu Hollandse Republiek, ed. G.C. Molewijk (Weesp, 1988); i. Schöffer, “The Batavian Myth during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Britain and the Netherlands 5 (1975), ed. J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann, 78–101; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), 75–81; Marijke Spies, “Verbeeldingen van vrijheid: David en Mozes, Burgerhart en Bato, Brutus en Cato,” De zeventiende eeuw 10 (1994), 148–52.

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paragons of civilization venerated by Renaissance Europe. This experiment in comparative ethnology represents the Revolt as a fight by the Hollanders “for the freedom of their souls” as well as of their bodies, and exults in the Hollanders’ combination of piety and tolerance: This [Reformed] religion … we maintain with a rare constancy and we spread it as we extend our territory…. We prescribe it without forcing it on anyone [zonder hem af te perssen], and those who take no pleasure in it with us we consider worthy more of pity than of punishment. We have no commands to give to the human heart; we torture no souls. Let each one believe what he can; in this regard too let FREEDOM be inviolate [ongeschonden]….15 The flip side of such self-congratulation was the anxious xenophobia directed at Calvinist refugees from the southern provinces. This emotion pervaded towns like Leiden and Utrecht, where such refugees comprised a third or more of the membership of the Reformed Church, but was common enough elsewhere. Southern Calvinists were accused of an intolerance that mirrored that of the Spanish and was equally pernicious. Their opponents said that the Calvinists’ form of church government merely replaced the old Spanish inquisition with a new Genevan one, and that their violent efforts to suppress Catholicism, having fatally undermined the Revolt in the south, now threatened to do the same in the north. The story of Ghent’s Calvinist theocracy was referred to frequently, in tones of dark foreboding.16 A famous speech delivered in 1597 by Burgomaster Hooft encapsulates much of this thinking. ­Occasioned by the excommunication and imprisonment of Goosen Vogelsang, a maker of velvet, it was a tirade against the influence of “foreigners,” by which Hooft meant Calvinist refugees from the south, within the Dutch Reformed Churches. “The ­management of affairs,” Hooft argued, should be in the hands 15

16

Hugo Grotius, Parallelon rerum-publicarum liber tertius: de moribus ingenioque populorum Atheniensium, Romanorum, Batavorum, ed. J. Meerman, 3 vols. (Haarlem, 1801–1803), 3:146. See also Christian Gellinek, Hugo Grotius (Boston, 1983), 65–83; E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, “Grotius, Hooft and the Writing of History in the Dutch Republic,” in Clio’s Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (Zutphen, 1985), 54–72; H. Kampinga, De opvattingen over onze oudere vaderlandsche geschiedenis bij de Hollandsche historici der xvie en xviie eeuw (The Hague, 1917), 14–7, 36–7, 62, 69–73, 80. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995), 64–5; Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (Leiden, 2000), 105; Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelij­ke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (The Hague, 1989), 110.

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of ­“persons of a prudent, steady, and peaceable disposition, which qualities, I believe, prevail more among the natives than among those who have come here to live from other lands.” These foreign ministers and elders, trying to impose on the natives an alien orthodoxy and, more importantly, an alien demand for orthodoxy, show that they do not know “the nature of the land and its people”; Hollanders, declared Hooft, “are accustomed, like the Bereans, to examine Scripture for themselves.”17 Hooft ignored the fact that few of the Reformed churches in the north were ever completely dominated by southerners, and they only briefly. He remained silent about the extremism of some of his own landsmen and -women. In the seventeenth century, Remonstrants developed further this strategy of branding intolerance a foreign vice and imputing an innate tolerance to the Dutch. In his Kerckeliicke Historie, Johannes Wtenbogaert hailed the Revolt against Spain as a fight for the pure Gospel and for freedom of conscience. To these two causes, he suggested, the Dutch had been devoted since the beginning of the Reformation and so remained – especially Hollanders, who “whatever their persuasion (excepting the Roman and Genevan heretic-­ hunters and -burners, and those who support them), do not like the burning of books under any circumstances.”18 Of course, no one needed reminding who the most outspoken champions of religious tolerance were in contemporary Holland. In effect, Wtenbogaert was claiming the Dutch character to be inherently Remonstrant in its religious sensibility. His narrative of the Reformation bolstered such claims by highlighting the continuity between his own party’s beliefs and those of the first Dutch reformers.19 Other Remonstrant authors adopted the same strategic use of historical narrative, but located the origins of Dutch Protestantism not in the 1550s, as did Wtenbogaert, but earlier, with Erasmus of Rotterdam. It was Grotius who, in his Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas (1613), first made the case for the broad popularity of Erasmian piety in the Habsburg Netherlands; he who first represented the Remonstrants as the heirs of this Netherlandish tradition, 17 Brandt, Historie der reformatie, 1:818, 820. 18 Joannes Uytenbogaert, Kerckeliicke Historie, Vervatende verscheyden Gedenckwaerdige saeken, In de Christenheyt voorgevallen, van Het Jaer vier hondert af, tot in het Jaer sestien hondert ende negentien. Voornamentlijck in dese Geunieerde Provincien (Rotterdam, 1647), 777. 19 This paragraph is indebted to the insights of Charles H. Parker, “To the Attentive, Nonpartisan Reader: The Appeal to History and National Identity in the Religious Disputes of the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 57–78. Cf.  also D. Nauta, “De reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie,” in Geschiedschrijving in Nederland, ed. P.A.M. Geurts and A.E.M. Janssen, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1981), 2:207.

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t­ racing a continuous chain of influences from the great Christian humanist, via the so-called “Libertines” of the late sixteenth century, to his own party.20 As has been shown, the facts of the matter were much more complicated. Erasmus’s influence in the Netherlands was as diffuse as it was pervasive, and the inclination to view ethical behavior as the essence of Christianity did not necessarily owe its inspiration to him. Dirck Coornhert, Hubert Duifhuis, Caspar Coolhaes, and other religious leaders known as “Libertines” were inspired by spiritualist and Protestant teachings at least as much as by humanist ones. And Jacob Arminius certainly did not derive from Erasmus his position on predestination. By constructing retrospectively such a line of influence, however, Grotius gave his own religious party a venerable genealogy. As a native Hollander, uniquely eminent scholar, and champion of a “purified” Christianity, Erasmus was the perfect father-figure for a religious movement intent on portraying itself as autochthonous, popular, and distinctly Dutch.21 Gerard Brandt’s Historie der Reformatie stands as a masterful elaboration of the same historical schema. It represents Erasmus not just as a bona fide Reformer, but as the wisest and most important in all Europe: “This man led freedom into the Christian church/ .… / A Rotterdammer teaches the world Reformation.”22 For Brandt, as for Grotius, the historic popularity of Erasmus in the Netherlands implied that the Remonstrant faith had the sympathy of the Dutch people and the religious tolerance by which it survived their support. By Brandt’s day, it also conveyed a message 20 21

22

Hugo Grotius, Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas, ed. Edwin Rabbie (Leiden, 1995), 151. G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, “De doorwerking van de Moderne Devotie met name bij de Remonstranten,” in De doorwerking van de Moderne Devotie. Windesheim 1387–1987, ed. P. Bange et al. (Hilversum, 1988), 81–94; M.E.H.N. Mout, “Limits and Debates: A Comparative View of Dutch Toleration in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” in The emergence of tolerance in the Dutch Republic, ed. Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck et al. (Leiden, 1997), 37–47; Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, Ch. 2; Bruce Mansfield, Phoenix of His Age: Interpretations of Erasmus c 1550–1750 (Toronto, 1979), Ch. 4; J.C.H. Blom and C.J. Misset, “‘Een onvervalschte Nederlandsche geest.’ Enkele historiografische kanttekeningen bij het concept van een nationaal-gereformeerde richting,” in Geschiedenis godsdienst letterkunde. Opstellen aangeboden aan dr. S.B.J. Zilverberg, ed. E.K. Grootes and J. den Haan (Roden, 1989), 226–27; Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1985), 138 ff; and see Chapter 2 above. “Deez’ heeft de vrijheit in de Christen’ kerk geleidt/…. /Een Rotterdammer leerdt de werelt Reformeren.” Brandt, Historie der reformatie, caption to portrait of Erasmus, vol. i, between 64 and 65. Cf. Peter Burke, “The Politics of Reformation History: Burnet and Brandt,” in Clio’s Mirror, ed. Duke and Tamse, 73–85; S.B.J. Zilverberg, “Gerard Brandt als kerkhistoricus,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 49 (1968): 37–58. The historical schema of ­Remonstrant historian Philip van Limborch was essentially the same; cf. Pieter Jacobus Barnouw, Philippus van Limborch (The Hague, 1963), 39–48, 142.

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about the legitimacy of the political patrons of tolerance, the pro-States, antiOrangist party. Remonstrant viewpoints dominated Dutch historiography to the end of the Republic and even beyond, thanks partly to the ­influence of the Collegiant Jan Wagenaar’s Vaderlandsche Historie (1749–1759).23 Proclaiming themselves the heirs of the original Dutch Reformation and the bearers of a genuinely Dutch Protestantism, Remonstrants found it natural to pray not just for their own welfare but for that of the entire Dutch “fatherland.” According to Peter van Rooden, the Remonstrants were the first group of dissenters to celebrate the national days of fasting, prayer, and thanksgiving (bededagen) decreed by the States-General, adopting the custom as early as 1627. Remonstrant ministers like Simon Episcopius proclaimed that God had bestowed his blessing on the Dutch Republic and allowed it to prosper as a reward for the religious tolerance practiced by its government. By the end of the seventeenth century, Mennonite and Lutheran congregations commonly celebrated the same occasions with similar prayers. In the eighteenth century, the different denominations even competed to display the greatest patriotism. All of them attributed the special divine status of the land in part to its tolerance, which allowed their churches to function.24 That hundreds of foreigners who visited the Republic remarked on its religious tolerance is well-known; indeed, by the late seventeenth century the Netherlands clearly stood for tolerance in the minds of foreigners, just as it does today. From the 1610s, if not earlier, the itinerary of foreign tourists conventionally included a sampling of churches and synagogues; guidebooks, a genre that developed later in the century, pointed them to the same. Like modern tourists, visitors took aesthetic pleasure in the art and architecture; by attending services they satisfied what we would call an anthropological interest in foreign customs and rituals (those of the Jews and Quakers exercised a special fascination, accounts suggest); and like today’s tourist in the red light district, some of them also derived a thrill from exposure to things forbidden at

23

24

See G.J. Schutte, “‘A Subject of Admiration and Encomium’: The History of the Dutch Republic as Interpreted by Non-Dutch Authors in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in Clio’s Mirror, ed. Duke and Tamse, 117; L.H.M. Wessels, “Jan Wagenaar (1709–1773): Bijdrage tot een herwaardering,” in Geschiedschrijving in Nederland, ed. Geurts and Janssen, 1:117–40. Peter van Rooden, “Dissenters en bededagen. Civil religion ten tijde van de Republiek,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 107 (1992): 703–12. Although Van Rooden suggests that many Catholics “probably” celebrated the same biddagen, it is unclear whether they expressed (or felt) the same gratitude as did Protestant dissenters for the nation’s tolerance.

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home. Savored or condemned, religious pluralism featured as a standard topos in their travel accounts, which, in this regard as in others, tended to conflate the Republic as a whole with Holland. Indeed, based sometimes on but a quick visit to Amsterdam, German accounts made sweeping generalizations about Dutch tolerance. In part, this was visitors seeing what they were prepared to see and reporting back what they themselves had read in earlier reports: C.D. van Strien has noted that English authors of travel accounts often borrowed heavily from the travel guides and earlier accounts they had read. Such literature became a vehicle for the circulation of stereotypes. So did the periodical literature of the Enlightenment, which likewise represented the Dutch as an especially tolerant, freedom-loving people.25 It was not just foreigners, though, who defined the Dutch as tolerant; rather, as we have seen, the definition originated among groups within the Netherlands for whom it had special, partisan meanings. If it became part of a more widely-shared self-definition, it was not because all the Dutch were happy about this characteristic of their society, only that they acknowledged it and saw it as distinctive. Nor should this sense of collective identity be equated with modern nationalism. Scholars have amply documented the ambiguities of the term “nation” in the early modern period and the continued strength of local and provincial loyalties. As in other spheres, so in the cultural Holland had a disproportionate influence within the Republic and was able to project aspects of its own self-definition on the larger whole. Certain cities, like Haarlem and Gouda, consciously cultivated reputations for tolerance; others, like Dordrecht and Groningen, did not. Only toward the end of the eighteenth century did the notion emerge that each political “nation” should comprise a single, organically united, culturally and linguistically unique “Volk.” A product of

25

Julia Bientjes, Holland und der Holländer im Urteil deutscher Reisender 1400–1800 (Groningen, 1967), esp. 88–112; Bots, “Tolerantie of gecultiveerde tweedracht,” 668–69; Christian Gellinek, ed., Europas Erster Baedeker: Filip von Zesens Amsterdam 1664 (New York, 1988); Marijke Meijer Drees, Andere landen, andere mensen. De beeldvorming van Holland versus Spanje en Engeland omstreeks 1650 (The Hague, 1997), esp. 99–106, 116–31; R. Murris, La Hollande et les Hollandais au xviie et au xviiie siècles vus par les Français (Paris, 1925); C.D. van Strien, British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period: Edward Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces (Leiden, 1993), esp. 8–13, 41–9, 131–32, 201–11, 228–29, 322; and Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau, Le voyage de Hollande: récits de voyageurs français dans les Provinces-Unies, 1748–1795 (Oxford, 1994), 61–9. See also Herman Meyer, “Das Bild des Holländers in der deutschen Literature,” in Herman Meyer, Zarte Empirie: Studien zur Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1963), 202–24; and the new anthology, Kees van Strien, Touring the Low Countries: Accounts of British Travellers, ­1660–1720 (Amsterdam, 1998); Schutte, “A Subject of Admiration and Encomium,” 109–31.

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Herder and German romanticism, the equation of “nation” and “Volk” gave new power and meaning to the notion of “Dutch” religious tolerance.26 According to the romantics and their heirs, every Volk had a unique spirit, or character. Generally the qualities attributed in the nineteenth century to the Dutch volksgeest, or volkskarakter, were the same ones attributed over two centuries earlier: love of freedom first and foremost, followed by virtue, tolerance, a deep Biblical piety, industry, cleanliness, chastity (among women), and certain qualities of moderation and steady temper captured by the term “phlegmatic” and by Dutch words difficult to translate like nuchter and bedaard. (Against these, the most commonly-mentioned vices were greed, drunkenness, stupidity, and crudeness.) Explanations for these qualities – to the extent that ­considered ones were offered – shifted a bit more. Early modern scholars had followed the ancient Greeks in pointing to climate and soil as their chief causes. Warm or cold, wet or dry, the environment determined a people’s bodytype and character. While the Dutch, then, shared many traits with other northern peoples, Holland’s cold and wetness, it was said, gave its dwellers special “qualities of soul and of mind.”27 In the nineteenth century, the great liberal historian Robert Fruin raised two others forces to a level equal with environment: race and “social conditions.” By the first he meant particularly to distinguish the Germanic from the “Roman” (that is, romance-­language-speaking) volksaard; the latter referred to a people’s economic activities. C ­ ommerce, dominant in the Netherlands, “demands freedom of movement”; “it cannot suffer to be regulated or ruled” and has the effect of stimulating love of freedom in all domains, the religious as well as the political. Fruin added cynically that such love did not necessarily translate into “liberality,” a willingness to grant others the freedom you demand for yourself, citing as an example the way the Dutch ruled their colonies. But his was a dissenting opinion, and even he did not pursue the thought consequently. If he had, he might well have cited the Reformation as another example. Instead, he subscribed completely to the whiggish view of it as a glorious phase in the centuries-long struggle between two great forces, “centralised tyranny and the spirit of civil and religious liberty,” as John Lothrop Motley put it.28 Both men, along with Bakhuizen van den 26

F.M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought (Oxford, 1965); Lewis W. Spitz, “Natural Law and the Theory of History in Herder,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955): 459–60. 27 Grotius, Parallelon, 1:17–27; Meijer Drees, Andere landen, andere mensen, esp. 12–20, ­25–56; Kampinga, De opvattingen over onze oudere vaderlandsche geschiedenis, 36–7. Among the Renaissance scholars who preceded Grotius in developing this “climatological theory” was, unmentioned by Meijer Drees, the French political theorist Jean Bodin. See Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (New York, 1945), 85–152. 28 John Lothrop Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (London, 1868), 21.

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Brink and other liberal historians of the nineteenth century, projected onto the past the liberal Protestantism of their own age. To them, freedom – religious, civic, economic – was an essential, indivisible principle, and necessarily entailed religious tolerance. History was the story of its progress.29 Liberal church historians, especially members of the “Groningen school” of Protestant scholarship, applied the same thinking more specifically to the course of the Dutch Reformation. On the one hand, as a northern, Germanic people, the Dutch were said to incline naturally to Protestantism, the religion of freedom. On the other, their unique traits were said to give Dutch Protestantism distinctive qualities.30 Bernard ter Haar wrote of the Reformation in the Netherlands that it “proceeded entirely from the spirit of the people [volksgeest], and took, from its earliest beginning, an independent course that was entirely in accord with the people’s character [volkskarakter].”31 That character was tolerant, confident in human free will, and inclined to view sermon-on-the-mount ethics as the essence of Christianity. Also writing around mid-­century, Petrus Hofstede de Groot portrayed Calvinism as a belief system imposed by foreigners on the Dutch people which “disrupted and disturbed the natural, genuinely Netherlandish development of the Christian spirit here.”32 In the evolution of that spirit, the Groningen school assigned to Erasmus a very ­special place. As Barend Glasius put it,

29

30

31 32

Robert Fruin, “Het karakter van het Nederlandsche volk” and ibid., “Het antirevolutionnaire staatsrecht van Groen van Prinsterer ontvouwd en beoordeeld,” in Robert Fruin’s verspreide geschriften, 11 vols., ed. P.J. Blok, P.L. Muller, and S. Muller (The Hague, 1900–1905), 1:1–21 (on “liberality” p. 14) and 10:158–64; Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, 21, 49, 131–32 and passim; J.W. Smit, Fruin en de partijen tijdens de Republiek (Groningen, 1958), esp. 2­ 6–8, 100–06; John Paul Elliott, “Protestantization in the Northern Netherlands, A Case Study: The Classis of Dordrecht 1572–1640” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1990), 6–16; Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1950). While in many ways the liberal historiography of the nineteenth century was a continuation and development of the Remonstrant/Staatsgezinde historiographic school of the Republic (Brandt, Van Limborch, Wagenaar et al.), Smit shows that Fruin departed significant from this tradition in his appreciation for centralized governmental authority. Barend Glasius and H.M.C. van Oosterzee, Galerij van Nederlandsche geloofshelden voor de evangelie-waarheid (Tiel, 1853–1854), esp. 6–7; Petrus Hofstede de Groot, De Groninger godgeleerden in hunne eigenaardigheid: toespraak aan zijne vroegere en tegenwoordige leerlingen, na vervulde vijfentwintigjarige hoogleeraarsbediening (Groningen, 1855), esp. 77–8. Bernard ter Haar, De geschiedenis der Kerkhervorming, in tafereelen: een leesboek ter bevestiging der protestanten in hun christelijk geloof (Amsterdam, 1854), 241. Quoted in Nauta, “De reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie,” 2:215, whose treatment of the nineteenth-century church historians I largely follow.

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Erasmus’s distinctive manner of thinking and acting, with respect to the reformation of the church, had its basis chiefly in his temperament and character as a Netherlander; and … reciprocally the great influence which he exercised on the supporters of Reformation and the course of Reformation in our fatherland seems to have resulted from the Netherlanders’ natural conformity with their countryman.33 Even before Erasmus, though, came Geert Groote, Wessel Gansfort, and the Brothers of the Common Life; for Glasius and the others, these men and the movement with which they were associated, the Modern Devotion, expressed the first distinctly Dutch conception of Christendom and were the true originators of the Dutch Reformation.34 In the early twentieth century, Leiden church historians Frederik Pijper and Johannes Lindeboom brought a greater scholarly rigor to the study of the Dutch Reformation, but interpretatively they stood directly in the tradition of the Groningen school. To denote the distinctly Dutch religious movement he saw unfolding in the sixteenth-century, Pijper coined the label “national-­Netherlandic reform movement” (nationaal-Nederlandse reformatorische richting), which Lindeboom later shortened to “Netherlandic-reformist” (Nederlandse-reformatorische) or alternately to “national-Reformed” (nationaalGereformeerd). Both men saw the movement as essentially Erasmian in character and continuing in a straight line of influence down to the Remonstrants. They did not celebrate exuberantly, but they did maintain the same pantheon of Dutch reformers as their predecessors, which included such figures as Cornelis Hoen, Anastasius Veluanus, Hubert Duifhuis, and Dirk Coornhert.35 Lindeboom described the “Niederländisch Frömmigkeitstypus” that these men embodied as oriented toward the Bible (especially in its original 33 34

35

Barend Glasius, Verhandeling over Erasmus als Nederlandsch Kerkhervormer (The Hague, 1850), 5. Petrus Hofstede de Groot, Johan Wessel Ganzevoort, op het negende halve eeuwfeest zijner geboorte herdacht (Groningen, 1871); Ter Haar, De geschiedenis der Kerkhervorming, in tafereelen; Bernard ter Haar, W. Moll, and E.B. Swalue, eds., Geschiedenis der christelijke kerk in Nederland, in tafereelen, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1864–1869). Frederik Pijper, “Geestelijke stroomingen in Nederland voor de opkomst van het remonstrantisme,” in De remonstranten, gedenkboek bij het 300-jarig bestaan der Remonstrantsche Broederschap, ed. G.J. Heering (Leiden, 1919), 37–60; Frederik Pijper, Erasmus en de Nederlandsche Reformatie (Leiden, 1907); Johannes Lindeboom, De confessioneele ontwikkeling der reformatie in de Nederlanden (The Hague, 1946); Johannes Lindeboom, “Erasmus’ Bedeutung für die Entwicklung des geistigen Lebens in den Niederlanden,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 43 (1952): 1–12; D. Nauta, “De reformatie in Nederland in de historiografie”; Blom and Misset, “Een onvervalschte Nederlandsche geest.”

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languages), optimistic about human nature, and somewhat indifferent to ceremonies; it strives, he said, for apostolic simplicity and for pure behavior more than pure doctrine.36 Hendrik Enno van Gelder continued the same historiographic tradition into the 1970s. While dropping the nationalist terminology, he was unabashed in his anachronism: he explicitly presented the same cast of characters as “the most modern of their time, unconscious precursors of liberal Protestantism and of modern emancipation from church supervision, conscious defenders of tolerance, sometimes even of religious freedom.”37 In The Two Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (1961), Enno van Gelder elevated Erasmian humanism to its ultimate status as not just a bona fide Reformation but the “major” one of the sixteenth century, exceeding the Protestant Reformation in its radicalism and long-term impact.38 Of course, in every age there have been groups who constructed Dutch religious identity differently. During the Reformation, the Calvinist minister Reynier Donteclock made the Hollanders out to be natural-born spiritualists; it was their “nature and condition,” he postulated, “not to make a work of religion” – hence their support in great numbers for his foe, Coornhert.39 Usually, though, the different religious parties claimed the Dutch character to incline naturally toward their own beliefs. The Counter-Remonstrant theologian Jacobus Trigland implied as much in his Kerckelycke Geschiedenissen (1650), the alternate account of the Reformation he offered as rebuttal to Wtenbogaert’s Kerckeliicke Historie. Catholic authors used history similarly, not to claim that the Dutch were tolerant but to emphasize how ancient and deeply rooted the Catholic faith was in their land. Such was the overarching purpose, for example, of Hugo van Heussen’s Batavia sacra, sive Res Gestae Apostolicorum Virorum, Qui Fidem Bataviae Primi Intulerunt (1714). In the nineteenth century, both Calvinist and Catholic historians projected onto the past their own, confessional visions of the modern Dutch nation. In the twentieth century, some historians have employed a similar essentialism to explain the historic popularity of Anabaptism and Mennonism in the Netherlands. Pijper 36 37

38 39

Lindeboom, “Erasmus’ Bedeutung,” 7. H.A. Enno van Gelder, Revolutionnaire reformatie. De vestiging van de Gereformeerde Kerk in de Nederlandse gewesten, gedurende de eerste jaren van de Opstand tegen Filips ii, 1575–1585 (Amsterdam, 1943), 9–10. Cf. H.A. Enno van Gelder, Vrijheid en onvrijheid in de Republiek. Geschiedenis der vrijheid van drukpers en godsdienst … van 1572 tot 1619 (­Haarlem, 1947), esp. 262; and H.A. Enno van Gelder, “Humanisten en libertijnen, Erasmus en C.P. Hooft,” Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis ns. 16 (1920): 47, 53. H.A. Enno van Gelder, The Two Reformations in the Sixteenth Century: A Study of the Religious Aspects and Consequences of Renaissance and Humanism (The Hague, 1961). Quoted in H. Bonger, Leven en werk van Dirk Volckertsz. Coornhert (Amsterdam, 1978), 199.

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viewed the sixteenth-century Anabaptists as constituting the “left wing” of his “national-Netherlandish reform movement.” More recently, William Nijenhuis has declared that Anabaptism was “a typically Dutch phenomenon” and “that two of the [Mennonites’] most important characteristics were in conformity with the Dutch character: individualism and a morality which tended towards legalism.”40 It is the liberal vision of Dutch identity, though, that has prevailed in the twentieth century, and still circulates widely. Some theologians continue to find meaningful the notion of a Dutch “theologische volksziel,” which they conceive of as anti-dogmatic, humanistic, and ecumenical.41 More than a few specialists in religious history continue to explain the tolerance of the Dutch Republic as a product of the unique power of the “Erasmian spirit” in its progenitor’s homeland, and/or in terms of a “Low Countries tradition.”42 As for the most popular and widely-read historians – Huizinga, Romein, Schama – they all project onto their broad screens variants of the same vision. Even Schama sees the very soul of Dutch national identity as Erasmian, and while he does not credit it directly for the Republic’s tolerance, he does represent it as a unifying force that gave people of all religions, from the Catholic painter Jan Steen to the Pietistic Calvinist Jacob Cats, a common ethos. Where Schama departs from his predecessors is that, eschewing essentialism and teleology, he regards “Dutchness” not as a quality determined by race, climate, topography, or economics, but as a cultural construct, something the Dutch fashioned for themselves in the early years of the Republic. And indeed, that is precisely what they were doing when they defined themselves, among other things, as tolerant.43 40

41 42

43

Pijper, “Geestelijke stroomingen,” 42–5; W. Nijenhuis, “The Dutch Reformation,” in Lowland Highlights: Church and Oecumene in the Netherlands, ed. J.A. Hebly (Kampen, 1972), 25, critiqued in Otto de Jong, “How Protestant are Mennonites?,” in From martyr to muppy. A historical introduction to cultural assimilation processes of a religious minority in the Netherlands: The Mennonites, ed. Alastair Hamilton, Sjouke Voolstra, and Piet Visser (­Amsterdam, 1994), 35. See the remark similar to Nijenhuis’s in Jan en Annie Romein, De Lage landen bij de zee (Utrecht, 1949), 198. E.g. A. van Beek, “Het Nederlandse van de Nederlandse theologie,” in Het hemd is nader dan de rok. Zes voordrachten over het eigene van de Nederlandse cultuur, ed. S.C. Dik and G.W. Muller (Assen, 1991), 108–20. For “Erasmian spirit” see e.g. Samme Zijlstra, “‘Tgeloove is vrij.’ De tolerantiediscussie in de Noordelijke Nederlanden tussen 1520 en 1795,” in Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiende eeuw tot heden, ed. Marijke GijswijtHofstra (Hilversum, 1989), 49; James Tracy, “Erasmus, Coornhert and the Acceptance of Religious Disunity in the Body Politic: A Low Countries Tradition?,” in The emergence of tolerance in the Dutch Republic, ed. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al., 49–62. Johan Huizinga, Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1968), 49–53; Romein, De Lage landen bij de zee, 373 ff.; Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, esp. 97, 338. On

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Recent decades, however, have seen a reaction set in against the celebration of “Dutch” religious tolerance; indeed, some scholars have suggested the Dutch Republic was not so tolerant after all. Jonathan Israel has used some of the strongest language. The outlawing of Catholicism and elevation of Reformed Protestantism as official faith of the Republic in the period 1573–1581 entailed the decisive “rejection of toleration” by the Dutch regent class. What prevailed thereafter and through the entire seventeenth century was “an ambivalent semi-tolerance … seething with tension.” The case of Amsterdam’s Remonstrants exemplifies what Israel sees more broadly as the experience of the dissenting churches: the tolerance granted them was really, in his view, a form of “concealed intolerance,” for by confining them to a single schuilkerk it condemned them to the status of a small and marginalized group. Outside the Generality Lands, Catholics, whose number Israel believes has been exaggerated, formed in most places an equally small and tamed minority. In an essay published in 2002, Joke Spaans suggests similarly that “containment,” not tolerance, was the policy of Dutch regents toward the non-Reformed churches. In any event, the true test of tolerance, according to Israel, was not such rival churches at all but radicals who broke with traditional Christianity altogether: Socinians, deists, and especially Spinozists, who enjoyed scant freedom of expression and on occasion suffered direct persecution. Only in the eighteenth century did a genuine tolerance, inspired by the Enlightenment, come to prevail.44 Other scholars have denigrated what tolerance did exist by impugning its motives. Sometimes they allow a word or two or a subtly disparaging tone to carry the whole weight of their judgement, as when Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra uses the phrase “knip-op-de-beurstolerantie.”45 As she and others point out, by facilitating commerce and immigration tolerance was immensely profitable. Regents saw its utility also in maintaining “peace” and civil “order.” Of course, the Dutch themselves advertised the economic benefits of tolerance as early as the sixteenth century, though their more sophisticated discourses tended to bundle tolerance into a broader package of advantageous freedoms.46 And

44

45 46

the modern continuation of this process of cultural construction, see Van Ginkel, Op zoek naar eigenheid. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), 372, 676, 1033, 655; Joke Spaans, “Religious policies in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic,” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop (Cambridge, 2002), 72–86. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, “Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid,” in Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid, ed. Gijswijt-Hofstra, 9. For an early example see Van Gelderen, The Dutch Revolt, xiii. De la Court’s (op. cit.) is the classic exposition.

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“peace” and “order,” it should be recognized, were code words that referred to a specific status quo whose maintenance was neither inevitable nor universally desired. To point out the interests which religious tolerance served is only good history, but to reduce the reasons for its practice to those interests smacks of a reductionism against which all the methodological insights of the last twenty years counsel. Andrew Pettegree goes to an extreme in a recent essay, arguing that tolerance was used “as ruthlessly and cynically as persecution and intolerance to further particular political ends.” To the magistrates who promoted it, it had no value or meaning in itself; it served merely as a “weapon” or “party tool” in their struggle for power with the ministers of the Reformed Church.47 It seems highly questionable, though, whether the forces of intolerance were themselves always ruthless and cynical, never mind the supporters of tolerance, of whom a majority never served in government. Moreover, if calls for tolerance were merely a stratagem requiring no conviction, one would expect them to come equally from all who would have benefited. Instead, the loudest, most insistent ones came from groups who represented tolerance as one of their core principles: “Libertines” in the earliest years of the Republic; Collegiants, Waterlander Mennonites, and, above all, Remonstrants later. ­Pettegree’s revisionism would take us from extreme to extreme – from an acceptance of such representations as the whole story to a cynical dismissal of them altogether. An essay by Gijswijt-Hofstra offers clues to why such revisionism has taken root among historians. It forms the introduction to a volume entitled Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid – an appearance, or false semblance, of tolerance. Gijswijt-Hofstra does not deny the prevalence of religious tolerance in the Republic. She concurs, however, with the paradoxical judgment of Ernst Kossmann that tolerance itself is inherently intolerant, since in the very act of tolerating, a dominant group defines its own behavior or beliefs as normal and those of the tolerated as deviant.48 In other words, tolerance comes up far short of the mark when measured against modern standards of equality and non-discrimination. In the second place, Gijswijt-Hofstra expresses great unease with the notion of “‘de’ Nederlandse tolerantie,” that is, Dutch tolerance in the singular, even when limiting her consideration to the Republic. She argues that religious tolerance was a product largely of “extensive regional and 47 48

Andrew Pettegree, “The politics of toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620,” in Tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (Cambridge, 1996), longer quotation from 183. Gijswijt-Hofstra, “Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid,” 20–1. Note that Israel and Kossmann use the term “tolerance” differently, the former to mean full equality and freedom of ­public worship.

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local autonomy within the Republic,” and that so much variation existed in its quality and quantity that to speak of “‘the’ Republic” as tolerant is in itself misleading. This argument subtly conveys an animus against the nationalism that the notion of “Dutch tolerance” has come to embody. Finally, she criticizes as excessive the sheer amount of attention given to religious tolerance in the Republic. In her view, this fixation perpetuates a myth of the Dutch people as tolerant that obscures the actual intolerance displayed in the modern era, toward ethnic minorities in particular. These views resonate strongly with values prevalent in modern culture, especially within the academy. Multiculturalism has raised standards of non-­discrimination by exposing cultural biases that had gone unnoticed; nationalism has yielded place to anti-nationalism, veneration of the past to the deconstruction of historical myths. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a long succession of groups used the history of religious toleration as a vehicle through which to define and legitimize their own identity. Distorting it through anachronism and teleology, they shaped that history into something quite ahistorical, the idea that the Dutch were by nature tolerant. That idea partakes indeed of the mythical.49 Formerly it invited celebration; today it invites debunking. But in debunking it, we should remain conscious of the distortions our own ideological commitments might introduce. Misleading as it was to see in seventeenth-century tolerance the roots of modern liberalism, it would be equally misleading to judge it by modern standards. Ambiguous terminology makes it dangerously easy to do so: today the phrase “religious tolerance” implies religious freedom, which we define as a basic human right; it entails freedom of worship, religious speech, and assembly, and the legal equality of different religious groups. By contrast, until the Enlightenment to tolerate something meant merely to “souffrir,” or grudgingly concede its existence. Tolerance, by its nature, attributed a basic illegitimacy to what was being tolerated, just as Kossmann says. Thus, to cite but one example, the Discours sur la permission de liberté, written in 1579, contrasted tolerance to official sanction; urging that Protestants and Catholics should “remain in the liberty which they possess either by permission or by connivance and tolerance,” it equated tolerance precisely with that connivence by which non-Calvinists subsequently were able to worship in the Republic.50 Adding 49

50

Kossmann has pointed out the same concerning all representations of the Dutch as a particularly freedom-loving people. E.H. Kossmann, “Freedom in seventeeth-century Dutch thought and practice,” in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world impact, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge, 1991), 297. “demeurent en la liberté de laquelle ou par permission ou par connivence & tolérance ils sont en possession.” Quoted in Catherine Secretan, “La tolérance entre politique et

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to the confusion, scholars define tolerance variously as an ideology, attitude, pattern of social behavior, governmental policy, or legal structure. How much tolerance they find in the Republic seems to depend largely on their choice of definition. Measuring degrees of tolerance, however, may not be the best way to advance historical understanding. Instead of heaping praise or casting aspersions, I would urge that we adopt, for the time being, a more descriptive approach, and that, instead of continuing to weigh religious fervor against self-interest, we explore the many social and cultural dimensions of confessional coexistence that have never received careful study. In 1995, Simon Groenveld argued provocatively that Dutch society was first “verzuild” (columnized) not in the late ninteenth century, as usually maintained, but in the seventeenth. By this he meant that Dutch society, in the period 1650–1750, was divided into comprehensive, largely self-contained religious blocks, each one endogamous, with its own norms and values, charitable systems, educational institutions, and business networks.51 Groenveld’s conclusions were based on scant information and premature, to say the least. They raise, however, a host of fascinating questions. How common were religiously mixed marriages? Did Catholics, Calvinists, and Mennonites go to the same schools? Attend each others’ weddings and funerals? Read the same books? Play the same music? Did they employ, do business with, give charity to one another? How did confessional coexistence work in practice? And how distinctive really – how unique in time and place – were the accommodations and arrangements by which the different religious groups in the Dutch Republic managed to live together? How “Dutch,” in other words, was “Dutch” religious tolerance? Ironically, that question remains as unanswered as the others.

51

rhétorique,” in The emergence of tolerance in the Dutch Republic, ed. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al., 99–100. Cf. Philip Benedict, “Un roi, une loi, deux foix: Parameters for the History of Catholic-Reformed Co-existence in France, 1555–1685,” in Tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Grell and Scribner, 67–8. Simon Groenveld, Huisgenoten des geloofs. Was de samenleving in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden verzuild? (Hilversum, 1995).

Chapter 9

Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations and Realities of Religious Toleration I’d like to begin with a poem by Jan van der Veen, an apothecary from Deventer. Written in 1630 to celebrate a friend’s wedding, his comic verses evoke the religious diversity of the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age*. It begins, Laat vry preeken alle Secten: Laat vry preeken d’onbevlecten: Laat vry preeken wie dat wil, ‘t Zy tot treves of geschil. ‘t Zy van oorlog ofte vrede, Of yet anders inde stede. Preek vry Paus en Cardinaal, Met u Ordens altemaal, Met al u geschooren knapen; Jesuiten, Leken, Papen, Preek vry, Luther en Calvijn, Preek vry, Menno en Armijn, Laat vry preken Zwinglianen, Puriteynen, Arrianen, Libertijn en Perfectist, Socinianen en Sophist, Robbert Robbertsen den flouwer. Den Mennisten Bruyloft-houwer, Ian Taurens, int suchtend’ huys, Broeders van de Rose-cruys. Turken, Ioden ende Heyden, Knipperdollingh, Ian van Leyden, Preek vry, Preek, Ian Alleman, En wat lepel lecken kan,

Let all the sects preach freely Let the immaculate preach freely Let whoever wants preach freely Be it for truce or dispute Be it of war or peace Or something else in their place. Preach freely, pope and cardinal With all your [religious] orders With all your tonsured fellows – Jesuits, laymen, priests. Preach freely, Luther and Calvin Preach freely, Menno and Arminius Let them preach freely – Zwinglians, Puritans, Arians, Libertine and Perfectionist, Socinians and Sophist, Lax Robbert Robbertsen, The innkeeper of “The Mennonite Wedding,” Torrentius in the sighing house, Rosicrucian brothers, Turks, Jews and Heathens, Knipperdolling, John of Leiden. Preach freely, preach, Joe Shmoe, And whoever can lick a spoon.

* Because this essay was originally delivered as the Fourth Annual Golden Age Lecture at the University of Amsterdam, quotations in it from Dutch sources originally appeared only in Dutch. Here I provide English translations.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_011

224 Preek dat al de kocx op-schaffen, Preek vry dat de honden blaffen, ... Preek vry reusel uyt de Swijnen, Preek vry suyker uyt rasijnen, Preek vry ellef ellen langh, ‘t Minnen gaat sijn oude gangh.1

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Preach that all the cooks are serving up Preach freely that the dogs are barking ... Preach the lard out of the hogs Preach the sugar out of the raisins Preach freely on and on Courting will always carry on.

Van der Veen employs in this bit of doggerel a series of rhetorical tricks. He collapses time: Knipperdolling and Jan van Leyden were sixteenth, not seventeenth-century figures. One group he double-counts, calling them both Arians and (their more common name in the Netherlands) Socinians. Alongside major denominations he mentions obscure lay preachers, sophists, a secret society, and people who refused to belong to any church, whom Calvinists called “Libertines.” Catholicism he treats as a multiplicity of orders and ranks. All these tricks have the apparent purpose of maximizing the number of faiths the poet can list as being “preached.” Still, all these “sects” did exist in the Netherlands. Van der Veen also, though, mentions “Turks, Jews, and heathens.” Has the poet now left behind his homeland to speak of the entire world, or is he implying that these groups too formed part of the Dutch religious scene? Jews, of course, were famously permitted to live and worship in Amsterdam and a handful of other cities. But the presumption of historians has always been that few if any “Turks,” a term often used in the seventeenth century to mean Muslims in general, were present in the Dutch Republic.2 In fact, Muslims are mentioned frequently by contemporaries, both Dutch and foreign, as among the religious groups tolerated in the Republic. Perhaps the most famous example is Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Character of Holland”: “Hence Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew/ Staple of Sects and Mint of Schisme grew;/ That Bank of Conscience, where not one so strange/ Opinion but finds Credit, and Exchange.”3 Here the quartet of “Turk-ChristianPagan-Jew” seems to perform a symbolic function, representing all the faiths of the world. Marvell’s description of Amsterdam is meant to be derogatory, in 1 Jan van der Veen, Ian vander Veens Zinne-beelden: oft Adams appel, Verciert met seer aerdige const-plaeten; Mitsgaders syne oude ende nieuwe ongemeene bruydt-lofs ende zege-zangen (Amsterdam, 1642), 338–39. 2 The same is true of heathens, in the religious sense of pagans (the term was also used to denote gypsies), but in what follows I will leave them aside. 3 Andrew Marvell, “The Character of Holland,” in his Miscellaneous Poems (London, 1681), 113.

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contrast to the admiring one by Jean-Francois Le Petit, an immigrant from Artois. According to him, In this city nations of every sort are received and welcome and may reside freely without any investigation into [their] religion, be they French, Germans, English, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Scots, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Cymbrians, Poles, Livonians, Lithuanians, Hanseatics, or others from northern quarters such as Muscovites, Russians, Tartars, and Scythians – yea, Turks and Jews too.4 Granted that many people came to Amsterdam who left no documentary trace, it seems unlikely that Tatars or Scythians ever formed substantial communities. As a source of facts, this list too lacks credibility. As a representation, though, of the religious toleration prevailing in Amsterdam, it gains power, just as Van de Venne’s does, precisely from its length – from the number and variety of groups enumerated. It is not just written descriptions, though, that suggest a Muslim presence in the Republic; so do visual images – or at least on first sight they seem to. People wearing Muslim styles of clothing appear regularly in paintings of the Dam, here in Amsterdam, like this painting by Gerrit van Berckheyde ­(figure 9.1). Berckheyde churned out paintings of the Dam with such figures in them. Significantly, he did not include them in paintings of other ­locales, like the Grote Markt in his home town, Haarlem. Many other artists embellished their paintings of the Dam with such figures too, including Johannes Lingelbach, Jan van Kessel, Cornelis de Bie, and Jan van der Heyden. People dressed in Muslim  styles also figure in this delicate drawing by Lambert Doomer (Figure 9.2). Now, of all the places where Muslims, if there were any in the Republic, might have been seen, the Dam seems one of the most likely, given Amsterdam’s commercial ties to North Africa, the Levant, Persia, and lands further east. A remark by the Swiss military officer Jean-Baptiste Stouppe raises the 4 “In dese Stadt syn ontfangen ende welcome alderley Natien, die daer vrije moghen resideren, sonder eenich ondersoeck in Religie, sy zijn Francoysen, Duytsche, Enghelsche, Italianen, Spaengiaerden, Portugesen, Schotten, Dane, Sweedsche, Noortwegers, Cymbres, Poelsche, Lijfflanders, Lithauwers, Oosterlinghen, ofte andere vande Noortsche quartieren, als Moschoviten, Russen, Tartres, ende Schyten: Ja oock Turcken ende Joden.” Jean-Francois Le Petit, Nederlantsche republycke, bestaende in de Staten so generale als particuliere van ‘t Hertochtd. Gelder, Graefsch. van Hollant, … Geconfereert ende vergeleken met die van Swytsersche Cantoenen… (Arnhem, 1615), 102.

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FIGURE 9.1

Gerrit Berckheyde, Dam Square, View to the North, 1674 (detail). Courtesy of Amsterdam Museum

FIGURE 9.2

Lambert Doomer, View of Old Town Hall and the Waag, ca. 1640 or 1650. Courtesy of Stadsarchief Amsterdam

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same expectation. Writing in 1673, he first listed all the Christian groups to be found in the Republic, then he added, I do not intend to write concerning the Jews, Turks, and Persians.... Nor do I believe that Turks and Persians can be found in these lands except in Amsterdam and possibly some other port-cities, so that no inferences can be drawn with regard to other cities.5 Stouppe’s observation has a caution and specificity that lend it a ring of truth. It was precisely Amsterdam and other major port cities that stood most open to the world, where Muslim merchants or sailors might conceivably have been encountered coming and going, or conducting business. Yet who are these figures in exotic clothes really, or rather, what do they represent? Their turbans, hats, and long, loosely fitted robes make clear they are meant to be people from Muslim lands, but that does not mean they are necessarily Muslim; Jewish and Christian minorities in the “territories of Islam” wore similar clothes. One possibility is that these images portray Armenian merchants (Figure 9.3), who were Christians, with their own form of Christian faith and worship. Migrating from Persia and the Levant, Armenians settled in ­Amsterdam in increasing numbers over the seventeenth century.6 One does not, though, have to take these images so literally. Notice, for instance, the juxtaposition in the Dappert drawing of exotic foreigners and a humble wagoner with horse and sled; it recurs in numerous images of the Dam. The very regularity of the juxtaposition (like the regular appearance of the foreigners themselves) suggests we are dealing here not with a scene observed at some moment but with stock figures. As art historian Boudewijn Bakker has suggested, the figures should probably be understood as “the personification of

5 “Ick wil vande Jodenen, Turcken, en Persianen niet melden.… Ick geloof oock niet, dat in dese landen, Turcken, en Persianen, gevonde[n] worde[n], als alleen in Amsterdam, en misschien noch eenige in andere Zee-Stede[n]; In voege, dat daer uyt geen gevolgh, in’t reguard van andere stede[n], getrocken kan worden.” Jean-Baptiste Stouppe, De religie van de Hollanders, vertoont in diversche brieven/ Gheschreven door een officier van de conincklijcke Fransche armée, aen eenen professeur van de theologie in Berne (Cologne, 1673), 37. Other descriptions suggesting the presence of Muslims include Thomas Helwys, A short declaration of the mistery of iniquity (London, 1935), 69, 210–11; and Anon., Colloquium Ofte een t’Samenspraeck Over een Wonderlijcken Droom van Dromo Philetairos (Knuttel pamphlets, 10492) (n.p., 1672), unpaginated. 6 René Bekius and Wout Ultee, “De Armeense kolonie in Amsterdam 1600–1800,” De Gids: nieuwe vaderlandsche letteroefeningen 148 (1985): 216–24.

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FIGURE 9.3

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“A Merchant of Armenia.” Engraving from Nicolas de Nicolay, Les navigations peregrinations et voyages, faicts en la Turquie (Antwerp, 1576). Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London, [M.S. Anderson] 1585 – Nicolay

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local ­business and international commerce.”7 If that is their meaning, one does not need to assign them to a specific ethnic or religious group; their generic presence represents Amsterdam’s commercial ties to the Islamic world and conveys the city’s proud self-image as emporium mundi. So, where does this leave us? Were there Muslims in the Republic? Did the toleration for which the Republic was renowned extend also to them? If not, how do we account for the discrepancy between representations and reality? In fact, Muslims did come to the Netherlands, more than scholars have previously recognized. With one chief exception, those who came were welcomed. Their numbers, though, were indeed small, and none, so far as we know, established permanent residence.8 As sporadic, temporary visitors, Muslims had a very marginal presence in Dutch society. The puzzle is thus that Muslims played a role in the image of Dutch religious toleration that was out of all proportion to their presence.

…

The fact that Muslims were “infidels” who rejected Christianity did not in itself prevent them from being tolerated. If that were the case, Jews would not have been tolerated in the Republic either. It is worth considering for a moment the specific arrangements by which Jews were accommodated, for they reveal something about the variety of forms toleration could take, and about what forms were deemed appropriate for non-Christians. The first Jews to settle in the Republic (apart from a very few in the Ommelanden of Groningen) were Sephardim whose ancestors had been forcibly ­baptized in Portugal. When they arrived, they were still Conversos, that is, Catholics of Jewish ancestry, with little knowledge of rabbinic Judaism. As Miriam Bodian and other scholars have shown, they had to learn what rabbinic Judaism was, and the process by which they came to accept its norms was complex, even painful.9 Their first congregation, organized before 1609, met for worship 7 Boudewijn Bakker et al., De verzameling Van Eeghen: Amsterdamse tekeningen 1600–1950 (Zwolle, 1988), 80. 8 This generalization does not include a small number of Muslims who converted to Christianity. One was Henri Cherif, a Moroccan prince, who converted to the Reformed faith in 1603 and married a woman from Sluis. In 1690, three Turkish boys taken prisoners of war in Hungary were baptized as Catholics in Den Bosch. Henry de Castries, ed., Les sources inédites de l’histoire de Maroc de 1530 à 1845, Série I, Dynastie Saadienne (1530–1660) ii, Archives et Bibliothèques des Pays Bas, 6 vols. (Paris, 1906–1923), 1:42–9; F. van Anrooy et al., Nederland in stukken. Beeldkroniek van Nederlandse archieven (Haarlem, 1979), 131. 9 Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, 1997); Yosef Kaplan, Les nouveaux-juifs d’Amsterdam: essais sur l’histoire sociale et intellectuelle du judaïsme séfarade au xviie siècle (Paris, 1999);

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in the home of one of its members, Jacob Tirado. A few years later, a second congregation had constructed on the Houtgracht a house whose interior was designed to serve as synagogue. Like the “schuilkerken” which Christian dissenters established, this synagogue was semi-clandestine: everyone knew the building’s purpose, but no external feature identified it as a synagogue. In 1618, a third congregation began to meet in a warehouse. So far, arrangements for Jewish worship were much the same as those for worship by Christian dissenters in the officially Calvinist Republic.10 The 1630s, though, saw a crucial parting of the ways: on the one hand, Catholics, Mennonites, and other native Dutch dissenters continued to worship in buildings whose exteriors disguised – if only superficially – their function. On the other hand, Amsterdam’s Jews, who now joined together in a single ­congregation, had a grand new façade put on the front of their Houtgracht synagogue (Figure 9.4). A few years later in 1642, Stadholder Frederik Hendrik paid an official visit to this synagogue. Jews, in other words, were now able to worship publicly. The new synagogues constructed in Amsterdam in the 1670s declared Jews’ presence there even more forcefully, and one of them, the famous Portuguese Esnoga, served as model for synagogues later constructed in The Hague and elsewhere. Jews in the Republic were subject to a distinctly different dispensation than were Christian dissenters – that is, the form of toleration they enjoyed was qualitatively different. They suffered more civil disabilities than did any dissenters. In Amsterdam, where by far the largest number lived, they could buy citizenship but not pass it on to their children. They were admitted to only a handful of guilds, which meant they were barred from most occupations. Jewish life was regulated legally in unique ways. An Amsterdam ordinance of 1616 forbade Jews from proselytizing, insulting the Christian faith, or having sex with Christians (though more than a few Sephardic men seem to have slept with their maidservants anyway). By the same token, the toleration Jews 10

Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton, 1989), esp. Ch. 3. On the early Sephardic congregations in Amsterdam and their synagogues, see esp. Jacob Zwarts, “De eerste rabbijnen en synagogen van Amsterdam naar archivalische bronnen,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Genootschap voor de Joodsche Wetenschap in Nederland 4 (1928): 147–241; E.M. Koen, “The Earliest Sources Relating to the Portuguese Jews in the Municipal Archives of Amsterdam up to 1620,” Studia Rosenthaliana 4 (1970): 25–42; E.M. Koen, “Waar en voor wie werd de synagoge van 1612 gebouwd?,” Maandblad Amstelodamum 57, no. 9 (1970): 209–12; H.J. Zantkuyl, “Reconstructie van een vroeg 17e eeuwse synagogue,” Maandblad Amstelodamum 57, no. 9 (1970): 199–207; R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld, De Sefardim in Amsterdam tot 1795. Aspecten van een joodse minderheid in een Hollandse stad (Hilversum, 1989), 37–83.

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FIGURE 9.4

231

Romeyn de Hooghe, The former Portuguese synagogue on the Houtracht, ca. 1675–1695. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

enjoyed was official and formal. They could have their own cemeteries, and as we have seen, they could worship publicly.11 Christian dissenters, by contrast, were tolerated “by connivance.” The only civil disability they faced, at least in Holland and the other maritime provinces, was exclusion from government office. Religiously, though, they had to organize discreetly, worship privately, and be buried alongside Calvinists. Catholics in particular were subject at times to harrassment and extortion. Christian dissenters occasionally complained, as did Catholic Father Johannes Kyser, that Jews enjoyed more freedom than they did.12 This was a selective and self-serving comparison, but it does highlight the fact that toleration could take different forms. 11 Fuks-Mansfeld, De Sefardim in Amsterdam tot 1795. Aspecten van een joodse minderheid in een hollandse stad, 53–8, 76–83. 12 “formeel aansienlyck kerkgebouw.” Zwarts, “De eerste rabbijnen,” 202 note. Lutherans in Arnhem complained likewise: see K.G. van Manen, “Verboden en getolereerd. Een

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FIGURE 9.5

“Lutheran Church on the Spui.” Engraving from Olfert Dapper, Historische beschryving der stadt Amsterdam... (Amsterdam, 1663). Courtesy of Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam, otm: OF 63–376

There was just one exception to this contrast between Jews and dissenters, namely Lutherans. For them, just as for Jews, the 1630s saw a breakthrough from private to public worship with the construction of their church on the Spui, which, though it lacked a tower or bells, was manifestly a “formal, ­prominent church building” (Figure 9.5).13 And again like the Jews, in the 1670s they built in Amsterdam an even more splendid and obvious place of worship. What was it that Lutherans and Jews had in common that set them apart from other non-Calvinists? The most apparent factor, as Peter van Rooden has observed, is origin: both groups were foreigners.14 Most Sephardim spoke Portuguese, wrote Spanish, and in other respects too remained Iberian in culture. To Dutch people, the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim seemed even more

13 14

bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de Evangelisch-Lutherse Gemeente te Arnhem in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen [Vereniging Gelre] 83 (1992): 87. Quoted in Jacqueline Kerkhoff, Tanja G. Kootte, Martinus Wingens, and Franciscus Maria, eds., Geloven in verdraagzaamheid? Voorwerpenlijst (Utrecht, 1998), 35. Peter van Rooden, Religieuze regimes. Over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland, 1570–1990 (Amsterdam, 1990), 25.

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foreign. Most Lutherans in the Republic were first- or second-generation immigrants from northwestern Germany or Scandinavia. Even in Amsterdam, whose L­ utheran congregation had been founded by refugees from Antwerp, preaching was mostly in German, and three quarters of the people who joined the congregation in the 1630s came from German-speaking lands.15 In the ­conditions of their worship, these foreigners actually had it better than did native dissenting groups. The reason why, I would suggest, is because they did not belong to the local community in the same way native dissenters did. As outsiders, their presence, even if very visible, did not impinge on the religious identity of the community. To be sure, wherever Jews were allowed to settle, they were regulated and restricted, and one should not forget they were never admitted to most Dutch cities. Precisely because they were so alien, though, their beliefs so different, Jews seemed, in the view of some Christians, to pose little threat. “[W]e already have many [religions] here,” wrote Hugo Grotius, “and the least danger is from the one that is most different: acerrima fratrum odia, et facilis ex proximo lapsus” (“most bitter are the hatreds of brothers, and easy is the fall from nearby”).16 By this reckoning, Jews had little chance of making many converts or undermining the position of the official, Reformed church. In Lithuania, which had a substantial minority of Muslims, the same was said of them: “Infidels do not spread abroad their poyson amongst others, as [the] Heretiques do.”17 Many of the other arguments made by Grotius for tolerating Jews could have been made for Muslims too. It was the duty of Christians to try to convert them, and that would not be possible if one “cut them off from the conversation of Christians.” Nor was this an aim which, according to Protestants, Catholics had any hope of achieving, for Muslims, like Jews, were repelled by aspects of Catholicism they considered idolatrous. Muslims, like Jews, were children of Abraham. And besides, argued Grotius, a civilized society should extend hospitality to all foreigners.18 15

16 17 18

Erika Kuijpers, Migrantenstad. Immigratie en sociale verhoudingen in 17e-eeuwse Amsterdam (Hilversum, 2005), 104–111, 366–67. See likewise on Lutherans in Utrecht, where German services continued through the eighteenth century, Ronald Rommes, Oost, west, Utrecht best? Driehonderd jaar migratie en migranten in de stad Utrecht (begin 16e-begin 19e eeuw) (Amsterdam, 1998), 195 and passim. Hugo de Groot, Remonstrantie nopende de ordre dije in de landen van Hollandt ende Westvrieslandt dijent gestelt op de joden, ed. J. Meijer (Amsterdam, 1949), 113 (adages from Tacitus and Seneca). Johann Junius Brutus Polonus [pseud. Johann Crell], A Learned and exceeding well compiled Vindication of Liberty of Religion, trans. John Dury (n.p. [London], 1646), 11. De Groot, Remonstrantie, quotation on 110. Cf. the millennarian hopes of Reformed theologian Johannes Cocceius for the general conversion of Muslims at the end of time: J. van

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By this logic, Muslims who came to the Republic should have been well treated, and indeed it seems most of them were. Apart from the pioneering research of Gerard Wiegers, this topic has been little studied, so that any conclusions here must be tentative.19 Nevertheless, it seems clear that the number of Muslims in the Republic was minuscule compared to the number of Jews. As a consequence, many of the issues posed by Jewish immigration never arose in connection with Muslims. For instance burial: we know of only one Muslim who died in the Republic; he was buried in the cemetery of the Oude Kerk in Middelburg, his body laid on its side facing Mecca, in accord with Islamic precept.20 As for worship, it is far from certain, but one group of Muslims may have established, for a time, a sort of mosque in Amsterdam. The group in question were Moriscos, who along with slaves, diplomats, merchants, and corsairs, account for most of the Muslims who came to the Netherlands.

…

During the Middle Ages, slavery had been a large-scale phenomenon in the Christian lands in and around the Mediterranean. Muslims who were captured by Christians in battle were enslaved; so were Muslims on ships seized by Christian privateers, while the Knights of Malta and St. Stephen, among others, launched predatory raids against Muslim coastal communities. Muslim slaves in southern Europe worked the land, practiced crafts, and served households; among the domestic servants a high proportion were women or children. All this continued into the early modern era, but over time the scale of domestic slavery declined, and by the late seventeenth century what remained principally was the hard core, as it were, of early modern slaves: adult male captives, most of whom served as oarsmen on the galleys of Europe’s Mediterranean

19

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Amersfoort and W.J. van Asselt, eds., Liever Turks dan Paaps? De visies van Johannes Coccejus, Gisbertus Voetius en Adrianus Relandus op de islam (Zoetermeer, 1997), 19. G.A. Wiegers, A Learned Muslim Acquaintance of Erpenius and Golius: Ahmad b. Kâsim al-Andalusî and Arabic Studies in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1988); G.A. Wiegers, “Learned Moriscos and Arabic Studies in the Netherlands, 1609–1624,” in Romania Arabica: Festschrift für Reinhold Kontzi zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. J. Lüdtke (Tübingen, 1996), 405–17.; G.A. Wiegers, “De Nederlanden en de islam in de zeventiende eeuw: wisselwerking tussen cultuurcontact en beeldvorming?,” in Religie, cultuur en minderheden. Historische en maatschappelijke aspecten van beeldvorming, ed. W.A. Shadid and P.S. van Koningsveld (Tilburg, 1999), 141–53; G.A. Wiegers, Het inquisitieproces van Alonso de Luna. Moriscos in Spanje en de diaspora in de zeventiende eeuw en hun geschriften over het christendom ­(Nijmegen, 2004). Wiegers, “De Nederlanden en de islam,” 143, 150 note 16. The man, who died in 1602, was Abd al-Hamîd, head of a delegation from Atjeh.

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naval powers: Venice, Genoa, Tuscany, the papacy, France (from the 1660s), and Spain.21 It is, I think, a well known story, but the liberation by the Dutch of Muslims who had been Spanish slaves paved the way for the Republic to forge alliances with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. Several factors led the Republic to seek alliances with these Muslim states: first and foremost, they shared a bitter enemy, Spain. All who counted the Habsburgs as their foes had at least one common cause, and as early as the 1530s it had led the French crown to make the first in a series of pacts with the Ottoman Turks. With the Revolt against Spain, Dutch rebels too found that the Ottomans were a natural ally, and indeed the Revolt might well have been crushed had Philip ii not had to divide his military resources between the Netherlands, France, and the Mediterranean, where he was locked in a struggle with the Ottomans for naval supremacy. In 1565, an Ottoman envoy came to the Netherlands and offered support to the rebels; another one came in 1580–81. Ideas were floated, though never acted on, for the Ottomans and Dutch to coordinate their military efforts against Spain.22 As an officially Protestant land, the Republic had an additional reason to ally with Muslim powers: the hatred which Protestants and Muslims shared of Catholicism, which both condemned for its “idolatry.” Visiting The Hague in 1613, Moroccan envoy Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari expressed sympathy for the Calvinist faith of his hosts; in turn, according to him, Protestant scholars taught people “that they should not hate the Muslims because they are the sword of God on His earth against the worshippers of idols.”23 Not all Protestant scholars really felt such solidarity, but some did appreciate that it was Catholic states and rulers, above all the Habsburgs, who bore the direct brunt of Muslim assaults, both in the Mediterranean and on land in central Europe. 21

22 23

P.S. van Koningsveld, Islamitische slaven en gevangenen in West-Europa tijdens de late Middeleeuwen (Leiden, 1994); Salvatore Bono, Schiavi musulmani nell’Italia moderna: galeotti, vu’ cumpra’, domestici (Napoli, 1999); Alessandro Stella, Histoires d’esclaves dans la ­péninsule ibérique (Paris, 2000), 69–70, 88; Paul W. Bamford, “The Procurement of Oarsmen for French Galleys, 1660–1748,” American Historical Review 65 (1959): 31–48; L.A. ­Berbrugger, “De l’esclavage musulman en France,” Revue africaine 1 (1856–1957): 38–41; Gillian Weiss, “Commerce, Conversion and French Religious Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” in The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France, ed. Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass, and Penny Roberts (Bern, 2000), 275–88. A.H. de Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic: A History of the Earliest Diplomatic Relations, 1610–1630 (Leiden/Istanbul, 1978), 83; Alastair Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence in Antwerp’s Golden Age (Oxford, 2001), 8. Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari, Kitab nasir al-din ‘ala ‘lqawm al-kafirin (The Supporter of Religion against the Infidel), ed. and trans. P.S. van Koningsveld, Q. al-Samarrai, and G.A. Wiegers (Madrid, 1997), 195.

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Musing on the mysteries of divine providence, Englishman Thomas Fuller observed how all West-Christendome oweth her quiet sleep to [the King of Spain’s] constant waking, who with his galleys muzzleth the mouth of Tunis and Algier. Yea, God in his providence hath so ordered it, that the Dominions of Catholick Princes (as they term them) are the case and cover on the East and South to keep and fense [sic] the Protestant countreys.24 In an age of religious wars, Protestants and Muslims had common interests, an embarrassing truth that gave plausibility to the smears of Catholic polemicists who accused their Protestant foes of “Calvino-Turkism,” suggesting that the two religious groups had common beliefs and practices, as well as interests.25 Emperor Charles V might have squelched the Protestant Reformation in an early phase if not for the Ottoman threat and other distractions. Later, by forcing Philip ii to divert his resources, the Ottomans helped make possible the success of the Dutch Revolt against Spain. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Dutch authorities were also concerned for the safety of Dutch merchants and sailors. For the Christian enslavement of Muslims mentioned earlier was no one-way street: not only did the ­Ottomans enslave Christian prisoners of war and some of their Balkan subjects; more pertinent for the Dutch, the Barbary corsairs seized Christian ships, their cargoes and their crews, whom they sold as slaves or held for ransom.26 Based in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and the Moroccan port of Salé, they attacked Dutch shipping in the eastern Atlantic, including vessels returning from the East Indies, and made the Straatvaart, that is, Mediterranean commerce, extremely perilous. At the same time, Dutch merchants were growing increasingly interested in the Levant, and they began to demand that their trading rights there be put on a secure footing. 24 25

26

Thomas Fuller, The History of the Holy Warre, 4th ed. (Cambridge, 1651), 281. A pioneering polemic, in this regard, was William Rainolds and William Gifford, CalvinoTvrcismvs id est, calvinisticæ perfidiæ, cvm Mahvmetana collatio, et dilvcida vtrivsqve sectæ confvtatio: quatuor libris explicata (Antwerp, 1597). See M.E.H.N. Mout, “Calvinoturcisme in de zeventiende eeuw. Comenius, leidse orientalisten en de turkse bijbel,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 91 (1978): 576–607. For overviews, see Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2003); Stephen Clissold, The Barbary slaves (London, 1977). On the ransoming of Dutch captives, see C.J. den Ridder, “Gedenk de gevangenen alsof gij medegevangenen waart. De loskoop van Hollandse zeelieden uit Barbarijse gevangenschap, 1600–1746,” Tijdschrift voor zeegeschiedenis 5 (1986): 3–22.

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In 1596, Dutch forces captured, during an attack on Cadiz, “a Moor from Barbary” named Mahumeth Oachia, “born in the city of Fez.” He was taken back to the Netherlands, where an Amsterdam merchant lodged him. At the ­merchant’s suggestion, the States-General sent the former slave home, with a letter requesting the king of Morocco’s friendship. This gesture failed to bear fruit.27 In 1605 the States-General tried again: the previous year the Dutch army had captured the town of Sluis, whose deep-water harbor was used by the Spanish fleet. Some one hundred thirty-five Muslim slaves had been taken from the Spanish galleys there. Temporarily they were lodged in Zeeland. They seem to have been well treated – certainly they were fed good Dutch fare on the journey home – cheese and beer daily, and a warm meal with meat or fish twice a week. About a hundred were taken via Safi to Marrakech, where they were presented, in stunning new clothes, to the new King of Morocco, Mulay Zidan; the “other slaves or Turks” were brought to Algiers.28 All this was done at Dutch expense, and – what impressed Moroccan and Turkish rulers most – no ransom money was requested. Later too, some former Spanish slaves found their way home via the Netherlands.29 In 1610, the Republic finally concluded its long-desired treaty with Morocco. Two years later, it did the same with the Ottomans, and in 1622 an agreement was reached with Algiers, although the Algerians proved highly selective in their fidelity to it.30 Consequent to these treaties, the States-General sent a 27

28 29

30

This idea was proposed by the Amsterdam merchant Bartholomaeus Jacobsz on behalf of the city of Amsterdam. It was modelled on the example of the English, who had returned “seeckere gevangene Torcquen ende Mooren die den ridder Draeck loffelicker memorien [ie Francis Drake] mede vuyt Ingen [England] brachten.” De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 1:18–30, quotation on 18–9. De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 1:51–79, quotation on 69. See e.g. A. Th. van Deursen et al., eds., Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal: Nieuwe reeks, 1610–1670, 7 vols. (Rijks geschiedkundige publicatiën, 135, 151, 152, 176, 187, 208, 223) ­(’s-Gravenhage, 1971-), 6:524 (3 May 1624); “Besluiten Staten-Generaal 1626–1630,” web pages available at http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/besluitenstatengeneraal1576-1630/ BesluitenStaten-generaal1626-1651 [accessed 28 May 2019], 15 Sept 1626. Other impoverished Turks given assistance to aid their return home from the Netherlands may also have been former slaves: see e.g. Van Deursen et al., eds., Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, 7:608 (6 Nov 1625); “Resolutiën Staten-Generaal 1626–1651,” 2 Jan, 19 Apr, 1 Oct 1627, 22 Feb 1629. Similarly, in a 1628 peace treaty with Algiers the French crown promised that all Muslim slaves who had escaped from the lands of Algiers’ enemies would be given free passage through France to return to Algiers. Weiss, “Commerce, Conversion and French Religious Identity,” 278. For the text of these treaties, see De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 1:577–85; De Groot, Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic, 247–60; Lieuwe van Aitzema, Saken van staet en oorlogh, in, ende omtrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden, beginnende met het jaer 1621, ende

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series of ambassadors who were resident in Morocco and the Ottoman Empire, starting with Pieter Maertensz Coy in Marrekech and Cornelis Haga at the Sublime Porte, the Ottoman court, in Istanbul. They also established various consulates, including ones in Aleppo and Algiers. Muslim rulers did not establish equivalent embassies or consulates, either in the Republic or elsewhere in Europe. In general, they preferred Christian diplomats to come to them, and as it happened, this suited well many European princes, who did not wish to be seen honoring and befriending infidels; diplomacy conducted abroad was more discreet. When Muslim rulers did need agents in Europe, they often employed Jews, as a series of Moroccan kings used the Sephardic Pallache family in the Republic.31 Thus while Muslim ambassadors to the Republic were not unknown, they came only sporadically for specific missions. From Morocco came three such ambassadors, one after another, between 1609 and 1613; two others paid visits in later years. The Corsairs of Salé sent their own envoys twice (Figure 9.6), having abjured in 1626 their allegiance to the Moroccan king and established the independent corsair republic of Bou Regreg.32 Three Ottoman envoys came to the Republic. The only Persian ambassador visited in 1626–1627.33

31

32 33

eyndigende met het jaer 1632, 6 vols. (’s-Gravenhaghe, 1669), 1:144–46. In fact, an initial agreement with the Algierians had been reached in 1617, but had broken down almost immediately. A.H. de Groot, “Ottoman North Africa and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” Revue de l’occident musulman et de la méditerranée 39 (1985): 135–36. See also G.S. van Krieken, Kapers en kooplieden: de betrekkingen tussen Algiers en Nederland, 1604–1830 (Amsterdam, 1999); K. Heeringa, “Een Bondgenootschap tusschen Nederland en Marokko,” Onze Eeuw 7 (1907): 81–119. Mercedes Garcia-Arenal and G. Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore, 2003); for a later period, see Johan de Bakker, “Slaves, arms, and Holy War: Moroccan policy vis-à-vis the Dutch Republic during the establishment of the Alaw-i dynasty (1660–1727)” (Ph.D. diss., Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1991). See Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden, 2002), 291–311; Roger Coindreau, Les Corsairs de Salé (Paris, 1948). The Ottoman ambassadors were Ömer Agha in 1614, “Hussein” in 1618–19, and Mustaffa Aga in 1641; Moroccan ambassadors were Hammou ben Bachir in 1609–10, Ahmed ben Abdallah in 1610–11, Ahmed el-Guezouli in 1612–13, Youssef Biscaïno in 1624–25, and Mohammed ben Askar in 1645; the Persian ambassador was Musa Beg in 1626–1627; from Salé came Mohammed Vanegas in 1629, and Brahim Duque, Mohammed Penalosa, and Brahim Manino together in 1659. See the extensive materials for these years in De Castries, ed., Sources inédites. A large number of entries concerning these Muslim ambassadors’ visits can be found also in the resolutions of the States-General. For 1609 see N. Japikse and H.H.P. Rijperman, eds., Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal van 1576 tot 1609, 14 vols. (’s-Gravenhage, 1915–1970), vol. 14 (rgp Grote serie, 223); for the years 1610–1625 see Van Deursen et al., eds., Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal; for 1626–1630 see “Besluiten ­Staten-Generaal

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FIGURE 9.6

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“Ambassadors from Salé.” Engraving from Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten... (Amsterdam, 1676). Courtesy of Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam, otm: OM 63–360

These ambassadors stayed for periods that ranged from a month to over a year; a majority were in the Netherlands for some four to eight months. They came with suites, of which the Ottoman envoys had the largest: the one who came in 1614, named Ömer Aga, came with a suite of 19 persons (not all of whom were Muslim). While in the Netherlands, these dignitaries spent most time in The Hague, but they did get around. They travelled to and from the Netherlands via Rotterdam, Den Briel, Delft, Hellevoetsluis, and Amsterdam. Some also made a point of touring: Ömer Agha, for example (who was sent by Khalil Pasha, admiral of the Ottoman navy, specifically to gather information on the ­Republic)

1626–1630.” For all these years and exclusively for 1631 on, see hna, Staten-Generaal 1550– 1796 (1.01.03) 3168–3218. On the Ottoman embassies, see also K. Heeringa, ed., Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van den Levantschen handel, 3 vols. (The Hague, 1910), 1:161–2, 653–68, 1109; on the Persian embassy, Hendrik Dunlop, ed., Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Oostindische Compagnie in Perzië (’s-Gravenhage, 1930), lxxiii–lxxiv, 144, 201–03, 227, 675–82, 694–705 et seq.; on the Moroccan embassies, Jacques Caillé, “Ambassades et missions Marocaines aux Pays Bas à l’epoque des sultans Saadiens,” Hesperis-Tamuda iv (1963): 5–67.

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was shown around Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht.34 Moroccan envoy Ahmed ben Abdallah spent a month with the Dutch army in 1610, observing it as it besieged Jülich, while the Persian ambassador visited a series of garrisons, being received “with great honors and firing of salutes.”35 The same ambassador, when he first arrived in The Hague, was met by the stadhouder accompanied by thirty-six coaches full of nobles, military officers, and other worthies. In short, the presence of these envoys had a certain visibility. In 1659, three ambassadors from Salé brought with them, among other gifts, an ostrich, which was put on display in Amsterdam. It died after a few days because boys had fed it nails, to test the rumor that this extraordinary creature could digest anything, including steel.36 In addition to these ambassadors, accredited to the States-General, nonofficial envoys came to the Netherlands as well. I mentioned earlier al-Hajari. Sent to France by the king of Morocco, he returned home via the Netherlands, where he spent June through September 1613, mostly in Leiden, where he had a friend, Thomas Erpenius, the first professor of Oriental languages at the University. In later years al-Hajari wrote a wonderful autobiographical work, Nasir al-din, with an account of his trip. In it he recalls in touching detail several encounters he had with the stadholder, Prince Maurits, who “welcomed me, uncovered his head, took me by my hand and made me sit down with him.”37 Like several other Muslim ambassadors who visited the Republic, al-Hajari was by origin a Morisco, that is, a descendant of the Spanish Muslims who 34 35

De Groot, Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic, 127. Hermann Goetz, “Persians and Persian costumes in Dutch Painting of the Seventeenth Century,” Art Bulletin 20 (1938): 282. 36 Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten van Egypten, Barbarijen, Lybien, Biledulgerid, Negroslant, Guinea, Ethiopiën, Abessynie... (Amsterdam, 1676), 239; S. de Vries, Handelingen en Geschiedenissen, Voorgevallen tusschen den Staet der Vereenighde Nederlanden En dien van de Zee-Roovers in Barbaryen; Als der Rijcken en Steeden van Algiers, Tunis, Salee en Tripoli; Van ‘t Jaer Christi 1590. tot op ‘t Jaer 1684 (Amsterdam, 1684), 94; De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 6:610. 37 al-Hajari, Kitab Nasir, 200–02. Other non-accredited envoys who came to the Republic include one Sidi Ahmed ben Kassem, secretary to the king of Morocco, mentioned in 1623; it is unclear whether he is the same as cAbd al-cAziz b. Muhammad, who came in 1609 as secretary to Hammu b. Bashir and stayed on a few months more after the ambassador himself had departed (Wiegers, “Learned Moriscos and Arabic Studies in the Netherlands, 1609–1624,” 408). Also, “een man genaamd Abdulla” was sent to Dutch Republic in or before 1615 by Ismael Aga, a highranking official in Istanbul, to rescue his sister, who with another woman was a slave in France; al-Hajari, Kitab Nasir, 203–04 note 28. In 1645 we hear of Turks coming to Amsterdam to hire ships for deployment in the war over Crete that had broken out between the Ottomans and Venice; who they were is not known. Maandblad Amstelodamum 5 (1918): 53–4.

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FIGURE 9.7

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Vincente Carducho, The Expulsion of the Moriscos, 1627. Courtesy of Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

had once had their own kingdoms in Iberia and who in the sixteenth century had been forced to receive baptism. Most Moriscos, though formally Christian, had remained loyal to Islam, and in 1568 those in Granada had taken up arms to resist the suppression of their Muslim way of life. Spanish governments came to view Moriscos as a seditious fifth column, an internal enemy that was conspiring with Muslims and Protestants abroad, among them the Dutch. Thus in 1609 Philip iii decided finally to expel them from Spain. About three hundred thousand men, women, and children, the largest group of religious refugees in early modern history, were forced to leave their homeland (Figure 9.7). Most fled, either directly or via France, to North Africa, while others went further east.38 At least a few went to Amsterdam. 38

On the diaspora of the Moriscos upon their expulsion, see L’expulsió dels moriscos: Conseqüències en el món islàmic i el món cristià: 380è aniversari de l’expulsió dels moriscos, Congrés internacional: Sant Carles de la Ràpita, 5–9 de desembre de 1990 (Barcelona, 1994); Míkel de Epalza, Los moriscos antes y después de la expulsión (Madrid, 1992); M. GarcíaArenal, La Diáspora de los andalusíes (Barcelona, 2003); Abdeljelil Temimi, “Le passage des Morisques à Marseille, Livourne et Istanbul d’apres de nouveaux documents italiens,” Revue d’Histoire Maghrebine 55–6 (1989): 303–16; Abdeljelil Temimi, Le gouvernement

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Not long after the first expulsion order was issued, the Duke of Medina Sidonia warned Philip that “great numbers” of Moriscos were fleeing for Holland, where they were receiving a “warm welcome.”39 The Duke seems to have been exaggerating about the numbers, but not greatly about the welcome. Three years later, Ambassador Haga in Istanbul received a visit from a delegation of Moriscos led by a man whom the Ambassador called Mahomet Abulac and whom Gerard Wiegers has identified as a Morisco scholar named Muhammad abu ‘l-Asi, a.k.a. Alonso de Luna.40 As Haga reported to the StatesGeneral, Abu ‘l-Asi heaped praise on the Dutch for their treatment of his people, thanking, on behalf of their entire nation, me as representative of Your High and Mighty Lordships and His Excellency [the stadholder] for their nation being so well and honorably treated in being transported from our ships to theirs in Barbary, and also for their being well received when coming to our lands…. furthermore presenting me with the service of all their nation, who are here in great numbers, and [declaring] that they would be sure to spread the reputation of the [Netherlands], requesting that I please recommend their nation to Your High and Mighty Lordships and His Excellency, that in case they should come [to the Netherlands] from France or other lands they might be sent with our ships to these lands. Haga later thanked Abu ‘l-Asi for his assistance, praised the Moriscos, and promised that they could expect from him and the Dutch authorities “only what can be of profit to your nation both here and in our fatherland.”41 This ottoman et le problème morisque (Zaghouan, 1989); J. Mathorez, Les étrangers en France sous l’Ancien Régime: histoire de la formation de la population française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1919), 1:155–71; Robert Sauzet, “Les relations entre chrétiens et musulmans à travers quelques écrits autobiographiques du midi de la France,” in Chrétiens et musulmans à la Renaissance: actes du 37e colloque international du cesr (1994), ed. Bartolomé Bennassar and Robert Sauzet (Paris, 1998), 265–74; Santiago La Parra López, Los Borja y los moriscos: repobladores y “terratenientes” en la huerta de Gandia tras la expulsión de 1609 (Valencia, 1992). 39 As paraphrased in Garcia-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, 59. 40 Wiegers, Inquisitieproces van Alonso De Luna, 11. 41 “van wegen haere gantsche natie mijn bedanckende ten regarde van U.H.M.E. ende S.E., dat hare natie soo wel ende eerlijck van de onse in hare schepen in Barbaria overgevoert, getracteert zijn geweest, oock dat sij, in onse landen comende, wel ontfangen werden…. presenterende voorts aen mijn den dienst van alle haer natie, hier in groot getal sijnde, ende dat sij de eere van de landen [i.e. nederlanden] allesints willen verbreyden, mijn biddende, dat mijn soude believen hare natie aan U.H.M.E. ende S.E. te recommanderen, dat sij, uuyt Vranckrijck ofte andere plaetsen daer comende, souden mogen met onze schepen in dese landen gesonden worden.” Heeringa, ed., Bronnen, 1:214–15, 218–19.

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exchange confirms that some Moriscos had come to the Republic, though it is unclear whether any remained there as of 1612. If any Muslims ever established a mosque in the Dutch Republic, it was this group of refugees. Two contemporary sources suggest they did. One, the Annales of Catholic priest Franciscus Dusseldorp, states that a considerable number of “Moors” who fled Spain came to Amsterdam and were given permission to establish there a “synagogue.” ­Given that Dusseldorp is speaking explicitly of Moriscos, it is clear that he is using the word “synagogue” generically to mean a non-Christian place of worship, i.e. in this context, a mosque.42 The other source is a chronicle kept by the Catholic canons of Haarlem. It asserts too that a “synagogue” was opened by people who had been banished from Spain on account of their conspiring with Africans and Hollanders.43 Unfortunately, both these sources are problematic 42

43

“Undecima Septembris huius anni [1609] rex Hispaniae scribit ad ducem Parmae, marchionem, Deniae, se comperisse quod Mauri in regnis Valentiae et Granatae, ex Mahometanis reliquiae, cum Turca et Marochiano rege conspirassent; quibus etiam accessissent heretici septentrionales maritimi, nonnullique principes Christiani, hostes magnitudinis Hispanicae. … Quare jubet rex Hispanus, ut Mauri omnes ante certum diem, cum illis bonis quae corpore suo portare possent, finibus Hispaniae decederent. Aliquot eorum continuo Amstelredamum appulerunt; quibus concessa fuit ibidem synagoga, in quam ex praecipuis istius civitatis hereticis nonnulli, circumciso inguine, nomen dederunt. Usque adeo calvinismo et turcismo convenit.” R. Fruin, ed., Uittreksel uit Francisci Dusseldorpii Annales, 1566–1616 (The Hague, 1893), 387–88. This passage has been variously interpreted. Taking the term “synagoga” literally and ignoring its context and usage, Zwarts claimed that Dusseldorp was accusing Calvinists in Amsterdam of converting not to Islam but to Judaism; according to him, the last sentence referred in particular to the Converso Pereyra family, who embraced rabbinic Judaism and were circumcized around that time. Zwarts, “De eerste rabbijnen,” 202–03 note **. In contrast, Wiegers has suggested that the “leading heretics” mentioned in the passage were not Calvinists but Moriscos – i.e. that, having reached Amsterdam, they underwent a transformation parallel to that of Jewish Conversos in the city, who became professing, practicing Jews. So, according to Wiegers, the Moriscos turned from secret or would-be Muslims to circumcized, full-fledged practitioners of Islam and members of a mosque. Wiegers, “De Nederlanden en de islam,” 144. Dusseldorp, though, does not use “Mauri” and “heretici” as synonyms: by “heretici” he means Calvinists, and the point of the passage is to slur the latter – it’s a variant on the accusation of “Calvino-Turcism” found in other Catholic polemics. My thanks to Dr. Jan Bloemendal for assistance in interpreting this passage. “11 Sept. [1609] Amstelodami aperitur synagoga Judaeis, exulibus ex Hispania propter conspirationem cum Africanis et Hollandis.” J.J. Graaf, ed., “Tabula Chronologica Episcopatus et Ecclesiae Cathedralis Harlemensis etc.,” Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis van het bisdom Haarlem 1 (1873): 238. According to this entry, it was Jews who opened at that time a synagogue in Amsterdam. But it cannot be coincidence that the date of the entry, 11 September 1609, was the day the first order was issued in Spain expelling the Moriscos. The rationale for the order was precisely that Moriscos were conspiring with Spain’s African and Dutch enemies. Jews had been expelled from Spain in 1492, and, although some later returned, the great majority of Sephardic Jews who came to Amsterdam in the 1600s-10s did so from Portugal.

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in ways that would be tedious for me to explain here. It would be rash to draw any definite conclusions from them, but still, I find it entirely believable that Morisco refugees, arriving as a group, would have gathered together regularly for prayer. That they could do, depending on their numbers, in a room in a house where one of them lodged. If that is what’s meant by mosque, then Moriscos would simply have been doing what another group of refugees from Iberia, Sephardic Jews, were doing in Amsterdam at the same time. Abu ’l-Asi’s request – that the Dutch transport future arrivals from France or elsewhere to Ottoman lands – expressed an expectation that more Moriscos might come to the Republic subsequently. We know that at least a few did. In 1629 an ambassador from Salé, Mohammed Vanegas (himself a Morisco), asked the States-General for a squadron of ships they were dispatching to North Africa to convoy to Salé (unfortunately, the source doesn’t specify from where) “a small ship having on board 25 or 26 Moriscos with their wives and their children.” Five years later, the rulers of Salé received report that there were “two Andalusian Moors” in Amsterdam; they asked the States-General to arrange for the two to be sent back to Salé. Then there is the case of Lorenzo Escudero, a musician and comedian from Seville. He was said, at least (by two men who testified to the Holy Office in Spain) to be a Morisco: in 1658 he converted in Amsterdam to Judaism.44

…

How many merchants of Muslim faith (Figure 9.8) ever came to the R ­ epublic remains an open question.45 Certainly merchants from Morocco and the ­Levant had by treaty the right to come and trade in the Republic. It’s possible the two Andalusian Moors in Amsterdam in 1634 were merchants. Moreover, authorities in Salé had heard about them “from some Moors who have come 44

45

De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 4:242–43 note 2, 5:355; Yosef Kaplan, “Les prosélytes juifs dans la communauté portugaise d’Amsterdam au xviie siècle. Le cas de Lorenzo Escudero,” Actes du septième congrès mondial des études juives: histoire des Juifs d’Europe, 87–101 (Jerusalem, 1981) (my thanks to Prof. Kaplan for communicating the substance of this article to me); Kaplan, Les Nouveaux-Juifs d’Amsterdam, 76; I.S. Revah, Spinoza et le Dr Juan de Prado (Paris, 1959), 31, 61–8. It is unclear whether Escudero was a Morisco in the sense of a crypto-Muslim; there were only a few such in Spain at this late date (Henry Charles Lea, The Moriscos of Spain: their conversion and expulsion [New York, 1968], 321–93). But it is likely that Escudero was at least of Moorish/Morisco ancestry. A group of “Turkish” merchants granted privileges in Antwerp in 1582 were in fact Greek. Christians. J.A. Goris, “Turksche kooplieden te Antwerpen in de xvie eeuw,” Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis 14 (1922): 30–8.

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FIGURE 9.8

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Jacob de Gheyn ii, Three studies of an African man wearing a turban, ca. 1605–1629. Courtesy of The British Museum

from there,” i.e. Amsterdam.46 Perhaps the latter were merchants who traded between Amsterdam and Salé. What is clear is that Muslim merchants did not settle in the Republic and establish the kind of communities that Sephardic merchants did. This fits a broader European pattern, for as in diplomacy, so in commerce Muslims generally preferred Europeans to come to them, rather than vice-versa.47 On occasion, Muslim merchants did bring goods to European ports such as Malta, Palermo, Livorno, Marseilles, Toulon, Bordeaux, and Plymouth.48 But the one and only city in Christian Europe where Muslim 46 47

De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 5:355. For arguments concerning the reasons for this preference, see Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982), esp. 61; Nabil Matar, ed. and trans., In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 2003), xv–xxxiii; Olivia R. Constable, “Muslim Merchants in Andalusi International Trade,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, 1992), 759–73. On the groups active in commerce within the Ottoman Empire and on Dutch-Ottoman commerce generally, see Mehmet Bulut, Ottoman-Dutch economic relations in the early modern period 1571–1699 (Hilversum, 2001), esp. 46–57, 174–79. 48 Matar, In the Lands of the Christians, xviii–xix; Weiss, “Commerce, Conversion and French Religious Identity,” 278–79, 286.

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­ erchants resided continually and in number was that age-old meeting place m of east and west, Venice. There they constituted a recognized community with corporate privileges and a communal residence, the famous Fondaco dei Turchi, founded in 1621.49 In general, though, little of the trade between Christian and Muslim lands was in Muslim hands. In the late Middle Ages, Venetian and Genoese merchants had carried much of it; in the sixteenth century, Sephardic Jews had come to play key roles, while Dutch, English, and French merchants dominated in the seventeenth. For the most part, European merchants travelled to Muslim lands, not vice-versa, and even in Aleppo, Smyrna (Izmir), and other major Levantine ports, most trade with Europeans was mediated by local Jewish and Christian minorities. Among those minorities were the Armenians, who gradually extended their own trade networks and by the early eighteenth century had a thriving community in Amsterdam. Like Jews and Lutherans, this group of foreigners too were granted, in 1714, what native Christian dissenters never were, permission to build a proper church, a visible, public place of worship, on the Kromboomsloot.50

…

The last and largest category of Muslims in the Republic were corsairs from the Barbary coast. Some came to the Republic involuntarily, having been captured in engagements with Dutch ships.51 One such prisoner was a janissary from 49

50 51

See i.a. Paolo Preto, Venezia e i Turchi (Florence, 1975); Ugo Tucci, “Tra Venezia e mondo turco: i mercanti,” in Venezia e i Turchi: Scontri e confronti di due civiltà, 38–55 (Milan, 1985); Cemal Kafadar, “A Death in Venice (1575): Anatolian Muslim Merchants Trading in the Serenissima,” in Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World, ed. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 97–124 (Brookfield, Vt., 1996). Muslim merchants (many but not all) were housed together in Venice from 1579, initially in an inn. Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam in zijne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen, vorregten, koophandel, gebouwen, kerkenstaat, schoolen, schutterye, gilden en regeeringe, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1760), 2:218; Bekius and Ultee, “De Armeense kolonie in Amsterdam.” In August 1619, there were “een groot getal Zee-roovers t’ Amsterdam gevancklijck binnen gebraght.” They would have been given “de Strop te loon,” according to De Vries, except that the governor of Algiers wrote the States-General pleading for their lives, which indicates that they were from Algiers and strongly suggests they were Muslim. De Vries, Handelingen en Geschiedenissen, 36. In May 1635, two ships from Salé were captured by Dutch captains. The latter sold off in Spain many of the crewmen from the ships, but brought back to the Netherlands the two ships’ captains plus “cinq ou six autres Mores de ladicte [town of] Salé.” In addition to instigating a suit against the two Dutch captains, David Pallache, agent of Morocco’s king, asked the States-General to provide the two captains and their men passports so they could return home. De Castries, ed., Sources

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Algiers named Ali Alabasco. Brought back to Enkhuizen in 1620, he rotted in jail there for eighteen months, starved by a guard who ate more than half his food rations. Alabasco was released after a truce was struck between the Republic and Algiers (figure 9.9). Upon this happy turn of events, he was treated as a celebrity, the cream of Enkhuizen society inviting him to their houses. He was shown around Hoorn, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Schiedam, Den Briel, Vlissingen, Middelburg, and Veere. Once he was no longer an enemy, he and his hosts seem to have developed quickly a strong mutual regard. Alabasco was clearly an extraordinary man: not only did he learn Dutch, he counted – and was able months later to recount – the number of large, medium, and small vessels in all the ports he visited. He returned to Algiers in 1622 in the c­ ompany

FIGURE 9.9

“The city of Algiers.” Engraving from Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten... (Amsterdam, 1676). Courtesy of Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam, otm: OM 63–360

inédites, 5:370. In November 1658, forty-seven “Moors” from a corsair ship out of Salé were brought back to the Netherlands on a Dutch naval vessel after their ship was attacked and destroyed while under Dutch protection. After being kept first in the Rotterdam admiralty jail, then on board a ship, the Moors were returned home, their captain receiving partial indemnification for his loss. De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 6:468–522.

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of Cornelis Pijnacker, the Dutch consul, who treated him, he said, like a brother. Urging the Algerian authorities to make peace with the Republic, he told them the Dutch were “the most pious and faithful people in the whole world” and “that Amsterdam was Constantinople.”52 Other corsairs visited the Republic of their own accord. The 1612 treaty with the Ottoman Empire, known as the Capitulations, gave them a right to sail into Dutch ports, stipulating that “[w]hen corsairs of Algiers reach Dutch harbours, they must be treated with respect” and sold the materiél and supplies they needed.53 At least ten corsair ships took advantage of this right in the 1620s, arriving in Veere, Vlissingen, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Enkhuizen.54 Some came to seek shelter and make repairs, having been battered by storms or by the cannon of their intended victims. Others came to sell their booty. Their presence was an embarrassment to Dutch authorities, who anticipated (correctly) that their French and English allies might accuse the Republic of condoning and even assisting pirates who preyed on their shipping. Even more embarrassing, some of the corsair ships were themselves prizes, that is, captured Christian vessels. To make the diplomatic dilemma more complex, some of the ships had Christian slaves on them, whom Dutch authorities insisted on setting free. This action the corsairs denounced as a treaty violation.55 The most difficult question, though, was raised by the fact that some of the corsairs were actually Dutchmen who had, as the saying went, “turned Turk,” that is, settled in Muslim lands and converted to Islam. Known in Europe as “renegades,” such converts were no small group: by some accounts half or more of all the Barbary corsairs in the early seventeenth century (fewer later) were renegades from one part of Europe or another.56 Some were sailors who had 52

“de vroomste ende trouwste luijden van de gheheele werlt” and “dat Ambsterdam [sic] was Constantinopolis.” Cornelis Pijnacker, Historysch verhael van den steden Thunes, ­Algiers ende andere steden in Barbarien gelegen, ed. G.S. van Krieken (’s-Gravenhage, 1975), 51, 53, 57–61 (quotation 60–1); cf. Van Aitzema, Saken van Staet en Oorlogh, 1:148–50. 53 Art. xxi (17o), in De Groot, Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic, 252; the right reinforced by article 13 of the 1622 treaty with Algiers (Van Aitzema, Saken van Staet en Oorlogh, 1:145). 54 Extensive materials concerning these ships’ visits, and the dilemmas they posed, can be found in De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, vol. 4; and in the resolutions of the StatesGeneral for the years 1623–1626: see references in note 33. See also De Vries, Handelingen en Geschiedenissen, 57–66; Heeringa, ed., Bronnen, 1:905–28, 979–80. 55 hna, Staten-Generaal (1.01.03) 3184, 95v-96r (8 Mar 1625); Heeringa, ed., Bronnen, 1:927. 56 Joke E. Korteweg, Kaperbloed en koopmansgeest. “Legale zeeroof” door de eeuwen heen (Amsterdam, 2006), 110. See also Bartolomé Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar, Les chrétiens

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converted to Islam as a way to gain their freedom, having been captured at sea and made slaves in North Africa. Others were privateers who had adopted one of the Barbary ports as their home and converted more or less freely. In either case, those who embraced Islam found paths to advancement open, some rising to positions of high rank, like the notorious Jan Janszoon from Haarlem, a.k.a. Murad Raïs, admiral of the Salé fleet. Many others did well for themselves on a smaller scale, like one Lambrecht Pieterszoon from Enkhuizen, who at the age of fourteen had been taken captive by corsairs from Salé. By the age of twenty-one, he had three ships of his own. The arrival of corsair vessels in Dutch ports thus confronted Dutch authorities with an unprecedented question: how to treat Christian converts to Islam. In December 1623, the States-General decided the matter, at least in principle. If renegades wanted to return to Christianity, they would be received back and have their freedom. But if they did not, it would be reasonable to punish them just as Turks punished those who abjured Islam (“deselve also te tracteren, als Turcken Cristenen geworden synde, ende … wederom in Turckien gebracht werden[de], aldaer onthaelt ende gestraft werden”). As the States-General surely knew, and as subsequent inquiries confirmed, apostates from Islam were liable in Muslim lands to be burnt. In other words, the States-General threatened to execute any renegades who came to the Republic. This was, to put it mildly, a harsh policy, and not a wholly realistic one, despite being based on the principle of reciprocity. In the first place, it violated treaties the Republic had signed, which made no distinction between persons raised as Muslims and converts to Islam. In the second place, Muslim rulers often sent renegades as their ambassadors to Europe. The Ottoman envoy who had come to the Netherlands in 1580–81, for example, had been a renegade Frenchman, while a Moroccan envoy in 1610 had probably been a Spaniard by origin. For this latter reason in particular, the States-General hesitated, declaring it inconvenient for the time being (“nyet dienstich … voor dese tyt”) to introduce such a policy.57 Initially, they hoped simply to avoid the issue by asking the Turkish sultan to prohibit renegades from visiting the Republic in future. This hope proved vain when, the very next winter, a “Turkish” vessel with three renegades on board,

57

d’Allah: l’histoire extraordinaire des renégats, xvie et xviie siècles (Paris, 1989); Mercedes García-Arenal, ed., Conversions islamiques: identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen (Paris, 2001), 141–223. hna, Staten-Generaal (1.01.03) 3182, 503r-v (22 Dec 1623).

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one of them the above-mentioned Pieterszoon, was driven by foul weather into Vlissingen.58 The three men were immediately thrown in jail. As the States-General pondered the fate of these renegades, they received a forceful remonstrance from a Moroccan ambassador, Youssef Biscaïno, who happened at that moment to be in the Netherlands. In a letter addressed to Prince Maurits, Biscaïno protested that the renegades had come to Vlissingen in good faith “as to a port of our friends and allies.” He argued further that to jail, never mind execute renegades was inconsistent with the Republic’s general policy of religious toleration. The renegades in question, he noted, had “by their own will and without any coercion” become “Moors,” and if the Dutch authorities doubted it, he challenged them: give the renegades their freedom and let them do as they wish, “since they are in a land where the conscience is free and no one is burnt because of their religion.”59 In response, the States-General explained that the renegades were “odieus” – as odious to Christians as Muslim converts to Christianity were to Muslims. For the sake of friendship between their lands, the States-General would have this group of renegades released when their ship set sail, but this clemency would be for the last time. Please ask your ruler, they told Biscaïno, to ensure that no more renegades come, and warn that hereafter they will be treated as Turks treat those who abjure Islam.60 The States-General issued the same warning in a letter to the “viceroy” of Algiers, to whom they explained that popular sentiment in the Republic demanded such harsh action.61 Writing from Istanbul, Ambassador Haga suggested the States-General would do well 58 59

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De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 4:98. On Janszoon, see most recently Korteweg, Kaperbloed en koopmansgeest, 109–11. “als in een haven van onse vrunden ende geallieerden”; “met haeren willen ende sonder eenigen dwang”; “naerdien sy in een lant syn, daer de conscientie vry is ende men nyemant om de religie en brant.” De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 4:120. Biscaïno’s feelings toward the Dutch had been colored by the fact that his cousin, who had accompanied him to the Netherlands, had been murdered by a sailor in Den Briel. On that occasion, Biscaïno had accused the States-General of anti-Muslim sentiment and of not doing all they could to catch the culprit. Taking offence at the accusation, the States-General had responded that the ambassador “beter wiste dat men hier te lande de Mahometanen ofte die van andere gesintheden in ‘t stuck van religie syn nyet en sochte t’ outrageren.” De Castries, ed., Sources inédites, 4:10; cf. Van Deursen et al., eds., Resolutiën der StatenGeneraal, 7:268. De Castries, Sources inédites, 4:124; quotation at hna, Staten-Generaal (1.01.03) 3184, 96r (8 Mar 1625). hna, Staten-Generaal (1.01.04) 6898, letter dd. 11 Mar 1625. Algerian authorities cooperated to the extent that in 1626 they promised the States-General that if any Algerian vessels should, by chance or on purpose, go to “Fiandra,” no “renegati Fiamengi” would be

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to make good their threat, making an example of one renegade, or group of renegades. Likewise he advised them to punish as pirates the next corsairs to sail a French or English prize into Dutch harbor. This, he thought, would deter others from paying any further visits.62 Haga did not convince his masters in The Hague, but he had some success with the sultan, who issued an order prohibiting Algerian and Tunesian corsairs from landing in the Netherlands. Between them, the States-General’s threat and the sultan’s order seem to have had the desired effect, for though it took time for word to spread, after 1626 there were no more corsair landings. In the end, the States-General never executed anyone.63

…

In 1668, a Holland patriot boasted, “Holland wants it to be known, and no Hollander need be ashamed when it is said, that it is a free province where freedom not only is given to all Christians but [would be] even to Jews, Persians, and Turks, if they came here: it is our shining glory.”64 To the knowledge of this man, it seems, there were no Turks in Holland, but if they did come he felt certain they would be welcome. As we have seen, “Turks” in the broad sense of Muslims did visit the Republic occasionally, but their numbers were small and, apart from a few who converted to Christianity, none, so far as we know, settled there permanently. Most who came were received hospitably: slaves were set free; ambassadors were treated with honor; Moriscos, as fellow enemies of Spain, were hailed as allies and given refuge. Few Muslim merchants seem to have come to the Republic, but that did not mean they were unwelcome; rather, it reflected how little long-distance trade generally was in their hands. Corsairs were a political embarrassment and discouraged from visiting, but it was their piracy, not their faith, that caused problems. Of all the Muslims who

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­ ermitted to leave the vessel, “a fine che no siano facti alcuni tradimenti et rumori.” Heep ringa, ed., Bronnen, 1:985. Heeringa, ed., Bronnen, 1:499–500. Years later, when a group of renegades was captured at sea, the States-General applied the principle of reciprocity in much more benign fashion: they offered the captives to the families of Dutch men being held as slaves in North Africa, for exchange to obtain the latter’s release. hna, Staten-Generaal (1.01.03) 3203, 496v (1 Nov 1644). “Holland wil den naam hebben, en niet eenen Hollander, behoeft zich te schamen, dat men zeid, dat het een Vrije Provincie is, en daar men niet alleen alle Christenen Vrijheid geeft: maar zelver de Joden, Persianen en Turken, zoo ze hier quamen: Dat is een Tak aan onze Kroon.” Anon., Den Zeeuwsen Buatist, of Binnenlandsen Verrader, Ontdekt in een Oproerig en Landverdervend Pasquil... (Rotterdam, 1668), 28.

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came to the Republic in the seventeenth century, the only ones not tolerated on religious grounds were the renegades. Threatened with execution, Dutch converts to Islam provoked a reaction that foreign-born Muslims never did. Two factors, I believe, explain why renegades were treated so harshly. The first has to do with ideas and emotions surrounding religious conversion. For to say that conversion was a sensitive affair in early modern Europe is an understatement: as occasions when the most personal convictions of an ­individual became matters of intense public concern, conversions were the ultimate religious “scandal.” To the group losing a member, they were a betrayal of God, truth, church, friends, and family. To be sure, conversions from one Christian faith to another seem to have been common in the young Dutch Republic, and attitudes to such conversions relatively mild there. Conversions to Islam, though, were an entirely different matter. They were an apostasy which all Dutch Christians, of whatever “gezindte,” could agree in condemning vehemently. To quote the States-General, renegades were found “odious”: they evoked feelings of anger and repugnance in a way born infidels did not. The second factor is the distinction between natives and foreigners. For as we saw with regard to Jews and Lutherans, people of different faiths were treated differently, in the Republic as elsewhere in Europe, depending on whether they were foreigners or natives. Armenians offered another example of this: when numerous enough to afford to build a proper church, visible as such from public thoroughfares, they were allowed to do so. And by allowed I do not mean just that they received permission from the city government, but that their church and the activities in it were tolerated also by neighbors and others. In this respect, foreigners enjoyed a religious freedom denied to native dissenters. One could say likewise that foreign Muslims were treated better in the Republic than native ones. Between the representations we began with and the realities we then explored, I think the contrast is now clear. Mentioning Turks, Persians, and pagans in the same breath as Jews, representations of Dutch religious toleration commonly blurred the distinction between large, small, tiny, and possibly non-existent groups. They suggested that Muslims had a far greater presence in Dutch society than they had. This was a rhetorical manoeuver, a way to emphasize through exaggeration a very real feature of the Republic, unique in seventeenth-century Europe, namely the number and variety of religious groups tolerated. In blurring distinctions between groups, the representations also implied that all groups were tolerated more or less equally, in the same way. Yet as we have seen, there were important differences in how groups were treated – not always better or worse, either, but simply different sets of

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arrangements, each with advantages and disadvantages. The schuilkerk, for all its fame and importance, was by no means the only accommodation made for non-Calvinist worship. Further examination would reveal still more variety in the forms and patterns of religious toleration in the Dutch Republic. But that’s a story for another day.

Chapter 10

“In Equality and Enjoying the Same Favour”: Biconfessionalism in the Low Countries Such is the nature of our government that even the Papists, who on ­account of the common cause have embraced our side, are faithful to us by virtue of solemn promises. For that reason we ought also to have permitted the public exercise of Papist Religion, were it not that the priests and monks, our sworn enemies, had endeavoured to incite them to sedition. Indeed we even tolerate the Anabaptists themselves, being convinced that [knowledge of] the true religion is a gift of God…. Ecclesiastical Ordinances Drafted by Order of the States of Holland, 15761

∵ In the wake of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, when Europe’s Christians struggled with the consequences of their new religious divisions, those who ruled over religiously mixed populations discovered that there were two ways to accommodate multiple churches in a single state. One was for them to acknowledge publicly and officially that their subjects – and perhaps they themselves, as a governing elite – were divided by faith into rival ecclesiastic establishments. But in an age when separation of church and state was almost inconceivable, that meant that rulers who viewed themselves as “Christian magistrates,” responsible for promoting piety and the “true faith,” had to authorize, protect, and possibly give governmental support to forms of Christianity which they deemed erroneous, pernicious, or even satanic. They also had to find mechanisms for containing the religious enmities that would set some of their subjects inevitably against one another, and possibly against them. The other approach was for rulers to establish a single official church but unofficially to tolerate dissent so long as it stayed discreetly out of sight, out of the

1 Alastair Duke, “Select documents for the Reformation and the Revolt of the Low Countries, 1555–1609,” https://dutchrevolt.leiden.edu/english/sources/Pages/default.aspx [accessed 28 May 2019], #34, “Justification.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_012

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public sphere. In that case, rulers could maintain a pretense, or fiction, that they and their subjects remained religiously united. They could avoid strife and secure the material benefits that often came from accepting religious diversity, even while salving their consciences and preserving the sacred foundation of their state. So stated, it is no wonder that rulers usually found the second approach more palatable than the first. Of course, both approaches had variants, and aspects of the two could be combined with one another. But basically the alternatives were de jure official toleration, which historians call “bi-” or “multiconfessionalism,” depending on the number of churches sanctioned; or de facto toleration by connivance.2 The Dutch Republic was the supreme example in early modern Europe of the latter. Founded during the Revolt against Spain, it was officially a Reformed (Calvinist) polity and by its laws, most importantly the Union of Utrecht (1579), it granted non-Calvinists only the limited right of freedom of conscience.3 That meant that people did not have to belong to the Reformed Church or attend its services, and that in the privacy of their homes they and their families could believe as they pleased and engage in any sort of domestic devotions. On this basis, Catholics, Mennonites, and a variety of other native religious dissenters were able in practice, with the tacit complicity of magistrates and f­ellow citizens, to form congregations and operate the quasi-clandestine churches known today as schuilkerken – hundreds of them. These churches, which looked from the outside like ordinary houses, barns, or warehouses, were the most important mechanism by which religious diversity was accommodated in Dutch society.4 Historians tend to forget, however, that the schuilkerk was by no means the only such mechanism, and that the Republic’s reputation for toleration did not rest on them alone. Perhaps most remarkably, in the southeastern enclaves of Maastricht, the Lands of Overmaas, and Upper Gelderland, cut off from the rest of the Republic by foreign territory (Map 1), Catholics as well as Calvinists worshiped completely openly. In these three areas, conquered by stadholder Frederik Hendrik in 1632, Dutch authorities granted de jure official toleration to Roman Catholicism. But if Frederik Hendrik or his father William of Orange had had their way, these would not have been the only bi-confessional parts of the Dutch Republic. Beginning in the 16th century, it was repeatedly proposed, 2 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), Chs. 6–8. 3 S. Groenveld and H.L.Ph. Leeuwenberg, eds., De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte (The Hague, 1979), article 13, pp.34–5. 4 See Chapter 7 above.

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suggested, or feared that the Dutch might adopt a biconfessional arrangement for Calvinists and Catholics, their two largest religious groups, and the two that were most at odds. Models were not far to seek: both to the south and east, the Low Countries were flanked by biconfessional neighbours. Arguments were made that biconfessionalism had advantages over granting dissenters mere freedom of conscience. Yet in practice, only parts of the Low Countries ever adopted such an arrangement, and only for brief periods, with the sole exception of those small southeastern enclaves, where biconfessionalism lasted, with just one notable interruption, to the very end of the Republic. What follows, then, is a story less of what was than of what might have been – of a possibility people were keenly aware of, but that time and again failed or was rejected.

…

At the beginning of the Revolt, when the Habsburg Philip ii still ruled all seventeen provinces of the northern and southern Netherlands, it was the spread of Calvinism that posed most urgently the question whether more than one religion could be tolerated, and if so, how. Severe placards issued by Philip and his father Charles v made any form of Protestant belief or worship punishable by death. And yet, after years of fermentation underground, in 1566 tens of thousands of Netherlanders evinced publicly their sympathy for the new faith by attending outdoor “hedge sermons” by Protestant preachers. A great wave of iconoclasm, perpetrated by far smaller groups, followed. In its wake, to avoid further unrest, officials struck local accords with Protestants which, in some cases, granted the latter provisionally the right not only to continue their hedge sermons on the same sites they had previously used, as Philip’s regent Margaret of Parma had reluctantly conceded, but to conduct their services within city walls. In some cities, such as Utrecht and Nijmegen, Protestants were permitted to use one of the church buildings they had attacked and “purified” during their iconoclastic riots. In the metropolis of Antwerp, economic hub of the Low Countries, William of Orange negotiated an accord with Calvinist and Lutheran leaders, organizing a special militia to enforce the agreement and keep the peace.5 Margaret quickly voided those accords that overstepped the bounds she had set, but several months passed before it became clear that her half-brother repudiated all of them. In that interval, in November 1566 William of Orange distilled his views into a Memorandum on the critical state of the Low Countries 5 Pieter Bor, Oorsprongk, begin, en vervolgh der Nederlandsche oorlogen, beroerten, en borgerlyke oneenigheden, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1679–84), 1:96–112, quotation on 99; P.J.H. Ubachs, “De Nederlandse religievrede van 1578,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 77 (1997): 44.

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and the means to cure them. In it, he urged that the Netherlands learn from the tragic experience of its neighbors France and the Holy Roman Empire. Holding out as a negative example the religious wars that had afflicted both lands, he pleaded for the Netherlands to avoid futile suffering and devastation by adopting promptly and willingly the same remedy that the French and Germans had eventually been forced to accept under duress: …seeing our poor country so ill and on the brink of destruction, it seems to me that we must look around us and see what remedy our neighbors, who have been struck by the same evil, have employed; for, having tried all the means in the world to avoid the exercise of another religion, they have in the end been compelled by force … to permit it…. In a list of possible solutions, Orange threw his weight behind two: either permit non-Catholic worship and “prescribe in each province certain places for it,” or “leave it to the choice of each city, lord, or gentleman holding powers of high justice.” Himself a German prince with a network of allies and clients in the Empire, Orange felt it would be especially fitting if the Netherlands, until recently a part of the Empire, “conformed” in this regard “to its institutions.”6 One possible solution Orange notably rejected: granting Protestants mere freedom of conscience. This, he thought, would leave them unsatisfied and so was a recipe for disloyalty and unrest – an argument which, mutatis mutandis, would be made decades later concerning Catholics. Moreover, it would be the true way … to nourish in these lands all the sects and heresies of the world, [and to] cast the rest into an atheism that could only cause disobedience without any respect, for one knows that those who think badly of the Catholic religion would never want to have anything to do with our churches, and all those people would die like brute beasts…. Freedom of conscience, in other words, had two grave disadvantages. First, to grant it to everyone was to open the door to an unlimited variety of faiths, some of them far more noxious than Calvinism. Negative judgement aside, this

6 William of Orange, “Mémoire sur l’état critique des Pays-Bas et les moyens d’y porter remède,” http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/groe009arch02_01/groe009arch02_01_0124.php [accessed 28 May 2019]; Liesbeth Geevers, Gevallen vazallen. de integratie van Oranje, Egmont en Horn in de Spaans-Habsburgse monarchie (1559–1567) (Amsterdam, 2008). In an alternate version of the Mémoire (same reference), Orange also subscribed to permitting only the Augsburg Confession (as in the Empire), or only the Augsburg Confession and that of Calvin, in addition to the Catholic religion.

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was an astute prediction, for in the seventeenth century the Republic would have no equal in Europe in the number and diversity of its religious groups. Second, Orange argued, faith alone was not enough: without worship and a church, people were as good as without religion altogether.7 Earlier in the same year, Franciscus Junius, minister to Antwerp’s Calvinists, had made precisely the same points in A brief discourse sent to King Philip. Without the public worship, ceremonies, and moral lessons provided by a church, people would fall into atheism and libertinism: “people must be kept under the outward discipline of some religion, whatever it may be, whether good or bad,” and so the best course was for Philip to countenance the Reformed Church, with its robust system of ecclesiastic discipline, alongside the Catholic and to require everyone to belong to one or the other. In effect, Junius was proposing an alliance of Catholics and Calvinists against the licentiousness he associated with spiritualist sects such as the Family of Love. The magistrates of Leiden, when in January 1567 they struck an accord with local Calvinists, justified themselves in similar terms, claiming their purpose was to hinder “all other reprobated sects and heresies,” including the Anabaptists.8 These arguments had no purchase on Philip ii, who sent the Duke of Alva to extirpate everything he regarded as heresy, which most definitely included Calvinism. Only in 1572, after some cities in Holland and Zeeland renewed the revolt by admitting the Sea Beggars and proclaiming William of Orange their leader, did the issue of toleration arise again. Orange once again favored full rights of worship for both Calvinists and Catholics. At the first “free” assembly of the States of Holland in July, his representative Philip van Marnix, Lord of St. Aldegonde, declared that his master’s intention was “that freedom of religion would be maintained, both for the Reformed and the Roman [Catholics], and that everyone in his own, in public and in churches or chapels, however the authorities find it most suitable to ordain, would have free exercise of the same.”9 Orange instructed his commanders accordingly; local agreements were struck similar to those in 1566; and on several occasions, Orange leapt to the defense of Catholic worship, standing up to the most militant of his own supporters. His efforts were to no avail. Beggar troops attacked Catholic churches in Haarlem, Leiden, Gouda, and Dordrecht, among other cities. Further disturbances were forestalled only by closing Catholic churches. The desperate 7 Orange, “Mémoire.” 8 Franciscus Junius, “A brief discourse sent to King Philip, our prince and sovereign lord…,” http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/koss002text01_01/koss002text01_01_0004.php [accessed 28 May 2019]; Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:107. 9 Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:389.

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s­ ituation in which the rebels found themselves made them prone to war hysteria, ready to accept as true any rumor of sedition. Catholics as a group could not escape the suspicion that they supported Philip ii, champion of their faith, against a rebel coalition dominated by Protestants. Though the dating is uncertain, around April 1573 the States of Holland bowed to pressure and banned Catholic worship.10 Five years later, Orange tried again, making the most serious and ambitious effort in the history of the Low Countries to introduce biconfessionalism: the official, de jure authorizing of Calvinism and Catholicism, with both faiths to be exercised publicly and equal “civil” rights for their adherents. Why Orange strived so hard to this end has been a subject of much commentary and judgement by historians, who tend to posit that he was motivated either by a principled belief in religious freedom or by a pragmatic, political need to keep Catholics and Calvinists fighting together against Spain, not against one another. The debate is a sterile one because the two alternatives were anything but mutually exclusive; Orange’s values and interests wholly coincided.11 One can say, though, that the driving motivation behind his effort was, as in 1572, the urgent need to maintain the rebel coalition of Calvinists and Catholics. This time, though, the coalition he was desperately trying to hold together extended across all seventeen Netherlandish provinces, which by the Pacification of Ghent (1576) had agreed to fight together to force “the Spanish” to depart. Thus it included, at one end of the spectrum, Holland and Zeeland, where Calvinism was now the official, public faith; at the other end, the Walloon provinces, chiefly Artois and Hainault, where Protestantism had never gained a firm foothold and elites, especially the nobility, were determined to thwart its spread; while in the middle, internally divided, stood most of the other provinces, foremost among them Flanders and Brabant, from which thousands of Protestants had fled into exile. Under the terms of the Pacification, all the provinces had agreed to a suspension of the heresy edicts, but nothing more. This was utterly insufficient to satisfy either the refugees who now flooded back to their homes, or the other members of the Reformed congregations that quickly formed.

10 Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:380–93; Duke, “Select documents,” #26; Alastair C. Duke, Reformation and revolt in the Low Countries (London, 1990), 203–09; H.A. Enno van Gelder, Revolutionnaire reformatie. De vestiging van de Gereformeerde Kerk in de Nederlandse gewesten, gedurende de eerste jaren van de Opstand tegen Filips ii, 1575–1585 (Amsterdam, 1943), 17–33; James D. Tracy, The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance, and Politics in Holland, 1572–1588 (Oxford, 2008), 81, 118. 11 For an overview of the debate, see Ubachs, “Nederlandse religievrede,” 42–3, who denies that the religievrede was an expression of religious tolerance.

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The events that ensued in 1577–79 were complex and varied greatly by l­ocale. Overall, though, a general dynamic can be observed in those middle provinces, as well as in Amsterdam and Haarlem, which like the former had previously been occupied by Spanish troops and only joined the Revolt with the Pacification. Where the urgings of Orange did not suffice, popular agitation, including violent attacks on Catholic clergy and institutions, forced city governments, still dominated by Catholics, to grant Calvinists some limited freedom of worship. Calvinists took this as merely a stepping stone toward the eventual triumph of their faith and suppression of Catholicism. Alarmed Catholics took it as precisely the same. Every success the Calvinists booked encouraged further their militancy, and in a whole string of cities, including Antwerp, they seized control of government, either legally or by force. In Ghent, where a tradition of guild militancy added an edge of social radicalism to their movement, Calvinists established a theocratic regime that set about exporting Calvinist revolution far and wide across Flanders. Alienated and angry, the Walloons abandoned the rebel coalition, making peace with Spain.12 The “religious peace” proposed by Orange in the summer of 1578 was intended to arrest this dynamic at its midpoint by establishing a stable balance between Calvinist and Catholic parties. The term itself, “religious peace” (Religion-frid in the original, translated usually as religievrede) was a German import, and in proposing it to the States General, Orange explained that by it he meant “the freedom of religions with their exercise, as in Germany and other kingdoms.”13 The most extensive argument on its behalf was made by the Reformed Synod of South Holland, which Orange, through his court chaplain Villiers, mobilized after the States General gave his proposal a cool reception. In requesting full freedom of worship for the Reformed, the synod marshalled an impressively long list of precedents to prove that it was not true, as some claimed, “that two religions cannot exist together in one land.” They noted Roman emperors who had permitted both pagan and Christian worship. In discussing the standard examples of France and Germany, the synod pointed out (not entirely accurately) that in cities such as Frankfurt, Worms, Ulm, and Augsburg, Protestant and Catholic religions were both practiced “without disunity or tumult … Indeed, in some cities, even in one church.” The synod went on to 12

13

General accounts in English include Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, 1977), 187– 98; Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), 184–205; K.W. Swart, William of Orange and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572–84 (Abingdon, 2003), Chs. 2–3. R.H. Bremmer, “De nationale betekenis van de Synode van Dordrecht (1578)” in De nationale synode van Dordrecht 1578. Gereformeerden uit de Noordelijke en Zuidelijke Nederlanden bijeen, ed. D. Nauta and J.P. van Dooren (Amsterdam, 1978), 112.

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cite the further contemporary examples of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland; the Ottoman Empire and Morocco; and, like a trump card, the Papal States, where the pope himself allowed Jews to have “their public synagogues or schools.” Surely Protestants, as fellow Christians who “desire only a reformation and correction” of God’s church, deserved at least as much. All in all, the synod argued, experience suggests that “one could much rather and more certainly say that all who have wished to suppress one of the two religions have put their state or government in great peril and danger.” To which consideration the synod added also the threat, cited in 1566, that without a proper church would-be Protestants might fall into “an epicurean, godless existence.”14 Drafted in the Council of State, published in the name of the Archduke Matthias, Governor-General of the Low Countries, and sent by the States General to the individual provinces for their consideration, the religious peace of 1578 was intended for implementation across the Low Countries. For the sake of “the common Fatherland,” the peace was to remain in force until it “shall please God … by means of a good, holy and free, general, or at least national, council, to resolve the conflicting opinions which we see in these lands concerning the matter of religion.” When such a council might be convened or how it might resolve the differences, except perhaps by an agreement similar to the religievrede itself, was never clear. But in the interim, for an indefinite period, Calvinists were to be allowed to worship publicly in any large community where they (excluding those resident for less than a year) numbered over 100 households and in smaller communities wherever they (with the same exclusion) formed a majority of the population. In Holland and Zeeland, where the shoe was on the other foot, the same provisions were to apply to Catholics, whose religion was to be “reestablished.” Universities, schools, hospitals, charitable foundations, and similar institutions were to make no distinction between members of the two groups, who were to be equally eligible for government offices and public posts. Protestants were to observe some of “the laws and customs of the Catholic church regarding marriage.” Outside Holland and Zeeland, they were also to observe Catholic holy days and prohibitions on the sale and eating of meat. Numerous clauses were designed to avoid future conflicts. Sites of Catholic and Reformed worship were to be located as far apart from one another as possible. Preachers were to avoid saying anything “tending toward riot or sedition”; soldiers were to wear no contentious “marks or signs on the body”; people were not to compose, sell, or sing “any scornful or injurious songs, ballads, refrains or other libels or defamatory writings.” In each 14

A.C. de Schrevel, ed., Recueil de documents relatifs aux troubles religieux en Flandre, 1577– 1584 (Bruges, 1921), 1:460–71; see also Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:968–71.

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city, a commission composed of two Protestant and two Catholic members was to be established to investigate infractions of the peace and report them to magistrates.15 The proposal met with a very mixed reception in the provinces. It was rejected out of hand by the States of Artois and Hainault as contrary to the Pacification. In the States of Holland it was defeated by a majority of votes, though a local peace instituted by Orange in Haarlem in 1577 continued until 1581.16 On the provincial level, only the States of Friesland and the Ommelanden of Groningen formally accepted the proposal. But in Antwerp, the civic militia succeeded in pressing magistrates to agree a provisional accord modelled on the wider one. Other cities followed suit, adopting local versions of Orange’s religious peace.17 Floris Thin, Advocate of the States of Utrecht and an ally of Orange’s, penned in the summer of 1578 a first draft of what became the Union of Utrecht, in which he proposed that all members adopt the religious peace. But the final version, signed in January 1579, left Holland and Zeeland as officially Reformed provinces and gave other member-provinces carte blanche either to adopt the religious peace or to regulate religious affairs as they pleased, so long as they respected individual freedom of conscience. Catholics in Holland and Zeeland, then, would not get freedom of worship as a quid pro quo in exchange for the expansion of Protestantism elsewhere. Many people regarded the Union, accordingly, as anti-Catholic. Orange declared it “worthless” and continued for several months to hope that the States General might approve another union based on his religious peace. In May he gave up and signed the existing document.18 All in all, some 27 cities adopted some version of Orange’s religious peace for a shorter or longer period between 1578 and 1581.19 Neither in Haarlem, 15 16

Schrevel, ed., Recueil, 448–59, 492–503. Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (The Hague, 1989), Ch. 2. 17 Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:974–75, 990–96; Geeraert Brandt, The History of the Reformation and Other Ecclesiastical Transactions in, and about, the Low-Countries…, trans. John Chamberlayne, 4 vols. (London, 1720–23), 1:344–49; Swart, William of Orange, 153–60; Israel, Dutch Republic, 194–95, 203; Tracy, Founding of the Dutch Republic, 157, 164; R.H. Bremmer, Reformatie en rebellie. Willem van Oranje, de calvinisten en het recht van opstand. Tien onstuimige jaren: 1572–1581 (Franeker, 1984), 166–68. 18 J.J. Woltjer, “De wisselende gestalten van de Unie” in De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte, ed. S. Groenveld and H.L.Ph. Leeuwenberg (The Hague, 1979), 88–100; Bremmer, Reformatie en rebellie, 150; Swart, William of Orange, 159–60; Jan den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt, trans. R.B. Powell, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1973), 1: 17–19; Tracy, Founding of the Dutch Republic, 143. 19 Ubachs, “Nederlandse religievrede,” 55.

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­ ntwerp, Utrecht nor elsewhere, though, did such local accords check ProtA estant militancy or halt the accelerating trend toward polarization along religious lines. Even while the accords lasted the terms of some of them had to be renegotiated after violent clashes. Most of the accords still functioning as of March 1580 fell victim to the anti-Catholic backlash that followed the decision of the Catholic George de Lalaing, Count of Rennenberg to abandon the revolt and return, with the provinces of which he was stadholder (Friesland, Groningen, Overijssel, and Drenthe), to Spanish obedience. Across large parts of the Low Countries, Catholic churches suffered iconoclasm, Catholic clergy were expelled, and placards were issued outlawing the mass. By 1581, Catholicism was banned in all those provinces and cities still in revolt.20 However complete, the defeat of Orange’s religievrede did not constitute, any more than the similar turn of events in Holland earlier, a decisive “rejection of toleration,” as Jonathan Israel has claimed.21 It did mean, though, that one form of toleration, de jure biconfessionalism, had been rejected in favor of another, de facto connivance. From the moment of its constitutional birth, with the abjuration of Philip’s sovereignty in 1581, the Dutch Republic was a Reformed polity. Until the Synod of Dort in 1618–19, the character of that Reformed religion may have been disputed, and full confirmation may not have come until the end of the Eighty- Years’ War, at the Great Assembly of 1651. From as early as the 1580s, though, there was little ambiguity about the identification of the Dutch state as Reformed. In 1647, pious Zeelanders would even call the Reformed faith “the fundament upon which this flourishing republic is based, and the principal, indeed only bond by which the various provinces remain united with one another in any common state government.”22 The edge of anxiety that can be heard in the Zeelanders’ declaration is as telling, however, as the declaration itself. Issued in the context of peace negotiations with Spain, the declaration formed part of an extended argument why the Republic should not “permit anywhere, wherever and under whatever pretext it may be, the public exercise of the Roman superstitions.”23 In 1608, Philip iii had made freedom of worship for Dutch Catholics one of the conditions for making peace and recognizing the United Provinces as a sovereign, independent land. The Dutch had rejected such a concession out of hand, and the two parties had ended up concluding only a twelve-years’ truce. Like a ghost that 20 See note 12; for details see Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, vol. 2. 21 Israel, Dutch Republic, 372. 22 Lieuwe van Aitzema, Verhael, van de Nederlandtsche vreedehandeling, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1650), 2:263–64. 23 Aitzema, Vreedehandeling, 2:265.

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could not be laid to rest peacefully, though, the possibility that the Republic might yet grant formal freedom of worship to Catholics, at least in some regions, continued 40 years later to haunt pious Calvinists.

…

Despite the defection of the Walloon provinces in 1579, the military victories of the Duke of Parma in the 1580s, and the return of all the southern provinces to Spanish obedience, northern Netherlanders continued for many decades to hope that the south might still be won over to the anti-Spanish cause and rejoin the north in revolt. They dreamed of a Low Countries reunited under a revived Pacification of Ghent. Given, however, that the south had in the interim been effectively recatholicized, it was clear to the political leaders of the Republic that any hope of realizing these dreams depended on their willingness to accommodate the southerners’ Catholic faith. They understood too that southerners would offer no sympathy or support for military campaigns launched in their direction if they viewed the Dutch not as political liberators but as religious oppressors. Thus in 1602, before ordering their army on an offensive, the States General issued an open letter to the “prelates, princes, counts, lords, nobles and cities of Brabant, Flanders, Artois” and the other southern provinces. Urging them, for the sake of their freedoms, to support the Dutch war effort, the States General assured them that if they did, they could so order their religious affairs as they found best, and that “nothing shall be done or undertaken by us” against their religion. Such generosity, though, was conditional on the southerners’ forsaking the Spanish voluntarily. After the Dutch army reduced the city of Grave, its commander Prince Maurits felt no obligation to make any special concession to the city’s Catholics, who would be treated “without investigation, in all fairness in this matter just like other inhabitants of these United Netherlands.”24 In 1629, Den Bosch, one of the four “capital cities” of Brabant, was taken by siege, one of the greatest Dutch victories in the Eighty- Years’ War. In negotiating the terms of its eventual surrender, its magistrates tried to obtain guarantees for Catholic clergy, institutions, and worship. Stadholder Frederik ­Hendrik, youngest son of William of Orange, may have been inclined to grant their ­request, but was not in a strong enough position politically to buck Calvinist opposition.25 Den Bosch, until then the seat of a Catholic bishop 24 25

gpb, 2:9–14, 601–06 (quotes on 9, 12, 602). J.J. Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, Prins van Oranje. Een biografisch drieluik (Zutphen, 1978), 291–94; W.A.J. Munier, Het simultaneum in de landen van Overmaas. Een uniek instituut in de Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis (1632–1878), (Leeuwarden, 1998), 9.

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(Ophovius) with whom Frederik Hendrik had friendly relations, was Protestantized, at least in the official, institutional sense: a majority of its inhabitants always remained Catholic. The surrounding bailiwick (Meierij) of Den Bosch remained for almost 20 years in extreme turmoil, religiously as well as politically, as Dutch and Spanish forces continued to contest it. During this “time of reprisals,” each side attempted to suppress the other’s religion and expel its clergy, but neither side had the means to do so entirely. The stadholder and the bishop would have preferred to tolerate both pastors and dominees rather than see, as they did, both persecuted. This miserable spectacle did no good for the reputation of the Dutch in the south.26 1632 saw Frederik Hendrik lead the Dutch army on another offensive campaign, this time up the river Maas, and this time the States General decided in advance, though initially they kept their decision secret, “to proceed on the model of 1602.” The first cities to fall were Venlo and Roermond, in Upper Gelderland. Neither offered great resistance to Frederik Hendrik’s overwhelming force, and though neither surrendered voluntarily, the stadholder treated them as if they had. Under the terms of their capitulations, Catholic institutions and clergy were protected and Catholic worship continued as before, with the requirement only that one church be vacated for use by the Reformed. Even the bishop of Roermond could remain and continue in function. Penetrating further, the Dutch army took Sittard, Straelen, the major strategic prize of Maastricht, and then the city and duchy of Limburg. In all these places, it was declared, public Reformed worship would be introduced, but Catholicism would otherwise be left intact. At this juncture, the States General published an open call for the southerners to rise up, guaranteeing explicitly that whoever did so would retain not only their “privileges, freedoms and rights” but also “the public exercise of the Roman Catholic religion.”27 The door to Brabant, Flanders, and other provinces seemed open. In the event, the Dutch offensive got no further, and within a few years the Dutch had yielded back to the Spanish some of their recent conquests. In the territories they retained, though, Dutch authorities kept their word, making no attempt to suppress Catholicism. A quest for allies and supporters, then, had induced the Dutch to promise far-reaching concessions to Catholics in southern territories. These concessions, which Catholics in the seven northern provinces could only envy, won 26

V.A.M. Beermann, Stad en Meierij van ’s-Hertogenbosch van 1629 tot 1648. Een episode uit het laatste stadium van den Tachtigjarigen Oorlog (Nijmegen, 1940), 127–51; Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 284, 295, 303–05. 27 Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 375–89 (quotation on 376); gpb, 2:13–18, 621–24, 647–53 (­quotation on 16).

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them few friends among their fellow Netherlanders. By making similar promises, though, the Dutch also hoped to secure the friendship and appease the sensibilities of another, more powerful ally: France. French diplomats served as mediators, along with English ones, in the truce negotiations of 1608–9, and, as representatives of a Catholic monarch (the convert Henry iv), they had instructions to do what they could to improve the situation of Dutch Catholics. Obviously if they pushed too hard on this point, they would lose their neutrality and with it their ability to mediate between the Dutch and Spanish. They did, though, manage to extract from the former one concession. Not to the Spanish and not in writing, but in a verbal pledge the States General and Prince Maurits promised “on their honor … that no religious innovation would be introduced” in the villages of Brabant that, in the course of the war, had fallen under their sway. In the countryside around Breda, Bergen-op-Zoom, and Grave, then, Catholicism would continue “on the same footing” as always, as the sole permitted religion.28 Perceiving that the Dutch would yield no further, the French diplomats, led by the jurist Pierre Jeannin, decided to plead the case of their co-religionists more broadly only after the negotiations finished. Then, in a spirited address to the States General, Jeannin argued that Dutch Catholics had proven their loyalty to the Dutch state in wartime, had contributed to its victory, and now deserved to share in the fruits of peace. State security may previously have justified severe measures restricting Catholic worship, but in a time of peace there was no need for such. Jeannin’s own king had granted legal toleration (in 1598) to those who shared the same faith as the Dutch; the latter should do the same reciprocally for Catholics. The experience of France proved that toleration was conducive to peace, and ­indeed that it was rather intolerance that undermined the loyalty of 28

Emanuel van Meteren, Historie van de oorlogen en geschiedenissen der Nederlanderen en der zelver naburen, 10 vols. (Gorinchem, 1748–63), quotation on 10:114–15; W.J.M. van Eysinga, De wording van het twaalfjarig bestand van 9 april 1609 (Amsterdam, 1959), 114–26, 148–53. The Dutch honored this agreement through the period of the truce, and even after 1621 Catholicism was scarcely hindered in the region. In the negotiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia, the Spanish demanded that Catholics in the region, and throughout States-Brabant, be allowed to retain permanently their churches, clergy, and ecclesiastic property. The arguments of the States of Zeeland cited earlier aimed to forestall any such concession, which Calvinists feared would have a domino-effect, opening the door to freedom of worship for Catholics in other parts of the Republic. The Dutch rejected the demand, and after the region was definitively ceded to the Republic in 1648, Catholicism there was made illegal. Peter Toebak, “Het kerkelijk-godsdienstige en culturele leven ­binnen het noordwestelijke deel van het hertogdom Brabant (1587–1609): een typering,” Trajecta 1 (1992): 124–43; Charles de Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten. Reformatie en katholieke herleving te Bergen op Zoom 1577–1795 (Hilversum, 1998), 283–86; gpb, 2:267–70.

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subjects, fomented factions, and threatened the unity of a state. In the Netherlands themselves the Catholic faith had been “received and authorized” in the early years of the revolt. As a gift of the Holy Spirit, faith could not be coerced, and those people who found their religion suppressed would either maintain it all the more stubbornly or “fall little by little into contempt for God and impiety.” For all these reasons and more, Jeannin concluded, Dutch authorities should grant Catholics “the free and public exercise of their religion.” Knowing, though, how little inclined the States General were to such a step, and knowing how much resistance and divisions the latter would give rise to, Jeannin, on behalf of his king, asked only that Dutch Catholics be allowed to worship in their homes “without being investigated there, and without the rigor of the placards previously issued … being exercised any longer against them.”29 Jeannin’s pleas fell mostly on deaf ears. Many Dutch authorities even made a point in 1609 of renewing the placards against Catholic worship, to ensure that Catholics understood that the truce had not expanded their freedoms. Not surprisingly, many Catholics felt betrayed by the Spanish as well as Dutch. In one pamphlet presenting a fictive dialogue, a Catholic lauds the truce as a good thing generally – defends it even against a Calvinist’s suspicions – but complains of one point that “greatly displeases him, yea gnaws him to the bone, [and] makes his flesh and blood wither…. that we have been granted, alas, neither church nor chapel nor even a wretched little cell to consecrate the holy mass.…” When his interlocutor points out that a Calvinist would be executed for treason if he proclaimed the “Word of God” publicly in the lands of the king or archdukes, the Catholic grants that he and his co-religionists have “no complaints” as long as they are left in peace to worship in their homes; then they can be counted on as loyal, “good patriots.”30 In practice, Catholics found that many local authorities did grow more relaxed, and that, during the period of the truce, they could worship in private with less fear of raids and prosecution than before. Ironically, it was the French friend not the Spanish foe who continued in subsequent years to exert religious pressure on the Dutch.31 French clout 29 30 31

J.A.C. Buchon, Choix de chroniques et mémoires sur l’Histoire de France avec notices littéraires. Négociations du Président Jeannin (Paris, 1838), 692–95. Willem Jansz Yselveer, Dialogvs ofte tvve-spraec in rym ghestelt tusschen twee personagien ghenaemt ghereformeert patriot ende roomsch catholijck. Vervatende in’t corte den handel vande tvvaelf-jarighen treves, Knuttel/TEMPO no. 1625 (n.p., 1609), B iii v(o). In 1629, for example, Louis xiii wrote the States of Holland on behalf of the Catholics of Den Bosch, requesting freedom of worship for them and for Catholics throughout the Republic. A.M. Frenken, “De Bossche Bisschop Michaël Ophovius O.P. 1570–1637,” Bossche Bijdragen 14 (1936): 84, 154–55.

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was demonstrated in 1635 when the Republic and France concluded a treaty of alliance. Its object in the first instance was the southern provinces, which, if France went to war with Spain, it was agreed the French and Dutch would jointly invade. The southerners would be invited once again to rebel, which if they did, the treaty envisioned their becoming “a league of independent cantons, on the model of Switzerland”; if they did not, their lands would be partitioned between France and the Republic. A key provision of the treaty held that the Roman Catholic religion would be preserved “in its entirety” in the territories incorporated into the Dutch state, with Catholic clergy enjoying “the same liberty, authority, and prerogative” as they enjoyed currently.32 Richelieu assured the Dutch negotiators it was not his intention to exclude the Reformed faith entirely from the territories in question, suggesting that France would not object if Reformed persons worshiped privately, but in the text of the treaty the Reformed received no rights at all. Voicing the vehement opposition of many Calvinists, a minister declared flatly to Frederik Hendrik “that it would be better not to have the city of Antwerp than to win and hold it with admittance of the Roman [Catholic] religion.” But Frederik Hendrik did not share this view, nor did he see the terms of the treaty as a departure from precedent: He had seen a similar basis adopted in the year 1602; it was merely a granting of permission [toelatinghe] for the Roman [Catholic] religion, without which the king of France could never be induced to [conclude] the treaty…. In the East Indies we permitted the heathen idolatry and icons of the Chinese and of others living in places under our authority; the popish ceremonies weren’t as bad as them. We did right to promote our religion and its introduction; we could promote it, and ought to do so, where we are master, which would enable us to appoint the magistracy as we see fit. It would be better to introduce the [Reformed] religion where it is not, with permission for the Roman [Catholic], than simply to remain outside the places of our enemy. Alone we could not drive off the Spaniard; it was a great thing that the king of France offered us his hand in aid, and opened the door [for us] to introduce our religion.…33 In other words, an incremental expansion of the Reformed faith was better than none. Given the conditions set by the French, Frederik Hendrik – and, 32 Israel, Dutch Republic, 527; Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 431. 33 Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 434–35; Pieter Johan Blok, Frederik Hendrik, Prins van Oranje (Amsterdam, 1924), 164–67; Henri Lonchay, La rivalité de la France et de l’Espagne aux Pays-Bas, 1635–1700. Étude d’histoire diplomatique et militaire (Brussels, 1896), 68–9.

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when it came down to it, a majority in the States General – were prepared to make even broader religious concessions than they had made three years earlier. With the help of France, they hoped to make good the disappointments of the Maas campaign. Naturally, France’s Most Christian King could not “without offending his conscience give the aid of his own forces for a conquest whereby the exercise of the Catholic religion would be destroyed.” So his ambassador declared in 1646 when once again the French and the Dutch were planning a joint military campaign. This time, Dutch negotiators promised only that if Antwerp fell to their army, the exercise of the Catholic religion would remain “free and public” in the city, adding in a secret article that Catholics would retain the use of a maximum of four churches. The plan, in other words, was for Antwerp to become biconfessional. Calvinists quickly disavowed it.34 From a Calvinist perspective, it was a mixed blessing that these territorial ambitions were never realized. On the one hand, it robbed them of the opportunity to attempt more widely in the south what they undertook first in the cities, and eventually throughout the States-held parts of Brabant and Flanders: a political and ecclesiastic Reformation intended to replicate, in these overwhelmingly Catholic areas, the religious settlement that prevailed elsewhere in the Republic, with Catholicism reduced to an illegal faith tolerated only by connivance and practiced only privately. On the other hand, the conditions under which the Dutch were likely to gain control of the territories, in particular the terms set by the French, were likely to protect Catholicism and establish it as a lawful, or even monopoly, faith. In the process, the Republic would lose its character as a Calvinist state, not only by virtue of incorporating officially Catholic provinces but perhaps also, it was feared, through the undermining of Calvinist dominance in the north. One pamphleteer articulated this fear in a much-printed dialogue of 1646, in which a Catholic interlocutor challenges the conventional wisdom that peace with Spain was in the interest of Dutch Catholics. Agreeing rather with a Calvinist in demanding that war continue, the Catholic foresees that within a few years, France and the Republic would succeed in partitioning the southern provinces. Then France shall become the next door neighbor of these provinces, [and] then shall we Roman Catholics make our presence felt more. The number [of people] of our faith in these provinces is great and considerable, not at all to be compared to the small number of Huguenots in France. The king [of France] shall with good cause be able to say: ‘I grant the 34 Aitzema, Vreedehandeling, 2:94–9 (quotations on 95, 98).

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­ uguenots freedom of worship in my kingdom; it’s only fair then that H you in the United Provinces grant freedom of worship to the Catholics.’ The Spaniard, until now our neighbor, has never had the courage to recommend freedom for us Catholics, not even with a letter. For he was our ­enemy, he gave no freedom to any of the Reformed, and he had no power to give force to his recommendation. None of these points hold for France. It is a friend, and powerful, and it shall hereby win the hearts of all the Catholics in this land. It shall also be able to produce certain treaties, compacts, and promises by which freedom of worship, at least in certain places, has been promised.35 Calvinists had reason to fear the expanding power of France, and to agree with those Dutch politicians who found wisdom in the maxim “Gallus amicus non vicinus”: France could be a useful friend but would make a dangerous neighbor.36 When in the 1660s Louis xiv developed an overweening ambition to annex the southern Netherlands, it spelled religious as well as political danger for the Republic. Louis’ invasion of the Republic in 1672 had of course religious consequences for the areas occupied by his armies and those of his allies, the Prince-Bishops of Münster and Cologne.37 As expected, French commanders quickly began the process of liberating Dutch Catholics from the shackles of a limited toleration which the latter had always viewed rather as a form of limited persecution.38 In its place, the French introduced a new “religious peace.” In Arnhem, Nijmegen, Zutphen, Deventer, Zwolle and several other cities they allocated one of the existing church buildings, usually the grandest of them, for Catholic use, 35 Anon., Munsters vredes-praetje. Vol alderhande opinien, off d’al-ghemeene wel-vaert deser landen in oorlogh off vrede bestaet, Van Alphen/TEMPO no. 185 (n.p., 1646) (= Knuttel 5290–5295), Bv-B2r. 36 Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 429. 37 For the following, see Israel, Dutch Republic, 643–44, 796–825, esp. 798–800; M.G. Spiertz, L’Eglise catholique des provinces-unies et le Saint-Siege pendant la deuxieme moitié du xviie siecle (Louvain, 1975), 115–25, 160–62; Willem Frijhoff, “Religious toleration in the United Provinces: from ‘case’ to ‘model’” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and H.F.K. van Nierop (Cambridge, 2002), 35; Willem Frijhoff, Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002), 171–72; Bertrand Forclaz, “‘Rather French than Subject to the Prince of Orange.’ The Conflicting Loyalties of the Utrecht Catholics during the French Occupation (1672–73),” Church History and Religious Culture 87 (2007): 509–33; I. B., Le conseil d’extorsion Ou la volerie des François… (N.p., n.d. [1673?]); Abraham van Wicquefort, De Fransche Tyrannie… (Amsterdam, 1674), passim. 38 Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 12–13.

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while leaving the Reformed use of the others. The most symbolic of all church buildings in the Republic, Utrecht’s cathedral, was ceremoniously reconsecrated and likewise appropriated for Catholic worship.39 In Nijmegen and Utrecht, Catholics were numerous and confident enough to behave aggressively, manifesting their faith publicly in processions, funerals, and outdoor decorations. The biconfessionalism introduced by the French had the effect in these two cities of generating more conflict between Catholics and Calvinists than had existed previously, or at least of pushing into the public arena conflict that had remained largely latent and obscured as long as Catholicism had been restricted to the private sphere.40 In the meantime, Catholic regular clergy began to stream into the occupied territories from abroad, reclaiming the former monasteries and convents of their orders. Jesuits founded schools in several occupied towns. Apostolic Vicar Johannes van Neercassel lobbied at the French court to achieve his and his predecessors’ most cherished goal, the restoration of the archbishopric of Utrecht. Neercassel envisioned a biconfessional arrangement similar to that in France, whereby the Catholic Church would have restored to it at least some of its former benefices, buildings, and other ­properties. Crucially, Catholics would also become eligible for public office, so that they would share political power with their Calvinist fellow burghers. But the Catholics who in 1672 greeted Louis almost as a messiah were quickly disillusioned. Louis’ strategic goal had never been to take Amsterdam, but rather Brussels, and from the beginning the French had not intended their occupation of Dutch territory to be permanent.41 To be sure, they did propose better conditions for Dutch Catholics. In July 1672 they offered the Dutch a peace treaty under whose terms Catholics would have been allowed the “public exercise” of their religion “throughout the entire United Provinces”; in communities with multiple church buildings, they would have been allocated one, while elsewhere they would have had permission to build a church of their own; provincial authorities would have paid the salaries of Catholic curés as they did those of Calvinist dominees.42 While some members of the States General were ready to sign, their defeatism infuriated the “common people.” The proposal ended up only stiffening Dutch resistance to the French forces, 39 40 41 42

See also A. Vanhaelen, “Utrecht’s Transformations: Claiming the Dom through Representation, Iconoclasm and Ritual,” De zeventiende eeuw 21 (2005): 361–62. Forclaz, “Rather French.” Paul Sonnino, “Plus royaliste que le pape: Louis xiv’s Religious Policy and his Guerre de Hollande” in War and Religion after Westphalia, 1648–1713, ed. David Onnekink (Farnham, 2009), 17–24; Sonnino, Louis xiv and the origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge, 1988). Les conditions sous lesquelles le roy tres-chrestien & sa majesté de la Grande Bretagne consentiroient de faire la paix avec les Etats Generaux, Knuttel/TEMPO no. 10070 (n.p., 1672).

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who after several military and diplomatic reverses were obliged by November 1673 to begin withdrawing their forces from the Republic. No sooner did they leave an area than Catholics found themselves forced once again to live their faith under the old restrictions. The eventual peace treaty, concluded in Nijmegen in 1678, did not improve their legal position. The French occupation turned out to be the last time Catholics worshiped entirely publicly in any of the Republic’s seven provinces. Precisely to prevent a repeat of 1672, the Dutch secured in 1697, by the Treaty of Rijswijk, the right to install garrisons in Namur, Ypres, and other fortified towns in the southern Netherlands. These garrisons were expanded in 1715 under the so-called Barrier Treaty. The Dutch soldiers who manned them were allowed to hold Calvinist services, but only “in private places … to which one may not give any external mark of a church.” Some of these “private places” actually had a semi-public character: in Tournai, for example, suitable places for worship were set up inside the bourse and the arsenal. Nor did soldiers attend all of these services alone: some native burghers, descendants of sixteenth-century Calvinists, joined them, manifesting a Protestant identity their families had kept secret for generations. But this was contrary to treaty.43 Biconfessionalism proper was never introduced to any territories except those conquered in 1632. In the latter, however – Maastricht, the Lands of Overmaas, and Upper Gelderland – biconfessionalism proved to be no temporary expedient, but a long-term arrangement that endured, with one interruption in the Lands of Overmaas, for as long as these territories were part of the Republic. These outlying enclaves, surrounded by foreign territory, were the great exception to what is usually described as “the” Dutch religious settlement.

…

When Frederik Hendrik had taken Maastricht, not only had the States General approved a capitulation treaty that guaranteed Catholics freedom of worship, they had also accepted the status of the city as a “condominium,” a territory ruled jointly by the dukes of Brabant and prince-bishops of Liège.44 Legally, 43 Israel, Dutch Republic, 978–79; Eugène Hubert, Les garnisons de la barrière dans les paysbas autrichiens (1715–1782): étude d’histoire politique et diplomatique (Bruxelles, 1902), 35–113 (quotation on 36–7); Tractaet van barriere, tusschen sijne Keyserlijcke en Catholij­ cke Majesteyt Karel de vi, sijne Majesteyt van Groot-Brittannien, en de Staten Generael. ­Gemaeckt en gesloten te Antwerpen den 15. November 1715 (The Hague, 1715). 44 On Maastricht, see P.J.H. Ubachs, Twee heren, twee confessies. De verhouding van staat en kerk te Maastricht, 1632–1673 (Assen, 1975); [Rinse van Noordt and M. Tyderman], Tegenwoordige staat der Vereenigde Nederlanden. dl. 2. Vervattende eene beschryving der

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the States General had taken over the dukes’ role. So now the city had a Calvinist and a Catholic master, whose two faiths were recognized as enjoying equal status. In ecclesiastic affairs, as in municipal government, the principle of parity formed the basis of life in Maastricht, much as it did in Augsburg and the other German “parity cities” under the Peace of Westphalia. Each confession had a right to half the city’s communal resources, including two of its four parish churches. This right was held by the two confessions as groups, not by their members as individuals, so that the division remained even despite the roughly five-to-one ratio by which Catholics outnumbered Calvinists in the population. Unsurprisingly, Catholics perceived Calvinists as being unfairly favored, while Calvinists for their part pressed the authorities to suppress Catholicism and remove its adherents from power. They did so in vain, for despite having far greater military and political clout than the prince-bishop, Dutch authorities were punctilious in keeping to the letter of the law. Catholics continued to constitute the Liègeois half of the city government, retaining precisely as many offices of each kind as Calvinists held; the mighty Chapter of St. Servaas and its companion, the Chapter of Our Lady continued to function as before, as did monasteries and convents; Catholic charities and schools labored on, funded partly by their medieval endowments, partly by municipal subsidies. Even the Franciscans and Jesuits, banished in 1638 for treason, were allowed to remain in the city after the French (who occupied the city from 1673 to 1678) readmitted them. Catholic worship was restricted only in that processions were not allowed to venture beyond the precincts of St. Servaas, and priests could not carry the viaticum openly to the sick and dying.45 In the three Lands of Overmaas – Dalhem, Valkenburg, and ’s-Hertogenrade – the situation was different. These lands were never condominia, and the rights of Catholics in them had their legal basis only in the capitulation treaty for the city of Limburg, which the Dutch had soon yielded back to the Spanish. Nevertheless, Dutch authorities applied the terms of the treaty also to these lands, which as parts of the duchy were treated as dependencies of the city. In fact, only parts of the three lands fell under Dutch sovereignty, for in 1648 Spain and the Republic agreed to partition them, and under the Partition Treaty of 1661 each side retained portions of all three. The result was to turn the lands

45

­ eneraliteits Landen, Staats Brabant, Staats Land van Overmaaze, Staats Vlaanderen en G Staats Opper-Gelderland… (Amsterdam, 1751), 343–86. During the French occupation of 1673–78, Calvinists in Maastricht were allowed to worship publicly, but only in one small church. Munier, Simultaneum, 201–05.

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into a complex patchwork, with some districts, such as that of Holseth, Vaals, and Vijlen, forming isolated islands.46 Unlike Maastricht, which attracted immigrants and had a large garrison, the Lands of Overmaas never became home to a substantial Calvinist population.47 Even more than their co-religionists in Maastricht, Catholics in these rural lands resented bitterly the intrusion of Calvinists from outside, and the privileging of a tiny Calvinist minority. Nor was a system of parity ever introduced, leaving relations between the confessions uncertain and changeable, subject to a host of pressures. There was much to play for and the contest was fairly overt, so it is no wonder tensions ran high and sporadic violence continued to erupt as late as the 1780s. In Vaals, the only place where Calvinist churchgoers matched Catholics in numbers, such violence was endemic. Part of the contest was for control of church buildings: in the Lands of Overmaas, unlike anywhere else in the Republic, Catholics and Calvinists shared their use. This arrangement, known as simultaneum, existed in some other parts of Europe, including several German cities; as a possibility for the Low Countries it had been cited as early as 1578 but never introduced. The Limburg capitulation treaty suggested its introduction in locales that had only one church, and in the 1630s it was instituted everywhere Calvinist ministers were posted. It lasted until the 1661 partition treaty, which granted full sovereignty to the Spanish and Dutch over their respective territories. At that juncture, “the public exercise of religion” being regarded as “a point of sovereignty,” the Dutch felt practically obliged to terminate Catholic use of the churches and replace Catholic officials with Calvinist ones.48 It was the turn of Calvinists to suffer similar repression between 1673 and 1678, during the French occupation. But afterward, once Dutch sovereignty was reestablished, the authorities opted not to return to the status quo ante in every respect. Once again they purged Catholics from local government and imposed Calvinist laws regarding marriage and education. They did not, though, hand the churches back to the Calvinists. Instead, while denying any legal obligation to do so (as the French asserted they had), they reinstated the terms of the 1632 treaty. They never declared this intent explicitly, ordering only that Protestants not be hindered in their use of the churches. Yet in practice, their actions and words amounted to a revival of 46

J.A.K. Haas, De verdeling van de Landen van Overmaas 1644–1662. Territoriale desintegratie van een betwist grensgebied (Assen, 1978); W.A.J. Munier, “Kerken en kerkgangers in Vaals van de Staatse tijd tot op heden,” Jaarboek van het Limburgs Geschied- en Oudheidkundig Genootschap 136–37 (2000–01): 85–262. 47 On Overmaas, see Munier, Simultaneum; [Noordt and Tyderman], Tegenwoordige staat, 387–418. 48 Munier, Simultaneum, 130.

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simultaneum. In a majority of villages, where they constituted the entire population, Catholics were left to enjoy exclusive, undisturbed use of the old parish churches. In Vaals, Catholics and Calvinists had connected but separate places of worship. In the 13 other locales where Calvinists had regular congregations, Catholics and Calvinists shared use of the local church. In a few other locales, Calvinists held occasional services in churches which they otherwise left to their Catholic neighbors. These arrangements did not change significantly for over a century. In one respect, then, the Lands of Overmaas did not conform after 1678 to the model of biconfessionalism with which this essay began: Catholics in them did not enjoy, as they had done until 1661, de jure official toleration. What had started as a legal right was revived and continued with the connivance of authorities. Yet, once again, Catholics worshiped entirely publicly, and no one pretended that the people of the Lands of Overmaas were of one faith. Upper Gelderland was different again. Though originally one of the four quarters of the province of Gelderland, its status as conquered territory made it, like Maastricht and the Lands of Overmaas, a “Generality Land” governed directly from The Hague. In 1632, the Dutch took one church in each city for use by the Reformed, leaving Catholicism otherwise untouched. Five years later, the Dutch lost these conquests back to the Spanish. With the help of allies, they retook parts of Upper Gelderland in 1702–03 during the War of Spanish Succession. At this juncture, they reintroduced the earlier arrangement in Venlo and planned to make Roermond a parity city, with Catholic and Reformed faiths exercised “pareillement,” but this aroused such opposition that here too they fell back on the 1632 provisions.49 The future of the region, for the remainder of the 18th century, was settled at the end of the war by a series of treaties in 1713–15, under which the Dutch ceded Roermond back to the Austrians, retaining only Venlo, Stevensweert, and most of the district of Montfort. In these places they pledged to leave Catholicism in its pre-1702 state “without any change or innovation.” But while in Montfort they kept their word, in Venlo and Stevensweert the Dutch retained a church for Reformed worship. In tiny Stevensweert, with its 30-odd houses, it was the only church. In Venlo, it was a modest chapel which the Reformed enlarged and refurbished, to the consternation of local Catholics, with whom there initially were clashes, especially when Dutch authorities tried to prevent eucharistic processions. Things settled down after a parlay in 1718, and Venlo, which served as the new capital

49

Clive Parry, ed., The Consolidated Treaty Series, 231 vols. (Dobbs Ferry, 1969–1986), 24:243– 49, 259–67 (quotation on 261); Munier, Simultaneum, 339.

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of States-Upper-Gelderland with a mixed Protestant-Catholic appeals court, emerged as a peaceful biconfessional – but not parity – city.50

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Viewed from, say, Amsterdam or The Hague, the biconfessionalism instituted in Maastricht, the Lands of Overmaas, and Upper Gelderland appears anomalous, a singular exception to the Dutch norm.51 Yet as we have seen, biconfessionalism had a history elsewhere in the Republic as well: as temporary ­expedient, failed experiment, foreign imposition, proposal, fear. Its study offers valuable perspectives on the Dutch religious scene. First, it highlights how remarkable it was that even a superficial, public pretence of religious unity was maintained throughout most of the Republic for most of its history. After all, when the Reformed became the official church of the rebel provinces in the 1570s-80s, its adherents were far outnumbered by those of other churches, principally Catholics. In the Republic’s largest and most tone-setting cities, Catholics and other dissenters continued always to form substantial m ­ inorities – as much as 40 percent of the Christian population in Amsterdam – while in rural pockets of Holland, Utrecht, Gelderland, and Overijssel, they constituted a majority.52 In States-Brabant and States-Flanders, the overwhelming majority of inhabitants, in both town and country, belonged to a faith whose clergy, churches, and services were illegal. In these Generality Lands a situation prevailed with few parallels elsewhere in Europe, the closest one perhaps being Ireland. The monopoly of the Reformed Church over public religious life was established despite repeated efforts by William of Orange to give Calvinists and Catholics equal rights, obvious and nearby foreign models for such an arrangement, and arguments that the latter was superior to freedom of conscience in both practice and principle. It was maintained subsequently despite diplomatic interventions by Spain and France, the inclinations of Frederik Hendrik, at least 50

Tractaet van barriere, art. 18 (quotation p. 19); J. Habets, Geschiedenis van het bisdom Roermond (Roermond, 1875), 2:259–82; [Noordt and Tyderman], Tegenwoordige staat, 552–72; P. Polman, Katholiek Nederland in de achttiende eeuw, 3 vols. (Hilversum, 1968), 3:131–33, 213–16. Polman’s use of the label “parity” for 18th-century arrangements in Venlo does not accord with present accepted usage of the term. 51 Thus represented by Munier and Ubachs; see references above. 52 Israel, Dutch Republic, 372–89, 637–45. See also H. Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland. Omvang en geografische spreiding van de godsdienstige gezindten vanaf de Reformatie tot heden (Assen, 1992), 15–62; J.A. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-­ Reformatie. Numerieke aspecten van protestantisering en katholieke herleving in de noordelijke Nederlanden, 1580–1880 (Assen, 1964).

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with regard to the Generality Lands, and lingering pangs of conscience, occasionally expressed, that Dutch Catholics might in justice be owed equal rights for their proven loyalty to the Republic. The experience of more than two dozen cities in the 1570s, however, seemed to demonstrate that biconfessionalism did not work: it did not prevent communities from polarizing along religious lines or Calvinists and Catholics from attacking one another. In other words, it did not promote civic harmony and order, which is what Dutch regents, in their capacity as regents, most wanted from a religious settlement. Biconfessionalism proved in those years to be not a static point of balance, but a labile point along a seemingly inexorable path leading from Catholic to Calvinist dominance. Moreover, while some argued that Catholics would be all the more loyal to a state that did not ban their faith, that state in its formative years defined itself in opposition to an enemy who posed as the champion of Catholicism. By the dominant logic of the confessional age, Dutch Catholics had to choose whether to support the triumph of their church over its enemies, or the triumph of their state over its. Inevitably, the thinking went, they had conflicting loyalties that made them unreliable, if not seditious. Most Dutch Catholics did not in fact treat these two desiderata as absolute, irreconcilable alternatives; in the long run, even most Catholic clergy in the Republic did not maintain so uncompromising a stance. Those who grappled with murky realities, however, conceded the clear air of the moral high ground to the ideological warriors of their day. Why then was biconfessionalism acceptable in Maastricht, the Lands of Overmaas, and Upper Gelderland? Why did it sink roots there, and there alone? Above all, because of the marginality of these small, outlying territories. Biconfessionalism in them set no potent precedent on the national level; it did not threaten the uniquely privileged position of the Reformed Church elsewhere in the Republic. By the same token, it did not achieve one of its intended purposes, to set an example that would encourage the rest of the southern Netherlands to join the Republic. Biconfessionalism was a religious bargain made by Frederik Hendrik and the States General in exchange for territorial expansion, and they were prepared to extend it further – indeed, some were willing even to accept officially Catholic provinces into the Republic – in order to realize their greater ambition of reuniting the 17 provinces of the northern and southern Netherlands. In the meantime, the arrangements established in 1632 proved workable enough, and they did set local precedents. Though Dutch authorities felt no legal obligation to maintain them in perpetuity, it is striking how, after various experiments, they eventually settled on reinstating the provisions of the 1632 capitulation treaties, even after later treaties seemed to supercede them – in 1678 in the Lands of Overmaas, 1715 in Upper G ­ elderland. In

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these two areas, biconfessionalism was reintroduced, or continued, even after it had lost its original legal basis. Studying biconfessionalism in the Netherlands reminds us also that religious arrangements in the Dutch Republic were more varied than sometimes portrayed. To be sure, native religious dissenters worshiped for the most part in schuilkerken. But along the periphery of the Republic, especially the long border with the southern Netherlands, Catholics also travelled regularly to attend mass in neighboring communities where their faith was the established one. Catholics from the interior of the Republic made these treks too on an occasional basis, especially to pilgrimage sites such as Handel, Uden, and Kevelaer. Lutherans, who for the most part were foreign immigrants or the nottoo-­distant descendants of such, were allowed to have highly visible places of worship, easily recognizable as such, though still without tower or bells. A different dispensation altogether applied to Jews, who could build imposing synagogues but suffered civil disabilities to which no Christian was subject. Superimposed on these general patterns were countless variations between provinces, towns, and villages, and significant (but still understudied) change over time. Even a single polity needed a variety of forms of toleration to accommodate different groups and circumstances, and that was especially true of a polity as diverse and decentralized as the Dutch Republic.

Chapter 11

Religious Encounters in the Borderlands of Early Modern Europe: The Case of Vaals 1 Introduction In the Dutch province of Limburg, at the far southeastern corner of the Netherlands, lies a village named Vaals. Without a train station and almost an hour’s bus ride from Maastricht, it is as remote from the centers of Dutch population and power as can be, within the confines of the country. Few foreigners have heard of it. Yet Vaals is famous among the Dutch, most of whom, it is no exaggeration to say, have visited it, typically on a school trip or family holiday. What brings them to Vaals is the so-called Drielandenpunt, or “three countries point,” that rises on the edge of the village. At an elevation of 322.5 meters, the Drielandenpunt has the distinction of being the highest point in the Netherlands. It is also the point where the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany meet – hence its name. From 1839 to 1919, it was even, uniquely, a four countries point, since there existed then a tiny sliver of an artificial country named Moresnet whose border met there as well. Promoted as a tourist destination since the 1920s, the Drielandenpunt attracts more than a million visitors per year.1 Feeding and lodging them is the business of the many hotels and restaurants at the bottom of the hill in the commercial center of Vaals, which nestles in a curve of the Dutch-German border. Vaals owes much of its identity to its location at the intersection of three states. Since 1976, it has formed a centerpoint of the Maas-Rhine Euroregion, an association established in 1976 to promote co-operation between the ­adjacent parts of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands in areas such as education and economic development. The further European integration has proceeded, the more the entire village has become a site of tourism and commemoration. In 1994, a former customs guardhouse was converted into a tiny, 1 An artificial historic monument was created in 1927 at the behest of the Dutch tourism board (vvv), some 35–40 meters north of the real geographical drielandenpunt. The Drielandenpunt is an artificial site also in that the highest point of elevation is actually about 50 meters to the west of it. See Roger Janssen, Vaals en het drielandenpunt (Zaltbommel, 2007). The territory of Neutral Moresnet, with a valuable zinc mine, had been contested between Germany and the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Belgium did not exist 1815–30). With only 344 hectares, its original population of 256 increased exponentially.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_013

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one-room ­Border Museum called the Klèng Wach (which in the local dialect means “small guardhouse”). In it, memories of national divisions are cast as the historical recollection of a thankfully bygone era. A statue of “Rencontre” on the main thoroughfare of the village is one of several recent monuments erected to symbolise the union or friendly meeting of nations in today’s Europe.2 In the early modern era, Vaals was likewise a place of intersection and encounter (figure 11.1). What is now the Dutch-German border divided Vaals from the territory of Aachen, an Imperial Free City in the Holy Roman Empire; something resembling the Dutch-Belgian border divided it from the Duchy of Limburg, which formed part of the southern Netherlands, ruled by the Spanish, later Austrian, Habsburgs. In fact, together with the adjacent villages of Vijlen and Holset, Vaals formed a little enclave of territory belonging to the Dutch Republic, since to the west, the German County of Wittem divided it from the rest of Dutch Limburg. Such anomalies – patches of land belonging to a state but separated from the rest of its territories – scarcely exist any more. The most important difference from today, though, is that in the early modern era, the borders dividing Vaals from its neighbours were religious as well as political ones. For while the Dutch Republic was officially Calvinist, Aachen, Limburg, and Wittem were all staunchly Catholic. Surrounded by Catholic states, Vaals was an outpost, not only of the Republic but of “the true Reformed religion.” That made it a site of intensive engagement – and as we shall see, struggle – between Protestants and Catholics. Vaals poses a challenge to the textbook image of early modern Europe that prevails today. This image represents Europe in the wake of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations as a place where a majority of people had little or no contact with people of different faiths. Whether or not it was ratified by formal treaty, it is said, the principle of cuius regio eius religio meant that most 2 Others include (a) a monument to peace on Belgian territory near the Drielandenpunt, erected during the Cold War (b) a 1997 monument celebrating the creation of the Euro (mentioned by Hoven) (c) near the Drielandenpunt itself there is a boulder with a bronze plaque to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the EU-region Maas-Rhine. Vaals thus exemplifies the use of some borderlands “as symbols of peace and cooperation”; see Julian Minghi, “Changing Geographies of Scale and Hierarchy in European Borderlands,” in Boundaries and place: European borderlands in geographical perspective, ed. David H. Kaplan and Jouni Hakli (Oxford, 2002), 35, 43–5; Minghi, “From conflict to harmony in border landscapes,” in The Geography of Border Landscapes, ed. Dennis Rumley and Julian V. Minghi (London, 1991), 15–30. On the meaning of the border in modern memory, see Jac van den Boogard et al., Grenz-Controle / Grens-Kontrolle: Aachen, Eupen, Maastricht – Oral Histories (Remscheid, 2008). The Maas-Rhine Euroregio was one of the earliest established; see Joanna M.K. Kepka and Alexander B. Murphy, “Euroregions in Comparative Perspective,” in Boundaries and place, ed. Kaplan and Hakli, 56–9.

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early modern rulers were able to impose their own brand of Christian faith on their subjects. To be sure, it is acknowledged, there existed a small number of states where more than one church was allowed by law to operate: above all, France, until the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. There also existed states like the Dutch Republic, where a tolerated, de facto religious diversity belied the official adherence of the state to a single church. Merchants, soldiers, and a few other exceptionally mobile groups encountered rival confessions on their travels abroad. And of course some Christian states tolerated local Jewish minorities. But overall, the dominant image is of a Europe where most people, especially rural folk, lived out their lives within “gated” communities of people who shared a common faith and church. This image is deeply flawed. As a growing body of research shows, millions more Europeans than previously thought had direct experience of religious diversity.3 One of the places they did so, exemplified by Vaals, was along the borders between states. During the early modern era, there were hundreds of borders in Europe between states with different official religions. These borders were especially dense in central Europe, where cuius regio ended up applying to each Swiss canton and each of the sovereign territories and other units that comprised the Holy Roman Empire. Some of these cantons and territories were tiny, by modern standards – Catholic Zug, for example, was only about ten miles long by thirteen wide (including lakes) and it shared more than a third of its border with Protestant Zurich. Others had highly irregular shapes, with enclaves and exclaves that intertwined them inextricably with their neighbours. The Electoral Palatinate may stand as an extreme example of this. As Bernard Vogler has observed, few inhabitants of the Calvinist Palatinate lived more than ten or fifteen kilometers from a Lutheran territory.4 Their experience points to a much wider truth: even people who lived in religiously homogeneous communities encountered people of different faiths on a regular basis if they lived close enough to a pertinent border. So what happened when people of different faiths met along the political borders of early modern Europe? What characteristics did the structuring and organizing force of political borders impart to their interactions? What forms, both conflictual and co-operative, did their relationships take? And what effect did the proximity of a border have on the tenor of religious life in nearby 3 For a synthesis based on this research, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). 4 Bernard Vogler, “La naissance d’une frontière confessionnelle dans les pays rhénans de 1555 à 1618,” in Les frontières religieuses en Europe du xve au xviie siècle, ed. Robert Sauzet (Paris, 1992), 312.

FIGURE 11.1

Isaak Tirion, Nieuwe en Naauwkeurige Kaart van de drie Landen van Overmaaze Valkenburg, Daalhem en ’s Hertogenrade (Amsterdam, 1739) Courtesy of Regionaal Historisch Centrum Limburg

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communities? These are not questions historians have previously addressed, at least not in any depth, nor have they been posed by scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Border Studies.5 Bringing together geographers, anthropologists, and other social scientists, Border Studies became a defined field only relatively recently, stimulated especially by globalization, which has raised questions about “the meaning of statehood, the principle of territoriality that underpinned it, and the international structure it supported.”6 Border Studies may have something useful to contribute to what is sometimes called “the spatial turn in history.”7 It has not, however, devoted much attention to religion. In what follows, we will first consider briefly some of the chief insights developed by scholars engaged in Border Studies and what relevance those insights have for the study of religious borders in early modern Europe. Then we will return to examine in some detail the complex but revealing case of Vaals, which highlights two special features of religious life in early modern border regions. Religious groups of all stripes made creative use of the political borders between states to pursue their religious aims, and dissenting groups in particular found that the proximity of such borders facilitated their worship and very survival.

…

Border Studies teaches that territorial borders are but one manifestation of a wider phenomenon: the boundary as a device “through which social distinctions are constructed” and identities forged.8 In this respect, borders between political units can be compared to the boundaries between races, ethnic groups, classes, or genders. By drawing them, we categorize people into groups; by defining the limits of those groups, we articulate their identities. On this point, contemporary Border Studies has been influenced heavily by postmodern theorizing, which emphasizes the artificial, constructed character of all such distinctions between groups, and the way their drawing always entails an exercise of power.9 Mathias Albert goes so far as to declare that we should 5 A notable recent exception is Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of ­American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia, 2012), Chapter 8. 6 Mathias Albert, “On boundaries, territory and postmodernity: An international relations ­perspective,” Geopolitics 3 (1998): 55. 7 See Barney Warf and Santa Arias, The spatial turn: interdisciplinary perspectives (London, 2009); Symposium “The Spatial Turn in History,” German Historical Institute, February 2004. 8 David Newman and Anssi Paasi, “Fences and Neighbours in the Post-modern World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography,” Progress in Human Geography 22 (1998): 188. 9 Newman and Paasi, for example, cite Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, 1991) (see his Ch. 10) on this point. See

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not “pretend that there are given entities which take logic[al] precedence over their boundaries”; culture itself, he declares, is a “boundary-construction exercise.”10 At any rate, modern Border Studies has repudiated totally the kind of claims that began to be made in the seventeenth century about certain political borders being “natural” to the landscape – for instance, the borders of France as running along the Pyrennees and the Rhine River. At the same time, no one contests the fact that, once defined, borders, like other boundaries, take on a dynamic of their own, engendering palpable differences between those whom they divide. What is distinctive about political borders, as opposed to other kinds of boundaries, is that they are mapped first and foremost spatially, in terms of territory, and that the power to define them is deemed a core attribute of governmental authority. Most of this holds true also for the early modern era, except that defining political units in precise geospatial terms was not then the dominant practice. To be sure, the concept of a linear boundary circumscribing a state had existed since antiquity, and early modern cartographers used lines on maps to differentiate the territories of one state from those of another. Boundary stones and similar objects existed here and there to mark the limits of some jurisdictions along thoroughfares and other significant axes. But in legal and political documents, the scope of a polity was invariably defined by a list of the jurisdictions and/or administrative units included in it.11 In other words, a state was a concatenation of communities – and by no means were these communities necessarily contiguous – over which a particular ruler or governing body held those powers associated with sovereignty, such as the right to make laws, mint coins, and try capital offenses. Having a right over a community meant having the same right over its dependencies – or at least being able to make a strong claim to that effect, as did Louis xiv famously in the 1680s vis-à-vis large parts

10 11

also Vladimir Kolossov, “Border Studies: Changing Perspectives and Theoretical ­Approaches,” Geopolitics 10 (2005): 624; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, ‘Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,’ Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 11; Jan ­Penrose and Peter Jackson, eds., Constructions of race, place and nation (London, 1993), esp. 207. Albert, “On boundaries, territory and postmodernity,” 63. M.S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450–1919 (New York, 1993), 96–100; Jeremy Black, “Boundaries and conflict: International relations in ancien régime Europe,” in Eurasia, ed. Carl Grundy-Warr, World Boundaries (London, 1994), 19–54. This older concept of space corresponds also to the notion of “Landschaft” that predated “landscape”; see Denis Cosgrove, “Landscape and Landschaft,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 35 (2004): 57–71.

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of Alsace and other so-called “reunions” in western Germany and the southern Netherlands.12 However they were defined, borders obviously played a role in defining the religious as well as political identity of communities across early modern Europe. As states adopted different official religions, communities found themselves marked, by virtue of their position on the political map (or their inclusion on a list), as “belonging” to one or another of the major Christian confessions. In thousands of cases, neighbouring communities divided by political borders found themselves divided in an unprecedented way by faith as well. Borders became sites where states acting as champions of rival faiths clashed with one another, promoting religious enmities. If the logic of cuius regio was to suppress differences of faith within territories, though, it was also to validate such differences between territories. This was explicitly acknowledged in treaties like the Peace of Augsburg, Peace of Westphalia, and the various Swiss Landfrieden. Borders set limits on where authorities could attempt to impose a particular faith and police orthodoxy, and in this way borders became positive hindrances to the suppression of dissent. Marc Venard has studied this dynamic in the ecclesiastic province of Avignon in the sixteenth century. There, the Principality of Orange emerged as a “second Geneva,” only thirty kilometers distant from Avignon itself, the second Rome. Protestants from the papal state took refuge behind the borders of Orange and from there agitated against the Catholic authorities who had stripped them of their lands, even launching a military attack in 1573.13 This example leads naturally to a second point: it is a rare border in any historical era that hermetically seals the people of one territory off from another. Borders are always to some extent porous. This was certainly true in the early modern era, when most rulers lacked any effective mechanism to police, never mind close, the borders of their territory. To be sure, borders are always in some way restricting; to be more precise, they “provide normative patterns that regulate and direct interactions” between the populations whom

12

13

Probably the first treaty to include a map was the 1718 treaty between Holy Roman ­Emperor Charles vi and the Dutch Republic, fixing the boundaries between the latter and the Austrian Netherlands (Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 99). The first to describe a border in close detail was the Treaty of Campoformia in 1797 between France and Austria, describing the border between Austria and the Republique Cisalpine. Marc Venard, “Mosaïque politique, carrefour culturel et frontières confessionnelles dans la province ecclésiastique d’Avignon au xvie siècle,” in Les frontières religieuses en Europe, ed. Sauzet, 301–07.

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they separate.14 But the extent to which they coincide with social, economic, or cultural boundaries varies enormously; it is more the rule than the exception for them to be spanned by commercial ties, networks of kinship, and a variety of other social relations. Even when such boundaries do reinforce one another, “stable, persisting, and often vitally important social relations” can be maintained across them. Indeed, as Frederick Barth has pointed out, those relations are sometimes based precisely on the division created by the boundary: economically, for example, a boundary may create opportunities that would not otherwise exist.15 Contemporary examples of this are legion: Dutch people today cross southward into Belgium to buy fireworks and medicines that in Holland are dispensed only by prescription; Belgian men cross northward to go to Dutch brothels and to buy items like flowers and booze that are cheaper in Holland. On each side of the border, businesses flourish by catering to a clientele from the other side.16 The evasion in this manner of taxes and laws is nothing new. Studying social interactions in the seventeenth century across the border between the Swiss Canton of Schaffhausen and adjacent German lands, Roland Hofer has found Habsburg subjects storing their wine and grapes with their Swiss neighbours to avoid paying seigneurial dues on them. The fact that the inhabitants of Schaffhausen were Protestant and the Habsburg subjects Catholic was irrelevant. The two groups also intermarried, and the Protestant villagers of Thayngen delighted in attending the parish festivals and dances of their Catholic neighbours – pleasures they could not organize for themselves as they were forbidden by Schaffhausen law.17 Of course, such advantages accrue mostly to the people and businesses located within a convenient distance of the border. That distance defines a zone within which the presence of the border, and the interactions that take place across it, is an important factor shaping the life of the inhabitants. Straddling the border on both sides, that zone constitutes a “borderland,” a region in its own right which often has distinctive characteristics and a coherence that 14 15 16 17

Newman and Paasi, “Fences and Neighbours,” 194. Cf. Robert Muchembled’s “Introduction” to Eszter Andor and István György Tóth, eds., Frontiers of Faith: Religious Exchange and the Constitution of Religious Identities, 1400–1750 (Budapest, 2001), esp. p. 4. Fredrik Barth, Ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of culture difference (London, 1969), 10. Vitali Vitaliev, Passport to Enclavia: Travels in Search of a European Identity (London, 2008), 51–3. Roland Hofer, “‘Nun leben wir in der gefahrlichsten Zyth.’ Prolegomena zu einer Geschichte Schaffhausens im konfessionellen Zeitalter,” Schaffhauser Beiträge zur ­Geschichte 72 (1995): 23–70.

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unites its inhabitants with one another – sometimes more strongly than with the countrymen of their respective lands.18 In the extreme case, borderlands can constitute what Richard White has called a “middle ground,” a place of mixture and accommodation where the interaction of peoples generates new, shared meanings and practices.19 This concept of a middle ground has been criticized as offering too rosy a picture of life in the region studied by White, the Great Lakes of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.20 Whether it applies to borderlands between Christian states in E ­ urope is a question worth posing. It does seem to capture some aspects of life in the Balkan borderlands between the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires, concerning which Wendy Bracewell has done fascinating work. She has found a distinctive religious milieu developing among the Uskoks of Senj, guardians of the Habsburg border who glorified violence and vengeance, freely mixing Catholic religious rites and symbols with military ones. In their Muslim counterparts across the border, the martoloses, the Uskoks found worthy opponents  – ­“heroes” like themselves who shared the same code of honor. There are even examples of religious syncretism: one traveller in the 1660s reported that some Bosnian Muslims “read the Gospels, circumcised their children, believed that Mohammed was the Holy Ghost, and drank wine even in Ramadan (though to cause less of a scandal they did not put spices in it).”21 Finally, it is important to recognize that Europe’s political borders were not created simply by the dictat of rulers and imposed by them on passive subjects. As Peter Sahlins has demonstrated, non-elites sometimes played a crucial role in the definition and maintenance of political borders. Ordinary people appropriated, utilized, and indeed took advantage of borders for their own ­purposes.22 A crucial example, for our purposes, is the widespread early modern practice known in German as Auslaufen. It entailed religious d­ issenters 18

19 20 21 22

Borderlands could have different contours and scales with respect to different kinds of a­ ctivity – political, economic, social, etc. Cf. Charles Tilly: the boundaries of different kinds of social relations do not necessarily coincide; political boundaries can be to differing extents social and cultural – and religious – boundaries too. Charles Tilly, Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons (New York, 1984), 24. Richard White, The middle ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991). Criticism for example by Hermann Wellenreuther in Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Esser, eds., Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850, The Formation of Europe (HannoverLaatzen, 2006), 245–73. Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: piracy, banditry, and holy war in the ­sixteenth-centruy Adriatic (Ithaca, 1992), quotation from 34. The traveller Paul Rycaut was speaking of Bosnian Muslims who had converted to Islam from Christianity. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenées (Berkeley, 1989).

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in one state traveling across a political border to attend religious services in another state where their faith was legal. In different periods and varied forms, early modern dissenters can be found performing Auslaufen in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Poland, Transylvania, Hungary, the Netherlands, France, and Ireland. Auslaufen was done on such a large scale by Lutherans in seventeenthcentury Silesia that a whole string of Grenzkirchen was built along the Silesian border in Brandenburg and Saxony to meet their needs.23 Auslaufen was only possible thanks to the political borders dividing states from one another, and in a paradoxical way it respected those borders even as it violated them. Every time dissenters in one state attended religious services in another, they accepted and reinforced a distinction between two spaces, one where their religion was forbidden and another where it was permitted. Authorities and ordinary conforming Christians did the same every time they did not persecute or harrass the dissenters making their trek – which is not to say that such dissenters were always left in peace.24 They certainly were not in Vaals.

…

As late as the 1750s, the nucleus of this Dutch village had only ten or twelve houses, but it had churches for no fewer than five different religious groups: Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, a Walloon (that is, French-speaking) Reformed congregation, and a combined Dutch-German one.25 Why so many churches? Because of its location on the border between the Dutch Republic, Habsburg Netherlands, and Aachen. Historically, Vaals belonged to the Land of ’s-Hertogenrade, one of the three Lands of Overmaas (so called because, viewed from Brussels, they lay on the far, eastern side of the river Maas). These lands first became part of the Dutch Republic in 1632, when Stadholder Frederik Hendrik led a famously successful military campaign against the Spanish. Following the River Maas southward, the Dutch army got as far as Limburg, which it captured but soon lost again. 23

24 25

Olivier Châline, “Frontières religieuses: la Bohême après la montagne blanche,” in Frontiers of Faith, ed. Andor and Tóth, 60–1; Herbert Schöffler, Deutsches Geistesleben zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung: Von Martin Opitz zu Christian Wolff (3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 14–5. For more on Auslaufen, see Kaplan, Divided by Faith, Ch. 6. [Rinse van Noordt and M. Tyderman], Tegenwoordige staat der Vereenigde Nederlanden. dl. 2. Vervattende eene beschryving der Generaliteits Landen, Staats Brabant, Staats Land van Overmaaze, Staats Vlaanderen en Staats Opper-Gelderland met den staat der bezetting in de barriere-plaatsen enz. Met nauwkeurige landkaarten en printverbeeldingen versierd (Amsterdam, 1751), 415–16.

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Dutch and Spanish forces vied for control of the Lands of Overmaas for the next thirty years, until in 1661 the two parties finally agreed to a complicated division of them. Their Partition Treaty transformed Overmaas into an intricate checkerboard of jurisdictions, with each side – the Dutch and the Habsburgs – holding lands detached from their other territories. The principal reason why the Dutch insisted on retaining Vaals was so that it could serve as an outpost of Protestantism, and in particular so that Protestants who lived across the border in Aachen could have a place to worship.26 Protestantism had won the allegiance of a majority of Aachen’s residents in the late sixteenth century, and for a time Protestants had controlled the Aachen city government. An imperial ban had ended this interlude in 1598, inaugurating a period of persecution. Then in 1611, Aachen’s Protestants had risen up in rebellion and regained control of the city. Three years later, Emperor Matthias had ordered a Spanish army to occupy the city, restore its Catholic magistrates, and punish the rebels. In 1614, Protestantism had once again become strictly illegal, both in the city and in the surrounding territory over which it held sovereign power, the so-called Aachener Reich. Aachen emerged from this period of unrest as a fervently Catholic community, some of whose members manifested a fierce and abiding hatred of Protestants. Dissenting congregations survived only clandestinely, “under the cross” of persecution. However, while Protestant worship remained illegal to the very end of the Old Regime, Protestant beliefs were protected from 1648 onward: under the terms of the Peace of Westphalia, Calvinists and Lutherans (and in practice, Mennonites too) could live in the city and its territory, enjoying freedom of conscience in their own homes and the right to travel to attend services elsewhere. Aachen’s Catholic magistrates had strong economic incentives to tolerate these despised minorities, as their commerce and industry were mainstays of the city’s economy. Some of the Protestants were large-scale textile merchants, while others were in the copper industry. They were well known to Dutch authorities, as most of the copper they used to produce their brass goods was imported from Amsterdam, and some of Aachen’s Protestants had Dutch ancestors.27 26 27

P.J.H. Ubachs, “De Maasveldtocht van 1632, oorzaken en gevolgen,” Maasgouw 102 (1983): 1–23; J.A.K. Haas, De verdeling van de Landen van Overmaas 1644–1662. Territoriale desintegratie van een betwist grensgebied (Assen, 1978). Heinz Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten im 16. Jahrhundert. Ihre Stellung im Sozialgefüge und im religiösen Leben deutscher und englischer Städte (Gütersloh, 1972), 95–109; Heinz Schilling, “Bürgerkämpfe in Aachen zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts. Konflikte im Rahmen der alteuropäischen Stadtgesellschaft oder im Umkreis der frühbürgerlichen Revolution?,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 1 (1975): 175–231; Haas, De verdeling van de Landen van Overmaas, 160–61; August Brecher, Die kirchliche Reform in Stadt und Reich

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Beginning in 1649, Dutch authorities saw to it that in Vaals, less than an hour’s travel from Aachen’s city walls, their co-religionists would have a legal and reasonably convenient place of worship. The States General themselves bore the lion’s share of the cost of erecting, in this tiny village on the distant fringe of their territories, a stylish new Reformed church designed by the renowned architect Pieter Post, who was responsible also for Maastricht’s city hall and, back in The Hague, the assembly chamber of the States of Holland. Situated just one hundred meters from the border with Aachen’s territory, this church made a powerful statement.28 On the one hand, it symbolized the extension of Dutch authority and with it Calvinism to this remote outpost of the Republic, and in this sense it clarified the parameters of Dutch jurisdiction. On the other hand, it blurred the borders of that jurisdiction by projecting the religious influence of the Republic beyond them, offering patronage and protection to foreign co-religionists. Like the Silesian Grenzkirchen, the Dutch Reformed Church in Vaals was purpose-built for foreigners who, in a regular reverse-commute, made the trek to Vaals and back every Sunday. Protestants came to worship in Vaals not only from Aachen, but also from Burtscheid, a village just south of Aachen that belonged to an imperial abbey, and from Eupen in the Habsburg Duchy of Limburg. Vaals may have been the most prominent, but it was not the only such place of recourse. Protestants from Limburg and Liège similarly performed Auslaufen to Olne and Eijsden, which like Vaals were islands of territory retained by the Dutch specifically to provide religious services for Calvinists in neighbouring lands.29

28

29

Aachen von der Mitte des 16. bis zum Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Münster, 1957). Aachen’s Protestant congregations were initially formed, in the 1550s, by persons from the thenHabsburg Netherlands. In 1663 Aachen and Dutch authorities disputed the precise location of the border, the Aacheners claiming that the pastory, some fifty houses, and the front door of the parish church stood on their territory; if their claim was vindicated, it meant that the Dutch authorities had no right to seize the church and pastory of Vaals, or to expel its pastor. In a 1663 treaty, Aachen’s magistrates acquiesced in the Dutch claim that put the border some hundred meters further east, running through the pastory. As part of the agreement, the Dutch conceded that the Catholic pastor would retain use of the pastory and continue to receive the incomes associated with his post; as part of the deal, Aachen’s magistrates seem also verbally to have promised that the Reformed minister of Vaals, ds. Wenningius, could continue to live in their city. Stadtarchiv Aachen, RA ii Allgemeine Akten 929: Pfarrhaus zu Vaals und dortige Grenzen, 1660–1809; W.A.J. Munier, “Kerken en kerkgangers in Vaals van de Staatse tijd tot op heden,” Jaarboek van het Limburgs Geschied- en Oudheidkundig Genootschap 136–37 (2000–01): 113–17; see also J. Th. H. de Win, De Geschiedenis van Vaals (Vaals, n.d.), esp. 56. W.A.J. Munier, Het simultaneum in de landen van Overmaas. Een uniek instituut in de ­Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis (1632–1878) (Leeuwarden, 1998), passim. As was their wont,

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Ironically, the inhabitants of all three exclaves were mostly Catholic. As is well known, the Dutch Republic was officially a Calvinist polity but in practice tolerated a wide array of religious minorities. Catholics constituted the majority of the population in some areas, most notably the so-called Generality Lands, like Overmaas, which were incorporated into the Republic relatively late by virtue of military conquest. So while in Aachen, Limburg, and Liège Protestant minorities lived under Catholic regimes, across the border in the Dutch Lands of Overmaas a Catholic population lived under a Protestant regime. To be sure, those Protestant minorities in neighbouring lands were small by comparison with the Dutch Catholic population. Still, there was a degree of symmetry to the relationships: while Protestants in neighbouring lands received succor and support from the Republic, Dutch Catholics received the same from those neighbours. This two-way street manifested itself most clearly between 1663 and 1672, when the Dutch Republic made it difficult for Catholics in the Lands of Overmaas to hold religious services in their own villages. For that period, Dutch Catholics were performing an Auslaufen of their own on Sundays and holy days to Catholic chapels in neighbouring Spanish, German, and other territories.30 As it turned out, the Catholics in the Dutch Lands of Overmaas did not have to perform their Auslaufen for very long, for in 1673 the French invaded and it was the turn of Dutch Protestants to experience repression. When peace returned, though, in 1678, Dutch authorities did not revert to the immediate status quo ante. Instead, they returned to an earlier set of arrangements, implemented in Maastricht and the Lands of Overmaas when the Dutch had originally conquered the area. These arrangements were unique in the Republic. Everywhere else in the United Provinces, Dutch Catholics had to make do with so-called schuilkerken, quasi-clandestine chapels which looked on the outside like houses, or warehouses, or barns. There, in private, behind closed doors, Catholic congregations were usually left to worship in peace. This arrangement did not differ essentially from how most Protestant dissenters were treated. By contrast, in the Lands of Overmaas Catholics had been allowed in the 1630s to worship entirely publicly, and now after 1678 they were allowed to do so again. In a majority of villages, where they constituted the entire population, they even enjoyed exclusive, undisturbed use of the old parish churches. In locales

30

the Dutch also allowed Aachen’s Lutherans and Mennonites to build places of worship in Vaals, though these could not look on the outside like proper churches, with towers and bells. Catholics from Vaals attended mass and received the sacraments in Gemmenich, ­Orsbach, Sippenaeken, and Aachen churches during this period. Munier, “Kerken en kerkgangers,” 117, 133.

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where the Reformed had congregations, they and Catholics shared use of the local church, in an arrangement known as Simultaneum.31 In Vaals, Catholics and Reformed had originally shared use of the parish church, but since in the intervening years the Reformed had obtained a stylish new church of their own, they kept theirs and left the Catholics to use the old one. The most extraordinary fact was that these two churches, the new Reformed and old Catholic one, were joined architecturally: oriented at a ninety-degree angle to one another, they met at the old church tower, whose bells were used by both congregations to announce their services. In the 1750s, Catholics were allowed to rebuild their by then delapidated church on the same site.32 Otherwise, the situation did not change until the arrival of a French Revolutionary army at the end of the eighteenth century. That both Catholics and Protestants worshiped publicly in the Lands of Overmaas – that the religious minority was not confined to an illegal, quasiclandestine existence, but could have a church that looked like a church, with a spire and bells to announce their services – might anachronistically be celebrated as a triumph of toleration. In fact, it made for enormous tension between the two groups. Neither could avert its eyes and ignore the presence of the other; each asserted its presence in the public sphere, and indeed sought to dominate the latter. Add to this the fact that Catholics had to bow to the distant overlordship of a Protestant state which filled every governmental office with its co-religionists, vesting the tiny Protestant minority in their midst with overweening power, and it becomes no wonder that Catholic-Protestant relations were arguably more fraught in the Lands of Overmaas than anywhere else in the Dutch Republic. Petty harassment was chronic, especially where the two groups had to share use of a church building. For example, in the town of Valkenburg where Catholics and Calvinists shared use of the Church of Saints Nicholas and Barbara, the local minister complained in 1687 of the Catholics “that they make a din ringing the [church] bells morning and evening … they stand around in the portal of the church and disturb us with their mocking and otherwise, forcing their way into the church before we can exit.”33 When they

31 32 33

The Reformed had thirteen regular congregations in the Lands of Overmaas, plus several places where the Reformed worshiped more occasionally. See Ch. 10 above; Munier, Het simultaneum in de landen van Overmaas, 327 note 346. Mathieu Franssen, Acht eeuwen St. Pauluskerk Vaals (Vaals, 1994), 23–7, 50. W.A.J. Munier, De beginfase van het z.g. simultaneum in de kerk van de H.H. Nicolaas en Barbara te Valkenburg (1632–1687). Katholieken en protestanten in strijd om het bezit van een kerkgebouw (Valkenburg, 1985), 39.

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could get away with it, Catholics held open-air processions, gave their dead elaborate burials, and marked the landscape with visual symbols, such as a crucifix that hung above the portal of the Catholic church in Vaals. For their part, the Reformed protested against these public manifestations of Catholicism, and Dutch authorities took advantage of moments of political ambiguity and flux (for example in 1680) to engage in iconoclasm, destroying Catholic images and altars. Violence against persons was less widespread, but Vaals in particular saw a good deal of it, more than any other place, for several reasons. Catholic and Reformed numbers here were fairly evenly matched, thanks to the hundreds of foreigners who swelled the ranks of Protestant churchgoers. Vaals also stood as the pre-eminent bastion of Protestantism in the region, weighting events there with symbolic import. Last but not least, because Vaals was situated right on the border with Aachen, that city’s militant Catholics could intrude on it with ease and usually with impunity. In 1738, for example, Aachen’s Catholics responded to an act of perceived iconoclasm in Vaals. After Dutch authorities ordered the removal of the village crucifix, Catholics from Aachen “threatened to ransack the houses of the Reformed in the village of Vaals, yea to set the entire village … on fire and cut to pieces some of the Reformed of Vaals.” In 1750, three Protestant clothworkers were ambushed right in the middle of the village by a group of Catholics from across the border. The incident occurred on a Catholic feast day, which the clothworkers had spent weaving wool: one assailant explained that his companions had wished to “teach” the Protestants not to work on such days. One victim later died of the head wounds he received. In 1757, a Catholic from Aachen shot one of the wings off the figure of an angel that served as weathervane on top of the Walloon church in Vaals. Actually, these attacks within the village were more the exception than the rule, for Aachen’s Catholics did not have to cross the border to attack most of the Protestants who worshiped in Vaals: usually they simply ambushed Protestants en route as they travelled to and from services. Such attacks began almost as soon as Reformed services were inaugurated in Vaals in 1649. Protestants performing Auslaufen from Aachen and Burtscheid were stripped of their outer clothes and robbed of any valuables they had with them – even shoebuckles were snatched. Women and children were hauled out of carriages and mishandled. Even when the assaults caused no serious injury, as some did, they were powerful acts of religious violence that dishonored and intimidated their victims. Such attacks had been going on sporadically for over a century when in the 1760s a particular incident in Vaals escalated into a regional showdown.34 34

This incident is the focus of my book, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, 2014). The most important manuscript sources

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It ­began as a dispute over the child of a religiously mixed couple: its father, Heinrich Mommertz, was a Catholic from the territory of Aachen while its mother, Sara Maria Erffens, was a Calvinist from Vaals. The couple had met in Burtscheid, where Heinrich worked and Sara for a time lived; their marriage was a product of the interlocking economic and social networks that spanned the entire border region, crossing the lines between territories and faiths. The dispute was over whether their newborn baby should be baptized in its father’s faith or its mother’s – not an uncommon point of conflict in religiously mixed families. In this instance, though, the dispute took an unusual turn when on April 14, 1762, Heinrich’s sister Cunegonde attempted to kidnap the baby. Bursting into the Vaals Reformed church, where it was in the middle of being baptized, she tried to snatch the newborn out of the hands of its g­ odmother and run off with it. Her intention was to bring it to the local Catholic church for baptism there instead. This utterly vain undertaking resulted in the young woman’s immediate arrest. Her punishment seemed imminent and ineluctable, until a force from across the border intervened: an armed band of Catholic youths from the territory of Aachen invaded Vaals, dispersed the village guardsmen, bust Cunegonde out of her detention, and whisked her to safety (or so they hoped) back across the border. Three days later, the same band of mostly illiterate farmhands returned to Vaals to taunt the authorities there, holding a mock military exercise on the main street of the village. Needless to say, those taunted were not amused. Dutch authorities responded by sending in a company of soldiers and launching prosecutions against everyone they believed was involved, including the Catholic pastor of Vaals, Father Johannes Wilhelmus Bosten, whom they fingered as the mastermind behind events. The arrest of Father Bosten in December 1762 triggered a fullscale riot in Aachen. In retaliation for his arrest and imprisonment, Aachen’s Catholics launched a new series of violent assaults on Protestants travelling to Vaals; one of their victims, a Lutheran from Burtscheid, died of his wounds. Dutch authorities retaliated in turn by closing in 1764 all the Catholic churches in ’s-Hertogenrade. As protests flowed in from neighbouring Catholic rulers, the entire region was swept up in the furore, which was broadcast to a wider public through periodicals and books.

…

for the incident are located in the Dutch National Archive and the Regionaal Historisch Centrum Limburg, with further sources in Stadtarchiv Aachen and the Landeskirchliches Archiv Düsseldorf.

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What, then, can we conclude about the role of political borders in shaping relations between people of different faiths in Vaals and in early modern E ­ urope generally? First, it seems that Michael Walzer had a valid point when he characterized the international community of nation-states as a “regime of toleration.” To the extent that each state respects the others’ sovereignty, whether out of principle or of weakness, it tolerates whatever goes on within the borders of those other states.35 That was true also in the early modern world of religious practices: rulers who accepted the principle of cuius regio eius religio, whether explicitly or just de facto, acquiesced in the dominance of what they regarded as “heresy” in lands other than their own. Though not acknowledged formally in treaties such as the 1661 Partition Treaty for Overmaas, this fact was obvious in the case of the Dutch Republic and its Catholic neighbours. Viewed in this light, cuius regio appears not as the epitome of intolerance, as often portrayed, but as a basis for the practice of a certain kind of toleration, validating and protecting religious diversity – as long as it followed political lines. Secondly, though, early modern historians would do well to reflect on the origins of the phrase cuius regio and its use as part of a hegemonic discourse. As various scholars have shown, the concept of cuius regio had scant roots in either Protestant or Catholic theology. It was purely a legal concept, formulated in the sixteenth century in order to end religious conflict in the Holy Roman Empire. It was jurists on the Reichskammergericht, one of two imperial supreme courts, who after the 1555 Peace of Augsburg increasingly attributed the powers of cuius regio specifically to those lords who held not patronage or other rights but “Territorialhoheit.” Following behind practice, jurisprudence and legal theory came gradually to accept the unprecedented seizure of religious power by German princes and other sovereign rulers in the course of the Reformation. The phrase itself was coined only in 1599 by Joachim Stephani, who served as councillor and church administrator for the Lutheran dukes of Pomerania, and who was an expert on Roman law, which served so many early modern rulers as a means of aggrandizing power.36 Spreading first among his fellow lawyers, use of the phrase had an obvious appeal to rulers and their 35 36

Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, 1997), 19–22. See Johannes Heckel, “Cura religionis, Jus in sacra, Jus circa sacra,” in Festschrift Ulrich Stutz (Stuttgart, 1938), 224–98; Martin Heckel, “Zu den Anfängen der Religionsfreiheit im Konfessionellen Zeitalter,” in “Ins Wasser geworfen und Ozeane durchquert.” Festschrift für Knut Wolfgang Nörr, ed. Mario Ascheri et al. (Cologne, 2003), 367–73; B.C. Schneider, Jus reformandi: Die Entwicklung eines Staatskirchenrechts von seinen Anfängen bis zum Ende des Alten Reiches (Tübingen, 2001), esp. 237–56; R. v. Friedeburg, “Cuius regio, eius religio: The Ambivalent Meanings of State Building in Protestant Germany, 1555–1655,” in Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800, ed.

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agents, suggesting as it did that they could legitimately wield enormous power over the confessional commitments and religious life of their subjects – more power than in fact they were able to exercise. For in reality, early modern sovereignty was not indivisible, its limits were often ambiguous and contested, and rulers had very limited control over the periphery of their “regio.”37 As the case of Vaals shows, the proximity of another state with a different official religion nourished religious dissent within states, as dissenters benefited from the patronage and protection of nearby rulers who shared their faith, from churches and other religious resources in a neighbouring state, and from having ready to hand, if need be, a refuge. On both sides of a border like the one in Vaals, a religious borderland extended to a distance of several hours’ travel, within which zone the dissenters of each state enjoyed regular physical access to its neighbours. In the case of Aachen, nota bene, that borderland included the city itself, so that the very distinction between center and periphery was blurred, as it was in other small states and in morcellized ones like the Palatinate as well.38 Neighbouring states could even develop, as did Aachen and the Dutch Republic, a symbiotic relationship whereby one state depended on the other to offer religious services to dissenters whose worship it refused to tolerate on its own territory but whose presence it wished to retain, usually for its economic benefits.39 Thus governments as well as dissenters could exploit the principle of cuius regio and the proximity of a relevant border, even as they tacitly sanctioned their violation and transgressing. The cuius regio principle was, so to speak, porous, just as the borders of early modern states were. ­Neither the principle nor the borders were purely enclosing and restricting; to the contrary, they created possibilities, offering alternatives and forms of religious freedom for ordinary people that would not have existed without them.

37

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H. Louthan, G.B. Cohen, and F.A.J. Szabo (New York, 2011), 73–91; my thanks to Robert von Friedeburg for helping to clarify the development of the concept. See Jacques Ancel, “L’Évolution de la notion de frontière,” Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences 5 (1933), 538–54. Regarding hegemonic narratives and counter-narratives with regard to boundaries, see Newman and Paasi, “Fences and Neighbours,” 195. Compare the insights of contemporary Border Studies that “the concept of ‘border space’ now embraces not only the area along the boundary, but internal regions” and that processes of boundary-formation are not geographically localized but engage states in their entirety. See Kolossov, “Border Studies,” 622–23. This kind of symbiosis thus differs somewhat from the one noted by Venard in his study of Avignon, that the ability of one state to purge itself of religious dissenters often depended on the existence of another state to which those dissenters could flee. Venard, “Mosaïque politique, carrefour culturel et frontières confessionnelles”; see also Kaplan, Divided by Faith, Chapter 6.

Chapter 12

“For They Will Turn Away Thy Sons”: The Practice and Perils of Mixed Marriage in the Dutch Golden Age On December 20th, 1597, Burgomaster Cornelis Pieterszoon Hooft delivered a famous statement to the assembled magistrates of Amsterdam. In it he pleaded the cause of religious toleration, not only for the velvet-maker Goosen Vogelsangh whose case was before the magistrates, but for all who deviated from the city’s official Calvinist orthodoxy. Hoping to preempt the ad hominem attacks he expected in response, he acknowledged his own, very personal engagement with religious dissent, and reflected on its meaning: Some shall perhaps discount my arguments, or entirely reject them, because my wife attends the sermons of the Mennonites. But what is one to do? At my urging she has been to [the Reformed] church, but she declares that she is not as well edified there as at the other. This situation I have in common with many people, including prominent ones, and it is deserving neither of calumny nor of punishment.1 Hooft expected his opponents to attribute his views to the fact that his own wife was a religious dissenter. And in effect he conceded the point: at home, in his interactions with his wife, he had learned toleration. He had tried to bring his wife around to the true church. But what was one to do when persuasion failed? The question was rhetorical: nothing. Hooft’s marital experience had clarified for him the limits of human power. It was a lesson, he observed, that many Netherlanders, including many of his fellow regents, were learning. Hooft was not alone. Many of his contemporaries remarked on how common interfaith – in the parlance of the day, “mixed” – marriages were in the young Dutch Republic. All agreed that they had a major impact on the Republic’s religious climate. Bernard Dwinglo, a Reformed minister, observed in 1602 that “Heromnes,” the Dutch everyman, “would not stand for the burning of heretics.” His explanation jibed perfectly with Hooft’s personal confession: “For [what] if one man saw his niece, another his uncle, a third his son, [and] yes, 1 Geerard Brandt, Historie der reformatie en andere kerkelyke geschiedenissen, in en ontrent de Nederlanden, 4 vols. (2nd ed. Amsterdam, 1677), 1:821.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_014

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some their wives, flesh of their flesh [uyt haer arm], who are dearer to them than their own souls, suffer unto death? … [W]hat do you think, sirs, would it succeed? What joy would there be, do you think?”2 According to the Dutch, the love they felt, despite all religious differences, for those closest to them made persecution a repugnant prospect. They commonly cited religiously mixed families, above all mixed marriages, not just as symptom but as cause of the toleration that prevailed in Dutch society. Repeated by foreigners such as Ellis Veryard and Sir William Temple as well as by natives, this idea became part of Dutch national identity in the seventeenth century, during the Dutch Golden Age.3 As historians have discovered, though, such matters of identity and image can have a complex relation to social reality. Were mixed marriages really more common in the Republic than elsewhere in Europe? Do their numbers help explain the toleration that prevailed there?4 Given the relevance of the subject to modern concerns, scholars have done surprisingly little research on the history of mixed marriage. At present, we simply do not know much about intermarriage rates in the seventeenth century. We can, however, approach the issue from a different angle by examining the attitudes and practices surrounding mixed marriage, comparing those in the Republic to ones elsewhere. What did churches teach with regard to mixed marriage? Did lay practice accord with clerical teachings? How did pastors and magistrates deal with religiously mixed couples? How did the couples themselves cope with their religious differences? And, crucially, how were their children raised? As we shall see, in all these regards it is far from clear that the northern Netherlands differed sharply from other parts of Europe. In the wake of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, when western Christendom split into rival confessions, mixed marriage raised in the most intimate, concrete terms the question how people of different faiths could live together harmoniously. Writing about Germany, Étienne François has described it as one of the two great taboos of early modern religious life. And yet the taboo was broken: at least some mixed marriages are attested in every

2 Wiebe Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk. Een studie over het gereformeerd pro­ testantisme in Friesland, 1580–1650 (Hilversum, 1999), 96 note 1. 3 C.D. van Strien, British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period: Edward Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces (Leiden, 1993), 201; Temple refers to “the force of Commerce, Alliances, and Acquaintance,” William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London, 1673), 183. 4 I confine myself here to marriages between Christian partners, not treating issues related to Christian-Jewish and Christian-Muslim marriages, which were strictly prohibited.

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European land with a religiously mixed population.5 What role, then, did this taboo play in early modern religious culture? How did mixed marriage figure in the fierce competition between Europe’s churches for legitimacy and members? The answer, in short, is that mixed marriage testified in the past, as it does today, to a particular pattern of relations between groups, one characterized by social integration, cultural assimilation, and demographic movement. It was one of the principal points where the boundaries between Christian groups were uncertain and subject to flux. It thus posed a direct threat to the confessional consolidation that was a primary goal of churches in the seventeenth century, both in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe.

…

The word “mixed” often had negative connotations in early modern culture, and the other terms for interfaith marriages had even stronger ones. Most commonly, such marriages were called “unequal,” just as ones between young and old, rich and poor were. Quakers called such marriages “disorderly,” while the French sometimes called them “bigarré,” motley, like the outfits worn by court jesters and other fools.6 All Christian churches, both within and outside the Republic, deplored them. Amsterdam’s Calvinist consistory described mixed marriages as “improper,” “offensive,” and a sin against God.7 Delft’s consistory warned church members not to let their children marry persons of other faiths. Drawing the difference between faiths in black and white contrasts, it explained that Reformed Christians should not marry others because “light has nothing in common with darkness.”8 Catholic authorities condemned mixed marriages in equally sharp terms, regarding them as a form of sacrilege. Those who entered into them committed “a very grave mortal sin,” warned Christianus Molina in a popular Dutch-language tract. Philip Rovenius, who as apostolic vicar headed the Holland Mission of the Catholic Church, wrote in 1648 that “entering into a 5 Étienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen, 1991), 194 and passim. For evidence of mixed marriage in different European lands, see the non-Dutch literature cited in subsequent notes. 6 Daniel C. Beaver, Parish communities and religious conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 277; Élisabeth Labrousse, “Les mariages bigarrés. Unions mixtes en France au xviiie siècle,” in Le couple interdit: entretiens sur le racisme, la dialectique de l’altérité socio-culturelle et la sexualité, ed. Léon Poliakov (Paris, 1977), 159–76. The Dutch sometimes called them “gespikkelde huwelyken”; Donald Haks, Huwelijk en gezin in Holland in de 17de en 18de eeuw (Utrecht, 1985), 135. 7 Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur. De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam, 1578–1700 (Hilversum, 1990), 152, 168. 8 A.Ph.F. Wouters and P.H.A.M. Abels, Nieuw en ongezien. Kerk en samenleving in de classis Delft en Delfland 1572–1621, 2 vols. (Delft, 1994), 2:202.

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marriage with unbelievers is nothing other than the p ­ rostitution of a member of Christ to the devil.”9 As late as 1741, a papal pronouncement, the Declaratio Benedictina, condemned Catholics who, “driven shamefully mad by an insane love, do not abhor in their souls … these detestable unions, which Holy Mother Church has always damned and forbidden.” Such was the language the Curia used when, for the first time, it officially ­relaxed the rules concerning mixed marriage in the Netherlands.10 Churches discouraged mixed marriages also by disciplining those who contracted them. Practice here varied considerably. One of the earliest Dutch Reformed synods, held in Dordrecht in 1574, advised consistories to handle cases “according to the circumstances of the matter, either with a confession of guilt before the consistory or publicly, or by keeping them from the Lord’s Supper for a while, or by proceeding with the steps of excommunication.”11 Most commonly, Dutch consistories suspended the offending church member from ­taking communion until they had shown remorse and been reconciled to the congregation. Sometimes they suspended parents who permitted their children to enter into such marriages. In the years up to 1700, Amsterdam’s consistory took such action in one hundred eighty-four cases of mixed marriage, the number peaking between 1640 and 1660; the consistories of Rotterdam and Delft took action in forty-eight cases, most of them after 1645.12 9

C. Molina [Christianus Vermeulen], Den Oprechten Schriftuerlijcken Roomsch-Catholycken Mondt-Stopper (15th ed. Antwerp, 1745), 178; P. Rovenius, Reipublicae christianae libri duo (Antwerp, 1648), 386; cf. F.J.M. Hoppenbrouwers, Oefening in volmaaktheid. De ­zeventiende-eeuwse rooms-katholieke spiritualiteit in de Republiek (The Hague, 1996), 9. 10 Declaratio SSmi D.N. Benedicti PP. xiv. super matrimoniis Hollandiae et Foederati Belgii… (Louvain, 1742), 7–8; cf. H.F.W.D. Fischer, “De gemengde huwelijken tussen katholieken en protestanten in de Nederlanden van de xvie tot de xviiie eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor rechtsge­ schiedenis 31 (1963): 471. Henceforth, the church recognized as valid Protestant-Catholic and Protestant-Protestant marriages that had been solemnized by a magistrate or Reformed minister in the United Provinces or one of the “barrier cities” manned by Dutch troops. 11 J. Reitsma and S.D. van Veen, eds., Acta der provinciale en particuliere synoden, gehouden in de noordelijke Nederlanden gedurende de jaren 1572–1620, 6 vols. (Groningen, 1892), 2:147. 12 Roodenburg, Onder censuur, 151, 167, 177, 190; Manon van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Hol­ land. Stedelijke rechtspraak en kerkelijke tucht 1550–1700 (Amsterdam, 1998), 218, 236–37, 275. Given the size of the congregations in question, the small number of disciplinary cases concerning mixed marriage in the records of the Dutch Reformed churches suggests that Dutch consistories may have exercised discretion in pursuing them. As Judith Pollmann points out, however, Dutch Reformed Protestants who entered into mixed marriages could also avoid censure fairly easily. Many such Protestants never became actual members of the Reformed Church, or did so only at a mature age, preferring until then to remain “sympathizers” (liefhebbers) of the church (see below). By postponing the step of joining the church until after their marriage, they kept their choice of partner from ever falling under the purview of the consistory. Judith Pollmann, “From freedom of

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Weak, disorganized, and intermittently persecuted in the wake of the Dutch Revolt against Spain, the Catholic Church geared up only gradually to combat mixed marriages. Its ultimate weapon was the confessional, and in 1656 the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the Roman office that supervised missionary activity, ordered the priests of the Holland Mission to refuse absolution to anyone who entered into such a union, unless and until their partner converted to Catholicism.13 Such a refusal barred Catholics also from taking communion. As we shall see, it is not clear how many clergy obeyed this stern decree. In general, secular clergy operating in missionary territory were more accommodating than ones in bishoprics, while Jesuits, Dominicans, and other regulars were more accommodating still. At the end of the seventeenth century, even the pastors of Bergen op Zoom, a city that lay within the bishopric of Antwerp, were rather lax.14 Strictest of all groups in the Netherlands were certain Mennonites. How “marriage outside” (buitentrouw), as they called it, should be treated was in fact one of the principal points dividing different branches of the Mennonite movement from one another. At one end of the spectrum, Waterlanders believed that mixed marriage should not be punished so long as the Mennonite spouse remained an active and upright member of the congregation.15 Moderate groups such as the Young Frisians imposed at least a temporary ban, until the offender had demonstrated repentance. At the other extreme, Old Frisians and Old Flemings regarded marriage to other sorts of Mennonites, as well as to non-Mennonites, as a species of buitentrouw. Originally, they punished the latter with the “full ban,” that is, expulsion from the congregation and an ostracism so rigorous that even offenders’ family members were supposed to avoid them. Those expelled could be readmitted only upon the conversion or death of their spouse. Old Frisians softened this punishment in the mid-seventeenth century, Old Flemings only in 1739.16

13 14 15 16

conscience to confessional segregation? Religious choice and toleration in the Dutch Republic,” in Persecution and Pluralism: Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Trim and Richard Bonney (Oxford, 2006), 123–48. Fr. Marcellinus a Civetia and Fr. Theophilus Domenichelli, eds., Epistolae missionariorum ordinis S. Francisci ex Frisia et Hollandia (Quaracchi, 1888), 234; aau 34 (1908): 35. Charles de Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten. Reformatie en katholieke herleving te Bergen op Zoom 1577–1795 (Hilversum, 1998), 581; cf. “Report on the State of Popery, Ireland 1731,” Archivium Hibernicum 3 (1914): 125. Ben Israels [Yeme de Ringh], Tractaet Teghen het straffen der Buyten-getrouden, sonder onderscheydt (Amsterdam, 1628). Samme Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente en de oude gronden. Geschiedenis van de dopersen in de Nederlanden, 1531–1675 (Leeuwarden, 2000), 298–300, 307–08; B. Rademaker-Helfferich,

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For all their condemnation and censure, however, all these groups acknowledged that mixed marriage was a “honorable state of matrimony.”17 Not a single European church denied the validity of mixed marriages between Christians or the binding character of the union they created. This remarkable fact ­demands explanation. One reason, clearly, was the deep respect all the churches had for the sanctity of marriage. Even Protestant churches, which broke with Catholicism by permitting divorce, in practice granted it rarely. While celebrating the companionship that husband and wife could expect from one another, they never made emotional or spiritual intimacy a requirement for marriage, or lack of it sufficient grounds for divorce.18 A second factor was the authority of the New Testament, which explicitly declared marriages between Christians and pagans to be legitimate. In 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul had ruled that such marriages could be dissolved only if the pagan refused to live with the Christian spouse. In the post-Reformation era this sanction for divorce was known as the “Pauline privilege,” and Protestant leaders debated whether or not it applied to marriages between orthodox Christians and heretics.19 In any event, the privilege did not extend in the other direction: Christians could not abandon or divorce their pagan – or heretical – spouse because of religious difference. Only if a woman was being persecuted so severely by her husband that “there is imminent peril to her life” might she abandon him, counselled John Calvin; otherwise she was “not to deviate from the duty which she has before God to please her husband, but to be faithful [to him] whatever happens.”20 In practice, it was indeed wives being pressured by their husbands for whom religious authorities were usually concerned. Yet, as Calvin’s words suggest, their concern clashed with another imperative, to maintain patriarchal authority. Social stability and orderliness rested, all agreed, on the integrity of the f­ amily Een wit vaantje op de Brink. De geschiedenis van de Doopsgezinde gemeente te Deventer (Deventer, 1988), 89–90. 17 Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente, 307. Proposals by some Flemings for the dissolution of all marriages “outside the congregation” had been made in the 1620s but defeated; Wilhelmus Johannes Kühler, Geschiedenis der nederlandsche doopsgezinden in de zestiende eeuw (Haarlem, 1932), 194. 18 See i.a. Steven Ozment, When fathers ruled: family life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 80–99 (where Martin Bucer is noted as partial exception); Robert Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 176–80. 19 Reitsma and Van Veen, eds., Acta, 2:315–16; Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce, 143–74, 202 note 20; cf. Corpus Juris Canonici C. xxviii, Q. 1, c. viii–ix. 20 Philip E. Hughes, ed. and transl., The Register of the Company of Pastors of Geneva in the Time of Calvin (Grand Rapids, 1966), 345. Theodore Beza counselled similarly in his Trac­ tatus de Repudiis et Divortiis (Leiden, 1651), 246.

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and the clear lines of authority and obedience maintained within it. This was a third reason why all Europe’s churches accepted the binding force of mixed marriages. In England, preacher William Gouge used the example of wives who had “infidel husbands” as the very model of subjection wives generally owed their husbands. “If Infidels carry not the divels image, and are not, so long as they are Infidels, vassals of Satan, who are? yet wives must bee subject to them, and feare them.” How much more so, Gouge concluded, must they be subject to lewd, profane, drunken, and impious husbands.21 In the Netherlands, as in other religiously-mixed parts of Europe, clergy not only recognized mixed marriages, they performed mixed-marriage weddings. That is, they joined members of their church to non-members, issuing (if their church had official standing in their locale) the banns that publicly announced the union, and performing the ceremony that solemnized it. Calvinist ministers could scarcely avoid doing so in Zeeland, Drenthe, and the Ommelanden of Groningen, the three Dutch provinces where they performed the only legally valid weddings. There they also married Catholics to Catholics, Mennonites to Mennonites, and so forth. Elsewhere in the Republic such couples also had the option of marrying in city hall. Even here, though, ministers were willing to perform mixed-marriage weddings, on the grounds that “public marriage” was primarily a “civil [politisch]” matter.22 Ministers found it easier to adopt this view than did Catholic priests, since Protestant churches did not regard matrimony as a sacrament. While they often worked closely with magistrates to regulate marital affairs, they happily left ultimate authority over such affairs in the latter’s hands. As for the Catholic Church, its decree Tametsi in 1563 implicitly prohibited priests from marrying Catholics to heretics or heretics to one another.23 The decree had no force, though, where it had not been properly promulgated, as was clearly the case in parts of the Netherlands, amidst the tumults of the Revolt. Even where it had been, many priests and some bishops were willing

21 22

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William Gouge, Of domesticall duties (2nd edit. London, 1634), 275. F.L. Rutgers, ed., Acta van de Nederlandsche synoden der zestiende eeuw (Utrecht, 1889), 161; Reitsma and Van Veen, eds., Acta, 2:439–40, 3:446. The principal exception to this willingness was the initial refusal of most Dutch Reformed ministers to perform weddings if one or both of the prospective spouses were unbaptized. Resisted by laity especially in North Holland, this policy was abandoned in the 1620s-40s; Reitsma and Van Veen, eds., Acta, 161; W.P.C. Knuttel, ed., Acta der particuliere synoden van Zuid-Holland, 1621–1700, 6 vols. (The Hague, 1908–1916), 2:70, 226, 385. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H.J. Schroeder (Rockford, Ill., 1978), 183–85.

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to violate the decree. An attempt at enforcement suggests why. In 1656, the Congregation in Rome ordered priests in the Republic to stop performing ­mixed-marriage weddings, unless the non-Catholic converted beforehand.24 Antonius Peerkens, a Franciscan stationed on the border between Friesland and Overijssel, reported to his superior how deeply this order disturbed his flock. If a non-Catholic refused to convert, the Catholic was left with the painful choice of abandoning the intended match or foregoing priestly blessing (after being married legally by a minister or magistrate, Dutch Catholics were commonly “remarried” by a cleric of their own confession). In the latter case, in the eyes of the church they were guilty of fornication and concubinage and, unless absolved for these mortal sins, were doomed to damnation. But the same order forbade absolution. Far from promoting the conversion of nonCatholics, Peerkens feared Rome’s decree would lead many Catholics to abjure their faith.25 Peerkens realized, as did other priests with direct pastoral experience, that the Catholic Church risked losing far more than it would gain by adopting such a hard line. Odds were far better that Catholics in mixed marriages would remain true to their faith, that they would continue to practice it, and that they would raise their children in it if their wedding was performed by a priest rather than (or in addition to) a Protestant minister or magistrate. Indeed, the involvement of a priest at that crucial moment gave the church an invaluable entrée into the future life of the new family. Deafened by a chorus of protests, Apostolic Vicar Johannes van Neercassel asked the Congregation to reconsider its policy, which it did in 1671.26 Across Europe, Calvinist, Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican clergy performed the same calculation of potential loss and gain. It led them to perform mixedmarriage weddings and made them wary of chastising too harshly church members who entered into such marriages. Priests in the diocese of Strasbourg, in Alsace, warned their superiors: if they did not solemnize mixed marriages themselves, couples would simply ask a minister to do so, and then the odds would rise that the Catholic spouse would be lost to the church.27 A Scottish student noted a similar discrepancy between the rules of the French Reformed Churches and the practice he observed in the mid-1660s in Moyen-Poitou: 24 25 26

27

aau 34 (1908): 35. A Civetia and Domenichelli, eds., Epistolae Missionariorum, 234–35, 243–44. The Congregatio made no official statement but told Neercassel he should do what seemed best to him “for the salvation of souls”; this gave the priests of the Holland Mission a free hand to treat those married before magistrate or dominee as validly married. Declaratio SSmi D.N. Benedicti, 334, 49. Louis Châtellier, Tradition chrétienne et renouveau catholique dans le cadre l’ancien diocèse de Strasbourg (1650–1770) (Paris, 1981), 147.

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It is not permitted for a man or a woman to marry a papist. If they do, they have to come before the entire church and make a public confession of their error and of the scandal they have caused. Experience [though] teaches that this strictness should be used rarely, or gently. For if one came to enforce this rule, one would lose a believer who preferred to ­become a papist [than submit to it].28 To be sure, clergy in some religiously mixed communities did refuse to solemnize mixed marriages. Catholic priests in the southern French city of Nîmes, for example, required all Protestants who wished to marry a Catholic partner in a Catholic Church to convert. Between 1609 and early 1621, a quarter of all the weddings they performed in the Nîmes cathedral involved one partner (almost always the woman) converting to Catholicism in the preceding months. As Robert Sauzet has shown, though, the pattern that emerged in Nîmes illustrates another danger, besides the loss of church members, that ensued if clergy refused to solemnize mixed marriages: the gain of hypocritical, insincere, ones. Two or three times a year, on average, a Protestant woman who had converted to marry a Catholic approached the Nîmes consistory, asking it to pardon and readmit her to the Calvinist congregation. Invariably, after showing proper contrition, she was granted her request. Truthfully or not, she often blamed her parents for forcing the marriage upon her. Clearly, though, her manoeuver required the connivance of several parties, including the Catholic clergy, who did not demand that such converts “pro matrimonio” undergo a very thorough course of instruction in the Catholic faith or show great proof of sincerity. This “sacrilegious sham,” as one bishop of Nîmes called it, continued for decades, until in 1663 Louis xiv’s government outlawed abjurations of ­Catholicism on pain of banishment.29 In 1679 the government added as further penalty the confiscation of the convert’s property, and a year later it outlawed mixed marriage altogether. Conversions pro matrimonio were not unknown in the Netherlands.30 Aside from any institutional obstacles, those who wished to enter into a mixed 28 29

30

André Benoist, “Catholiques et Protestants en ‘Moyen-Poitou’ jusqu’à la Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes (1534–1685),” Bulletin de la Société historique et scientifique des DeuxSevres 2/16 (1983): 329. Robert Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique en Bas-Languedoc: le diocèse de Nîmes au xviie siècle (Paris, 1979), 165–67, 266–69. Pro matrimonio conversions were the norm also in the southwestern French town of Agen; Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Com­ munity in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia, 1993), 103–04. See the 1657 complaint by Jacobus de la Torre in aau 34 (1908): 37.

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­ arriage had to grapple with the convictions of friends, family, neighbors, and m above all their prospective spouse. One of Amsterdam’s countless painters who did not achieve fame was Guilliaume Gardijn, a Catholic who converted to Calvinism in order to win a certain Anna Formiau as his wife. He later told the Amsterdam consistory bluntly that he had only converted “to get this woman.”31 Eventually he returned to the Catholic fold. Still, until the 1750s there were no legal obstacles to mixed marriage in the Republic. At most, as in Utrecht, religiously mixed couples were required to make certain promises: that the Reformed partner would continue to practice his or her faith without hindrance or wavering, and that the couple’s children would be raised Reformed.32 But religiously mixed couples could readily marry in city hall or Reformed Church, and until 1738 men married to non-Calvinists were not legally barred from any occupation or office.33 They could serve as elder in the Reformed Church (the classis of Bolsward-Workum, in Friesland, ruled so explicitly in 1643) and it is possible they could even serve as minister.34 Generally, then, Netherlanders felt little pressure to convert. At the same time, some of them felt considerable pressure to marry outside their faith. This pressure came from the marriage market, which could be difficult for religious minorities. In 1645, Rovenius received a letter from the Congregation in Rome asking why so many Catholics in Friesland were marrying close relatives. “They persuade themselves too easily,” answered the apostolic vicar, that they cannot find marriage partners among “Catholic persons of equal condition outside the prohibited degrees” of kinship.35 In other words, went the complaint, there were too few Catholic families, which through intermarriage had already become related to one another. In 1660, Brother Peerkens heard similar from his flock: “due to the multitude of heretics and dearth of Catholic girls,” Catholic men claim “they can scarcely find Catholic girls equal to them.”36 By their own account, then, Dutch Catholics faced 31 Roodenburg, Onder censuur, 158–59; cf. R.B. Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam. De kerk der hervorming in de gouden eeuw, 5 vols. (Amsterdam/Baarn, 1965–1978), 2:91. 32 Resolution of the Utrecht city council dd. 15 Jan. 1677, in hua, dtb Registers van de ­Gemeente Utrecht 76, first pages (unnumbered). 33 gpb, 8:543–44. Cf. W.P.C. Knuttel, De toestand der Nederlandsche katholieken ten tijde der Republiek, 2 vols. (Den Haag, 1892–1894), 2:179–85. In 1738 the States General declared that officers in the Dutch army would be dismissed if they married a Catholic; in 1739 they extended the threat to civil officials in the Generality Lands. gpb, 6:238–39, 527. 34 Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk, 198; Reitsma and Veen, eds., Acta, 4:81; cf. Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647 (Nijmegen, 1995), 654–55. 35 aau 33 (1907): 50. 36 A Civetia and Domenichelli, eds., Epistolae Missionariorum, #425, dd. 5 May 1660, p. 244.

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a choice b­ etween religious and socio-economic exogamy: they could marry either Catholics or persons of the same status and wealth as themselves. Statistics support their story. D.J. Noordam has found that in the South Holland village of Maasland, religiously mixed marriages were never also economically mixed ones, and vice-versa. The tradeoff had a geographic dimension as well: the smaller the religious group, the farther it had to cast its net to find marriage partners of the same faith. For example, in the North Holland village of Graft, members of the Mennonite minority were twenty-three percent more likely to marry someone from outside the village than were Calvinists, who formed the majority, while Catholics, the smallest group, were sixty percent more likely.37 This pattern of tradeoffs is widely paralleled in the experience of minorities outside the Netherlands.38 For religious minorities to survive in the Netherlands or any other part of Europe, they had to ensure that most of their members were endogamous, marrying one another. This they did through values passed down the generations as much as through sanctions. All were aware that failure could have drastic consquences, for mixed marriage was indeed one of the chief ways groups lost members. Every mixed marriage presented the competing confessions with both opportunities and perils. On the one hand, clergy and laity could hope to win a “heretical” spouse for the “true” faith. Indeed, the prospect of saving a soul offered one of the few positive legitimations for marrying outside the group. When the national synod held in 1578 gave permission for Dutch Calvinists to marry their children to non-church members, it made its approval conditional on the intended spouses being “not opposed to the [Reformed] religion” and giving “good hope that they shall grow in knowledge of the truth.”39 Such unions as the synod had chiefly in mind, however, were not mixed marriages in the strictest sense. One of the most distinctive aspects of the religious scene in the Republic, especially in its early years, was the large number of people who were not members of any church. Some were known as “supporters” (liefheb­ bers) of the Reformed faith, who attended sermons in the Reformed Church but did not take communion; others had a loose affiliation to one of the other

37 38

39

A. Th. van Deursen, Een dorp in de polder. Graft in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1994), 99. See e.g. Peter Lang, Die Ulmer Katholiken im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe: Lebensbedin­ gungen einer konfessionellen Minderheit (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 147–48; Gabriel ­Audisio, “Se marier en Luberon: catholiques et protestants vers 1630,” in Histoire sociale, sensibilités collectives et mentalités: mélanges Robert Mandrou (Paris, 1985), 242. Rutgers, ed. Acta, 273.

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churches; while still others had no ecclesiastic allegiance at all.40 These people were the principal focus of competition in the Republic, and hope of winning them was indeed realistic: many eventually joined one church or another. Winning a convert from a different confession was another matter. On this point the attitude of the Dutch churches did not differ from that of their counterparts elsewhere: they feared mixed marriages might produce losses as readily as gains. In 1595, the Delft consistory admonished church members that they should not “deceive themselves with a vain hope of winning over the person of contrary faith,” for often “the evil gains the upperhand.”41 The Calvinist moralizer Jacob Cats, whose writings reached a huge Dutch audience, offered maidens the same advice: “Should someone fresh and healthy// Kiss a sick one’s mouth,// She’ll rather catch the ill// Than make the sick one well.” To which he added the warning: “…is it not certain that the man//Can push the matter harder than ever the maiden can?”42 But while wives were particularly vulnerable to pressure from their husbands, in practice religious influence could flow in either direction. Every mixed marriage brought two churches into direct competition with one another, and there were no guarantees for either that it would emerge victorious. Typically, churches preferred to sacrifice the opportunity of gain if by doing so they could avoid the risk of loss. Of course, much more was at stake than just one spouse per mixed marriage. It was the fate of the couple’s children that aroused most concern among not only church leaders but also friends, relatives, and secular authorities. The possibility of losing them for Christ was the ultimate, and oldest argument against marrying non-believers: “For they will turn away thy sons from following me, that they may serve other Gods” (Deuteronomy 7:4).43 From birth, warned Molina, the children of mixed marriages are subjected to evil influences; “they suck in heresy with [mother’s] milk.” They are taught to despise 40 41 42

43

See i.a. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995). Wouters and Abels, Nieuw En Ongezien, 1:245. “En yemant fris en wel gesont,// Indien hy kust en siecken mont// Die wort eer van het quaet geraeckt// Dan hy den siecken beter maeckt//…. Maer ist niet seker dat de man// Het stuck al harder drijven kan?” Jacob Cats, Houwelyck, dat is De gantsche gelegentheyt des Echten-Staets, 6 vols. (Middelburg, 1625), Vrijster, 2:33. Quoted i.a. by Franciscus Duysseldorpius, Tractatus de matrimonio non ineundo cum his, qui extra ecclesiam sunt (Antwerp, 1636), 353, 362; Christianus Catholicus [Johannes Watelaar], Korte ende waere uytvaert, Van alle oncatholijcke religien (Roermond, 1651), 9; rebutted in Israels, Tractaet Teghen het straffen, 11, 15–6. Cited also in Ireland: Alan Ford, “The Protestant Reformation in Ireland,” in Natives and Newcomers: Essay on the Mak­ ing of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641, ed. Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (­Dublin, 1986), 70.

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pope, bishops, and priests, and to say heretical prayers and catechisms; later, they are matched with non-Catholic partners; “…and so this cancer spreads insidiously to the children, children’s children, nieces [and] nephews in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, … [and] 10th degees….”44 With the children went the family’s future generations. More tenaciously than any other, the Catholic Church fought to prevent such loss. Its bishops granted dispensations for mixed marriages on condition that non-Catholic partners promise to allow their children to be raised as Catholics. Many priests demanded the same promise before they would solemnize a mixed marriage. Yet many children of Protestant-Catholic marriages were not raised as Catholics. Ignoring church strictures, lay society developed its own practices in this regard. In some parts of Europe, such as the Enzie district of northeastern Scotland, patriarchal authority prevailed and children were raised in the faith of their fathers. This was the practice as well in Strasbourg and the small French town of Mauvezin in the seventeenth century, and in the Palatinate in the eighteenth.45 An even more extraordinary testimony to male authority, if true, is a report that in the French province of Poitou parents kept their daughters religiously ignorant, or at least neutral, until they married, at which point they were expected to adopt their husband’s faith, whichever that was.46 On the other hand, it was mothers, not fathers, who generally had responsibility for the instruction of young children. In at least a couple of French locales – La Rochelle, the village of Sauve – the children of mixed marriages were often raised in their mothers’ faith.47 The offspring of mixed marriages, however, did not have to be raised all in the same faith. In Friesland, some couples alternated, baptizing their first child Catholic, their second Reformed, and so on, or vice-versa. Alternation in birth

44 Molina, Mondt-Stopper, 180. 45 Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (New York, 1998), 116; Châtellier, Tradition chrétienne, 146; Elisabeth Labrousse, “Conversion dans les deux sens,” in La Conversion au xviie siècle: actes du xiie Colloque de Marseille ( janvier 1982) (n.p., 1983), 166; Alfred Hans, Die kurpfälzische Religionsdeklaration von 1705: ihre Entstehung und Bedeutung für das Zusammenleben der drei im Reich tolerierten Konfessionen (Mainz, 1973), 360–61. 46 Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority (Philadelphia, 1991), 70. 47 Élie Benoist, Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes, contenant Les choses les plus remarquables qui se sont passées en France avant & après sa publication, à l’occasion de la diversité des ­Religions … jusques à l’edit de revocation, en Octobre 1685, 3 vols. (Delft, 1693), iii/i: 550–51; Sauzet, Contre-réforme, 267.

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order was the most common practice in eighteenth-century Utrecht as well.48 Other Frisian couples agreed “that, of the children who were born, the boys would be baptized in the Reformed church and the girls in the papist, or viceversa.”49 In the latter case, the parents’ religious affiliation set the pattern for their progeny: boys would be raised in their father’s faith, girls in their mother’s. In this way the correspondence between gender and faith was replicated from one generation to the next. Forty percent of mixed-marriage couples followed this practice in Bergen op Zoom.50 In fact, this may have been the most common practice in early modern Europe, attested to in lands as diverse as Transylvania, Prussia, France, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as the Netherlands.51 In one case, in the German city of Augsburg, it was even applied to paternal twins, the boy being raised Lutheran, the girl Catholic.52 Why was this practice adopted so widely? Without contemporary explanations, we can only hypothesize. Clearly it encouraged sons to identify with their fathers, daughters with their mothers, and to take on their parent’s religious identity as they would their gender-identity and, commonly, their social roles. A second reason seems at least as important: when followed by many families, the practice froze into place the demographic balance between faiths. True, children could in theory choose their own faith when they reached the “age of discretion,” commonly set at around twelve or fourteen. Yet as everyone knew, most adults remained loyal to the faith they were reared in. Thus unless an equal number of children, in the aggregate, were raised in each faith, a couple of generations could suffice to produce a massive shift in the number of ­adherents each church could claim. Such a shift would have challenged the stability of religiously-mixed communities. Churches with dwindling 48

Ronald Rommes, “Lutherse immigranten in Utrecht tijdens de Republiek,” in Nieuwe ­ ederlanders. Vestiging van migranten door de eeuwen heen, ed. Marjolein ‘t Hart, Jan N ­Lucassen, and Henk Schmal (Amsterdam, 1996), 45. 49 Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk, 337. 50 De Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten, 584. Also a common practice in Holland and other provinces, according to Fischer, “De gemengde huwelijken,” 466. 51 Laszlo Makkai, Histoire de Transylvanie (Paris, 1946), 272–73; Heinrich Pigge, Die religiöse Toleranz Friedrichs des Grossen nach ihrer theoretischen und praktischen Seite (Mainz, 1899), 398–400; Jean Quéniart, La révocation de l‘Édit de Nantes: protestants et catholiques en France de 1598 à 1685 (Paris, 1985), 79; Alasdair Roberts, “The Role of Women in Scottish Catholic Survival,” The Scottish Historical Review 70 (1991): 147; John Fulton, The tragedy of belief: division, politics, and religion in Ireland (Oxford, 1991), 209. A variation of this practice, imposed by certain governments (e.g. that of France from 1663), entailed all the children being raised in the state’s official faith if their father professed it, and the children following their same-gender parent if their mother was the one who professed it. 52 François, Die unsichtbare Grenze, 198.

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­ emberships would likely have felt threatened, while those with expanding m ones might have tried to assert their new strength. The practice described above removed both threat and temptation. Whatever current relations were between the faiths, it tended to perpetuate them. Whether by law, custom, or prenuptial contract, it was lay society that embraced this practice; no church ever enjoined or officially encouraged it. Yet once again, in practice, Europe’s confessions were opting for the safety of the status quo, for the consolidation of their positions, over the prospect of potential gain. Arrangements for the religious upbringing of mixed-marriage children were always precarious, though, given early modern mortality rates. Many children lost one of their parents before reaching the age of discretion. When that ­happened, death destroyed the religious balance within the family, putting authority over the children in the surviving parent’s hands. Some widows and widowers did not abide by the agreements they had made with their spouses. Such violations of trust were common enough that some communities, like the German city of Worms, issued regulations banning them.53 In other communities, authorities intervened on a case-by-case basis, leaving a rich record of confessional strife. Historian Charles de Mooij thus found detailed information about children from Bergen op Zoom whose Protestant parent had died. Between the 1630s and 1760s, Bergen’s Reformed ministers, elders, and magistrates mobilized repeatedly to prevent such children from being raised as Catholics. So did Protestant relatives and guardians. Indeed, a veritable tugof-war for control of the children sometimes broke out between family and friends of the Protestant spouse, on the one hand, and those of the Catholic, on the other. In some cases, Bergen’s Protestants placed children in the municipal orphanage rather than leave them in the hands of a Catholic parent or guardian. A common Catholic strategy was to send the children away to school or relatives in the nearby southern Netherlands, a move Protestants regarded as a form of kidnapping.54

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Specifically, the Lutheran city decreed that if a Lutheran spouse died, their Reformed widow(er) could not try to change the religion of children who were being raised as ­Lutherans. Fritz Reuter, “Mehrkonfessionalität in der Freien Stadt Worms im 16.-18. Jahr­ hundert,” in Städtische Randgruppen und Minderheiten, ed. Bernhard Kirchgässner and Fritz Reuter (Sigmaringen, 1986), 33. De Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten, 583–91. Similar struggles erupted in Amsterdam and Friesland: saa, Hervormde Gemeente Amsterdam Kerkeraad (376): Protocollen van den Bijzondere Kerkeraad, 19:70, 126; 24:205 et seq., 432; Herman Joseph Oldenhof, In en om de schuilkerkjes van Noordelijk Westergo. Katholiek leven in Frieslands noordwesthoek onder de Republiek (1580–1795) (Assen, 1967), 417–18.

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These “kidnapping” incidents had intriguing parallels in seventeenth-­ century France, where Huguenots accused Catholics of abducting many children. Jean-Paul Pittion has examined carefully ten such accusations, involving seventeen children, levelled in Montpellier in the early 1680s. In nine out of ten cases, the children were the offspring of a mixed marriage and one of their parents had recently died. In the French cases, though, unlike their Dutch counterparts, it was the Catholic parent’s death that set off a struggle. In five instances, it was a close relative of the deceased Catholic parent who did the actual “kidnapping,” removing the children from the Protestant parent’s home to prevent their being raised as Protestants. In two other cases, Catholic relatives brought legal suit against a Protestant guardian.55 Such relatives could count on the support of France’s Catholic authorities. Indeed, in 1681 a royal arrêt granted them a veritable license to act by reducing to seven the “age of discretion.” Thereafter, even seven- and eight-year-olds who purportedly wished to convert to Catholicism could legally be whisked away. Elie Benoist’s chronicle of the fortunes and misfortunes of the Reformed churches of France is filled with “kidnapping” stories meant to curdle the blood and evoke the sympathy of any parent. By his account, Catholics stooped to trickery, pressure, and worse, inducing little children, for example, to make the sign of the cross. That sufficed for Catholics to place them in a monastery or convent.56 What seemed darkly sinister to Huguenots, though, made common sense to many French Catholics. They deemed a bit of coercion entirely appropriate to make children convert, just as it was to make them behave; in both instances force had a pedagogic function and was for the children’s own good. Besides, children would scarcely be able to embrace the “true” faith as long as they were immersed in Protestant society and dependent on Protestant parents. In Paris, Rouen, Lyon, and other French cities, the Company for the Propagation of the Faith saw to their welfare. This organization, whose first branch was founded in 1632, provided young converts with lodgings, apprenticeship money, college tuition, dowries – whatever support they needed, on condition that they embrace Catholicism and remain faithful to it.57 If the death of one spouse in a mixed marriage invited the intervention of outsiders, the death of both spouses guaranteed it. When children were orphaned, either relatives, or friends acting as legal guardians, or in the last 55

Jean-Paul Pittion, “L’affaire Paulet (Montpellier 1680–83) et les conversions forcées d’enfants,” in La conversion au xviie siècle. Actes du xiie Colloque de Marseille ( janvier 1982) (Marseille, 1983), 209–29. 56 Benoist, Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes, iii/i: 142–44, 188, 250, 296, 547; iii/ii 19, 20, 71–3, 174, 229–30, 243–47, 299, 334, 338–39, 445, 449–52, 510–11; iii/iii 1003. 57 Odile Martin, La conversion protestante à Lyon (1659–1687) (Geneva, 1986), 139–72.

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instance local government had to step in to provide them with new homes. Throughout early modern Europe, orphans were classified among the most deserving of the poor, and an increasing number of cities founded orphanages to care for them. Invariably, those orphanages raised children in the city’s official religion. Naturally, religious dissenters did what they could to keep children out of such institutions, placing them with families or founding separate orphanages of their own, as many Dutch ones did from the second half of the seventeenth century. Still, most orphanages were public institutions, and it was the fate of many mixed-marriage orphans to be raised in them. In the Republic, such orphans received a Calvinist education notable for its strictness, if not depth, with regular catechism instruction and compulsory church attendance.

…

In the modern world, especially in America, where the myth of the “melting pot” is a crucial component of national identity, intermarriage is commonly associated with toleration and pluralism. So it was too in the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age. Natives and foreigners alike had the impression that people of different faiths married one another frequently there, and they credited those marriages with fostering a toleration unique in early modern Europe. In the decades that saw the Republic emerge as an independent country, this impression became part of Dutch identity. It is an impression whose accuracy cannot be confirmed or denied until more research is done. Even if mixed marriage turns out, however, to have been less common than generally thought, that would not make the Republic an “intolerant” society. People of different faiths did not have to intermarry in order to live peacefully alongside one another. Indeed, one can find cases in early modern history where peace between religious groups was predicated on their division. Jonathan Israel has shown, for example, that measures to prevent social mixing and, above all, sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews helped pacify Jewish-Christian relations. The erection, beginning in the 1550s, of scores of new Jewish ghettos across Europe calmed Christian fears by segregating Jews from Christians to an unprecedented degree. It reversed the trend of previous centuries, in which Jews had been driven, often violently, out of western and central Europe, and paved the way for a greater, not lesser, Jewish presence. The “parity” system that functioned in Augsburg and other German cities after the Thirty Years’ War was another successful arrangement for peaceful coexistence that entailed little intermarriage.58 58

Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1989); François, Die unsichtbare Grenze, 191–92.

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As these examples suggest, intermarriage is not an indicator of toleration per se, but of a particular type of toleration, one we might call “­integrationist.” Mixed marriage brought people of different faiths together around the same hearth and even in the same bed. It turned the religious “other” (or at least one such person) into a familiar, even beloved human being on whose well-being your own depended. It exposed each spouse to the other’s religious views, leading to conversions and a flow of people between churches. In many cases, it perpetuated religious diversity, passing it down the generations. In all these ways it conflicted with the efforts of seventeenth-century religious leaders to confessionalize society. Their goal, in the Netherlands as elsewhere in Europe, was to sharpen the confessional identity and strengthen the ecclesiastic allegiance of their followers. To be sure, all the rival churches wanted to win new members (or in the case of the Catholic Church win back old ones). But in the sphere of marriage and family life, all showed a preference for consolidation over expansion. While in theory every mixed marriage brought the potential for gain, in practice the churches came to regard mixed marriage more as a threat than an opportunity. With the exception of the Waterlanders, all discouraged and censured it. If clergy failed to oppose mixed marriage more forcefully, it was because they felt it would be counterproductive, raising not lowering the risk of losing church members. The same impotence and fear led many to acquiesce, if only tacitly, in the diverse arrangements for raising mixed-marriage children. Dutch and other Europeans who did marry a person of a different faith took upon themselves the task of working out, in their most intimate, private lives, the difficulties of inter-confessional relations. Their churches warned them against it, and judicial records document some of the resulting difficulties. Yet many anecdotes have come down to us of harmonious mixed marriages. Solidarity and sympathy seem often to have prevailed within the nuclear family. Outside the latter, though, confessional rivalries were never absent, and if ever a home were ruptured by the death of a parent, such rivalries might focus on it. Then the remaining family unit could quickly be torn to pieces.

Chapter 13

Integration vs. Segregation: Religiously Mixed Marriage and the “Verzuiling” Model of Dutch Society Few paintings from the Dutch Golden Age are as familiar to so many people as  Rembrandt’s group portrait, The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild (1662) ­(figure 13.1). The syndics had the duty of assessing the quality of cloth sold in Amsterdam and ensuring that no shoddy wares were passed off as good. It was a duty with a moral edge, and Rembrandt’s painting exudes seriousness. Wearing a modest black with flat white collars, the five syndics, assisted by the hatless servant behind them, appear united in their common endeavor. One would never imagine from this image that they were divided from one another in any fundamental way. Yet we know that these five men belonged to four different confessions. The chairman, seated with the book directly before him, was Calvinist. The second man from the left, half-standing, was a Mennonite of the strict, Old Frisian variety, and probably a deacon of his congregation.

Figure 13.1 Rembrandt, The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild, 1662 Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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The syndic on the far right was Remonstrant. The other two syndics, Jacob van Loon and Aernout van der Mye, were prominent Catholics who had semi-­ clandestine Catholic churches, so-called schuilkerken, in their homes. Isabella van Eeghen, who in 1957 uncovered the identities of these men, called them “a group of birds of very diverse plumage, who only in our Republic could sit around one table in so brotherly a fashion in the middle of the seventeenth century.”1 Thanks to her research, Rembrandt’s painting has come to symbolize the religious toleration of Dutch society in its Golden Age, a society where, according to English ambassador William Temple, “differences in [religious] Opinion make none in Affections, and little in Conversation”; where people of different faiths “live together like Citizens of the World, associated by the common ties of Humanity, and by the bonds of Peace….”2 Temple’s description of the Dutch religious scene, like Rembrandt’s painting, conveys an image of the Netherlands as a place where men like the syndics do not just coexist peacefully alongside one another, they live and work cooperatively together with one another. United by common interests, they share common tastes and values. Religious differences are relegated to the private sphere, where every individual enjoys freedom of conscience. People worship God as they please, and the people with whom they worship aren’t necessarily the same ones they live next door to or do business with. According to Temple, it was “the force of Commerce, Alliances, and Acquaintance, spreading so far as they do in small circuits” that made “conversation, and all the offices of common life, so easie, among so different Opinions.”3 In other words, in the intimate communities of Dutch towns and villages, people of different faiths got along because they were bound together by a dense net of economic, familial, neighborly and other ties. Constantly interacting in daily life, they were familiar and comfortable with one another. Temple was hardly the only foreign visitor to suggest that social integration was the key to religious toleration in the Dutch Republic. His countryman James Howell remarked, “I believe in this street where I lodge, there be well near as many religions as there be houses; for one neighbour knows not, nor cares not much what religion the other is of….” Ellis Veryard descended from street-level to the household, suggesting that it was “very ordinary to find the man of the house of one opinion, his wife of another, his children of a third and his servants of one different from them all; and yet they live without the least jangling of 1 I.H. van Eeghen, “De staalmeesters,” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 49 (1957): 65–80, quotation 80. 2 William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London, 1673), 182. 3 Temple, Observations, 183.

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dissension.”4 It is hard to believe, as Howell claimed, that people normally did not know what faith their neighbors practiced, or that most families were really as mixed as Veryard suggested. The authors of such descriptions were trading in a stereotype, one that circulated widely among both foreigners and natives. That stereotype cast Dutch society as religiously both uniquely diverse and thoroughly integrated.5 Stereotypes, of course, have no credibility if they do not bear a recognizable relation to truths. Biographies, histories of cities, and other studies have revealed countless instances of people of different faiths having friendly personal relations. They have offered examples of guilds, militias, chambers of rhetoric, and other organizations – even confraternities – whose ranks were religiously mixed. No study so far has found any sharp geographic segregation, with people of different faiths excluded from one another’s neighborhoods. To capture this state of affairs, Willem Frijhoff has long used the term “omgangs­ oecumene” – “ecumenicity of everyday life” – or a similar construction, and this term has been widely adopted by other scholars.6 In my view, the term is problematic because it departs so far from one of the key meanings of ecumenicity, which is a striving for the resolution of religious differences and the restoration of religious unity.7 The term “omgangsoecumene” has been useful, though, in so far as it has helped us articulate the great difference between interfaith relations in practice as opposed to ideology, and on the level of individuals as opposed to groups. As the research of Frijhoff, Pollmann, and others has made clear, personal relations could in practice be smooth and even amicable without any lessening of people’s ideological commitment to the enmities that were an essential part of so much Christian piety in the confessional age.8 4 C.D. van Strien, British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period: Edward Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces (Leiden, 1993), 228 note 70, 203. 5 See Chapter 12 above. 6 Frijhoff used the term as early as 1979 in “La coexistence confessionnelle: complicités, ­méfiances et ruptures aux Provinces-Unies,” in Histoire vécue du peuple chrétien, ed. Jean Delumeau (Toulouse, 1979), 2:229–57. Adopted by i.a. Christine Kooi, “Sub Jugo Haereticorum: Minority Catholicism in Early Modern Europe,” in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., ed. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilman Pabel (­Toronto, 2001), 159; Gabrielle Dorren, Eenheid en verscheidenheid. De burgers van Haarlem in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam, 2001), 134, 166; Charles de Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten. Reformatie en katholieke herleving te Bergen op Zoom 1577–1795 (Hilversum, 1998), 628. 7 See e.g. Wikipedia article “Oecumene,” at https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oecumene (accessed 28 May 2019). 8 See esp. Judith Pollmann, Religious choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641) (Manchester, 1999); Willem Frijhoff, Embodied belief. Ten essays on religious culture in Dutch history (Hilversum, 2002), Ch. 2.

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In 1995, Simon Groenveld threw down the gauntlet to this historiographic consensus, questioning whether Dutch society remained religiously integrated throughout its Golden Age. In his book Huisgenoten des geloofs, Groenveld asked whether, beginning around 1650 and continuing for some hundred years, the Republic was not in fact “verzuild,” that is, “pillarized.”9 This is a term commonly used to describe the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, when Dutch society was highly segregated, with the adherents of different faiths and ideologies having separate schools, hospitals, clubs, unions, political parties, and other organizations. Catholics, Calvinists, socialists, and (according to some scholars) liberals married, did business, and socialized each predominantly among their own kind, forming distinct subcultures with their own newspapers and other media. Though there are lively debates about its nature, most historians and sociologists agree that verzuiling was a fundamental aspect of Dutch society in that later era.10 By drawing a parallel to modern developments, Groenveld sketched a radically different picture of relations between people of different faiths in the early modern era. Of course, in some respects Groenveld built upon the work of previous scholars, among them J.A. de Kok, who argued that the decades leading up to 1650 saw Dutch society divide into confessional camps.11 With the Revolt against Spain and the adoption of Reformed Protestantism as the official faith of the rebel provinces, many Dutch people in the late sixteenth century found themselves betwixt and between. They did not support the intolerant, Tridentine Catholicism championed by Philip ii, yet neither were they Calvinists. J.J. Woltjer dubbed these people the “middle groups,” a label which perhaps misleadingly suggests that their beliefs were a compromise, or splitting of the

9 10

11

S. Groenveld, Huisgenoten des geloofs. Was de samenleving in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden verzuild? (Hilversum, 1995). While some scholars have questioned how unique verzuiling was to the Netherlands, finding versions of it in other European lands in the modern era, other scholars have questioned how useful the concept is even when applied just to the Netherlands. For reviews of the extensive literature on verzuiling, see i.a. Piet de Rooy, “Zes studies over verzuiling,” Bijdragen en mededelingen voor de geschiedenis der nederlanden 110, no. 3 (1995): 380–92; Peter van Rooden, “Studies naar lokale verzuiling als toegang tot de geschiedenis van de constructie van religieuze verschillen in Nederland,” Theoretische Geschiedenis 20 (1993): 439–54; Staf Hellemans, “Zuilen en verzuiling in Europa,” in Nederlandse politiek in historisch en vergelijkend perspectief, ed. U. Becker (Amsterdam, 1993), 121–50. Some aspects of verzuiling in the modern era, especially the political ones, patently do not apply to the early modern era, and Groenveld accordingly omits them from his model. J.A. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-Reformatie. Numerieke aspecten van protestantisering en katholieke herleving in de noordelijke Nederlanden, 1580–1880 (Assen, 1964).

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difference, between Calvinism and Catholicism.12 What is clear is that this group was as heterogeneous as it was large, and that as late as 1620 a majority of Dutch people did not belong as members to any of the churches that emerged as rivals in the young Dutch Republic. Some people were entirely unchurched, while others maintained an affiliation to one or another of the churches that was looser than full membership. De Kok argued that by 1650, the great majority of Netherlanders had made their choice, and that from that time, the Dutch population was effectively divided into Calvinists, Catholics, Mennonites, and adherents of other, smaller denominations. This process of choosing sides Groenveld compared to verzuiling. The century from around 1650 to 1750 then, in his vision, was one of verzuildheid, with Dutch society firmly divided into confessional blocks. In this period, the beliefs of each confession shaped not only the core religious activities of its members, they also “determined … the character and content of education and charity,” which constituted what Groenveld called a “second circle” of activity surrounding the core. What decisively proved verzuiling, however, was the way “confessionally determined patterns of norms and values” shaped a “third concentric circle” of social, economic, and cultural activity, determining how people behaved, with whom they did business, what books they read, and much more.13 Eventually, the churches’ grip on the lives of their members loosened, thanks to the influence of the Enlightenment and a new set of values emphasizing patriotism and civic virtue. Around 1750, claimed Groenveld, Dutch society entered a phase of “de-pillarization” that was to last roughly a century before pillarization began once again to increase. Presented in a mere eighty pages, Groenveld’s portrait of churches whose norms informed all aspects of their members’ lives, and of congregations that formed discrete, even isolated sub-communities is as extreme as it is sketchy. If it fits any religious groups in the Republic, it would be certain Mennonite ones renowned for their strictness, like the Old Frisians and Old Flemings. Whether it applies generally, though, is very much a question. Implicitly or explicitly, most studies that have appeared since Groenveld’s book have rejected its argument. Among these are Gabrielle Dorren’s book on Haarlem, Charles de Mooij’s on Bergen op Zoom, Ronald Rommes’s on Utrecht, and Wiebe Bergsma’s on Friesland.14 Bergsma even questions the assumption, widely shared, 12 See esp. J.J. Woltjer, Friesland in hervormingstijd (Leiden, 1962). 13 Groenveld, Huisgenoten des geloofs, quotations from 71, 70. 14 Dorren, Eenheid en verscheidenheid, 133–34, 163–67; De Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten, esp. 628–60; Ronald Rommes, Oost, west, Utrecht best? Driehonderd jaar migratie en migranten in de stad Utrecht (begin 16e-begin 19e eeuw) (Amsterdam, 1998), esp. 191; Wiebe

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that by around 1650 the Dutch population had divided along confessional lines. He finds that throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, roughly a quarter of the inhabitants of Friesland, Groningen, and Drenthe still were not members of any church.15 Joining this consensus are Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, authors of the synthetic volume 1650: Hard-Won Unity. They acknowledge a “growing segregation” between the confessions, but suggest that it was limited to worship and charity and did not extend even to education, never mind recreation or other spheres.16 The one concession they make to the verzuiling model concerns charity. In a 1997 monograph, Joke Spaans showed that, beginning in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, magistrates and provincial authorities in Friesland encouraged churches to take responsibility for assisting the poor of their faith. Beginning in the 1670s, Frisian authorities made formal agreements with the tolerated churches, granting them tax exemptions and otherwise facilitating their charitable operations. Finally in the 1750s, the provincial States legally required the churches to operate deaconries, and poor church members were no longer deemed eligible for the municipal charity previously disbursed on a non-confessional basis to all deserving, needy burghers.17 Dorren and Spaans have described a similar trend in Haarlem, and evidence suggests that the trend may have been general.18 It did not necessarily result in a comprehensive subdivision of the poor by confession; in fact, in Friesland a majority of the poor continued always to be aided by municipal, not ecclesiastic funds.19 To the extent, however, that charity came to be segregated along confessional lines, it does constitute a sphere where Groenveld’s model seems to fit, at least partly. One should note, though, that the segregation seems scarcely to have begun as of 1650, and there was no reversal of the trend – nothing that might be called depillarization – after 1750. In Groenveld’s model, one of the most critical spheres where verzuiling ­always manifested itself was that of marriage and family life: in a pillarized society, religious groups did not intermarry frequently. In fact, in all branches of the human sciences, scholars commonly regard whether groups intermarry Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk. Een studie over het gereformeerd protestantisme in Friesland, 1580–1650 (Hilversum, 1999), 96–150, 295–404. 15 Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk, 96–150 and passim. 16 Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650: Hard-Won Unity (Assen, 2004), 349–57. 17 Joke Spaans, Armenzorg in Friesland 1500–1800. Publieke zorg en particuliere liefdadigheid in zes Friese steden: Leeuwarden, Bolsward, Franeker, Sneek, Dokkum en Harlingen (Hilversum, 1999), 227–366. 18 Joke Spaans, “Katholieken onder curatele. Katholieke armenzorg als ingang voor over­ heidsbemoeienis in Haarlem in de achttiende eeuw,” Trajecta 3 (1994): 110–30; gpb, 6:355–56. 19 Spaans, Armenzorg in Friesland, 314–15.

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as a decisive criterion of their integration or segregation. If people of different faiths intermarry, families become mixed and the lines dividing groups are blurred. If they do not, nuclear units remain homogeneous and can serve as the building blocks of discreet subcommunities. Determining rates of interfaith, or as it was then called, “mixed” marriage in the Dutch Republic seems therefore a useful way to bring hard evidence to bear on this historiographic debate. In general, scholars have assumed that mixed marriages were frequent in Holland and other parts of the Republic that were religiously mixed, more so than in England or other European lands. As suggested by Veryard’s remark, mixed marriages were part of the stereotype of “Dutch toleration” that circulated in the Golden Age itself. Contemporaries believed that such marriages were not just a symptom of the religious toleration prevailing in the Republic, but one of its causes, teaching people of different faiths to exercise forbearance toward one another. To be sure, as Groenveld points out, all the major churches condemned mixed marriages and sought to combat them, warning members against them and disciplining ones who contracted them. The only group not to adopt such a negative stance were the Waterlander Mennonites. Yet none of the churches declared mixed marriages invalid, nor did any secular laws before the mid-eighteenth century obstruct such marriages or punish those who entered into them. Both Reformed ministers and civil authorities were prepared to marry people of different faiths to one another.20 Unfortunately, little systematic research has been conducted to determine the actual frequency or patterns of interfaith marriage in the Republic. What follows is a survey of the data available from scattered studies, supplemented by some additional primary source investigations. The data presented mostly concerns marriages between Catholics and Reformed Protestants, the two largest religious groups in the Republic. It ranges from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century, in part to reveal long-term patterns but also because the available evidence is simply much fuller for the later period. The result may be a rather abstract, impersonal treatment of marital relations, which, in the early modern era as today, were among the most nuanced and intimate of all human relationships. Nevertheless, it can help us evaluate competing claims about how integrated or segregated Dutch religious groups were. The chief difficulty in determining rates of mixed marriage is a lack of comprehensive, systematic sources, especially for the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century. In 1574, a provincial synod of the Reformed churches 20

On attitudes, strictures, and ecclesiastic policies toward mixed marriage, see Chapter 12 above.

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meeting in Dordrecht observed “that many brothers and sisters on all sides are entering into marriage with those who are papist or Mennonite.”21 Such complaints may fuel a suspicion that mixed marriages were frequent in the early years of the Dutch Republic, but they offer firm evidence only of a perception held by ministers and elders. Almost as problematic are cases in which local consistories subjected Reformed church members to ecclesiastic discipline for marrying outside the faith. While these cases offer insight into the lives of specific couples, they do not provide a basis for determining actual rates of intermarriage. Reformed Protestants were not subject to ecclesiastic discipline unless and until they became actual members, lidmaten, of the church, which many never did, while others did so only as adults. Members married to someone of another faith escaped ecclesiastic censure if their wedding took place before they joined the church. Even people who chose spouses of another faith after becoming church members were not always censured.22 The principal sources that sometimes allow us to determine rates of intermarriage are local marriage registers. These record (either together or as separate series) the registration (“ondertrouw”) of couples intending to marry, the publication of banns that followed, and finally their weddings. In Zeeland, Drenthe, and the Ommelanden of Groningen, Reformed ministers performed the only legal weddings. In other provinces, as in the Generality Lands, couples could wed in either the Reformed Church or town hall, though civil ceremonies were not available in all locales.23 Even where they were, some Catholics chose to marry in the Reformed Church, as did some Protestant dissenters. 21 22

23

F.L. Rutgers, ed., Acta van de Nederlandsche synoden der zestiende eeuw (Utrecht, 1889), 201. Judith Pollmann, “From freedom of conscience to confessional segregation? Religious choice and toleration in the Dutch Republic,” in Persecution and pluralism: calvinists and religious minorities in early modern Europe, 1550–1700, ed. Richard Bonney and D.J.B. Trim (Oxford, 2006), 123–48 (my thanks to Dr. Pollmann for allowing me to read her essay prior to publication); Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur. De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam, 1578–1700 (Hilversum, 1990), 146–204; Manon van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland. Stedelijke rechtspraak en kerkelijke tucht 1550–1700 (Amsterdam, 1998), 218, 236–37, 275. These civil and Reformed Church registers record the vast majority of weddings, though it is known that in the Generality Lands a few Catholics chose to flout the law and be married only by a priest (W.A.J. Munier, “Peilingen naar de neerslag van overheidsmaat­ regelen betreffende de huwelijkssluiting in de DTB-registers van stad en meierij van ’s-Hertogenbosch gedurende de Staatse periode [1629–1795],” Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 76 [1996]: 128–88). The same was probably the case elsewhere as well. To ensure, however, that their property was secure and their children recognized as legitimate, most Catholics went through the procedure of marrying legally, and had a priest “remarry” (hertrouwen) them, that is, solemnize their union in addition. Like Catholics,

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Table 13.1 Bergen op Zoom – percentage of all marriages that were mixed Years

% mixed, all religions

1726–30 1736–40 1746–50 1786–90

14.7 10.7 8.5 14.2

% mixed Catholic-Reformed

8.2 5.5

Source: De Mooij, Geloof kan Bergen verzetten, 582; additional raw data provided by Dr. de Mooij

In Bergen op Zoom, one of the chief cities of the Dutch Generality Lands, the large majority of Catholics continued to marry in the Reformed Church even after civil ceremonies were introduced. Here ministers began in the early eighteenth century to record the religion of the couples who appeared before them. The resulting figures, as calculated by Charles de Mooij, appear in ­Table 13.1. Overall, at least 11 percent of all marriages between 1736 and 1796 were religiously mixed. In the late 1720s the figure was almost 15 percent, declining by the late 1740s to 8.5 percent, then rising once again to over 14 percent by the 1780s. Over three-quarters of these mixed marriages, some 8.2 percent of all marriages, were between a Catholic and a Reformed Protestant.24 Located in the Generality Land of States-Brabant, Bergen had a population that, in the aggregate over the period in question, was about one-third Reformed, 60 percent Catholic, and 5 percent Lutheran. If people had chosen spouses without regard to religion – that is, if there had been no tendency toward endogamy – about 40 percent of marriages would have joined a Catholic and a Reformed Protestant. Unlike in Bergen, in most places it was only with the introduction of laws restricting mixed marriages that the religion of couples began to be recorded systematically. These laws reflected the rise among Dutch regents of new concerns and negative attitudes toward certain mixed marriages: not ones between Protestants of different confessions, which none of the laws mention, but toward marriages between Protestants and Catholics. Among the earliest was a 1677 ordinance issued by Utrecht’s magistrates in response to complaints by the local consistory that the Catholic Church was gaining adherents

24

Protestant dissenters might be “remarried” by their own clergy, though from the 1650s Mennonites generally ceased to bother with a separate ecclesiastic ceremony. De Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten, 131–41, 578–83.

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Integration vs. Segregation Table 13.2 Utrecht – marriages registered as Reformed-Catholic Year

Total # marriages

# registered as Reformed-Catholic

% registered as Reformed-Catholic

1680 1690 1700

383 293 346

8 10 10

2.1 3.4 2.9

1710 1711 1712 1713 1714 1715

419 382 403 434 367 337

38 21 46 38 25 26

9.1 5.5 11.4 8.8 6.8 7.7

1720 1730 1740 1750

361 409 318 386

26 16 21 27

7.2 3.9 6.6 7.0

1760

276

17

6.2

Source: Het Utrechts Archief, dtb Registers van de Gemeente Utrecht, inv. nr. 75–77, 81, 99–105

through mixed marriages at the expense of the “true Reformed religion.” Utrecht’s ­magistrates stipulated, as a condition of registering mixed couples, that Catholic brides and grooms had to promise to allow their Reformed partners to practice their faith unhindered, and to allow the couple’s children to be baptized and raised in the Reformed faith. Those who violated their promise were to be stripped of their citizenship – and thus too, in the case of artisans, of their guild membership and with it their livelihood. Violators might even forfeit their right to reside in the city.25 From this point, one finds in the Utrecht registers, both civil and Reformed, notations such as “the groom agrees to comply with the resolution of haar Edele Mogende [the magistrates], he being Roman [Catholic].” These notations were infrequent, however (Table 13.2), and it is likely that many mixed couples were not being registered as such. In 1709, magistrates felt it necessary to reissue the 1677 ordinance, this time insisting that it be strictly obeyed. Already on the rise, the number of couples 25

hua, SA ii 77, first pages, extract from resolution of city council dd. 15 Jan. 1677.

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registered as mixed doubled overnight. As the consistory complained, some Catholics still evaded the law by claiming to be Reformed, but if ever there was a time when authorities achieved something close to a complete registration of Catholic-Reformed couples, it was immediately after 1709.26 In the next six years, no less than 8.3% of all couples were registered as such (Table 13.2). Between 1720 and 1760, a sampling suggests, the figure averaged a little over 6%.27 Whether this decline from the 1710s reflected laxer registration procedures or changing marriage patterns is unclear. While the figures derived from Utrecht’s marriage registers are problematic, those from Holland are even more so. After all, in Utrecht mixed couples could usually acknowledge their religions without fear of further consequences. True, at least nine couples were prosecuted under the 1677 and 1709 ordinances, but as one of the victims of this persecution (as he viewed it) protested, he “knew hundreds of people living in this city, who did the same thing as he,” that is, raise their children as Catholics, disregarding the promises they had made.28 The Utrecht ordinance may have sought to regulate the behavior of mixed couples, but it did not really obstruct people from contracting mixed marriages, nor did it penalize Protestants who married Catholics. The first authorities to do that were the States of Holland, who decided in 1737 that Calvinist army officers in Holland’s pay were to be dismissed if they married a Catholic woman. The States General soon adopted this rule for officers throughout the Dutch army, later extending it to all soldiers.29 In 1739 they excluded Calvinist men married to Catholic women from all political offices in the t­ erritories they governed. The States of Holland and Gelderland did the same in the 1750s, a decade that saw a wave of legislation issued to combat what authorities perceived as a growing problem.30 From that time, in the affected territories, 26 27

28 29

30

hua, KR 12: Resoluties en notulen, 10 July 1713. These figures include numerous couples whose Catholic member promised to convert to the Reformed faith. Few reliable figures are available for the religious breakdown of Utrecht’s population in the eighteenth century, but as of 1650, it was about 33 percent Calvinist, 35 percent Catholic, 7–8 percent Lutheran, 8–10 percent Remonstrant, 1–2 percent Mennonite, and 12–6 percent unaffiliated with any church. See Chapter four above. hua, KR 12: Resoluties, 17 Feb 1716. These laws were issued in response to a pattern in which Dutch soldiers stationed in or near the southern Netherlands were falling in love with Catholic girls and consequently being “corrupted and seduced into popery.” Clearly, though, officials perceived a more general threat. H.F.W.D. Fischer, “De gemengde huwelijken tussen katholieken en ­protestanten in de Nederlanden van de xvie tot de xviiie eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor rechtsgeschiedenis 31 (1963): 463–85; gpb, 6:238–39. gpb, 6:527, 8:537, 539, 541–42.

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Protestant youths under a certain age were barred from marrying Catholics outright. The banns for Protestant-Catholic couples had to be published at sixweek intervals rather than weekly, delaying the wedding by some two and a half months. And couples who persisted were prohibited in Holland from exchanging a dowry, owning property jointly as husband and wife, or arranging for the longest-living spouse to enjoy usufruct of the other’s goods after the latter’s death. Authorities anticipated that some couples would try to evade these strictures by one of the partners converting to the other’s faith, either sincerely or with the intention of returning to their original faith after the wedding. To prevent such conversions “pro matrimonio,” as they were called, the various States established a probationary period, decreeing that a couple could not register to be married for a year after either partner converted.31 As a result of this legislation, magistrates and ministers in Holland, Gelderland, and the Generality Lands were supposed to keep track of marriages between Protestants and Catholics. In Rotterdam, they fulfilled their obligation by keeping a separate register of Reformed-Catholic marriages; in Enkhuizen, where a single register was kept, they noted couples who fell under the terms of the legislation; in Amsterdam, the commissioners for marital affairs began to record the religion of all brides and grooms who, when asked their faith, did not declare themselves to be Reformed. Using marriage registers, then, Donald Haks calculated the number of Reformed-Catholic marriages in three communities of South Holland between 1755 and 1794 (Table 13.3). He found that even in Leiden, the only city among the three, the number never rose as high as 3 percent, while in Maassluis and Wassenaar there were hardly any such marriages at all. G.J. Mentink and A.M. van der Woude similarly added up the number of Reformed-Catholic marriages registered in Rotterdam (Table 13.4). Their results were equally meager – this at a time when Rotterdam’s population included about 62 percent Reformed Protestants and 30 percent Catholics.32 The registers of other cities in Holland yield similar results. In Enkhuizen, Reformed-Catholic marriages were less than 1 percent of the total registered in the 1750s, rising to 3 percent by the 1770s (Table 13.5). The figures are even

31

32

gpb, 7:813–15 (States General placard dd. 3 Jun 1750), 8:543–44 (States of Holland placard dd. 24 Jan. 1755); J. Drost et al., Gelderse plakkatenlijst 1740–1815 (Zutphen, 1982), 64 (States of Gelderland placard dd. 19 May 1752). In December 1751 the States General extended the terms of the 1750 placard to all Protestants who married Catholics; gpb, 8:539–42. G.J. Mentink and A.M. van der Woude, De demografische ontwikkeling te Rotterdam en Cool in de 17e en 18e eeuw (Rotterdam, 1965), 46.

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Table 13.3 Percentage of all marriages registered as Reformed-Catholic in three Holland communities Leiden 1755–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90 1791–94

Maassluis

0.7 1.7 2.6 2.8 1.1

Wassenaar

0.4 0.2 0.3

1.5 0.9

(blanks = 0) Source: Haks, Huwelijk en gezin, 135 Table 13.4 Rotterdam – marriages registered as Reformed-Catholic, in 10-year totals Years

1755–64 1760–69 1765–74 1770–79 1775–84 1780–89 1785–94

Total # marriages

# registered as Reformed-Catholic

% registered as Reformed-Catholic

4916 5174 5054 5219 5682 5902 5644

47 53 62 77 86 87 100

1.0 1.0 1.2 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.8

Source: Mentink & Van der Woude, De demografische ontwikkeling te Rotterdam en Cool in de 17e en 18e eeuw, 174. Figures include the suburb Cool

lower for Amsterdam, where out of 2533 marriages in 1760, not a single one was registered as being between a Catholic and a Reformed Protestant. In 1770, 8 marriages were so registered, a mere 0.3 percent of the total; in 1780, 6, or 0.2 percent.33 These figures are difficult to believe: Catholic-Protestant marriage would have to have been utterly taboo to have been so rare in so large and mixed a city: in 1809, the first national census of religious affiliations found 50 33

S. Hart, “Enige statistische gegevens inzake analfabetisme te Amsterdam in de 17e en 18e eeuw,” Amstelodamum [Maandblad] 55 (1968): 5.

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Integration vs. Segregation Table 13.5 Enkhuizen – marriages registered as Reformed-Catholic Years

1755–59 1760–64 1765–69 1770–73

Total # marriages

# registered as Reformed-Catholic

% registered as Reformed-Catholic

337 383 390 265

3 3 8 8

0.9 0.8 2.1 3.0

Source: Enkhuizen ondertrouwregisters 1750–1761 and 1762–1773, at HTTP://MEMBERS .QUICKNET.NL/JAW.BUISMAN/GENEA/BRONNEN/BRONNEN.HTM (accessed 28 MAY 2019)

percent of Amsterdam’s more than 200,000 inhabitants to be Reformed Protestants and 20.9 percent Roman Catholics. One possibility, then, is that with their harsh legislation the States of Holland achieved their goal of discouraging intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics. Another possibility, though, is that the legislation encouraged people to lie about their faith, producing fraud on a massive scale. According to one Catholic pastor, that is precisely what was going on in Amsterdam, with the acquiescence of the city’s marriage commissioners. In response to a query in 1789 from a colleague in Antwerp, Father Bartholomeus Alberts explained that “most marriages of that sort [mixed Reformed-Catholic] are fraudulently contracted,” the Catholic partner claiming to be Reformed, and that “no [pastor] made any difficulty about admitting such persons [who had lied about their faith] to the sacrament [of communion]” subsequently.34 According to Alberts, it was principally the “common folk” who lied to the commissioners about their faith, and indeed this group had an opportunity which members of the urban elite might have lacked: commissioners were not likely to know the former, either personally or by reputation. Those of modest resources also had a motive that would have weighed less heavily on elites: a municipal ordinance required the banns of mixed couples to be published at city hall as well as in church, and consequently commissioners charged such couples three times as much to register as they did Reformed couples.35 34 35

Noord-Hollands Archief, Rooms-Katholiek Bisdom Haarlem (275) 256, letters dd. July 1789. Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam in zijne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen, vorregten, koophandel, gebouwen, kerkenstaat, schoolen, schutterye, gilden en regeeringe, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1767), 3:427.

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Table 13.6 Amsterdam – marriages registered as mixed with one Reformed partner Year

Total # marriages

1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780

2504 2268 2400 2908 2432 2485 2533 2427 2307

# registered as mixed 100 74 64 68 80 69 107 151 147

% registered as mixed 4.0 3.3 2.7 2.3 3.3 2.7 4.2 6.2 6.4

Source: Gemeentearchief Amsterdam 5001, inv. nrs. 526–604, 700–38. Source for 1780: Simon Hart, “Enige statistische gegevens inzake analfabetisme te Amsterdam in de 17e en 18e eeuw,” Amstelodamum [Maandblad] 55 (1968): 3–6. The figures for 1700–1750 are based on double registrations, those for 1760–1780 on the religion indicated for each individual registered.

Nowhere else in the Netherlands were the incentives and possibilities for fraud as great as in Amsterdam, so it is hardly surprising that couples of mixed religion elsewhere sometimes fled to the city to escape the obstacles put in their way at home.36 Yet even with regard to Amsterdam, it is not certain that dissembling has greatly distorted our figures. According to the city’s registers, 6.2 percent of all marriages in 1770 were mixed ones involving one Reformed partner; the other partner might be Catholic or, more commonly, of a different Protestant confession – in 1780, 6.4 percent of all marriages were of this kind (Table 13.6). Basing herself on other sources, Dini Helmers has found that, of all the couples in Amsterdam who separated or divorced in three years (1769, 1784, and 1804), a very similar number, 6.9 percent, were religiously mixed.37 One might suppose that, if anything, religiously mixed couples would be overrepresented among the ones whose relationships had run aground.

36 37

saa, Schout en schepenen (5061) 3052: Memorieboek van Commissarissen van huwelijkse zaken. Dini Helmers, “Gescheurde Bedden.” Oplossingen voor gestrande huwelijken, Amsterdam 1753–1810 (Hilversum, 2002), 219. Helmers, who questions the accuracy of the marriage registers, does not phrase her finding thus.

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Not all cities charged mixed couples higher fees than they did other c­ ouples – Enkhuizen, for example, did not – nor did any other city offer people the cover of anonymity to the extent that Amsterdam did. Social control was probably weaker in Amsterdam than it was anywhere else in the Republic, and it is difficult to imagine that much fraud transpired in villages where everyone knew everyone else. Perhaps that is why other sources and methodologies applied to rural communities have yielded results similar to those of Haks for Maassluis and Wassenaar. In his painstaking reconstruction of the South Holland village of Maasland, D.J. Noordam calculated how many men married women of other faiths, counting marriages between Protestants of different confessions as well as between Protestants and Catholics. Of all the men born in Maasland between 1640 and 1719, only a single one did so. Calculating on a different basis, Noordam found that the number of religiously mixed households in Maasland almost tripled between 1730 and 1800 – from almost none to a meager 1.7 percent.38 A contemporary census of villages in the Noorderkwartier of Holland, compiled in 1742 by Nicolaas Struyck, an early enthusiast for demography, yields similar figures. Struyck recruited schoolmasters, burgomasters, a merchant, a clockmaker, and other inhabitants of the villages in question as informants. Going door to door, they found only 1.1 percent of all households religiously mixed; at most 0.4 percent of all households were mixed Catholic-Protestant.39 Of course, not all mixed marriages joined Catholics and Reformed Protestants, and it is instructive to compare, to the extent possible, the frequency of intermarriage between different religious groups. In Bergen, three-quarters of all mixed marriages were between Catholics and Reformed Protestants. That was largely because Protestant dissenters constituted only about 5 percent of Bergen’s population. The same factor explains why over two-thirds of mixed marriages in Maasland (between 1730 and 1800) were between Catholics and 38 39

As of 1730, Noordam believes, the population of Maasland was about 80 percent ­Reformed, 20 percent Catholic. If people there were marrying without regard to religion, about 32 percent of marriages would have been mixed. Out of a total 6590 couples, 70 were mixed, of which 13 were Reformed-Catholic, another 3 were other Protestant-Catholic, and we do not know the religion of both partners in 11 cases. Nicolaas Struyck, Vervolg van de Beschryving der Staartsterren, en nader ontdekkingen omtrent den staat van ‘t menschelyk geslagt, benevens eenige sterrekundige, aardryks­ kundige en andere aanmerkingen, 2 vols. in 1 (Amsterdam, 1753), 2:4–83, as compiled by Van der Woude, Het Noorderkwartier, 132. According to Struyck, the households in twenty-two villages were 67.1 percent Reformed, 11.0 percent Catholic, 17.4 percent Mennonite, 3.3 percent Lutheran, 0.1 percent Jewish, 0.1 percent unknown, and 1.1 percent mixed. If people had married without regard to religion, about half of all marriages would have been mixed.

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Table 13.7 The Noorderkwartier in 1742 – distribution of mixed couples Religious mix Reformed-Mennonite Reformed-Lutheran Reformed-Catholic Other Unknown

# of couples (tot. 70) 25 18 13 3 11

% of all mixed couples 36 26 19 4 15

Source: A.M. van der Woude, Het Noorderkwartier (Utrecht, 1983), 1:132, 3:689 nOTE 98, based on Nicolaas Struyck, Vervolg van de Beschryving der Staartsterren, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1753), 2:4–83

Protestants: here Protestant dissenters constituted less than 1 percent of the population. In the Noorderkwartier, by contrast, where over 20 percent of the population was Mennonite or Lutheran, three-quarters of mixed marriages were between Protestants (Table 13.7). Relative to their numbers, then, Protestants intermarried with one another far more often than they did with Catholics. Lutherans seem to have been particularly amenable to mixed marriages: in Bergen over half of all Lutherans contracted them, while in Utrecht, according to Rommes, some 41 percent did so (mostly with Reformed Protestants).40 Small Protestant minorities had little option but to seek partners of another faith. Thus in Amsterdam almost two-thirds of Remonstrants who married in 1760, in total a mere eleven persons, were joined to a non-Remonstrant, while almost a third of Mennonites did likewise (Table 13.8). Beginning with Blaupot ten Cate in the nineteenth century, many historians have suggested that intermarriage with Calvinists helps explain why the number of Mennonites and Remonstrants in the Netherlands suffered such a dramatic decline in the eighteenth century. Apparently, many Mennonites and Remonstrants ceased to view the dogmatic differences between their own churches and the Reformed as significant. Either directly through conversion, or through mixed 40

50 percent of Lutheran men and 30 percent of Lutheran women entered into mixed marriages, “usually” with a Reformed Protestant, according to Rommes; these figures do not include a significant number of persons whose choice of partner is unknown. Utrecht’s Lutheran community declined from around 8 percent of the total population at mid-­ century to 3–4 percent by 1700. Rommes, “Lutherse immigranten in Utrecht tijdens de Republiek,” in Nieuwe Nederlanders. Vestiging van migranten door de eeuwen heen, ed. Marjolein ‘t Hart, Jan Lucassen, and Henk Schmal (Amsterdam, 1996), 35–53; Rommes, Oost, west, 58, 189 (where he gives a figure of over 40 percent for Lutheran women).

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Integration vs. Segregation Table 13.8 Amsterdam 1760 – who married spouses of a different faith (according to registration) Religious group

Remonstrants Mennonites Lutherans Reformed Catholic

Total # who married

11 32 815 3089 752

# who married spouse of other faith 7 10 103 107 4

% who married spouse of other faith 63.6 31.3 12.6 3.5 0.5

Source: Gemeentearchief Amsterdam 5001, inv. nrs. 526–604, 700–38. Source for 1780: Simon Hart, “Enige statistische gegevens inzake analfabetisme te Amsterdam in de 17e en 18e eeuw,” Amstelodamum [Maandblad] 55 (1968): 3–6. The figures for 1700–1750 are based on double registrations, those for 1760–1780 on the religion indicated for each individual registered.

marriage and the raising of their children as Reformed, they were absorbed into the R ­ eformed majority.41 Perhaps this is why neither the Reformed Church nor secular authorities showed great concern about such marriages. A similar process sapped the strength of Protestant dissent in Britain and Ireland in the same period.42 By contrast, most Dutch Catholics were determined to marry within their faith. In Bergen only 7 percent of Catholics married Protestants, while in Amsterdam in 1760 the registers suggest that less than 1 percent did; even if the registers are skewed by hundreds of percent, still only a modest number of Amsterdam Catholics would have married Protestants. Their avoidance was facilitated in these communities by their large numbers, which made it easier for them to find suitable partners of their own faith. Obviously, though, there also operated, on both sides of the divide, an aversion to Protestant-Catholic marriages. This aversion had been inculcated by generations of church teaching, cultural differentiation, and appropriation by individuals and families of opposing religious identities. In some communities, the aversion may have been so strong that one can indeed speak of a taboo. 41 42

See i.a. S. Blaupot ten Cate, Geschiedenis der doopsgezinden in Friesland (Leeuwarden, 1839), 248–49; S. Groenveld, J.P. Jacobszoon, and S.L. Verheus, eds., Wederdopers, menisten, doopsgezinden in Nederland 1530–1980 (3rd ed. Zutphen, 1993), 198–99. Michael Watts, The Dissenters, vol. 1 From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), 330; for the example of Quakers in Ireland, see Kevin Herlihy, The Irish dissenting tradition, 1650–1750 (Dublin, 1995), 94–5.

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In 1794, Petrus Loosjes, a Mennonite scholar living in Haarlem, observed that “[even] with this [current] toleration … it is still rare, though less rare than in earlier times, that persons of different faiths enter into marriage with one another.”43 As Loosjes’s words imply, rarity is a relative thing, but it would be difficult to call mixed marriage a rare phenomenon in eighteenth-century Bergen op Zoom. In Utrecht too, such marriages were at least common enough that most people would have had personal acquaince with a mixed couple. The question is whether Loosjes was observing accurately the customs of his native Holland. Was it really rare in the Dutch Republic’s reputedly most tolerant province for people of different faiths to marry one another? The marriage registers of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden, Enkhuizen, Maassluis, and Wassenaar all suggest so. They indicate that marriages between Catholics and Reformed Protestants were extremely rare as of the mid-eighteenth century (and in Amsterdam’s case, already as of 1700), their number rising by the end of the century to levels that were still lower than Bergen’s or Utrecht’s. As we have seen, however, the reliability of the registers in this regard, which some historians have assumed, is problematic to different degrees depending on the size of the community and degree of social control to which couples in it were subjected. More reliable evidence seems to confirm that rural intermarriage rates were low in the eighteenth century, indeed lower than overall intermarriage rates were in the early twentieth century, the period when the Netherlands were classically verzuild.44 If it is the case that intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics was rare in Holland in the early-to-mid-eighteenth century, had rates been higher previously but then declined? Certainly a suspicion is warranted that this was the case, but unfortunately, as problematic as our data is for the eighteenth century, our picture of the seventeenth is more holes than canvas. The dearth of systematic sources is itself telling, as it reflects an apparent lack of concern among secular authorities about mixed marriages. Perhaps such marriages 43 44

Adriaan Loosjes, Beschrijving van de Zaanlandsche dorpen (The Hague, 1968, orig. ed. 1794), 288; quoted in Van der Woude, Het Noorderkwartier, 132. In 1914, the overall rate of mixed marriage for the Netherlands was 11.2 percent, while by 1956 it had risen to 16.2 percent: John Hendrickx, “The Analysis of Religious Assortative Marriage. An Application of Design Techniques for Categorical Models” (Ph.D. dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1994), 144–53. For modern intermarriage rates see also “Volkstellingen 1795–1971.” http://www.volkstellingen.nl/nl/volkstelling/images/ pdf/VT_1971_A2_H2.pdf/VT_1971_A2_H2.pdf (accessed 28 May 2019); Dienke Hondius, Gemengde huwelijken, gemengde gevoelens. Aanvaarding en ontwijking van etnisch en religieus verschil sinds 1945 (Den Haag, 1999), 57–65; Rooden, “Studies naar lokale verzuiling,” summarizing nineteenth-century figures for Naaldwijk and Hoorn.

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were so common and accepted before the late seventeenth century as to be unremarkable – that is what anecdotal evidence suggests – but for the present this remains only a surmise.45 Even if, however, by the eighteenth century certain religious groups in Holland rarely intermarried, that does not mean that society had become thoroughly verzuild, as Groenhuis claims. Marriage and family life may have formed, along with charity, a particular sphere in which religious groups became segregated from one another, even as their members continued to rub shoulders in neighborhoods, guilds, militias, and clubs; to attend one another’s weddings and funerals; to be business partners and friends; and in other respects too to live together, as Temple said, “associated by the common ties of Humanity.” As Alexandra Walsham and William Sheils have pointed out in the English context, integration and segregation were not mutually exclusive, all-or-nothing alternatives.46 Hopefully, by distinguishing between different spheres of activity and forums of interaction, historians of the Netherlands can go beyond their current debate about “omgangsoecumene” and “verzuiling.” 45

46

One possible difficulty with this conclusion is if our figures, reflecting the sources on which they are based, represent religious allegiances as firmer and more fixed than they really were. Was every person registered as Reformed, for example, a devoted, consistent adherent of the Reformed faith? How did people register who were uncertain of the truth, or in search of it, or who found truth in the teachings of more than one church, or of none, or who regarded ecclesiastic affiliation as secondary to personal piety? Despite the claims of Kok, Groenveld, and others, it is by no means certain that this amorphous group, so large and prominent in the early years of the Republic, disappeared entirely after 1650. This is a crucial but complex issue requiring fuller treatment than is possible here. Alexandra Walsham, Charitable hatred: Tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), 207–14; William Sheils, “‘Getting on’ and ‘getting along’ in parish and town: Catholics and their neighbours in England,” in Catholic communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1620, ed. Benjamin Kaplan et al. (Manchester, 2009), 67–83.

Chapter 14

Intimate Negotiations: Husbands and Wives of Opposing Faiths in Eighteenth-Century Holland During its Golden Age in the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic gained a reputation across Europe for religious toleration, and one of the most widely cited proofs of that toleration was the frequent intermarriage of people of different faiths. As the accounts of foreign visitors attest, religiously mixed marriages and families were believed by contemporaries to be common and widely accepted in Dutch society, more so than in England or other lands. The traveller Ellis Veryard, for example, remarked that it was “very ordinary to find the man of the house of one opinion, his wife of another, his children of a third and his servants of one different from them all; and yet they live without the least jangling of dissension.”1 It is difficult to believe that most Dutch families were really as mixed as Veryard suggested, or that all mixed families were as harmonious. In effect, he and the authors of other such descriptions were trading in a stereotype, one that cast Dutch society as thoroughly diverse and accepting of religious differences even in the most private and personal of spheres. As the household was conceived as a microcosm of society, so harmonious households of mixed faith served these authors as emblems of a harmonious society, and of the potential of toleration to bring peace and prosperity to their own lands. Although the stereotype persisted, by the time Veryard published his travel account in 1701 something important was changing in the attitudes and behavior of Netherlanders: governing elites, at least, were growing noticeably ­hostile to what they called “unequal marriages” between people of different religions. Whereas prior to the late seventeenth century scarcely any legislation existed in the Republic touching on such marriages, civil authorities began to enact a series of laws against them, or at least against what authorities increasingly feared were their harmful consequences. The unions targeted were not between Protestants of different confessions – Calvinists, Lutherans, Mennonites, Remonstrants, and smaller groups – but rather between Protestants, chiefly adherents of the official Dutch Reformed Church, on the one hand, and Catholics on the other. The very term “unequal marriage” was often used 1 C.D. van Strien, British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period: Edward Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces (Leiden, 1993), 203.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004353954_016

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s­ ynonymously in the eighteenth century for these Protestant-Catholic unions.2 The magistrates of Utrecht were pioneers, issuing an ordinance as early as 1677; their counterparts in Zwolle began to regulate such unions in the 1680s. In the 1690s, the States of Groningen and Overijssel issued placards, as did the Lord of Vianen for his small territory in 1701. Starting in the 1720s, a series of proposals were made in the States of Holland to forbid mixed marriages outright, but these were never enacted. In the late 1730s, though, Holland’s States agreed to forbid its military officers to marry Catholics, a decision extended by the States General to all Dutch military officers and to government officials serving in the Generality Lands (territories governed directly by the States General). At the same time, the States of Utrecht issued a placard for the villagers of their province, as did the magistrates of Gorcum for their townsfolk. A third and final, climactic wave of legislation swept the Republic in the 1750s, when further laws were passed covering all the inhabitants of the Generality Lands, Gelderland, Overijssel, and finally also Holland, the most populous and religiously mixed province of the Republic.3 2 The term continued to be used also for differentness and “inequality” of non-religious sorts, namely of age and of wealth and social status. 3 The most important placards and ordinances appear in gpb, 8:543–44 (Holland 24 Jan 1755), 6:228 (Holland 21 May 1737), 6:238–39 (States General 7 March 1738), 6:527 (States General 11 May 1739), 7:813–15 (States General 3 June 1750); gup, 1:441–42 (3 Feb 1718 for Montfoort), 3:511–12 (Utrecht city 15 Jan 1677 and 9 Dec 1709); C.W. Moorrees and P.J. Vermeulen, eds., Mr. Johan van de Water’s Groot Plakkaatboek ‘slands van Utrecht aangevuld en vervolgd tot het jaar 1810, 2 vols. (Utrecht, 1856) 1:867 (Utrecht 1 Aug 1738); S.J. Fockema Andreae and F.J.L. Berkenvelder, eds., Groninger Plakkaatboek, 1594–1848 (Groningen, 1961), 32 (Groningen 31 March 1695); Heino Hermannus Brucherus, Gedenkboek van Stad en Lande; in zig behelzende ene naamlijst van de predikanten dezer provincie, sedert 1594 tot 1792, met enige aantekeningen en kerkelijke bijzonderheden; nevens een bericht aangaande het christendom alhier, eerst onder het heidendom, daarna onder het pausdom enz.; als mede ene historie van de hervormde kerk en schoolen in dit gewest; met enige bijzonderheden van ‘s lands hogeschool, de bezorgers, en hoogleeraars (Groningen, 1792), 277–78 (Groningen 12 April 1731); Historisch Centrum Overijssel, Stadsarchief van Zwolle (700) 70: Resoluties van schepenen en raden, fos. 416v417r (Zwolle 9 Aug 1682); Historisch Centrum Overijssel, Stadsarchief van Zwolle (700) 44: Resoluties van raad en meente, pp. 35–6 (Zwolle 16 March 1698); Historisch Centrum Overijssel, Staten van Overijssel (3.1) 282: Resoluties van Ridderschap en Steden, 1699 fo. 6r (Overijssel 29 March 1699); ibid. 51: fos. 33r-35v (Overijssel 20 March 1727); ibid. 81: 1757 fos. 29r-31v (Overijssel 17 March 1757); J. Drost et al., Gelderse plakkatenlijst 1740–1815 (Zutphen, 1982), 64 (#97, 19 May 1752); Gelders Archief, Gelderse Rekenkamer (0012) 29: Landdagsrecessen, pp. 67–177 (Gelderland 19 May 1752); Regionaal Historisch Centrum Zuidoost Utrecht, Nederlandse Hervormde gemeente Vianen (457) 63 (Vianen 1701). Gorcum’s ordinance is mentioned in hua, nhk Provinciale Kerkvergadering [Synode] (52-1) 131: Acta van de synodale vergaderingen van Zuid-Holland, fo. 41v (1738 synod, art. 13). The proposals to outlaw mixed marriage in Holland are recorded in Staten van Holland, Resolutiën van de Heeren Staaten van Holland en Westvriesland … 1575–1795, 278 vols., 1728:597 (1 July); 1734:263 (12 May); 1736:559 (13 Sept).

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All this law-making was partly a result of vigorous lobbying by the Dutch Reformed Church, whose leaders had become convinced that their church was losing through intermarriage a large number of adherents to its most potent and profound rival, the Roman Catholic Church. The consistory of Schiedam went so far as to suggest that a “papist” plot was at work: Catholic men were marrying Reformed women with the “intention” of pressuring their wives to convert and ensuring that all their children were raised as Catholics.4 In 1708, the classis of Amsterdam authorized a tract, the first Dutch Reformed tract ever directed specifically against mixed marriages, that suggested similarly that Catholics were beginning “to employ an unexpected and inconceivable trick and deceit … to storm God’s Church … with wives and to entice our simple members through marriages into leaving our church for their errors and idolatries.”5 The legislation sought by Reformed synods was intended to counter precisely this perceived threat. If civil authorities would not forbid mixed marriages altogether, the synods urged, they should at least stipulate that Catholic spouses had to allow their Reformed partners to practice their faith unhindered, and that all the children of such mixed marriages had to be baptized and raised in the Reformed Church.6 In Holland, Calvinist bastions like Gorcum supported such legislation enthusiastically. Other members of the provincial States, though, opposed it, and suggested that the church might as likely be gaining as losing adherents through mixed marriages.7 In 1737, therefore, the synod of South Holland decided to collect evidence that would prove its fears justified. It instructed local consistories to investigate mixed marriages in their communities and to report examples of loss and gain to the church through them. The result was a thick 4 hua, osa (1401) 482: Rapporten betreffende de huwelijken tussen gereformeerden en roomskatholieken in de Zuidhollandse classes, samengesteld op basis van gegevens uit de gemeenten, met aantekeningen naar welk kerkgenootschap de echtgenoten zijn overgegaan; met ingekomen stukken van diverse gemeenten waarin de gemengde huwelijken worden gerapporteerd, 1737–1738 [henceforth cited as Rapporten], item 28. 5 Joannes Mauricius, Gewigtige redenen, Om sig niet te begeven in den Huwelyken Staat met de gene, die Roomsgesind sijn. Voorgesteld tot een Christelyke Onderrichtinge voor alle Protestanten, Voornamentlyk Gereformeerden, Luterschen, en Mennonisten (Amsterdam, 1708), 229–40. Mauricius’s warning was directed to all Protestant groups in Amsterdam, and concerned itself exclusively with the danger of marrying Catholics. 6 hua, nhk Provinciale Kerkvergadering (52-1) 131: Acta van de synodale vergaderingen van Zuid-Holland, 1737 synod, art. 15 (pp. 42–4); Noord-Hollands Archief, Kerkenraad Hervormde Gemeente Haarlem (21) 229G: Repertorium ofte register van alle de akten van de Particuliere Noord-Hollandse Synoden … 1572–1793, 1737 synod, art. 21. 7 Noord-Hollands Archief, Hervormde Classis Edam (123) 88: Handelingen van de Noord-­ Hollandse synoden, 1738 synod, art. 22.

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dossier of reports, written by ministers and elders in 1737–1738 and compiled, first by regional classes and then by a deputy of the synod.8 They cover twelve cities and sixty-seven villages, all of them in South Holland except for Breda; seven villages which, like Breda, lay in the Generality Lands; and one village in the quasi-independent county of Buren.9 In total, they provide information on over six hundred mixed, Catholic-Reformed couples. Some consistories provided the synod with a complete listing of all mixed couples in their community, while others reported only particularly remarkable examples of gain or loss. Some reported only mixed couples currently living in their community; other lists went as far back as the 1650s. Some consistories offered detailed narratives recounting the lives of individual couples; but at a minimum, all indicated for each couple whether either spouse had converted to the other’s faith, and how the couple’s children had been, or were being, raised. This unique body of evidence reveals an enormous amount about relations between husbands and wives in religiously mixed marriages. Through both the details they offer of individual cases and the aggregate patterns they reveal, the reports allow us to penetrate one of the most intimate human relationships and to see how spouses of opposing faiths dealt with their religious differences, negotiating the terms of their lives together as a couple and as parents. For some couples, those negotiations were a one-time occurrence, resulting in a firm agreement prior to their engagement. For others, the negotiations were resumed at key moments over the years of their marriage, especially when a newborn child was to be baptized. Still others seem to have wrangled incessantly. In any case, the reports allow us to look beyond the teachings of 8 Rapporten; reports for six villages in the region of Delft survive separately in Gemeentearchief Delft, Classis Delft en Delfland van de Nederlands Hervormde Kerk (518) 3.43: Brieven over de enquête omtrent gemengde huwelijken in de Classis, 1738. 9 Reports are included for, in the classis Delft: Delft, Delfshaven, Vlaardingen, Maassluis, ­Ketel, Naaldwijk, Lieren/De Lier, Leydsendam, Wilsveen, Soetermeer, Nooddorp, Berkel, Overschie, and Pijnacker; in the classis Gouda: Gouda, Schoonhoven, Oudewater, Vianen, Moordrecht, Gouderak, Oudekerk a/d IJssel, Stolwijck, Groot-Ammers, and Jaarsvelt; in the classis Schieland: Rotterdam, Schiedam, Capelle a/d IJssel, Moercapel, Zevenhuizen, Hillegersberg, Ijsselmonde, and Cralingen; in the classis Leiden: Leiden, Lisse, Hoogmade, Voorhout, Catwijk a/d Rhijn, Catwijk op Zee, Oegstgeest, Noordwijk Binnen, and Noordwijk aan Zee; in the classis The Hague: Wateringen, Loosduijnen, and three quarters of The Hague; in the classis Woerden: Noorden a/d Waerde, Oude Wetering, and Alphen; in the classis Buuren: Beusichem; in the classis Breda: Breda city and barony, Etten bij de Leur, Gilse, Dongen, Alphen, ’s Princenhage, and Oosterhout; in the classis Gorinchem: Vlijmen, Engelen, Hil, Ethen, Drongelen, Hoornaar, Heukelom, Veen, and Meeuwen; in classis Den Briel: Oostjes plaat, Bommel, Nieuwe Tonge, and Herkinge; in the classis South Holland: Sprang, Besoyen, Dussen, Capel, Waspick, Raamsdonck, Geertruijdenberg, Made en Drimmelen, Hoog en Laage Zwaluwe, ’s Gravemoer, and Fijnard.

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churches and prescriptions of moralists like Jacob Cats to examine the actual behavior of mixed couples: the accommodations struck, the battles fought, the influence exercized by spouses on one another, and the power wielded by some spouses over their partners. Questions of power, influence, and accommodation within early modern marriages have previously been examined chiefly with an eye to two issues: the degree of patriarchal authority exercised by male heads of household, and the amount of affection felt by spouses for one another. Without a doubt, the dominant ideology across early modern Europe was patriarchal: magistrates, moralists, and clergy all conventionally compared husbands and fathers to princes and even to God, portraying their secure rule at home as an essential foundation of social and political order. In the 1980s, a vigorous debate erupted among scholars as to whether, and to what extent, the patriarchal family was a repressive institution, with historians like Steven Ozment challenging the view that men wielded in practice anything resembling unlimited power over their wives and children.10 At roughly the same time, it was recognized that a new ideal of “companionate” marriage, championed especially by Protestants, stressed the partnership, mutual regard, and emotional attachment necessary between spouses for a good marriage. Although not universally agreed or always clear, limits to acceptable behavior by men existed everywhere, while within the domain of the house and yard, women were always charged with supervising children, servants, food, and much else. Historians have suggested that patriarchal authority was even more limited in the Dutch Republic than elsewhere in Europe. Dutch authors, especially jurists, made clear that wives had the right to be consulted in decisions and to participate in the “governance of the family.” A great many Dutch women of the middling as well as poorer classes fulfilled economic roles outside as well as within the home. One of the most vivid impressions reported by visitors to the Netherlands was the freedom women enjoyed there, their public presence, independence, and assertiveness. Indeed, some foreigners described Dutch women as the real “mistress in the house” and as reducing their husbands to docility. Without validating this standard misogynist topos, Manon van der Heijden has suggested that Dutch wives did, over the seventeenth century, grow increasingly self-assured and assertive in their relationships with their husbands.11 10

11

Steven Ozment, When fathers ruled: family life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). For a sophisticated comment on the debate, see Linda A. Pollock, “Rethinking Patriarchy and the Family in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Family History 23 (1998): 3–27. Donald Haks, Huwelijk en gezin in Holland in de 17de en 18de eeuw (Utrecht, 1985), 150–57 (quotation p. 151), 224; Gerrit Kooy, Gezinsgeschiedenis: vier eeuwen gezin in Nederland

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All this raises a series of questions with respect to religiously mixed marriages: did husbands try to impose their religions on their wives and children, and if so, did they succeed? How common was it actually for women to maintain a confessional identity distinct from that of their husbands, and to attend church separately from them? To what extent did a mother’s primary responsibility for young children, and the responsibility she bore, increasingly emphasized in the eighteenth century, for the moral formation of children generally, give her sway over children’s religious fate? How often were children of mixed couples raised in their father’s religion, how often in their mother’s, and how often did the children replicate the religious mix of their parents? The only historian to have systematically studied relations between husbands and wives in religiously mixed marriages is Dagmar Freist, whose work focuses on the Bishopric of Osnabrück and other German lands. The overarching theme of her work is the way in which early modern Europe’s “classical gender hierarchy” and patria potestas, the patriarchal authority of male heads of household, were often undermined in religiously mixed marriages. The right of fathers, widely acknowledged in the Holy Roman Empire, to determine the religion of their children conflicted frequently with territorial laws, local customs, contractual agreements between spouses, and with the right, also generally acknowledged, of women as well as men to freedom of conscience. Such appeals to conscience and religious freedom had, at least in eighteenth-­ century Germany, according to Freist, “a certain emancipatory effect between the sexes” in mixed marriages. Likewise, state authorities often proved willing to undermine patriarchal authority in order to promote an official, or privileged, religion when the latter was the religion of the wife, or widow. Women were able to appeal, sometimes successfully, to courts and even to the highest imperial bodies against their husbands.12 What then was the situation in Holland? In his study of Calvinist discipline in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Herman Roodenburg makes only

12

(Assen, 1985), 15–6, 113; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London, 1987), 398–429; Dirk Damsma, Het hollandse huisgezin (1560-heden) (Utrecht, 1993), 52–7; Manon van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland. Stedelijke rechtspraak en kerkelijke tucht 1550–1700 (Amsterdam, 1998), 170–71, 224–29. Dagmar Freist, “One body, two confessions: mixed marriages in Germany,” in Gender in Early Modern German History, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge, 2002), 275–304 (quotation p. 297); Dagmar Freist, “Zwischen Glaubensfreiheit und Gewissenszwang: Das Reichs­ recht und der Umgang mit Mischehen nach 1648,” in Der Frieden? Rekonstruktion einer Europäischen Vision, ed. Ronald G. Asch (Munich, 2001), 294–322 (quotation p. 322); Dagmar Freist, “Der Fall von Albini – Rechtsstreitigkeiten um die väterliche Gewalt in konfessionell gemischten Ehen,” in In eigener Sache: Frauen vor den höchsten Gerichten des Alten Reiches, ed. Siegrid Westphal (Cologne, 2005), 245–70.

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some incidental remarks about the balance of power within religiously mixed households. With regard to mixed Catholic-Reformed couples he found that it was “by no means always the women” who yielded to their spouses and converted to the latter’s faith. When it came to the religious upbringing of children, while “in most cases” the husband’s preference prevailed, “the opposite occurred too.”13 The reports of 1737–38 allow us not only to generalize beyond a single city, but to give a more specific and nuanced answer. They show, on the one hand, that the Reformed Church had reason for concern: Catholics were convincing their Reformed partners to convert, and to allow their children to be raised as Catholics, more often than vice-versa. As did the consistory of Schiedam, so the reports highlight in particular the power wielded by Catholic husbands over their Reformed wives. More generally, they show that gendered patterns prevailed testifying to the greater power wielded by husbands within mixed marriages. On the other hand, and what is more remarkable, is how widely varied – how negotiable – the outcomes were of these intimate encounters between rival faiths. In the Dutch Republic, it seems, the pressure that bore on families from outside – from clergy and relatives, above all – ­influenced these outcomes but was far from sufficient to determine them. The same was true of patriarchal authority: though very real, it did not determine the religious affiliation of spouses and children in religiously mixed marriages.

…

First, a preliminary point: it is a misconception to think that mixed marriages were entered into only by people whose faith was lax, or who were flexible and ready to yield to whatever pressures were put on them. As the reports testify, some Catholics and Protestants very devoted to their confession entered into mixed marriages. Thus it was not just sympathizers of the Reformed Church, people who attended sermons regularly, who married Catholics, but also members, who had made voluntarily a deeper commitment to the church, making a public profession of faith, submitting to ecclesiastic discipline, and joining the select circle of people admitted to communion. Of the 613 mixed marriages described in the reports, 70 (11.4 percent) are mentioned as being of a full member of the Reformed Church. This must be understood as a minimum figure, for many consistories did not distinguish in their reports between members and sympathizers. In Delft, whose consistory provided a comprehensive list of mixed marriages in four quarters of their city, more than a third of such 13

Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur. De kerkelijke tucht in de gereformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam, 1578–1700 (Hilversum, 1990), 157, 158.

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marriages (15 out of 41) involved church members. The fighting that broke out between some spouses of rival faiths is another testimony to their devotion. One of the most bitter examples comes from the village of Besoijen, where a church member named Johanna Francoijsa Hendriksdorp was “sorely mishandled, cursed, and beaten by her papist husband Alexander Eerhard, formerly sergeant in service of these lands.” Eerhard beat his wife regularly with a cane and struck her with a scythe; he called her church a “pigsty” and said “it grieves me that I must sleep with a woman who is damned.” One night, as she slept, he put a knee on her chest, grabbed her by the hair with one hand, held a knife against her with the other, and threatened to kill her unless she swore never again to go to the “beggars’” church (a reference to the rebels in the Dutch Revolt against Spain). He was restrained by others in the house who heard the noise. Eerhard also tried to force his wife to venerate saints’ images, crucifixes, and other objects. Hendriksdorp resisted all these attacks.14 By no means were all mixed marriages unhappy. Indeed, in a small but striking number of cases the same person entered into one mixed marriage, then after being widowed, entered into another. For example, in the fishing village of Noordwijk aan Zee, a Reformed woman named Neeltje Dirks “was first married to a papist man, and became papist with him; from this marriage a child was born after the father’s death. Not long thereafter [Neeltje] remarried, to a Reformed man, and so became Reformed again, [and] is to this day a member of our church. However, [the local consistory reported,] her child from the first marriage was raised in the Roman religion, remained Roman, and recently married a papist man.”15 There were also numerous cases of children of mixed couples, clearly having experienced their parents’ marriage as a positive example, who themselves entered into mixed marriages. The result was multiple mixed marriages within a single family over a series of generations. To take another example from Noordwijk, one Michiel Clemmense there had, many years earlier, married a Catholic woman. One of their children, a daughter, had been raised Reformed but then married a Catholic man and converted to Catholicism; after his death, she married a Reformed man and convinced him to convert to Catholicism. Of the grandchildren of Michiel Clemmense, all were Catholic except one who converted to the Reformed faith upon marrying a Reformed woman.16 Such cases suggest that, whatever concerns or inhibitions existed with regard to mixed marriages, once they had been overcome, they could more easily be overcome again. 14 15 16

Rapporten, items 1 and 14. Rapporten, item 70. Rapporten, item 70.

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Table 14.1 Frequency of conversion by one or other spouse All cases #

Complete tallies onlya %

#

%

Conversion

251

40.9

81

32.7

No conversion

362

59.1

167

67.3

Total

613

100

248

100

a The complete tallies are for 4 quarters of Delft, 3 quarters of The Hague, Geertruidenberg, and 22 villages (see note 17 for criteria) Source: hua, osa 482; supplemented by sad, Classis Delft en Delfland (518) 3.43

Taking all 613 couples mentioned in the reports, either husband or wife converted to the other’s religion in 40.9% of cases, while in the remaining 59.1%, both spouses kept their own religion (Table 14.1). These figures however are skewed, because some consistories didn’t bother to report mixed marriages whose outcome was “neutral,” that is, neither spouse converted and either there were no children or the children were split evenly between the spouses’ faiths. If one looks only at towns and villages whose tallies seem to be complete, spouses kept their own religions in over two-thirds of cases.17 Just under a third of mixed marriages involved a conversion either “pro matrimonio” – around the time of the engagement and wedding – or subsequently. Among those who converted, 71.6% were women, 28.4% men (Table 14.2). In other words, women converted more than twice as often to the faith of their prospective or current husbands as vice-versa. This was true of both Reformed women and of Catholic women – they both converted more often than their male counterparts did. The problem for the Reformed Church arose from the gender imbalance among its adherents, for among the Reformed persons who married Catholics, 63.3% were women, 36.7% were men (Table 14.3).18 Thus in all, the Reformed Church figured that it had lost 187 spouses to Catholicism via

17

18

Tallies have been deemed complete if (a) they state explicitly they are (b) they include, as an ordinary part of their list, couples who keep their own religions and have no children (c) they are for communities in the classis of Gorcum, which issued instructions to report all mixed marriages. Satisfying these criteria are 4 quarters of Delft, 3 quarters of The Hague, Geertruidenberg, and 22 villages. The gender imbalance among Reformed Church members marrying Catholics was even greater in Delft in the seventeenth century: Van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland, 275.

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Intimate Negotiations Table 14.2 Who converted All cases # Husbands Wives Can’t tell Total

Complete tallies only %

#

%

67

26.7

23

28.4

168

66.9

58

71.6

16

6.4

0

0

81

100

251

100

Source: hua, osa 482; supplemented by sad, Classis Delft en Delfland (518) 3.43 Table 14.3 Who married Catholics All cases

Complete tallies only

#

%

#

%

Reformed men

217

35.4

91

36.7

Reformed women

357

58.2

157

63.3

Can’t tell

39

6.4

0

0

248

100

Total

611

100

Source: hua, osa 482; supplemented by sad, Classis Delft en Delfland (518) 3.43

mixed marriage, while only gaining 64. In this respect, the fears of Reformed ministers and elders had some foundation. Why and how were these people, over two-thirds of them women, converting? Some did so with enthusiasm, becoming fervent members of their new church. Such enthusiasm is evidenced, for example, by Catholics who became not sympathizers but full members of the Reformed Church. Other people who converted displayed an open-mindedness with regard to their convictions. Historian Charles de Mooij, in his book on Bergen op Zoom, mentions a Catholic woman who, when marrying a Protestant, promised “to investigate the Scriptures.” “[M]ay God give her enlightenment,” remarked the minister

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who registered the couple.19 Practical considerations clearly weighed heavily in many cases. Some people converted in the mere hope of making a particular match. In Hoogmade, for example, a widow named Barber Doedes Verbaan, a member of the Reformed Church, had converted to Catholicism “in hope of marrying a papist journeyman.” Ironically, the local minister noted, she “had been deceived in her hope.”20 Other people promised prior to their wedding that they would convert, either as part of a prenuptial agreement with their prospective partner or in response to the urging of authorities. Not that these promises were always lived up to. Take for example the case of Rutger Murraij in the village of Engelen. He married a widow named Willemijna Mulders, “who concluded a [written] contract with her husband … by which she promises to go to the Reformed Church and make a profession of the [Reformed] religion and also to raise her child, whom she had born by her previous marriage, in that religion.” She “has been in the Reformed church several times,” reported the local minister, “but to the great sorrow of the husband and his friends, has become papist again, with her child.”21 Some men only agreed to marry on condition that their prospective wives would convert. In Alphen a/d Rijn there was “a certain church member [who] was done harm in all kinds of ways by her papist husband, and he justified himself by appealing to the promise the woman made to him before marrying that she would go to church with him. This woman, asked by the minister whether that was true, answered ‘yes’ but said in facie [in the presence of the minister] to her husband, ‘how [i.e under what circumstances] did I promise that? [It was] because I was already pregnant by you and you threatened to leave me like a whore,’ and so forth.”22 Of course, women in such circumstances were under intense pressure to convert.23 Equal pressure might also be exerted after the wedding. For example, in Breda “a certain daughter of an alderman … having run off with a Catholic carpenter, was abandoned by the same, along with the little son he had fathered by her in marriage, because she refused to become of his religion.” Eventually, after the husband’s return, she yielded.24 19 20 21 22 23

24

Charles de Mooij, Geloof kan bergen verzetten. Reformatie en katholieke herleving te Bergen op Zoom 1577–1795 (Hilversum, 1998), 583. Rapporten, item 69. Rapporten, item 39. Rapporten, item unnumbered. The story of one Catholic-Reformed couple whose marriage was prompted by pregnancy is told in Luc Kooijmans, Vriendschap en de kunst van het overleven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1997), 210–18. According to Dr. Bertrand Forclaz (personal communication), such cases were numerous in Utrecht in the late seventeenth century. Rapporten, item 34.

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Some men were more crafty. For example, in Leiden “Christiaen Dorasse, a papist, married to a Reformed woman Judith Groenevelt, has used every [possible] ruse to get his wife to come over to the papist religion; to that end he moved with her [from Leiden] to Leiderdorp…; having arrived there he [professed a particular aversion to the local minister, conceding] that he could put up with her going every day to the city, but not to that minister, knowing that this would be difficult, indeed impossible for her, since she was pregnant and was going to bear a child.”25 Not that any strategies necessarily succeeded. As the case mentioned earlier of Johanna Hendriksdorp suggests, some women as well as men were able to resist extraordinary pressure. This was the case also in the marriage of a Catholic man named Jan Borstelee and his Reformed wife Marytje van der Burg, who lived in Delfshaven. Borstelee “gave his wife a hard and difficult time to get her to go with him to the papist church, which she eventually agreed to do; however, having once been in it, she left the church so put off by it that she declared to her husband that she would not become papist to save her life [nog om leven nog om dood].” Marytje van der Burg r­ emained Reformed, but did not become a full church member because of pressure from her husband.26 Other spouses made pro-forma, half-hearted conversions. For example in Vlijmen a former Catholic named Claes Somers was married to one Adriana de Jong. All three of their daughters were being raised Reformed, “but the consistory doubts greatly whether the husband can rightly be counted among the Reformed, for besides the fact that he has not become a member of our church, he comes to church at best just once a year.”27 Still other spouses ended up not going to any church at all. In Delft, one Pieter Bosman was Reformed and had a Catholic wife. All their children were baptized and raised Catholic, while he went “to church nowhere, as he did not attend the Reformed church because of the vexation by his wife and wife’s friends, [nor did he attend] the papist [church] because of his conscience [which objected] to that idolatry.”28 As the case of Pieter Bosman suggests, the pressure to convert by no means went all in one direction: 28.4% of conversions involved the husband adopting the wife’s faith. The power of some wives over their husbands is attested by stories told in the reports. For example, in the village of Oosterhout, near Breda, one “Johan Lokkerbol, [was] married about forty years ago to a bitterly papist woman, who through her rancor [as effectively] as through violence 25 26 27 28

Rapporten, item 68. Rapporten, item 50. Rapporten, items 39 and 47. Rapporten, item 51.

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o­ bstructed his becoming a church member, [and] prevented it for thirty-eight years.”29 Only men, though, used violence or the threat of it to get their spouses to convert. And only they abandoned, or threatened to abandon, their partner as leverage. The reports contain several examples of both. If either spouse converted, invariably all the children of the couple were raised in the faith shared by their parents. The conversion of many Reformed wives to the Catholic faith of their husbands therefore had negative consequences for the Reformed Church. In families where neither spouse converted, however, the picture was very different. Tables 14.4(a) and 14.4(b) show how children were raised in such families. “Sons-fathers daughters-mothers” refers to the practice, widely attested across parts of early modern Europe, of raising boys in the religion of their fathers, girls in that of their mothers.30 The consistory of Gouda described this arrangement as the norm, which (even if such neutral cases were often left unreported) the reports make clear it was not in Holland in general.31 Perhaps it was in Gouda, whose report is extremely selective. The arrangements categorized as “ambiguous” include ones where children were being raised in two faiths, or in none. In Delft, for example, the children of Maria Schelling, a Reformed Church member, “sometimes go to church with the mother, other times with the father.” Also in Delft, a Reformed woman named Alsje had a Catholic husband who “sails as ship’s carpenter to the East Indies; the children go with him to the papist church when he is home.”32 Also included in this category are cases in which the children are said to be “in danger,” meaning that they were being raised Reformed but that the Catholic spouse was contesting, or threatening to contest, the manner of their upbringing. 29 30

31 32

Rapporten, item 38. On this practice see Chapter 12 above; the articles by Freist cited in note 12; Karl-Theodor Gehringer, “Die Konfessionsbestimmung bei Kindern aus gemischten Ehen in der Zeit zwischen dem Konzil von Trient und dem Ende der Glaubenskriege,” in Fides et Ius: Festschrift für Georg Nay zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Winfried Aymans et al. (Regensburg, 1991), 303–16; Karl-Theodor Gehringer, “Die Konfessionsbestimmung bei Kindern aus gemisch­ ten Ehen in der Zeit seit dem Ende der Glaubenskriege (1648) bis Benedikt xiv. (1758),” in Scientia Canonum: Festgabe für Franz Pototschnig zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Hans Paarhammer and Alfred Rinnerthaler (Munich, 1991), 27–54; Karl-Theodor Gehringer, “Die Konfessionsbestimmung bei Kindern aus gemischten Ehen. Gesetzgebung und Praxis in der Zeit zwischen Clemens xiii. bis Leo xii. (1758–1829),” in Theologia et Jus Canonicum: Festgabe für Heribert Heinemann zur Vollendung seines 70. Lebensjahres, ed. Heinrich J.F. Reinhardt (Essen, 1995), 533–47. Rapporten, item 55. Rapporten, item 51.

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Intimate Negotiations Table 14.4 How the children were raised: all locales, couples with children and no conversion, situation prior to death of either spouse (where indicated) (a) Wife Reformed, Husband Catholic Arrangement

#

%

All children Catholic

65

42.8

Majority Catholic

10

6.6

1 child, Catholic

13

8.6

Sons-fathers daughters-mothers 50-50 Ambiguous

14 9 7

9.2 5.9 4.6

19.7

1 child, Reformed

5

3.3

22.4

Majority Reformed

2

1.3

27

17.8

152

(100.1)

All children Reformed TOTAL

% 58.0

(100.1)

Source: hua, osa 482; supplemented by sad, Classis Delft en Delfland (518) 3.43 (b) Husband Reformed, Wife Catholic Arrangement

#

%

%

All children Catholic

52

50.0

64.4

Majority Catholic

4

3.8

1 child, Catholic

11

10.6

Sons-fathers daughters-mothers 50-50 Ambiguous

8 1 3

7.7 1.0 2.9

11.6

1 child, Reformed

4

3.8

24.0

Majority Reformed

2

1.9

19

18.3

All children Reformed TOTAL

104

100

100

Source: hua, osa 482; supplemented by sad, Classis Delft en Delfland (518) 3.43

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The most telling figures are the percentages in the top right box of the two tables: they show that when the wife in a mixed marriage was Catholic, the children ended up being raised Catholic more commonly than when the husband was Catholic. In absolute numbers, the Reformed Church lost more children to Catholicism when the husband was Catholic, but only because there were many more mixed couples in which the husband was Catholic. In terms of percentages, more children were raised Catholic when the wife was Catholic than when the husband was – that is, as long as the wife did not convert. Tables 14.5(a) and 14.5(b) show that the same is true when one looks only at locales which reported all mixed marriages and not just an exemplary selection of them. Here there is still an imbalance – children are still being raised Catholic more often than Reformed – but the difference is not nearly as great. The middle category of neutral or balanced arrangements was actually surely bigger than the percentages in the right column suggest, because when a couple had just one child as of 1737, one cannot be sure what the parents’ intentions were for any subsequent children. If one puts all these figures together, combining conversion rates with these arrangements for the children, the result is Table 14.6. Looking on the right just at locales for which tallies are complete, one can see that in 42.4% of cases, wives either converted to the faith of their husbands or at a minimum most of Table 14.5 How the children were raised: complete locales only, couples with children and no conversion, situation prior to death of either spouse (where indicated) (a) Wife Reformed, Husband Catholic Arrangement

#

%

%

All children Catholic

21

30.9

41.2

Majority Catholic

2

2.9

1 child, Catholic

5

7.4

Sons-fathers daughters-mothers 50-50 Ambiguous

9 1 4

13.2 1.5 5.9

20.6

1 child, Reformed

4

5.9

38.3

Majority Reformed

1

1.5

All children Reformed

21

30.9

TOTAL

68

(100.1)

(100.1)

Source: hua, osa 482; supplemented by sad, Classis Delft en Delfland (518) 3.43

351

Intimate Negotiations (b) Husband Reformed, Wife Catholic Arrangement

#

%

%

All children Catholic

14

30.4

45.6

Majority Catholic

3

6.5

1 child, Catholic

4

8.7

Sons-fathers daughters-mothers 50-50 Ambiguous

3 0 3

6.5 0 6.5

13.0

1 child, Reformed

4

8.7

41.3

Majority Reformed

1

2.2

All children Reformed

14

30.4

TOTAL

46

(99.9)

(99.9)

Source: hua, osa 482; supplemented by sad, Classis Delft en Delfland (518) 3.43

the couple’s children were raised in the husband’s faith. In 28.3% of cases, the opposite was true, that is, husbands either converted to the faith of their wives, or at a minimum most of the couple’s children were raised in the wife’s faith. In another 29.4% of cases, the outcome was neutral, with neither spouse converting and the children, if the couple had any, either being raised in some form of even accommodation between the two faiths, or there being some ambiguity about their religious identities. All these outcomes were a product of negotiations, amicable or otherwise, between spouses.33 It seems to have been common for couples to discuss prior to their marriage both the possibility of conversion and how their children would be raised. Sometimes these agreements were included in notarized prenuptial contracts, but by no means always. A revealing story in this regard comes from Alphen a/d Rijn: in one family there, the wife was a member of the Reformed church, her husband was Catholic, and all six of their children ‘go to the papist church. When spoken to by the [Reformed] minister several times about the matter, the wife said she wished the children, or at least the girls, or half of the total number, went [to church] with her, but that she did not dare 33

Of course, in the case of current marriages with minor children, the reports only reflect the state of affairs at the time they were written; the future might well have brought further negotiations and changes to the religious upbringing of children.

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Table 14.6 The balance of religious power or influence within mixed marriages All reported marriages

Complete tallies only

#

%

#

%

%

45.8

58

23.4

42.4

47

19.0

%

Wife converts

168

27.4

All or most children raised in husband’s faith

113

18.4

No conversion, no children or children balanced

122

19.9

19.9

73

29.4

29.4

All or most children raised in wife’s faith

101

16.5

27.4

47

19.0

28.3

Husband converts

67

10.9

23

9.3

Can’t tell

42

6.9

TOTAL

613

100

6.9 100

0 248

0

0

(100.1)

(100.1)

Source: hua, osa 482; supplemented by sad, Classis Delft en Delfland (518) 3.43

bring up the matter further with her husband. The papist man himself was spoken to by the minister, who maintained that for him [the husband] to keep all the children for himself alone was tyrannical, since the mother too could claim at least some of them for herself. Upon which the papist man, flying into a rage, said, ‘minister, it’s not for you to speak about the matter, since the two of us [i.e. he and his wife] know the agreement [verdrag] made between us before marrying; and so minister be silent about the matter, for you shall obtain no alteration in it.’ The report goes on to comment, “Appeals to such an agreement, almost like a prenuptial contract, are frequent.”34 Those exercising pastoral roles in both the Reformed and Catholic Church frequently pressed mixed couples – especially the partner who belonged to their confession – to raise their children in the “true” faith. The leaders of the Holland Mission were so hostile to mixed marriages in theory that they never actually established formal criteria for granting dispensations to Catholics who entered into them.35 In practice, both the secular priests of the Mission 34 35

Rapporten, item unnumbered. Ironically, like their Reformed counterparts, Catholic officials feared their church was losing adherents through mixed marriages, and at least some hoped that the States of Holland would indeed ban the latter. Church of Rome, Declaratio SSmi D.N. Benedicti PP. xiv.

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and regular clergy were pragmatic, doing what they could to promote their faith within mixed households. For their part, though they lacked the desired support of legislation, Reformed ministers and elders in Holland enjoyed the many indirect advantages of their church being the Republic’s “predominant,” official one. Some succeeded in extracting promises from mixed couples. For example, in Leiden a Protestant named Aert van Kesteren “[was] married to a papist wife who was the widow of one Hendrik Cornelisse van Rode, in his life master-carpenter; Aert van Kesteren had been his apprentice…. [Van Kesteren], having gotten the woman [i.e. his deceased master’s widow] pregnant, married her, [and] both [spouses],” the consistory reported with satisfaction, “have bound themselves by signature in the baptismal register to have all the children born to them baptized in our church….”36 More curiously, the local consistory in Dussen extracted from one Reformed church member a promise that half – but only half – of his children would “profess the Reformed religion, with their father.”37 Whether such agreements or promises were later honored is another story. The church member in Dussen just mentioned, for example, was “brought over by his wife” to the Catholic faith, and all his children ended up being raised Catholic. Indeed, in one situation it was, if anything, the norm for such agreements or promises to be broken, namely when one of the spouses died. If a surviving spouse had converted upon marriage to the faith of the deceased, he or she sometimes converted back to his or her original faith. When Reformed spouses who had converted to Catholicism did not revert to the Reformed faith upon the death of their spouse, it was deemed notable and was mentioned by consistories in their reports. In this connection, it is important to realize that most conversions simply entailed one spouse attending services at the other’s church. With few exceptions, the language of the reports equates church affiliation with the church a person attended; neither a confession of faith nor participation in the sacrament of communion was required.38 This was not a high standard, and such conversions could be reversed with relative ease.

36 37 38

super matrimoniis Hollandiae et Foederati Belgii. Et Acta in Sacra Congregatione … Cardinalium Sacri Concilii Tridentini Interpretum, coram SS. D.N. 13. Maii 1741. exhibita (Louvain, 1742), esp. 55. Cf. Chapter 12 above; Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 61–8. Rapporten, item 78. Rapporten, item 1. E.g. the brief summary for the classis of Gorcum talks about persons converted from Catholicism as “gereformeert geworden, meer van wegen het gaan in onze kerke, als het doen van belydenis by ons” (item 57).

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Whatever arrangement for the children had previously prevailed in a family, it was common after the death of a spouse for all the children to be raised in the religion of their surviving parent. For this reason, dying spouses sometimes attempted to extract promises from their partner. Such promises, though, were not always kept. For example, in Schoonhoven one “Willem van Leeuwen, married to a Reformed church member, had promised his dying wife, and in an act of guardianship further confirmed, that he would raise their children in the Reformed religion; yet [after her death] he brought them all over to popery.”39 Whether or not it was legitimate to violate prior agreements in this way was contested. Some argued that it was, and the Classis of Breda even suggested that Protestants had a duty to do so. It expressed great frustration with the Lord of Alphen because after the death of his Catholic wife he had continued raising his daughters in his wife’s faith, “under the pretext of having promised it to the deceased.” The classis tried in vain to pressure him to do otherwise.40 The sudden overturning of previous arrangements by surviving spouses predictably upset relatives of the deceased, triggering quite often a tug-of-war between them and the surviving widow or widower. In Delft, for example, a grandmother named Marytje van der Voorn told her minister how her son had married a Catholic woman named Agnita Soesbergen and had had by her four children, all baptized in the Reformed church and given Reformed godparents. The son had subsequently drowned, after which his widow “immediately took all the children with her … to the papist church of her relatives and papist neighbors, against the will of the grandmother and [other] relatives of the deceased husband [who] were [the children’s] godparents, saying with great fury that, in the devil’s name, she would raise her children papist.” Marytje told her minister how she had “gone several times on a Sunday to the house [of her daughter-in-law] in order to take one of the children with her to the Reformed church, which the mother [i.e. her daughter-in-law] always refused her, so that she [the grandmother] has had to witness this and has not been able to exercise her role as godmother.”41 Relatives could try to influence the situation also by exerting financial pressure. So discovered Jannetje van Ravestein, a member of the Reformed Church in Delft. She had been married to a Catholic named Jan van Riemsdyk. After his death, she began to take their one child, a son, with her to church, “despite the fact that the husband’s relatives are very insistent and offer much [financial] help if she will let the child go to the papist church and, on the other hand, threaten that they will never recognize the child if she 39 40 41

Rapporten, item 19. Rapporten, item 33. Rapporten, item 52.

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raises it in the Reformed religion.”42 When Protestant children were put at risk, through the death of their Protestant parent, of being “lost” to Catholicism, secular as well as church authorities sometimes stepped in. For example, in Schoonhoven one Arij van Veen had been married to a Catholic woman. “After his death, his two children, baptized in our [the Reformed] church, were drawn away into popery by the papist mother, despite the efforts made by the magistracy and consistory of Schoonhoven to bind her to her promise.”43 Even if previous arrangements were left in place after the death of a spouse, they might well come under renewed pressure if the surviving widow or widower remarried, for then the new spouse might try to convert the survivor or might try to influence the religious upbringing of his or her newly acquired stepchildren. This was true whether or not the original family unit was religiously mixed. Thus for example in Oudewater a Reformed widower named Jacob de Lappen, with two children from his first marriage, remarried a Catholic named Jacomijn de Stererin. He thereupon converted to Catholicism, “with his prior children.”44 In Schiedam a Reformed Church member named Cytie was married to a Catholic man “who causes her much grief because she will not allow her son by her previous marriage to go with him to the papist church.”45

…

Not surprisingly, the 1737–38 reports do not represent losses to the Reformed Church as the result of voluntary conversions by Reformed spouses convinced by the pious model and loving persuasion of their Catholic partners that the latter’s faith and church represented true Christianity. To the contrary, some of the most detailed narratives contained in the reports recount egregious cases of pressure and outright coercion inflicted by Catholic spouses on Reformed partners, who are represented, along with their children, as victims. The reports’ viewpoint and selectivity simply reflect their purpose, to convince civil authorities of the need for legislation. For every tale they offer of coercion, though, the reports mention many more cases without explanation, and naturally they never speak of pressure in the opposite situation, when the Reformed faith came to prevail in a family. One may justifiably suspect that when a Reformed Protestant and a Catholic married one another, the religious outcome of their union was not always a result of a struggle for power between 42 43 44 45

Rapporten, item 53. Rapporten, item 54. Rapporten, item 55. Rapporten, item 7.

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the spouses. Although sceptical of success, both Catholic and Protestant clergy certainly hoped that Christian spouses would exercise a beneficent influence on their heretical partners, reclaiming them for the “true” faith. Affection and respect for one’s life-partner, desire for spiritual as well as physical and emotional unity, an empathetic understanding gained by living close-up with another faith: though barely hinted at by some reports, these and other positive motives may have influenced the decisions of spouses in many mixed marriages. To reduce the matter to a question of power presupposes, moreover, that both parties had a determined attachment to their respective churches, whereas clearly in some cases one partner – or prospective partner, in the case of conversions pro matrimonio – was simply more devoted to his or her church than the other. One woman in the village of Groot Ammers even cited pressure from her husband as an excuse to justify to the local Reformed minister a conversion to Catholicism that later emerged to have been free and heartfelt.46 As mistaken, then, as it would be to claim that evenly mixed households were paragons of toleration – as if such mixes were always the result of a comfortable, stable, uncontested agreement – so would it be erroneous to suggest that the conversion of one spouse to the other’s faith, or even less the raising of children all in one faith, represented the triumph of intolerance.47 And if power is not the whole story, even less so is patriarchy. To be sure, a majority of the egregious cases of coercion involve a husband mistreating a wife. Thanks to the patria potestas they wielded both by legal right and social convention, the greater physical strength many enjoyed, and their greater mobility, early modern husbands had the ability to cause their spouses “grief” in ways beyond the capacity of most wives. Several times in the seventeenth century, Reformed synods had sought the intervention of civil authorities to counter “the tyranny which some women, members [of the Reformed Church], have to suffer from their papist husbands.”48 When, therefore, in 1736 some members of the States of Holland resisted calls by the Reformed Church to ban marriages between Catholics and Reformed Protestants outright, a committee proposed that only marriages of Catholic men to Reformed women be banned.49 Such a double standard would have been anything but unique 46 47 48 49

Rapporten, item 55. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 266–93. Noord-Hollands Archief, Hervormde Classis Edam (123) 82: Handelingen van de NoordHollandse synoden, 1627 synod art. 38. Cf. ibid. 82, 1628 art. 23, 1629 art. 20; ibid. 85, 1655 art. 43, 1666 art. 23 Staten van Holland, Resolutiën van de Heeren Staaten van Holland en Westvriesland, 1736: 646–47 (23 Nov).

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357

in religious history: in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, Muslim men could marry non-Muslim women, but not vice-versa.50 In the event, this proposal too failed and none of the legislation passed in the Republic contained a genderbias: their restrictions applied equally, whichever spouse was Reformed and whichever Catholic. The only exceptions were the placards forbidding military and political officers from marrying Catholics, for the obvious reason that only men were permitted to hold such offices. These placards were directed against a threat to the Reformed Church specifically from women. Conflating religious and sexual temptation, one suggested that Catholic females acted as the agents of “sweet-talking, alluring popery,” “seducing” Reformed men into converting.51 Whether through clout or influence, men did in fact prevail more often than women in the intimate negotiations that ensued whenever a Catholic and a Reformed Protestant married one another. The balance of religious power, however, was not so heavily lopsided as the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church sometimes suggested, and in a majority of cases husbands did not impress their faith either on their spouse or on the majority of their children. In 28% of marriages, the religion of the wife predominated in the family, and in another 29% there was an even balance. Actually, the proportion of evenly balanced families was probably greater, since we do not know how any subsequent children were raised in families that had only one child as of 1737–38. In sum, the most striking thing about the outcomes of these negotiations is their variability. Both the quantitative patterns revealed by the reports and the narratives of individual families told in them testify, above all, to the very personal nature of the encounter between husbands and wives of opposing faiths in Holland, and the inability of clergy, relatives, or anyone else to coerce them. 50 51

Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, trans. David Maisel, Paul Fenton, and David Littman (London and Toronto, 1985), 62. gpb, 6:238.

Index A, Joost Janssoen van der 129 Aachen 280, 289–92, 294–95, 297 Abdallah, Ahmed ben 238n33, 240 adiaphora 91–95 Africa, North 225, 236, 241, 244, 249, 251n63 Aga, Mustaffa 238n33 Aga, Ömer 238n33, 239–40 Alabasco, Ali 246–48 Aleppo 238, 246 Algiers 236–38, 246–48, 251 alms. See charity Alphen a/d Rijn 339n9, 346, 351, 354 Alsace 192–93, 285–86, 305 Altona 177 Alva, Duke of 52, 258 ambassadors 185, 238–40, 242, 244, 249–51, 269, 317. See also chapels, embassy Amersfoort 18, 84 Amstelkring Museum 164–66, 204 Amsterdam 26, 42, 95, 135, 154, 164, 246, 260, 271, 290, 298, 316 Catholics in 18, 70n92, 151, 276 foreigners visiting 204, 213 Jews in 168, 224, 230–33 mixed marriage in 312n54, 327–34, 338, 341–42 Muslims in 19n51, 224–29, 237, 239–41, 243–45, 247–48 Reformed Church in 2, 35, 152, 184n39, 300–01, 307, 338 Remonstrants in 118, 120, 219 schuilkerken in 164–67, 180n31, 181–84, 187, 194 Anabaptists 28, 54, 61, 84, 87, 217–18, 254, 258. See also Mennonites Anglicans 88, 148, 155n25, 305 Annales school 2, 5 anthropology, historical 2, 5, 25–26, 30, 146 anti-intellectualism 69–72, 82 anticlericalism 32, 47, 65–70, 73–74, 99 Antwerp 28n5, 53n26, 55, 113, 127, 208, 244n45, 260, 302 émigrés from 108, 233 biconfessionalism in 256, 258, 262–63, 268–69

apostasy 27, 249, 252. See also conversion apostolic vicars 110–11, 115, 119, 182n35, 271, 300, 305, 307 Armenians 227–28, 246, 252 Arminians. See Remonstrants Arminius, Jacobus 104, 211, 223 Arnhem 124, 231n12, 270 art 101–02, 107n13, 120–24, 145, 179, 208, 212, 225–27, 316–17 in schuilkerken 112–15, 164–65 Artois 225, 259, 262, 264 atheism 30–31, 35, 49–50, 118, 257–58, 261 Augsburg 260, 273, 311, 314 Confession 257n Interim (1548) 52 Peace of (1555) 286, 296 Auslaufen 21, 174–78, 288–89, 291–92, 294 Austria 170, 196, 289. See also Vienna; Habsburgs Avignon 286, 297n39 Bakhuizen van den Brink 214–15 Balkans 236, 288 ban (Mennonite). See excommunication banns. See marriage baptism 36, 53–54, 87, 119, 121, 304 children from mixed marriages 295, 310–11, 325, 338–39, 347, 353–55 forced 229, 241 liturgy of 49, 89, 95 rebaptism 52, 92 Barbary corsairs. See corsairs Barrefelt, Hendrik Jansen van (Hiël) 55–57, 60, 64, 68, 75 Barrier Treaty (1715) 272, 301n10 Batavians 208–09 beggars (geuzen) 258, 343 Belgic Confession 37 Belgium 2, 8, 279–80, 287 benefices 51, 109, 128, 271 Berckheyde, Gerrit van 225–26 Bergen-op-Zoom 266, 302, 320 mixed marriages in 311–12, 324, 331–34, 345–46

360 Bergerus, Johannes Mauritius 153–56, 159–60, 162 Beza, Theodore 96, 303n20 Bible 69, 73, 75, 90, 93, 140, 147, 151, 210, 216, 345. See also sola Scriptura Gospel 27, 38–39, 49, 52n24, 60, 78, 210, 288 New Testament 41, 60, 66–67, 70–71, 303 Old Testament 78, 107, 150, 172, 309 Scripture, relation of to Spirit 53, 60, 62 vernacular 12, 28 biconfessionalism 20–21, 254–78 Bie, Cornelis de 225 Bijlert, Jan van 114–16, 121, 123 Biscaïno, Youssef 238n33, 250 Blainville, P. de 185 blasphemy 78, 146, 158, 161, 171 Bloemaert, Abraham 111, 115, 121, 123 Bloemaert, Hendrick 114, 121 Bodin, Jean 140, 214n27 borders 21, 96, 278. See also Auslaufen borderlands 279–95, 297 Border Studies 284–89, 297n38 Bosch, Den (’s-Hertogenbosch) 264, 267n31 bailiwick (Meierij) of 265 confraternities in 124–25, 127, 131–32, 143, 229n8 Bosten, Johannes Wilhelmus 295 Brabant 207, 259, 264–66. See also Netherlands, Southern Dukes of 206, 272 States-Brabant 269, 276, 324 Brandenburg 185, 289 Brandt, Gerard 54, 211, 215n29 Breda 339, 346, 354 countryside near 266, 347 Brederode, Johan Wolfert Count of 132 Brenz, Johannes 36, 64 Briel, Den 239, 247, 250n59, 339n9 Brienen, Abraham van 111 Britain 15, 170, 187–89, 195–96, 333. See also England Brothers of the Common Life. See Modern Devotion Brugghen, Hendrick ter 121, 123 Buchell, Arend van (Arnoldus Buchelius) 105n11, 123 Bullinger, Heinrich 96–97

Index Buren, County of 339 burial. See funerals Burtscheid 291, 294–95 Buurkerk 109, 112, 129–31, 134 Calvin, John 31, 35, 50, 60–61, 84, 93, 303 Calvinism, Dutch. See also discipline, ecclesiastic; Reformed Church as official faith 27–28, 101, 168, 178, 269 bolstered by “foreigners” 209, 215 confessional quality of 43, 103–04 conflict with Libertinism. See Libertines development in Utrecht 48, 92–97, 104–07, 109, 118, 153–54 doctrines 36–37, 172 early 4, 27, 175, 256, 258, 260 historians of 25–26 influence of exile experience 14–15 moral idiom of 136–37, 144 number of adherents 28–29, 118, 120, 273–75 sectarian tendency in 86–88 uniformity idealized by 11–12, 90–91, 93–97, 99 Calvinism, French 189 Calvino-Turkism 236, 243n42 canons 47, 109, 143, 243 capitulation treaties 248, 265, 272–74, 277 Castellio, Sebastian 42, 81 catechism as “human addition” 37–38, 72–73, 75, 80 classes 31, 314 Heidelberg 94, 96 Lutheran 30 sermons 49, 90 Catholicism 148–49, 183, 223–24, 233, 235. See also biconfessionalism; conversion; exorcism; Holland Mission; Trent, Council of Dutch 14–16, 114–15 English 187–88 in Utrecht 15, 20, 37, 101, 108–16, 271, 276 outlawing of 263 pre-Tridentine 10, 13–14, 95 Cats, Jacob 218, 309, 340 cemeteries 171, 231, 234 chapels 111, 126, 165, 170, 195–96, 275, 292. See also schuilkerken

Index court 189–90 embassy 190–92 manorial 175, 187–89 monastic 110 charity 23, 49, 89–90, 95, 109, 129, 179, 184, 273. See also poverty confraternities provide 126, 129, 132, 134–35, 144 demoniacs receive 147, 156–58, 162 verzuiling and 122–23, 222, 320–21, 335 Charles v 2, 52, 236, 256 Cherif, Henri 229n8 children 111, 121, 135–36, 156, 230, 323. See also baptism age of discretion 311–13 Muslim 234, 241, 244, 288 of church members 28, 118–19 of mixed marriage 294–95, 299–300, 305, 307–15, 317, 325–26, 333, 336, 338–44, 346–57 Christendom 71, 96, 216, 236, 299 church orders 48, 81, 91, 254 Libertine view of 38, 80, 84, 92–94, 96–97 church wardens 127, 183n36 of Jacobskerk 48–49, 89, 91–92 citizenship 12, 124, 171, 173, 196, 230, 325 classis (of Reformed Church) 90–91, 94, 104, 136, 153, 338–39, 354 clergy 2, 27, 52, 82, 103. See also ministers, appointment of accused of tyranny 36, 37–38, 41, 44, 62, 66–67, 70, 80, 188 attacks on 260, 263, 265 Catholic 13, 15–16, 20, 109–11, 114–15, 180, 182–84, 187–88, 199, 254, 265–66, 268, 271, 273, 302, 323n23 Jacobskerk 47, 56–7, 88, 91–2 Reformed 27–28, 86, 90–91, 93–94, 96–97, 129–30, 152, 156, 160, 178–79, 220, 307 stance on mixed marriage 299, 302, 304–6, 310, 315, 329, 342, 352–53, 356–57 Cocceius, Johannes 25, 233n18 Collegiants 212, 220 collegiate churches 92, 109–10, 128, 143n, 271 Cologne 54–55, 177, 185, 270 colonies 26, 214

361 communion 29, 35, 40, 52, 62, 95, 117, 301–2, 308, 353. See also eucharist admission to 37, 49, 57n40, 65, 68–69, 77, 80, 85, 87–89, 117–19, 329, 342 Company for the Propagation of the Faith 313 condominium 272–73 confession 3, 14, 16, 38, 45, 52, 257, 320 auricular 31, 37, 47, 58, 186, 302 of faith 37–38, 44, 72, 75, 80, 90, 96 of guilt 161, 301, 306 confessionalism 4, 11, 15–17, 23, 32, 43, 81–82, 98–99, 103–04, 117, 121, 123, 300 confessionalization 4, 16–17, 144, 315 confraternities 24, 124–45, 318 Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith 302 connivance 20, 199, 221, 231, 255, 263, 269, 275, 306 conscience. See freedom of conscience consistory 37, 48, 89–91, 105n11, 107–08, 338–39. See also discipline, ecclesiastic Contra-Remonstrants 104–05, 107, 121, 138 conventicles 118, 179, 201 convents 110–11, 127, 271, 273, 313 conversion 63, 115, 148, 233, 244, 251, 313, 332 in mixed marriage 302, 305–07, 309, 315, 327, 338–39, 342–57 to Islam 248–52, 288n21 See also apostasy; marriage, mixed; renegades Conversos 229, 243n42 Coolhaes, Caspar 32, 37, 74, 97n42 Coornhert, Dirck 11, 38, 40n43, 42, 74, 104, 135, 216–17 correction, house of (tuchthuis) 126, 135–37, 142–44 corsairs, Barbary 234, 236, 238, 246–49, 251. See also renegades Counter-Reformation 34, 57, 101, 114 court, provincial 105, 138 Coy, Pieter Maertensz 238 cuius regio eius religio 280–81, 286, 296–97 Daneau, Lambert 41 Dathenus, Peter 94 deacons 49, 89, 93, 95, 105n11, 109, 117, 143, 154–57, 316, 321

362 Declaratio Benedictina (1741) 301, 305n26, 352n35 Delft 28, 51, 154, 172, 239 consistory of 93–94, 300–01, 309 mixed marriage in 342–44, 347–48, 354 Denck, Hans 61 Deventer 28, 127, 223, 270 devil 146, 150–54, 156–57, 160–62, 301 discipline 34, 137, 139, 143–44, 171, 258 ecclesiastic 10, 16, 34–35, 43, 87, 94, 103, 117–18, 152–53, 342. See also consistory of religiously mixed couples 301, 322–23 rejected by Libertines 31, 34–35, 37–38, 42–44, 48–50, 55, 68, 80, 84, 89, 92, 96, 104, 136, 154 social 17, 125, 135, 141. See also correction, house of divorce 303, 330 doctors. See medicine domestic devotions (devotio domestica) 29, 180, 187, 198–200, 255 Dominicans 110, 302 Donauwörth 173–74, 177 Donteclock, Reynier 217 Dordrecht 109, 124, 213, 258, 301, 322–23 Dort, Synod of 26, 96, 263 Drenthe 28n3, 86n8, 263, 304, 321, 323 Drielandenpunt 279–80 Duifhuis, Hubert 11, 43, 88–93, 97, 216. See also Jacobskerk; Libertines life 39, 47–49, 51–57 thought 38, 58–82, 211 Dusseldorp, Franciscus 154, 158, 243 Eckhardt, Meister 40, 54, 58–59 ecumenicity of everyday life. See omgangsoecumene education 12, 33, 70, 72, 75, 82, 103, 109, 147, 179, 202, 274, 279, 312, 314. See also universities separate 23, 122, 186, 193, 222, 261, 271, 273, 319–21 églises de fief. See chapels, manorial Eighty Years’ War 263–64. See also Revolt, Dutch Eijsden 291 elders 49, 89, 95, 105n11, 109, 117, 132, 143, 210, 307, 353. See also consistory

Index emancipation, Catholic 168, 196 embassies. See chapels, embassy Emden, Synod of 90, 96 enclaves 255–56, 272, 280, 292–93. See also Overmaas, Lands of endogamy 222, 308, 324 England 34, 96, 148, 151–52, 155, 158, 172, 248, 322, 335–36. See also Britain Catholicism in 187–90 Church of 88, 152, 155n25. See also Puritans refugees in 4, 90 Enkhuizen 247–49, 327, 329, 331, 334 Enlightenment 19, 25, 195–96, 198, 213, 219, 221, 320 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Desiderius 32–33, 50, 71–72, 82, 210–11, 215–16. See also Humanism Erastianism 85 Erffens, Sara Maria 295 Erpenius, Thomas 240 Escudero, Lorenzo 244 Esnoga 230 Est, Frans van 47, 57n40 eucharist 18, 58, 113–14, 275. See also communion Eupen 291 excommunication 34–35, 80, 136, 209, 301. See also discipline Mennonite ban 302 exile 14–15, 87, 96, 259. See also refugees exorcism 58, 148, 151–52, 154–56. See also demoniacs extraterritoriality 191–92. See also chapels, embassy Family of Love 39, 51, 53–57, 60, 64, 81, 258 festivals 95, 115, 129–30, 133, 140, 145, 173, 187, 287, 294. See also holidays Flanders 2, 20, 207, 259–60, 164–65, 269, 276 flashpoints (for conflict) 173–74 foreigners in Reformed Church 95, 209, 215 represented in paintings 227 studying Dutch history 1, 4–6, 279 visiting 22, 186, 204, 212–13, 299, 314, 317–18, 336, 340. See also Muslims

Index worship by 168, 190, 232–33, 246, 252, 291, 294 France 2, 3, 5–6, 13, 52, 95, 148–49, 151, 190, 235, 237, 285, 286n12. See also Paris ally of Republic 248, 266–71, 276 invasion by 122, 270–74, 292 mixed marriage in 300, 305–6, 310–11, 313 model for Netherlands 179, 257, 260, 266, 281 Muslims in 235, 237n29, 240–42, 244 Reformed churches in 90, 96, 189. See also Huguenots toleration in 170, 177n20, 189, 289 Franciscans 273 Franck, Sebastian 42, 54, 70–72, 81 Frankfurt 260 Frederick Hendrick, Prince of Orange 105, 107, 138, 230, 255, 264–65, 268, 270, 272, 276–77, 289 freedom 24, 117, 196, 208–09, 211, 213–15, 217, 219, 221, 231, 249–52, 259, 297 Christian 30–31, 35, 40, 66, 75, 80 of conscience 17, 66, 102–4, 178–80, 200, 206–07, 210, 250, 255–57, 262, 264, 276, 290, 317, 341 of worship 178, 220n48, 258, 260, 262–63, 266n28, 267, 270, 272. See also biconfessionalism Friesland 23, 27, 52, 262–63, 305, 307, 310, 321 Fruin, Robert 214–15 funerals 24, 54, 117, 126, 129, 132, 174, 271, 294, 335 Further Reformation 25, 107 Gansfort, Wessel 216 gelatenheid (German Gelassenheit) 40, 59 Gelaudens, Clara 149, 156–63 Gelderland 16, 24, 132, 153, 326 Upper 255, 265, 272, 275–77 gender. See patriarchy Generality Lands 18, 168, 276–77, 292, 307n33, 323–24, 327, 337, 339. See also Overmaas, Lands of Geneva 37, 69, 84, 95–97, 154, 156n28, 209–10, 286 German Theology 40, 58–59, 82 Germany. See Holy Roman Empire

363 Gerobulus, Johannes 156, 158 Ghent 127, 209, 260 Pacification of (1576) 259, 264 ghettos 314 Gijswijt-Hofstra, Marijke 5, 19, 219–21 Glasius, Barend 46n1, 50n12, 215–16 Glorious Revolution 195 Glückstadt 186 Gorcum (Gorinchem) 124, 337–38, 344n17 Gouda 44, 48, 84, 104, 127–28, 181–82, 213, 258, 348. See also Herbertszoon, Herman Graft 308 Grave 264, 266 Great Assembly (Grote Vergadering) (1651) 263 Groenveld, Simon 23–24, 122, 222, 319–22, 335n45. See also verzuiling Groningen 27, 28n3, 52, 86n8, 132, 153, 213, 229, 262, 304, 321, 323, 337 Groningen school 215–16 Groote, Geert 216 Grotius, Hugo 208–11, 233 Gualtherus, Rudolf 97 guilds 43, 137, 140, 174, 230, 260, 318, 325, 335 Haar, Bernard ter 46n1, 215 Haarlem 28, 213, 225, 240, 249, 320–21, 334. See also Coornhert, Dirck Catholicism in 15, 95, 111, 167, 243 confraternities in 124, 127–28, 130, 132 Reformation in 5, 258, 260, 262–63 Habermas, Jürgen 163n34, 170, 200–03 Habsburgs 87, 206, 235, 287–90. See also Charles V; Netherlands, Southern; Philip ii Austrian 275, 280, 286n12 Haga, Cornelis 238, 242, 250–51 Hague, The 56, 118, 123, 180, 183n37, 230, 235, 239–40, 275, 291 Hainault 259, 262 Hajari, Ahmad ibn Qasim al- 235, 240–41 Hamburg 177, 193–94 Handel 21, 174, 278 Hartman, Jan 164 Hasselt, Augustijn van 55 heathens (pagans) 141, 223–24, 260, 268, 303 hedge-preaching 27, 52n24, 175, 256

364 Hedio, Caspar 30 Heidelberg 73, 96. See also catechism Helmichius, Werner 84, 87–88, 102 Henry iv, king of France 177, 266 Herbertszoon, Herman 32, 41–42, 46, 73, 75, 91 Herder, Johann Gottfried 213–14 heresy 13, 40, 54, 57, 81, 86, 172–73, 177, 233, 243n42, 258, 296, 298 in mixed marriage 303–04, 307–10, 356 Hernals 175–76. See also Vienna ’s-Hertogenrade See Overmaas, Lands of Heussen, Hugo van 217 Hiël. See Barrefelt, Hendrik Jansen van Hoen, Cornelis 216 Hofstede de Groot, Petrus 50n12, 215–16 holidays 31, 115, 174, 261, 292. See also festivals Holland 27, 44, 111, 120, 180, 227, 260–63, 287. See also individual cities Hollandocentrism 46, 213 inhabitants’ self-definitions 205, 208–11, 214, 217 mixed marriage in 231, 304n22, 308, 311n50, 322, 326–28, 331, 334–35, 336–57 non-Calvinists in 17, 105, 108, 242–43, 251, 267n31, 276 Reformed church in 90n19, 132, 260 States of 104, 254, 258–59, 291 Holland Mission 15–16, 110, 182n35, 300–02, 305n26, 352–53 Holseth. See Vaals Holy Roman Empire (Germany) 61, 96, 170–71, 173–74, 279–81, 286–87 as model 257, 260 historians of 2–3, 5 immigration from 108, 168, 225, 233 mixed marriage in 299, 311–12, 314, 341 Refomation in 1, 30–31, 36, 39, 92n24, 296 refugees in 4, 90 toleration in 20–21, 175, 177, 186, 189–90, 199, 273–74, 288–89, 292. See also Augsburg, Peace of; Westphalia, Peace of honor 17, 134, 136, 139, 143, 158, 162, 242, 288 Honthorst, Gerrit van 114, 121 Honthorst, Herman van 111 Hooft, Cornelis Pieterszoon 37, 42, 95, 97, 207, 209–10, 298

Index Hoorn 44, 84, 247 house chapels. See chapels; schuilkerken Huberts, Mayken 149, 156–58, 160–63 Huguenots 148, 172, 177, 189, 269–70, 313. See also France; Nantes, Edict of Humanism 1, 27, 55, 57, 62, 101, 135, 211, 217–18 Libertinism not to be equated with 10– 11, 32–34, 40, 44, 47, 50, 71, 77, 82, 85. See also Erasmus of Rotterdam, Desiderius; Libertines Hungary 229n8, 261, 289 Huygens, Constantijn 123 hymns 94, 142, 151, 157 iconoclasm 13, 77, 79, 93n28, 256, 263, 294 idolatry 64–65, 72, 107n13, 127, 132, 141, 144, 172, 233, 235, 268, 338, 347 imitation of Christ 53, 59, 82 immigrants 95, 108, 168, 219, 225, 233–34, 274, 278. See also foreigners Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat) 173–74 Imperial Cameral Court (Reichskammergericht) 296 Indies, East 236, 268, 348 infidels 229, 233 inquisition 34, 37–38, 144, 149, 206–07, 209 integration 23–24, 95, 97, 99, 315, 316–35 Ireland 186–88, 199, 276, 289, 309n43, 311, 333 Israel, Jonathan 7, 19, 219–20, 263, 314 Italy 33, 101, 133, 196, 235, 245. See also Venice Jacobskerk 47–49, 56–57, 80, 88–93, 96–98, 129, 133n29, 142n53 Jansen, Cornelis 55 Janszoon, Jan (a.k.a. Murad Raïs) 249 Jeannin, Pierre 266–67 Jesuits 110, 184n39, 186, 223, 271, 273, 302 Jews 10, 101, 224–25, 227, 229–34, 238, 246, 251–52, 261, 281, 314. See also synagogues Jorisites, David 39 Joyous Entry 206–07 Junius, Franciscus 258 Karl Alexander, Duke of Württemberg 190 Kevelaer 21, 278

Index Khalil Pasha 239 kidnapping 295, 312–13 Klèng Wach 280 kloppen (klopjes) 15, 111, 117, 182, 188 Knipperdolling, Bernhard 223–24 Knüpfer, Nicolaus 113, 121 Königsberg 186 Koselleck, Reinhard 200 Kossmann, Ernst 8, 220–21 Lalaing, George de, Count of Rennenberg 263 Landfrieden (Swiss) 286. See also Switzerland law, Roman 296 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 48, 89 Leiden 180, 209, 240, 258 Libertines in 32, 44, 48, 84. See also Coolhaes, Caspar mixed marriage in 327–28, 334, 347, 353 University of 96, 105 Leiden, John of 223–24 Lemannus, Cornelius 132 Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor 190–91 Levant 225, 227, 236, 244, 246 liberties. See privileges Libertines 4, 10–12, 15, 29–45, 46–51, 67, 73–74, 80–82, 84–86, 88–89, 91–99, 101, 104, 118, 136, 153–55, 160, 211, 220, 223–24, 258. See also Duifhuis, Hubert; Jacobskerk liefhebbers. See sympathizers Liège 272–73, 291–92 Limburg 21, 265, 273–74, 279–80, 289, 291–92. See also Overmaas, Lands of Lindeboom, Johannes 50n12, 216–17 Lindenius, Johannes 158, 160 Lipsius, Justus 55 Lithuania 225, 233 liturgy 49, 81, 89, 104, 114, 127, 165 Locke, John 195 Loists 39 Lord’s Supper. See communion Loosjes, Petrus 334 Louis xiv, King of France 21, 270–71, 285, 306 Luther, Martin 30, 36, 39, 61, 66, 73, 223 Lutherans 28, 44, 84, 101, 108, 119–20, 151, 212, 231n12, 252, 256, 278, 292n29, 295, 324, 326, 331n39

365 church buildings of 19, 167–68, 185, 198, 232–33 clergy of 61, 153 confession of 43, 98–99, 104, 144, 305 in Germany 31, 61, 171, 173–75, 189–90, 193–94, 198, 281, 289–90, 296 in mixed marriages 311–12, 332–33, 336 Maas campaign (1632) 265, 269, 289 Maasland 308, 331–32 Maassluis 327–28, 331, 334 Maastricht 21, 125, 127, 255, 265, 272–77, 279, 291–92 madness 146–50, 161, 163, 301 magic 5, 25, 147–48, 152, 155–56, 158–61. See also posession, demonic Malta 234, 245 Maresius, Samuel 132 Marnix van St. Aldegonde, Philip van 30, 43, 49, 80, 258 Marriage 52, 57, 117, 179, 261, 274, 304, 323, 327, 329, 340. See also marriage, mixed; weddings marriage, mixed (interfaith) 23, 123, 295, 298. See also children; conversion; verzuiling ecclesiastic measures against 301–02, 304, 338, 352 investigation into 338–39 laws against 123, 307, 336–37 losses and gains from 305–06, 308–10 notions regarding 300–01, 303 rates of 222, 298–99, 314, 322–35 relations between spouses in 339–48, 350–52, 355–57 religion of children from 310–14, 348–50, 354–55 social significance of 315, 317, 319, 321, 335–36. See also integration Marian devotions 18, 59, 112, 180 Marvell, Andrew 224 mass 14, 126–27, 129, 137, 142, 180, 263, 267, 278, 292n30. See also communion Matthias Habsburg, Archduke 261, 290 Maurits, Prince 131, 240, 250, 264, 266 Maximilian ii, Holy Roman Emperor 52 Medemblik 44, 84 medicine 148–49, 155, 161 Mediterranean Sea 234–36

366 membership, church 36–37, 45, 56, 107, 171, 209, 345. See also discipline, ecclesiastic; sympathizers; volkskerk inclusive 11, 38, 48–49, 78, 85, 89–90 numbers 28–29, 108n15, 118–19, 180, 320–21 requirements for 35, 37, 87, 95 voluntary 16, 86, 117, 178 Mennonites 118, 212, 217–18, 220, 223, 289–90, 292n29, 298, 316, 320, 324n23, 331n39. See also Anabaptists in mixed marriages 302–04, 308, 315, 322–23, 332–33, 336 in Utrecht 102, 104, 108, 119–21, 160, 326n27 schuilkerken of 166–67, 183, 186, 194, 230, 255 Menocchio 33 mentality, history of 5, 29, 200 microhistory 24, 149 Middelburg 168, 234, 247 Middle Ages 137, 171, 187, 189, 234, 246. See also confraternities; Modern Devotion; mysticism middle groups 3, 10, 12–13, 85, 319 militia companies 124, 137, 140–41, 193, 256, 262, 318, 335 ministers, appointment of 91–92. See also clergy Modern Devotion 12, 32, 59, 216 Moersbergen, Adolph de Waell, Lord of 138–44 Molina, Christianus 300, 309–10 Mommertz, Cunegonde (Cunigunda) 295 Mommertz, Heinrich 295 Montano, Benito Arias 55, 57n39, 71 Montfort 275 Moreelse, Paulus 104–05, 121, 123–24 Moresnet 279 Moriscos 19n51, 240–44, 251 Morocco 229n8, 235–40, 244–46, 249–50, 261. See also corsairs, Barbary Motley, John Lothrop 214 Mülheim 177 Münster, prince-bishop of 52, 270 Muslims 19–20, 223053, 288, 357. See also Turks mysticism 11, 39–40, 42, 47, 54, 57–61, 75, 81–82, 101, 104. See also spiritualism

Index Namur 272 Nantes, Edict of (1598) 177, 189, 201, 266, 281 national-Reformed movement (so-called) 32, 50, 216, 218 Neercassel, Johannes van 271, 305. See also apostolic vicars neighbors 122, 133, 149, 157, 159–60, 162–63, 307, 354 toleration among 108, 168, 170–71, 184, 252, 317–18, 335 new bishoprics scheme 34, 52 Netherlands, Southern 2, 9, 21, 29, 95, 208–09, 278, 280, 286, 312, 326n29. See also Brabant; Flanders; Limburg; Walloon provinces conquest of 264, 268–70, 272, 277 Niclaes, Hendrick 53–56, 61, 68. See also Family of Love Nicodemites 44 Nijenhuis, William 218 Nijmegen 256, 271 Nîmes 306 nobles 43, 80, 95, 98, 109, 131, 137–39, 189, 194, 259 Catholic 16, 24, 120, 187–88 Nördlingen 171 Oachia, Mahumeth 237 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van 138 Olne 291 omgangsoecumene (ecumenicity of everyday life) 23–24, 318, 335 Ophovius, bishop of Den Bosch 265 Orange, principality of 286 Orange, William of 49, 172, 208, 255–60, 262–64, 276 orphans 129, 152, 178, 312–14 Orschot, Adriaan van 111 Ortelius, Abraham 55 Osnabrück, bishopric of 341 Ottoman Empire 235–40, 244, 248–49, 261, 288, 357 Oudewater 355 Overijssel 263, 276, 305, 337 Overmaas, Lands of 21, 255, 272–77, 282–83, 289–93, 296. See also Limburg; Vaals pagans 224, 303 Palatinate 175, 281, 297, 310

367

Index Pallache family 238, 246n51 papacy 31, 35, 58, 66, 235, 261, 286, 301 Paris 69, 172, 177, 313 parish 34, 49, 52, 89, 91, 94, 98, 109–10, 124, 127–28, 171, 180, 187, 202, 287, 291. See also Jacobskerk church buildings of 27–28, 86, 102, 160, 178, 275, 292–93 parity 132, 273–76, 314 Parma, Alessandro Farnese, Duke of 264 Parma, Margaret of 256 particularism 4, 11, 16, 84–99 Partition Treaty (1661) 273–74, 290, 296 patriarchy 303–04, 310, 340–42, 356 patriciate 15, 111, 131, 137, 141 patronage rights (jus patronatus) 92, 98, 109, 296 Pauline privilege 303 Peerkens, Antonius 305, 307 pelagianism 34, 44 Pelletier de la Houssaye, Le 192–93 Pelt, Gerrit 111 Pérez de Valdivia, Diego 149 Perfectionists 223 persecution 107, 118, 138, 186, 219–20, 290, 299, 303 by Habsburg government 27, 34, 39, 87 churches under the cross 87, 90, 290 critiqued 42, 67, 74 of Catholics 110, 265, 270, 302, 326 Persia 225, 227, 238, 240, 251–52 Petit, Jean-Francois Le 225 Pettegree, Andrew 19, 220 pharisees 41, 66–67, 70 Philip ii, king of Spain etc. 4, 17, 27, 34, 37, 84, 206, 235–36, 256, 258–59, 263, 319 Philip iii of Spain 241–42, 263 Pieterszoon, Lambrecht 249–50 Pijnacker, Cornelis 248 Pijper, Frederik 50n12, 216–18 pilgrimage 21, 62, 173–74, 278 pillarization. See verzuiling pios usus, ad (for pious uses) 109, 128–29, 141–42 Plantin, Christopher 53n26, 55–56, 60 Poitou 305–06, 310 Poland 261, 289 polemics 104, 148, 152–53, 236 Portengen, Petrus 121, 123

Portugal 225, 229, 243n43 possession, demonic 17, 146–63 Post, Pieter 291 pot masters (potmeesters) 49, 89, 93. See also charity; parish poverty 111, 129, 132, 135–36, 314, 321, 340. See also charity prayer 94, 130, 157, 179, 193, 199, 244, 310 fasting and 152, 155, 172, 212 preaching 29, 93, 122, 189, 193, 223–24, 233, 261. See also hedge-preaching; sympathizers by Duifhuis 43, 46–47, 49, 58–62, 66, 70n92, 73, 79, 89–90 Reformed 27, 86–88, 118, 142, 156, 179, 308, 342 predestination 36–37, 58, 104, 211 presbytery. See classis priesthood of all believers 38, 41, 67 private sphere religious differences in 315, 317, 336 worship in 17–21, 103, 108, 151, 164–203, 231–32, 255, 267–69, 271–72, 292. See also domestic devotions; public sphere; schuilkerken privileges 94, 140, 142, 187, 206–07, 246, 265 processions 18, 58, 126, 129, 172–74, 271, 273, 275, 294 proselytizing 230. See also conversion Prussia 186, 194, 199, 311 public opinion 80, 148, 150, 158, 162–63, 170, 172, 194, 201–02 public sphere 18, 20, 125, 163n, 183–85, 201–03 worship in 19, 170–71, 173–74, 178–81, 187, 189–90, 192–97, 199–200, 207, 220n48, 230–32, 246, 292–94. See also biconfessionalism; Reformed church Puritanism 87n12, 88, 107, 155n25, 156n28, 223 as type of morality 17, 125 Quakers 172, 212, 300, 333n42 recognition fees 185 recusants 187–89 Reformation, Protestant 66–67, 81, 124, 127–29, 171–72, 206, 236, 256–63, 269, 296

368 Reformation, Protestant (cont.) apathy and opposition in 27–45. See also Libertines historiography of 1–6, 9, 86, 92n24, 210–12, 215–18 in Utrecht 46–48, 91–93, 103, 142, 256, 263. See also Duifhuis, Hubert; Jacobskerk Reformed Church 2, 11, 45, 198. See also confessionalism; discipline, ecclesiastic; membership, church; sympathizers; synods; weddings as public church 16–17, 86, 102, 108, 168, 178–79, 183 confessional character of 37–38, 88, 332–33 criticism of. See Libertines French 305–06, 313 in Utrecht 104–08, 117–18, 153–54, 162 in Vaals 291, 293, 295 organization of (church order) 90–91, 93–97. See also ministers, appointment of mixed marriage feared by 338–39, 342, 244–45, 355–57 Walloon 109n19, 118n37, 132, 143n, 289, 294 refugees 4, 26n68, 209, 233, 241, 243–44, 251, 259, 286. See also exile churches of (vluchtelingenkerken) 87n12, 90 religious peace (religievrede) 48, 259–63, 270 Rembrandt 316–17 Remonstrants 101, 136, 143, 167, 181–82, 186, 210–12, 216, 219–20, 317 in Utrecht 104–05, 107–08, 118–22, 125, 138, 143, 326n27 mixed marriage by 332–33, 336 renegades 20n51, 248–52. See also conversion; Muslims Revolt, Dutch 34, 128, 140, 206–07, 0210, 236, 264, 267, 304 as watershed 2, 9–210, 14, 16, 84, 87, 102, 124, 151, 168, 205, 208, 255, 302 historiography on 1, 3–4, 6 religious politics during 21, 99, 172, 209, 235, 256, 258, 260, 263, 319

Index rhetoric, chambers of 12, 318 Rijswijk, Treaty of (1697) 272 Richelieu, cardinal 268 riots 5, 150, 260–01, 263, 274. See also iconoclasm in England 190 in France 13, 169, 172, 177 in Germany 174, 185, 193–94, 294–95 Robbertsen, Robbert 223 Roermond 265, 275 romanticism 214 Romein, Jan and Annie 6, 218 Rosicrucians 223 Rotterdam 28, 301, 92n24, 104, 118, 127, 239, 247–48 Duifhuis in 51–57 mixed marriage in 327–28, 334 Rovenius, Philip 110–11, 114, 120, 123, 300–01, 307 Rudoph ii, Holy Roman Emperor 174 saints 39, 58, 95, 115–16, 126, 155, 343 days 122, 137, 171, 173–74. See also festivals; holidays sabbath 31, 107, 171 Salé 236, 238–40, 244–47, 249. See also Morocco Saxony 189–90, 289 scandal 133, 136, 141, 154, 156, 160, 162, 173, 183–84, 193–94, 252, 288, 306 Scandinavia 108, 159, 233 scepticism 101, 148–49, 156, 158–60, 162 Schiedam 247, 338, 342, 355 scholasticism 71–73, 76, 82 Schoonhoven 354–55 Schwenckfeld, Caspar 61 schools. See education; universities schuilkerken 17–18, 111–12, 119, 168–71, 180–202, 219, 230, 253, 255, 278, 292, 317. See also chapels art in 115, 123 The Hart 164–67, 180, 204 Schurman, Anna Maria van 106, 117 Scorel, Jan van 124 Scotland 187–88, 196–97, 225, 305, 310–11 Sea Beggars 258

Index segregation 122, 314, 316, 318–19, 321–22, 335. See also integration; verzuiling sermons. See preaching sex 230, 314, 357. See also patriarchy sextons 154 Silesia 289, 291 Simultaneum (sharing of churches) 273–75, 293 Sittard 265 slaves 234–37, 240n37, 248–49, 251 Sluis 229n8, 237 Smyrna (Izmir) 246 Socinians 219, 223–24 sola fide 31n13, 36, 40, 62 sola Scriptura 36–38, 40, 66–67, 73–75, 80, 82. See also Bible Sonnius, Franciscus 51–52 sovereignty 273–74, 281, 285, 296 Spaans, Joke 5, 15, 23, 26n68, 219, 321 Spain 4, 81, 148–49, 159, 190, 225, 232, 235–37, 240–41, 243–44, 246n51, 251, 263–70, 273–76, 290. See also Revolt, Dutch Speyer, bishopric of 175 Spinozists 219 spiritualism 11–12, 32, 39–45, 47, 51, 54, 57–65, 71–72, 81–82, 99, 104, 211, 217. See also Family of Love; Libertines; mysticism States, provincial of Holland 104, 212, 254, 258–59, 262, 291, 326–27, 329, 337–38, 352n35, 356 of Utrecht 98, 105, 128, 138–39, 141–42, 149, 154, 160, 262, 337 other provinces 90, 262, 266n28, 321, 326, 327n31, 337 States-General 90–91, 138, 179, 212, 260–62, 291 diplomacy of with Muslim rulers 237, 242, 244, 246n51, 249–52 mixed marriage legislation of 307n33, 326, 327n31, 337 policy vis-à-vis southern provinces 264– 67, 269, 271–73, 277 stations (Catholic) 110–11, 180, 182n35, 184n39 Stephani, Joachim 296 stereotypes 213, 318, 322, 336

369 Stevensweert 275 Stouppe, Jean-Baptiste 225, 227 Straelen 265 Strasbourg 33–34, 305, 310 Struyck, Nicolaas 331–32 Switzerland 20, 140, 268, 281, 286–87, 289 sympathizers (liefhebbers) 29, 43–44, 88, 108n15, 118, 301n12, 308, 342, 345 synagogues 19, 168, 185n40, 192–95, 212, 223, 230–31, 243–44, 261, 278. See also Jews syncretism 288 synods (of Reformed church) 42, 90–91, 94–96, 104, 132, 153, 260–61, 301, 308, 322–23, 338–39, 356. See also discipline, ecclesiastic; Dort, Synod of Tacitus 208, 233n16 Tapper, Ruard 51–52 Tauler, Johannes 54, 58–59 Temple, Sir William 21–22, 299, 317, 335 Thin, Floris 262 Thirty Years’ War 108, 314. See also Holy Roman Empire; Westphalia, Peace of Tirado, Jacob 230 Toleration Act of 1689 (England) 195 Toleration Patent of 1781 (Austria) 196 Torre, Jacobus de la 119, 306n30 Torrentius, Johannes 223 torture 110, 158, 161 Tournai 272 Transylvania 289, 311 Trent, Council of 34, 52, 304–05. See also Catholicism Trigland, Jacobus 217 Tripoli 236 tuchthuis. See correction, house of Tunis 236 Turks 223–25, 227, 229n8, 235–37, 240n37, 244n45, 248–52. See also Muslims; Ottoman Empire Twelve Years’ Truce 138, 185, 263, 266–67 Uden 21, 174, 278 Ulm 260 universities 2, 5, 7–8, 51–52, 69, 96, 105, 111, 132, 261

370 Uskoks. See Balkans Utrecht artists in 120–21, 123 Calvinism in 48, 92–97, 104–107, 109, 118, 153–54 cathedral 92, 109, 128, 271 Catholicism in 15, 20, 37, 101, 108–16, 271, 276 confraternities in 124–45 demonic possession in 149–63 immigration in 209, 233n15 Libertinism in 42–44, 46–48, 56–57, 88–90, 92–93, 96–97. See also Duifhuis, Hubert; Jacobskerk Mennonites in 102, 104, 108, 119–21, 160, 326n27 mixed marriage in 307, 310–11, 324–26, 332, 334, 337, 346n23 political turmoil in 42, 104–05, 137–38 province of (the Sticht) 16, 24 Reformation in 46–48, 91–93, 103, 142, 256, 263 Reformed Church in 28, 104–08, 117–18, 153–54, 162 religious diversity in 17, 320 Remonstrants in 104–05, 107–08, 118–22, 125, 138, 143, 326n27 schuilkerken in 166–67, 182 States of 98, 105, 128, 138–39, 141–42, 149, 154, 160, 262, 337 toleration in 121–23 University of 105 Utrecht, Union of (1579) 98, 140, 142, 178, 255, 262 Vaals 21, 274–75, 279–84, 289–97. See also Overmaas, Lands of Valkenburg 293. See also Overmaas, Lands of Vanegas, Mohammed 238n33, 244 Veen, Jan van der 223–24 Veere 247–48 Veluanus, Anastasius 79, 216 Venice 190, 235, 240n37, 246 Venlo 265, 275–76 Veryard, Ellis 299, 317–18, 322, 336

Index verzuiling (pillarization) 2–3, 23–24, 122–23, 222, 319–22, 334–35. See also segregation Vianen 337 viaticum 273 Vienna 175–76, 196, 198 Vijlen. See Vaals Villiers, Pierre de 260 visitations 31, 34, 37, 52, 89 Vlissingen 247–48, 250 Voetius, Gisbertus 25, 105–07, 109, 117, 122, 132 Vogelsang, Goosen 209, 298 volkskerk. See membership, church volksgeest 46, 214–16. See also “nationalReformed” movement Voorst, Dirck van 114 Vosmeer, Sasbout 110–11, 117n Wachtelaar, Johannes 111 Wagenaar, Jan 184, 212, 215n29 Walloon provinces 259–60, 264. See also Netherlands, Southern Walloon church. See Reformed Church Wardavoir, David 150–52 Wassenaar 327–28, 331, 334 weddings 24, 119–21, 222–23, 304–6, 322–27, 335, 344, 346. See also marriage Weigel, Valentin 61 Wesembeeke, Jacob van 207–08 Westphalia, Peace of (1648) 175, 185, 189, 198–99, 201, 266n, 273, 286, 290. See also Holy Roman Empire widows/widowers 312, 341, 343, 346, 353–55 Williams, Roger 195 Wit, Jacob de 165 witchcraft 5, 25, 147, 152, 155, 158–59, 161 Wittem, County of 280 wonder-year (1566) 13, 27, 52, 175, 208, 256, 258, 261. See also hedge-preaching; iconoclasm Worms 260, 312 wrath, divine 13, 171–72 Wtenbogaert, Johannes 97n42, 104, 210, 217 Wtewael, Joachim 104–05, 121 Württemberg, duchy of 175, 190

371

Index Ypres 272 Zeeland 237, 258–59, 261–63, 266n, 304, 323. See also individual cities Zurich 96–97, 281

Zutphen 153, 270 Zuylen, Jonker Johan van 158 Zwinglians 96, 223 Zwolle 270, 337