11
Christine Kooi
It is indicative of the trajectory of early modern European historiography since the 1970s that the Netherlands had to wait until the third Reformation research guide to receive its own essay.1 Historical study of the “long sixteenth century,” especially the Reformation, has long been dominated, naturally enough, by the larger European language areas—Germany, France, England, Spain, and Italy. More peripheral regions, such as the Low Countries, Scandinavia, or the lands of eastern Europe, while hardly ignored, tended to suffer from a lack of general scholarly attention as a consequence. Happily, in the last twenty or so years, the situation has rectified itself and these regions—and their own independent historical experiences—have been assimilated more fully into the historiographical mainstream.2
The sixteenth century in the Netherlands, as in the rest of Europe, was dominated by two phenomena: war and religion. War meant the long revolt against Spain, that is, the region’s partial detachment from the Habsburg imperium, and religion took the form of the introduction and spread of the Protestant Reformation, particularly its Reformed variant. The upheavals attending these events led, uniquely in Europe, to the creation of an entirely new state, the United Provinces or Dutch Republic. The Low Countries thus provide fertile soil for students of sixteenth-century dichotomies; its history abounds in such questions as the relationship between church and state, center and periphery, local and national interests, princes and parliaments, cities and countryside, nobles and burghers, and clergy and laity, to say nothing of that most familiar antipathy, Catholic and Protestant.
James D. Tracy’s essay on the Dutch Reformation in the 1992 Reformation Europe II: A Guide to Research focused on the Reformed Church, which was certainly one of the most conspicuous products of the Netherlands’ revolt and reformation. Indeed, a good portion of the scholarly literature published since then has continued to concentrate on the fortunes of Reformed Protestantism in the region, especially the independent northern provinces. Whereas an earlier generation of historians described the Reformation as a national (usually Dutch) event, more recent historiography has underscored the vital importance of local conditions in the building up of Reformed congregations. In the decentralized political culture of the Low Countries, local authority wielded the most direct influence on ecclesiastical affairs. This was true whether the location was Antwerp or Utrecht, Leiden or Lille. Consequently, historians of the Netherlands have borrowed heavily in recent years from the methodology of urban studies of the Reformation in the neighboring Holy Roman Empire; the “reformation in the cities” turned out to be a useful paradigm in the Netherlandish case as well.3 What these civic studies, mining the rich municipal archives of the Netherlands and Belgium, have revealed is that religious change could have a broad variety of outcomes, and those outcomes depended largely on the relationships between the two principal actors in the process of reformation: municipal and ecclesiastical authorities.
In the Dutch Republic, where the Reformed Church won official recognition and the Catholic Church was disestablished by the 1570s, urban studies have shown that variations on the church-state relationship were numerous. The magistracy of Delft, for example, enjoyed a cooperative relationship with that city’s Reformed consistory in the late sixteenth century, which allowed the process of reforming church life there to proceed relatively smoothly. Meanwhile not far away in Leiden, the mistrust between that city’s magistracy and consistory led to repeated clashes between the two bodies on issues of church governance and autonomy.4 In an age that considered communal harmony a paramount virtue, the magistrates of Utrecht sacrificed ecclesiastical unity for the sake of civic peace by allowing their city’s Reformed Church to split, for a few years anyway, into two rival congregations.5 Even in the most harmonious cases, however, the relationship between civic authorities and Reformed consistories tended to be complicated, arising largely from the consistories’ desire to maintain a high degree of institutional autonomy, while also demanding magisterial favor and protection. For their part magistrates in all cities and towns insisted upon their right to superintend the church, reformed or not.6 In areas where civil and ecclesiastical interests overlapped, such as poor relief, considerable negotiation and accommodation was required of both parties.7 The alliance between political and religious rebels that had prevailed so successfully against Spain proved much more problematic in the creation of a new state. At stake was the larger question shared by all lands where the Reformation was successfully established: what precisely would the new church’s place and role be within the wider polity and society?
Complicating this question was the fact that the wider society of the Dutch Republic was not uniformly receptive to the Reformed Church. Insofar as they have been able to reconstruct figures, historians of the Reformation in the Dutch cities have determined that the proportion of confessing, committed Reformed Church members in most municipalities was relatively small. Research on the Dutch urban Reformation suggests that by 1620, in most cities committed, professing church members made up an estimated 20 to 30 percent of municipal populations.8 Thus the public church, the only officially sanctioned church of the Republic, did not even comprise a majority of the population fifty years after the start of the Revolt. The question that arises concerning the remaining four-fifths to two-thirds, of course, is this: what was their religious coloration? It is known that many fell under the category of liefhebbers, those who sympathized with the Reformed Church and attended its preaching, but stopped short, for whatever reason, of a full profession of faith. Who precisely these liefhebbers were is one of the great lacunae of Dutch Reformation historiography. Sources mention them anecdotally, but their reluctance to commit fully to church membership meant that they fell outside any official record-keeping purview. Were they loath to accept consistorial discipline? Were they members in the making, or simply casual churchgoers? These sympathizers still await their historian.
The rest of the non-Reformed population included those committed to other confessions, as well as the religiously indifferent. One of the most interesting and promising developments in recent historiography has been the greater attention paid to these non-Reformed confessional groups within the formally Protestant Netherlands. Virtually every manner of early modern European Christianity seemed to find a home in the Dutch Republic (especially the metropolis of Amsterdam)—a fact that was a continuing source of pain to the Reformed worthies who led the public church. The new state guaranteed freedom of conscience to all its citizens and left the regulation of religious affairs to provincial authorities. The combination of a public church that set high standards of membership and a government unwilling to coerce religious allegiance meant that a large portion of the population was free to worship God in other ways. Thus, many communities in the Dutch Republic included significant populations of Catholics, Mennonites, and, to a lesser extent, Lutherans. Religious pluralism thus prevailed in an ostensibly Calvinist state.
The fact of this religious pluriformity is receiving more attention from historians, some of whom eschew the hoarier term toleration, in favor of the more neutral descriptor coexistence. Willem Frijhoff finds the latter term “less loaded with positive values.”9 Recent research has indeed found that the fabled tolerance of the Dutch Republic in fact comprised a complicated and shifting mix of relationships among the public church, the other confessions, and the government. The essays in the conference volume Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age provide a useful window into this complexity; their breadth and variety make it clear that the degree of hostility or amity between the privileged church and the other confessions, and between the other confessions and the government, depended on a number of variables, including the attitudes of local magistrates and the course of the war against Spain. The degree of toleration also varied from province to province and town to town. And confessional coexistence took place at a range of levels—from casual everyday interaction to printed polemic to occasional judicial harassment. The highly variegated nature of this coexistence makes it difficult to generalize about it for the Republic as a whole.10
Consequently, there is some debate among scholars about the nature of religious freedom in the Dutch Golden Age. In his survey The Dutch Republic, Jonathan Israel takes a largely skeptical view, arguing that toleration was not really acceptable to most authorities until the later seventeenth century.11 It was certainly true that the intellectual discussion about toleration far outpaced the reality of it; Gerrit Voogt’s study of Dirck Coornhert makes clear that this freethinker was championing confessional concord already by the 1570s.12 If historians were to rely only on laws, placards, and Reformed polemics, the Republic would indeed seem to have been an inhospitable place for non-Calvinists. Frijhoff, however, argues for reframing the questions away from old paradigms of toleration toward the simpler issue of coexistence. He emphasizes what he calls the “interconfessional conviviality” of quotidian social life; that is, the peaceful interactions between adherents of different confessions that can be found in the ordinary traffic of human affairs.13 This approach requires examining sources beyond the purely ecclesiastical, such as notarial records, popular culture, and perhaps folklore. Like all other early modern states, the Dutch Republic was publicly intolerant of religious diversity, but in the private sphere a fair degree of confessional latitude prevailed. Indeed, the publicly Reformed religious identity that the Republic maintained was a polite fiction: it masked a complicated, confessionally mixed reality.
Wiebe Bergsma’s major study of the progress of the Reformed Church in the northern rural province of Friesland between 1580 and 1650 underscores this point.14 Moving up one level from the civic study, Bergsma examines the fortunes of the public church in an entire province that possessed a reputation for Calvinist orthodoxy. Challenging this image, Bergsma instead places the Reformed Church within a multiconfessional context; Friesland was also home to considerable numbers of Mennonites and Catholics during the period. The Reformed Church, he concludes, adopted over the long term a “minority mentality” that, despite its privileges, felt threatened by the other confessions and acceded to the toleration of them only grudgingly.15 This study makes clear that historians who wish to research the early modern Dutch Reformed Church cannot separate it from other confessions, for religious pluralism was one of the very factors that shaped the public church, contributing to both its successes and its failures.
Bergsma’s work also includes a chapter that examines, on the basis of biographical documents, the religious mentalities of four individual Reformed believers: a farmer, a nobleman, a preacher, and a scholar. This approach mirrors a recent trend in the historiography of early modern Netherlandish religious culture that focuses on particular individuals.16 As a genre, these works fall somewhere between biography and microhistory; individual experience functions as a window onto a wider historical landscape. When done well, this kind of history is extraordinarily vivid and effective. One of the most compelling of these studies is Judith Pollmann’s portrait of the Utrecht humanist lawyer Arnoldus Buchelius, whose road to God started with childhood Catholicism and traveled through religious indifference to finally reach a deeply felt Calvinism. Pollmann casts his journey in terms of the possibilities of religious choice in the Dutch Republic, where war and Reformation had created a confessionally splintered society. Buchelius, though committed to his church, nevertheless had Catholic friends, which was a common social phenomenon in the crowded cities of the Republic. This resistance to the claims of confessionalism, Pollmann argues, made it possible for the Republic’s multiconfessional society to operate relatively smoothly.17 In a similar manner, Willem Frijhoff’s account of the orphan Evert Willemsz, who ultimately rose to become a Reformed preacher in the colony of New Netherland, illuminates the possibilities for religious self-fashioning that Dutch society offered. Paul Abels traces the tangled career of the doctor, priest, preacher, and sometime charlatan Pibo Ovittius Abbema, who struggled through a variety of professional metamorphoses to find a middle path through the religious polarizations of the era. And Mirjam de Baar examines the life of the Flemish mystic and prophetess Antoinette Bourignon, who found a spiritual refuge for a time in the cosmopolitanism of the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age. Such individual cases attest to the religious heterogeneity of the early modern Dutch Republic and to the confessional possibilities within that heterogeneity. Since much research on the Reformation relies heavily on formal ecclesiastical sources, which can be notably terse and formulaic, these studies of specific personalities offer a richness and human dimension that more conventional church histories often lack. Whether such colorful figures are at all typical or representative is, of course, another question; that enough documentation on each of them survived to support a monograph indicates that such figures were, at the very least, unusual. The broader point they make, however, is credible: the religious pluralism that obtained in Dutch society allowed for a considerable degree of confessional mobility. Indeed, the recent research on religious pluralism in the northern Netherlands leads one to wonder whether the Reformed Church, had it not enjoyed governmental sanction, would have succeeded there at all.
As a result of this increased emphasis on religious pluralism, non-Reformed confessions in the Dutch Republic have received greater attention than ever before. The study of Dutch Catholicism in particular seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance, with the journal Trajecta as its standard-bearer. A notable example of this trend is Marit Monteiro’s study of spiritual virgins or klopjes: devout Catholic laywomen who lived together in communities but took no vows.18 These women aided and supported the priests of the Holland Mission in their ambulant ministries to Catholics in the Republic. Monteiro examines their spirituality and their sometimes ambivalent relationship with clerical authorities, and places them in the larger context of early modern female devotion. Her two individual examples, however, lived in the Habsburg-controlled Netherlands. A study of how klopjes worked and worshiped within the borders of the Republic is still wanting. Gian Ackermans’s prosopographical study of the secular clergy in the Holland Mission during the later seventeenth century offers a detailed portrait of these priests and their pastoral mission.19 Ackermans concentrates on the priests’ relationships with their supervisory bishops; given the complicated confessional climate in which they worked, close contact and supervision were necessary to the success of the Mission. Catholic devotion is the subject of Marc Wingens’s study of pilgrimage practices among early modern Dutch Catholics, who regularly made spiritual journeys over the border to shrines in the Spanish Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire.20 Studies such as these fall well in line with the larger historiographical interest in early modern Catholicism, which has tended to focus rather heavily on the Catholic powers of Italy, France, and Spain. The vitality of Catholicism in the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands in the seventeenth century would suggest that the phenomenon of early modern Catholicism should be viewed with the widest lens possible.21
Anabaptism, the other major non-Reformed confession in the Netherlands, has also received increased attention. In 2000 there appeared the first major survey of early modern Dutch Anabaptism in fifty years.22 S. Zijlstra recounts the Anabaptists’ history: their beginnings with Melchior Hoffman in the 1530s, their radicalization and subsequent persecution, the emergence of a new movement inspired by Menno Simons, the Mennonites’ schisms in the late sixteenth century, and, finally, their evolution into a tolerated minority religion in the Dutch Republic in the Golden Age. A major theme of this work is that of identity; like the Reformed, the various Anabaptist groups had to define themselves in relation to other confessions. The public church in particular saw the Mennonites as serious competitors, though Zijlstra argues that their number reached, at best, perhaps 60,000 by 1650.23 The Mennonites also suffered from the added complication of their own disputatiousness; they had to take into account not only other confessions, but their own sects and schismatics. Groups that authorities had feared as a grave threat to the social and moral order in the sixteenth century evolved during the seventeenth century into a harmless collection of small religious communities.
In the southern Netherlands, of course, the story line of revolt and reformation followed a divergent path: the Spanish reconquista of the 1580s ensured that Catholicism would ultimately triumph and Protestantism would be squelched. Nevertheless, some of the same historiographic trends and preoccupations are evident. Craig Harline in particular has examined the lives of specific individuals, notably Archbishop Mathias Hovius and the nun Margaret Smulders, to paint a social and cultural portrait of Catholicism in the seventeenth-century Spanish Netherlands.24 Sister Margaret claimed to be possessed by demons and was driven from her convent by her co-religious, only to fight her way back in again. Together with Eddy Put in A Bishop’s Tale, Harline uses the figure of the archbishop of Mechelen to describe the concerns of a fairly typical seventeenth-century bishop. Both studies aim to delineate the world of early modern Netherlandish Catholicism. More so than the other works cited above, their primary intention is narrative, using storytelling as a way of resurrecting the flavor of a particular era.
Like their northern counterparts, the cities in the southern Netherlands have been a focus of research as well. Because of the ultimate Habsburg triumph in this region, the southern cities naturally experienced a different outcome of revolt and reformation. For example, the southern city of Lille suffered very little from the upheavals of the sixteenth-century Netherlands.25 Its magistracy successfully preserved the city’s political stability in the midst of war, iconoclasm, and rebellion. Antwerp, the Netherlands’ largest and richest city in the sixteenth century, has received especial attention. Guido Marnef has provided a detailed look at the underground Protestantism of this mercantile metropolis.26 In the venerable Belgian tradition of social and economic history, Marnef seeks to place the various Protestant movements—Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Calvinist—in the specific urban milieu of this center of world trade. From scarce sources, he has patched together a prosopographical portrait of Antwerp’s religious dissidents. He ascribes the volatility of Antwerp’s reformation to the presence of a large “middle group” of citizens sympathetic to religious reform, but unwilling to commit to an illegal church. When Protestant churches were driven underground by persecution, these waverers prudently returned their allegiance to the Catholic church.27 Marie Juliette Marinus continues the story with the next chapter in Antwerp’s religious history, which is its seventeenth-century reincarnation as a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation.28 The city’s Catholic authorities worked zealously to institue the reforms and mandates of the Council of Trent in their parishes, especially in the first half of the seventeenth century. In this enterprise they had the full support of the city’s elite families, who favored in particular the educational projects of various religious orders.29 In this regard, Antwerp, which had once been the hub of Netherlandish Protestantism, joined the forefront of early modern Catholic urban reform pioneered by the Milan of Charles Borromeo.
If religion is one of the dominant themes of the historiography of the early modern Netherlands, then another is war—specifically, the long-running conflict with Habsburg Spain and its attendant ramifications. The eighty-year-long revolt of the Netherlands was variously a political rebellion, a civil war, a religious revolution, and a struggle among great powers. Different aspects of that conflict, from its sixteenth-century origins to its seventeenth-century outcomes, remain topics of abiding interest among scholars.30 The recent tendency among historians is not to see the conflict as a clear, unitary process with the creation of two separate states as its inevitable result, but instead to see it as contemporaries did: as a complicated, shifting, and unpredictable congeries of events, groups, and outcomes. Not without good reason has a reissue of the distinguished Dutch historian J. J. Woltjer’s most important essays on the subject been titled “Between War of Independence and Civil War.”31 A good example of this approach is Henk van Nierop’s Het verraad van het Noorderkwartier, which scrutinizes episodes from the revolt in North Holland in the early 1570s.32 From the local inhabitants’ point of view, Van Nierop argues, the conflict brought not liberation, but terror and insecurity; Spanish and rebel troops alike were seen as threats to good order, livelihood, and law. At best, the revolt was something to be survived whatever its outcome, which was far from clear in the 1570s. The inchoate and turbulent nature of the war is accentuated in K. W. Swart’s study of William the Silent’s performance as leader of the revolt. Despite his subsequent status as the heroic father of his country, William of Orange was not uniformly successful as the commander of the rebellion: he made bad decisions, had few battlefield victories, cultivated (at best) unreliable allies abroad, and was growing increasingly unpopular by the time of his assassination in 1584. He also failed to keep the rebel coalition intact, arguably contributing to the permanent splitting of the original seventeen provinces of the Netherlands.33
Jonathan Israel, however, contends in his survey of the Dutch Republic that the seeds of separation existed long before the revolt. Rejecting the scholarly consensus that has prevailed since the Second World War, Israel argues that the seven northern provinces, especially Holland, were in fact culturally, economically, and politically distinct from the ten southern provinces long before the war with Spain actually broke out; the war simply made actual an already latent disconnection. These provinces had always been marginalized under the southern-oriented Burgundian-Habsburg regime, and the revolt acted as a midwife to an independent northern state.34 Not all historians subscribe to this interpretation, however. Hugo de Schepper has posited the emergence of a modest but unambiguous national feeling in the Netherlands by the 1500s.35 H. G. Koenigsberger’s study of the parliamentary history of the late medieval and early modern Low Countries assumes at the very least a fundamental constitutional unity of all the provinces before the revolt.36 And C. Rooze-Stouthamer’s seminal research on the Reformation in Zeeland makes it abundantly clear that the culture and economy of this “northern” province was at least as heavily influenced by Flanders and Brabant as it was by Holland.37 Perhaps it is the distinctiveness of the sixteenth-century province of Holland—its economic dynamism in particular—that tends to lead to its conflation with the entire north. “Hollandocentrism” has been a common enough phenomenon in the historiography of the Netherlands. More research on the other six northern provinces is necessary before claims can be made about the region’s innate separateness.
The last major synthetic treatment of the entire revolt of the Netherlands was Geoffrey Parker’s The Dutch Revolt, which first appeared in 1977. Since this landmark study, historians have concentrated on specific aspects of the revolt itself, especially its origins and roots. Generally, they ascribe primarily political causes to the conflict, specifically the efforts by the Habsburg government to impose greater central authority on lands long accustomed to local autonomies and privileges. It was impossible, however, to disentangle the political from the religious in the sixteenth century, and the Reformation made the conflict sharper, bloodier, and more protracted. One of the rebels’ main objections to the central government was its continuing efforts to suppress Protestant heresy. Aline Goosens’s two-volume study of the Inquisition in the southern Netherlands provides the latest interpretation of the subject.38 She credits Charles V as the primary founder of this judicial apparatus, which reached the height of its activities between 1540 and 1570. The office functioned chiefly as an arm of civil rather than ecclesiastical power, Goosens argues; the government viewed it as a means both to squelch dissent and to bolster central authority and the cohesion of the state. She also makes tentative calculations about the number of victims of the Inquisition in the southern provinces during Charles V’s reign: nearly 1,500 people were executed out of 4,000 to 8,000 investigated.39 A parallel study of the Inquisition’s impact on the northern provinces would provide a complete picture of the suppression of religious dissent in the entire Low Countries.
In her study, Goosens also draws comparisons with Inquisitions in other lands, joining a welcome trend in the historiography of the early modern Netherlands: the growing effort to place the Low Countries in a wider European context.40 This comparative approach is gaining ground; Martin van Gelderen, for example, has examined the ideology of the revolt within the framework of the general European tradition of political thought.41 An increasing number of scholars have studied the revolt in the Netherlands with an eye to contemporary events in the rest of the continent, especially the region’s immediate neighbors, France and the Holy Roman Empire. The parallels between the revolt against Spain and the French civil wars are evident enough: a political contest between central and local powers, exacerbated by militant sectarianism that deeply affected the international politics of the day. A conference volume on the revolt of the Netherlands and the French civil wars, bringing together essays on the subject by a number of leading historians, makes tentative comparisons between the two conflicts.42 Among other things, the nature of sectarian violence contrasted in both cases: in France a deeper anti-Huguenot popular backlash took place, while in the Netherlands most Catholic reaction tended to remain state-controlled. Also, an important distinction between the two crowns was that while the French monarchy was weaker than the Spanish, it ruled over a more unitary state, while the Spanish king, though more powerful, presided over a composite empire far greater than just the Low Countries.43 Thus, Dutch Protestants could win independence, while French Huguenots could gain, at best, toleration.
The Netherlands had a complicated relationship with its neighbor to the east, the Holy Roman Empire. With the establishment of the Burgundian Circle of 1548, the Low Countries detached themselves from direct imperial jurisdiction, but the influence of the German territories remained strong. Both Habsburg and rebel alike looked to the east for support and aid. Emden in East Friesland became a haven for Netherlandish Calvinism in exile; its printing presses served the Reformed cause and it was here that the first blueprints of the Dutch Reformed Church were drawn up.44 Monique Weis’s examination of the diplomatic correspondence between the Habsburg government in Brussels and the empire underscores Philip II’s desire to be on good terms with his imperial neighbors—not least because the Spanish Road ran through their lands to bring much-needed troops to the Netherlands.45 Johannes Arndt’s important study of the empire during the Revolt of the Netherlands confirms how dependent the rebels were on the German hinterland, especially William of Orange, who desperately sought aid from the Protestant princes there.46 Likewise the Calvinists could rely on an elaborate network of Protestant institutions within the empire (universities, printing presses) to help them in their efforts. German presses were especially adept at promoting the “black legend” of Spanish cruelty and tyranny to the European public. One of the more remarkable outcomes of the revolt, Arndt notes, was the emergence of a new state, the Dutch Republic, that in constitutional terms closely resembled the Holy Roman Empire: a decentralized confederation of officially sovereign territories.47 Much more research needs to be done on Netherlandish-imperial relations in the early modern period; for example, the bishopric of Münster alone deserves examination for its role in Netherlandish political and religious history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In many respects, of course, the state with which the Low Countries found themselves most entangled in this period was Spain, whose king also happened to be their sovereign. Geoffrey Parker has done much to remind us that the revolt was also a Spanish event, one of a number of crises Philip II faced during his long reign. In his study of Philip’s grand strategy, Parker places the revolt squarely in the context of the Spanish king’s many other preoccupations with the Turks, with England, and with his global empire.48 Religious intransigence and missteps in policy, Parker argues, cost Philip the northern part of the Low Countries. From a less monarchical perspective, Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez examines how Spanish literary culture viewed the early modern Netherlands. The image of the Netherlanders that developed in Spain during the revolt was one of heretics and traitors, stubborn, arrogant, and greedy.49 Image and self-image intertwined; Spanish soldiery, by contrast, fought nobly for king and church. The Netherlands became a foil by which the Spanish could congratulate themselves on their superiority, and the Spanish would serve the same function for the rebels.
The placing of the early modern Netherlands within the greater European historiographical context is a welcome development that adds perspective and nuance to the interpretation of a complicated era. Many of the trends in the historiography of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlands reflect those of scholars of other European lands: the Reformation in the cities, the problem of religious coexistence, local studies, narrative and microhistory, the revaluation of early modern Catholicism, the construction of confessional and national identities, and the growing exploration in comparative history. To be sure, there are still gaps in the literature. The iconoclastic fury of 1566, for example, still awaits a definitive treatment. There is still no detailed, scholarly, comprehensive biography of William of Orange, or, for that matter, of his successor Maurice of Nassau. Further research into the Netherlands’ relationships (political, economic, and cultural) with the lands of the Holy Roman Empire will also bear significant fruit. More local studies of revolt and reformation are needed, especially outside the core provinces of Holland, Flanders, and Brabant. The Arminian controversy that rocked the Dutch Reformed Church in the 1610s—sparking the most serious religious violence in the Republic’s history—would benefit from a comprehensive examination. And the whole question of nascent national identity in this period, whether northern or southern, deserves further scrutiny. The history of the early modern Netherlands remains a rich vein to be tapped; thanks to the efforts of many scholars, it has permanently joined the historiographic mainstream.
Bibliography
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
Centre for Dutch Religious History at the Free University of Amsterdam: www.relic-vu.nl
Historisch Huis: www.historischhuis.nl
University of Leiden Library: www.dutchrevolt.leidenuniv.nl
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