Part III
6
Erin Lambert
I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.
Psalm 2:8
Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself… Blessed are the men whose strength is in thee, and in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
Psalm 84:1 and 5
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
Psalm 137:41
For many sixteenth-century Christians, the words of these psalms had particular resonance. As confessional conflicts mounted in the middle decades of the century, growing numbers of Europeans found themselves in danger when their understanding of Christianity differed from their rulers’. While some chose to conform and others died for their faith, thousands became exiles.2 They left behind home, family, and work, and took to the roads and seas in search of a place where they might safely practice their faith. We find evidence of the presence of religious exiles in cities scattered throughout Europe: Geneva, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Emden, London, and many others.3 No matter where they found themselves, they faced the challenge of beginning new lives and building communities in lands that were not their own.
The sound of psalm-singing was a thread that connected many of these experiences of exile. A young refugee who arrived in Strasbourg from the Low Countries around 1545, for example, wrote that he wept when he first heard the exiles there singing in the vernacular.4 Listening to many voices raised together in his own language brought to a strange place the sounds of the home to which he could not return. Those voices also provided a sign that he had found the company of friends who shared his faith as well as his loss. For others, the singing of psalms made audible their solidarity in the face of hostile circumstances. Enduring persecution in France, Huguenots sang together in secretive gatherings even if it was too dangerous to meet with a preacher.5 For them, the sound of communal song signified resistance: in the midst of persecution, they raised their voices as one. And for Jan Utenhove (1516–66), a Dutch exile in London, the Psalms similarly provided proof that God had the power to overcome any enemy that might threaten the faithful. Singing or listening to the Psalms, he wrote, was a comfort to those lost in the woods or at sea.6 His people had been expelled from their fatherland, but no matter where they went, they might sing the words that comforted David in his suffering.7 If they listened carefully, they would find assurance that God would one day gather his followers from all corners of the earth.8
In songs sung in a foreign land, Utenhove found a means of building a community with his fellow exiles in London.9 He therefore translated many of the Psalms into Dutch to meet the needs of the growing numbers of refugees from the Low Countries who came to the city during the reign of Edward VI. Like Utenhove, many of them had left their homes on the continent as the persecution of evangelicals intensified under the rule of Charles V.10 They joined an established community of Dutch immigrants who had come to England in search of economic opportunity.11 In London, the foreigners became known as the Stranger church, a name that articulated their place in the city and, as we shall see, evoked their complex relationship with the wider world. In 1550, their community gained official recognition as Edward issued letters patent, which granted to the Stranger church the nave of the abandoned monastery of Austin Friars.12 There, they were permitted to worship in their native language and to develop their own liturgy. Each week, members of the community gathered to listen to sermons and sing the Psalms from the metrical psalters that Utenhove prepared for them.13
Through an examination of the sounds of the liturgy and psalm-singing, this essay explores the ways in which the Strangers carved out a place for themselves in London.14 As such, it joins a growing body of scholarship attuned to the importance of song and aurality in the course of the Reformation and in the formation of early modern communities more broadly.15 As a number of scholars have shown, the sense of hearing was fundamental to the dissemination of information in the early modern period. Sixteenth-century communities were filled with the sound of gossip, and many heard the news from a town crier as merchants’ voices advertised their wares in the marketplace.16 In a world of limited literacy, reading often took place aloud.17 As a result, for many early modern Europeans, texts were conceived not only as printed or written objects, but as sound. For scholars, sermons, liturgies, broadsheets, proclamations, and other sources that evoke such acts of speech can provide access to that aural world. So too can records of acts of song. In a society in which oral communication was essential, song had particular significance. The sound of singing voices accompanied work and provided entertainment at home. In church, song had long offered praise and instruction. In the sixteenth century, it took on other purposes as well: the sound of song came to convey the differences between one form of Christianity and another, as Utenhove recognised when he began to translate the Psalms in the early 1550s.18
Robin Leaver has investigated the evolution of Utenhove’s psalters, their role in the Strangers’ weekly worship, and their relationship with the repertory of English liturgies and metrical psalms that took shape even as the Strangers built their community in London.19 This essay takes a different approach: it attends to the sensory experiences evoked by the psalters as physical objects, and it examines the Strangers’ psalm-singing in concert with the gestures, spoken words, and material culture of the liturgy. In this way, it also explores how we might reconstruct sensory experiences in the absence of individuals’ accounts of them_ prescriptive texts such as psalters, liturgies, and theological treatises are virtually the only surviving sources from the Edwardian Stranger community.20 Through these sources, this essay re-envisions the Strangers’ acts of singing and listening as practices of place-making and community-building. After attending to the ways in which the Stranger community and its psalmody were shaped by exile, I explore the use of psalms, spoken words, and liturgical spaces as modes of boundary-making in the Strangers’ discipline. Through the sound of many voices raised together as one, a group of individuals became a community and claimed their London church as a place of their own, and more specifically, as the place of the elect. Against this background, the sonic and material aspects of the Lord’s Supper emerge as ways of envisioning the exiles’ true home in heaven. In the face of growing uncertainty in the 1550s, sound united the Stranger church on a shared path through the world. And ultimately, this essay suggests, the sound of the Strangers’ worship redefined ‘exile’ and ‘home’ themselves.
Community in exile
The London Stranger community was, by its nature, shaped by migration. By the time the community received its charter, the experience of exile was familiar to growing numbers of Reformed Christians. The challenges of exile, for example, guided John Calvin’s conception of the true Christian church. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), Calvin outlined a Christian community that might take shape no matter where the faithful found themselves; that fellowship was to be defined by the true preaching of the Word and the administration of the Sacraments.21 The Christian community, in other words, was bound by no earthly geography. It could be constructed in any place, and it might be rebuilt again and again, no matter how many times its members were displaced or dispersed.
Such transience was familiar to the leaders of the Stranger church, who had already endured multiple migrations before their arrival in England. Like others who fled or were expelled from their homes, they faced an ever-shifting geography with little other than word of mouth to guide them. A purported safe haven might thus prove dangerous; a place that had provided temporary refuge might at any time become hostile.22 As a result, as the Strangers’ leaders had found, exile was not simply a single journey from home to a strange place, but an on-going migration. Years of travel on the continent shaped their approach to their newfound community in London. Much like Calvin, Johannes a Lasco (1499–1560), who was named the superintendent of the London exiles, defined the church as a fellowship of the elect called together from throughout the earth, and marked by the preaching of the Word and the enactment of the sacraments.23 In London, he began to write an ordinance for the Stranger church, which put this understanding of Christianity into practice.24 At the outset, Lasco identified devotion and sensory experiences as central elements of the life of the true Christian community, which was to take shape through the sound of preaching and the gestures of the liturgy.
Lasco suggested that those practices were also to be of use to other Christians facing the challenge of building a community anew. He intended his Latin liturgy, which he completed some time before it appeared in print in 1555, to serve as a model for exilic communities throughout Europe, even as it guided the Strangers’ own practices.25 In order to meet the day-to-day needs of the London congregation, one of the ministers, Marten Micron (1523–1559), produced a vernacular liturgy based on Lasco’s text.26 For all who gathered in Austin Friars, the liturgy was to provide a common bond. Over the course of time, its rhythms were to become familiar, structuring each week and guiding the course of each member’s life from baptism to burial. Through the words, sounds, and gestures of the liturgy, lives that had been redefined by exile were to find new patterns, and individuals with a range of experiences were to become a tight-knit community.
The liturgies of Micron and Lasco confirm that the Psalms were to play a vital role in that community: the church order incorporated congregational song into each Sunday’s service and called for psalm-singing to mark key occasions in the Christian’s life, such as baptism and marriage.27 Utenhove’s psalm settings thus complemented Lasco and Micron’s work, providing evidence of the aural culture of the Stranger community. Like the Strangers’ other liturgical, devotional, and theological texts, Utenhove’s psalters were published by printers who were themselves members of the community.28 Although no copies of his first editions are extant, references indicate that Utenhove’s initial collections, consisting of ten and twenty-five metrical psalms respectively, appeared in 1551.29 The earliest of his surviving psalm publications, a pamphlet containing settings of Psalms 23, 101, 115, and 128, appeared in 1552.30
While the texts of Lasco and Micron reveal much about the Strangers’ ecclesiology, the physical attributes of Utenhove’s pamphlet and the sounds it evokes carry us more deeply into the community’s sense of its place in the world. His edition of four psalms was a visual and tactile reminder of its readers’ status as exiles. Like Lasco and Micron’s theological texts, and like the psalters that Utenhove later published, that pamphlet was printed in a small octavo format. As Utenhove noted in one of his subsequent publications, this consistent size made it possible to bind all of the texts that a Christian needed into a single volume.31 In this light, it is notable that the sole surviving copy of Utenhove’s pamphlet is bound together with Micron’s treatise on the Eucharist and a copy of the catechism. The small size of the volume ensured that no matter where its reader went, all that was necessary for the practice of his or her faith might be held in the palm of the hand.32 In a community shaped by migration, the Strangers’ books emphasised portability. They could be hidden or carried easily in a pocket. The Strangers’ books, in other words, themselves provided sensory evidence of the uncertainty that exiles faced: at any moment, one might endure another expulsion and a new journey.
At the same time, those books, through which the Strangers might continue their devotions even if they were forced to migrate once more, also signified the endurance of their faith despite any forces that might disrupt it. The familiar pages of a psalter or the catechism might be turned in any place, even if one found oneself in a new or hostile territory. Thus, even as the Strangers’ books were markers of transience, they also fostered the formation of enduring communal bonds. Sung in unison, Utenhove’s psalm settings joined together many different voices: male and female, young and old. Guided by melody and rhythm, they declaimed the text together as one, and the sound of their song incorporated diverse individuals into a single community. For new arrivals, adding one’s voice to the chorus built and strengthened ties to that fellowship.33 Like a young exile in Strasbourg, Utenhove recognised that in a world in which much was uncertain, the sound of many voices joined together provided assurance that one was not alone.
For listeners attuned to the musical culture of the sixteenth-century Low Countries, psalm-singing might also bring familiarity to a strange place. In some of his psalm-settings, Utenhove adapted texts from the Souterliedekens, a Dutch psalter first published in 1540 and widely used among evangelicals in the early years of reform in the Low Countries.34 For the Strangers, to whom the Souterliedekens were likely familiar, Utenhove’s metrical psalms would have called to mind memories of their communities on the continent. By singing the psalms together in their native language, the Strangers’ raised voices made their new church of Austin Friars sound more like their former homes. At the same time, the melodies Utenhove employed in many of his psalm settings emphasised his community’s commonality with other exilic congregations. In some cases, he chose to use melodies that had become familiar to him in Strasbourg; in later translations, he increasingly drew upon the work of Clément Marot, basing metrical patterns on the French psalter or incorporating its melodies.35 Utenhove’s 1552 edition of four psalms, for example, included three melodies drawn from Strasbourg psalters and one from Geneva.36 Musical borrowings, as a result, evoked the Stranger congregation’s place within a broader network of exilic communities: even if members found themselves in search of a safe haven on the continent, they might find much that was familiar.
As the Strangers gathered together in Austin Friars, their metrical psalms thus provided multiple clues to the nature of their community. As material objects, the psalters from which they sang underscored both uncertainty and endurance. The melodies that resonated in the nave were reminders of what they had lost, even as they brought familiarity to a new place. The sound of many voices singing together made evident the bonds that they were forging together in London, even as their psalters ensured that they could build a community anew no matter where they might travel. The Strangers’ psalters, as a result, reveal the centrality of exile to their identity. So too, their metrical psalms can attune us to the ways in which the sensory experience of devotion was interconnected with the formation of a community.
Hearing boundaries
The sounds and gestures of the Strangers’ liturgy enable us to reconstruct that process of community building. The ways in which the Strangers employed sensory experiences to articulate their community’s boundaries and mark the individual’s membership within their fellowship emerge in instructions for the use of the liturgical space of Austin Friars. Throughout Micron’s vernacular liturgy, rituals at each stage of the Christian’s life employ the physical orientation of one member to others in order to emphasise passages in and out of the community. When children were baptised into the Stranger church, for example, their parents stood with them in the centre of the congregation so that the entire community might witness their introduction.37 Similarly, during a funeral, the congregation was instructed to surround the body that was to be buried.38 At key moments in the Christian life, therefore, membership in the community was articulated by the individual’s orientation to the congregation, signifying inclusion at baptism and departure at the graveside. The actions of the liturgy made movement across the community’s boundaries visible.
Such spatial relationships were especially vital to the Strangers’ practice of discipline, which was of particular importance to the life of the community. As in other Reformed communities, the Strangers demarcated the boundaries between their community and the world at large.39 Only those who lived in accordance with the Strangers’ discipline, for example, were permitted to be married or receive the Lord’s Supper in Austin Friars. The four disciplinary rituals included in Micron’s vernacular liturgy thus outlined processes of excommunication and reconciliation for those who transgressed the Stranger community’s moral boundaries. The first was a private procedure to be conducted in the presence of the ministers and elders, through which the Strangers’ leaders sought to educate members about the nature of their transgressions and entreated them to reconcile themselves with the community. For those whose offense had affected the entire congregation, or who could not be brought back into the fold through these private admonitions, the liturgy also included three public rituals: a ceremony of penitence, a service in which the unrepentant were excommunicated, and a ritual to welcome the repentant back to the community.40
Through sight and sound, each of those public liturgies emphasised the interaction of the penitent, the minister, and the congregation within the liturgical space of Austin Friars. In the first of the public rituals, members who committed an offense against the community and subsequently demonstrated heartfelt repentance to the elders were to be reconciled with their congregation. As the fallen member expressed remorse to the whole community, he or she stood in sight of the entire congregation. The preacher stood with the repentant member in the centre, and he reminded all present that the forgiveness of a single sinner demonstrated that all Christians stood upon the shoulders of Christ, and all were members of his flock.41 The preacher’s words implied that Christ, too, was spiritually present within their gathering. After a series of prayers of thanks for God’s forgiveness, the penitent reaffirmed his or her submission to the community’s discipline, and one of the leaders pronounced absolution ‘not only on earth, but also in heaven’.42 In combination with his spoken words, the Strangers’ arrangement within liturgical space emphasised the individual’s continued membership in the community. For the penitent, being surrounded by the community was proof of the potential for forgiveness, as well a reminder of the moral standards to which members were expected to conform.
Standing and speaking together in Austin Friars, the Strangers made visible and audible the ties that bound their community in London. As the preacher’s reference to forgiveness in heaven and on earth hints, their gathering within that space also signified their status as the elect who would one day be assembled at the right hand of Christ. In the liturgy of excommunication, through which those who refused to repent were expelled from the congregation, Micron used the image of this heavenly fellowship to describe both the formation and fragmentation of the Christian community on earth. Through excommunication, the impenitent sinner was utterly cast off from the congregation, in a decision taken by the full group of elders and deacons. Once again, the liturgy emphasised the close bonds that the Strangers had built through the practice of discipline in London. To remove a member from the community, Micron stated, was to cut off a piece of the living body of Christ.43 By speaking the words of prayers and admonitions, the preacher amputated a rotten limb from the body of the faithful.44 The excommunicated member faced the damnation of both body and soul, and was shut out of the eternal life promised to the Christian community. The ritual of excommunication further marked the continuity of the earthly and heavenly communities that the penitential liturgy had evoked; what was bound and unbound on earth, the liturgy repeatedly pronounced, was joined and severed in heaven.45
The sounds and gestures of the liturgy suggested, therefore, that the Strangers’ fellowship was to be eternal. Implicitly, the Strangers’ liturgy also recognised Austin Friars as a place belonging to a community of true Christians alone. Even though their congregation’s members had lost their homelands, they had found their way to the place of the elect. In the ceremony through which they welcomed a reformed excommunicant back to the congregation, the Strangers articulated understandings of departure and return that were not oriented to any earthly place, but instead, to that elect fellowship itself. Although the excommunicant had been severed from the community like a diseased limb, the preacher reminded his congregation, the ritual incorporated the repentant back into the body that was already whole in heaven. The penitent swore an oath of contrition, and the preacher pronounced that because the repentant member visibly returned to the community on earth, he was a member of that heavenly community in the sight of God.46 Echoing the ritual of excommunication, the preacher once again reminded the congregation that what Christians bound on earth, they also built in heaven; sin was thus forgiven both in their earthly community and in its heavenly counterpart.47
Finally, as they did at the close of every liturgical occasion, the congregation raised their voices together. To mark the penitent’s return to the fold, they sang the words of Psalm 103 – the same psalm that the liturgy called for them to sing beside the graves of the dead:
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits … who satisfies you with good as long as you live, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. …As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.48
The words of the psalm are filled with promises of forgiveness and images of renewal appropriate to the ritual of reconciliation. The melody to which the Strangers sang those words, however, recalled a different story: Utenhove paired the words of Psalm 103 with a melody borrowed from a setting of Psalm 137 familiar in exilic communities on the continent.49 The borrowed melody bore with it connotations of lament: Psalm 137 expressed the Israelites’ sorrow beside the rivers of Babylon. As the Strangers welcomed a member back to their gathering, their raised voices thus blended the text’s promise of return and renewal with a lament for a lost homeland. The words of the psalm were placed in tension with its musical setting, so that the aural experience of hearing its melody undercut its celebratory text. Sung and heard in the context of the ritual of reconciliation, the psalm setting transformed exile’s meaning: true exile, the liturgy as a whole implied, was separation from the elect on earth and in heaven. At the same time, as the penitent returned to the community of the elect, the sound of the congregation’s song implied their commonality with the wandering Israelites, who remained under God’s protection even in their captivity. As long as they were among those who shared their faith, the Strangers were home.
Through the sound of psalm-singing and their orientation to liturgical space, the Strangers claimed Austin Friars as the place of the elect and defined departure and return in relation to that community itself. In this light, exile was not defined by the loss of an earthly place; instead, expulsion was recast as separation from one’s fellows, and homecoming was in reunion with them. Although each of the Strangers had left his or her home behind, the sights and sounds of the liturgy cast their newly founded congregation as the true place of the faithful.
Envisioning heaven
As sung and spoken words repeatedly called upon the congregation to look to a future in heaven, the disciplinary liturgies also emphasised the Strangers’ shared presence in the exilic space of Austin Friars as a mode of imagining a place far beyond it. In the Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper that the Strangers practiced in London, objects and sounds similarly enacted a process of picturing through which they envisioned the heavenly community of the elect. As the Liturgy of the Supper invoked the senses of hearing, sight, touch, and implicitly, taste, it constructed an image of the Stranger community’s ultimate home. As Micron noted, the Eucharistic liturgy was a public profession of the Strangers’ pledge to follow the example of Christ, and it made the nature of their faith visible to any who encountered them. In advance of the day on which they received the Supper as members of that fellowship, each person made a public confession of his or her faith to the ministers and elders. When all who were thus prepared to receive the Supper had assembled, the minister explained the significance of their membership in that community. Those who were prepared to receive the Supper, he reminded them, were members of a community ‘in which [God’s] voice was openly heard in the Gospel of Christ’.50 One who was truly a Christian, and fortunate enough to live in a place where a true Christian community was gathered, was to devote him- or herself fully to that community. Those who received the Supper in Austin Friars, then, had been called to live as Strangers in the name of Christ.51
Like the disciplinary rituals, the Supper emphasised the community’s distinctness from the wider world by evoking multiple sensory experiences. With the entire community gathered together in Austin Friars, the congregation’s leaders prepared an ordinary table for the Supper, doing away with altars, candles, bells, and vestments.52 The setting of the Supper marked the Strangers’ separation from the practices of the traditional church. Instead of a space perfumed by incense, lit by candles, and resonating with the sound of bells, the Strangers’ Supper was structured by everyday objects and the sound of human voices speaking and singing in the vernacular. The replacement of an altar with a table was among the most striking departures from the traditional liturgy, and it became a visual sign of the Stranger community’s bonds.53 To gather at a table for food and drink, Micron explained, was a universal sign of peace and unity. As the Strangers’ table imitated that of the Apostles at the Last Supper, they bore witness to the love that bound their community and recognised that their fellowship foreshadowed the assembly of the elect in heaven.54 Their gathering in Austin Friars, in other words, was intended to make visible a community apart from all others, just as the disciplinary liturgies had done. In order to define that community’s separation from the world around them, Micron’s instructions for the Supper further emphasised the visual symbolism of everyday objects – things in keeping with the Strangers’ rejection of idolatry, but which might also be gathered from an ordinary home. The liturgy called for the table to be covered with a linen cloth. In the middle were placed four goblets and three tin plates, the largest of which held ordinary white bread.55 As with Utenhove’s pocket-sized psalters, the liturgy focused not on any particular location or specialised ritual objects, but on items that could be assembled in any place that a few of the faithful might gather. No matter where they travelled, the practice of the Supper remained constant – and so too might the earthly community of the elect.
The Supper formally began as the ministers, elders, and deacons were seated around the table and invoked God’s presence among their gathering. The leaders passed plates of bread and cups of wine from one to the next, their gestures underscoring the bonds among them as they ate and drank.56 In turn, members of the congregation took their place at the table, first men and then women, until all had received the Supper. As they gathered around that table, the Strangers experienced a constant stream of sound. From the pulpit, the preacher’s voice resounded over their gathering, reminding them once more of the significance of their fellowship and the sacrament they were to receive. So too, he called upon God to look down upon them from heaven.57 As the Strangers ate the bread that signified the body of Christ, their minister read to them from the book of John – words that described Christ as the bread of heaven that was to feed the faithful, and which promised mansions for those who followed God’s commandments.58 As they looked around the table at one another, the preacher’s voice reminded them, they were to see the community of the elect that was to be gathered in heaven beside Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the fellowship that was to live in those mansions.59
Through the actions of the Supper, Micron’s liturgy continued, the faithful themselves became the heavenly bread, the body of Christ. As they tasted the bread and listened to their preacher, the Strangers were to consider the process of the elect community’s formation. Like a loaf of bread, the true Christian community could be made only through the milling and mixing of many disparate members:
Just as no bread can be made unless many grains are gathered together and broken with the mill, so let us think that we cannot be a bread of the Lord unless we are gathered together as members of a body under the head of Christ … Just as one must purify the milled grains to have pure bread, so must we also sift out the coarse grit through the use of Christian discipline, if we wish to be a pure bread in the sight of Christ.60
Through the practice of discipline and the hearing of the Word, the Strangers’ souls were to be purified and unified like those grains, and kneaded and shaped until they became more like Christ:
Just as the broken and purified grains must be unified in a dough with water in order to make bread of them, so must we have life-giving water poured into us in order to be a bread of God … Just as the dough must be worked to the form of bread, and placed in a fiery oven to be baked, so must we also be worked to the image of Christ our whole lives long, so that his deeds may be seen more and more in us each day.61
As the Strangers ate together around the table, the words they heard thus transformed the physical objects of the Supper into images of the Christian life. By seeing, hearing, and tasting, they were to mould themselves into the bread of heaven – the body of Christ and the fellowship of the elect.
Finally, at the conclusion of the Supper, the Strangers raised their voices to claim heaven as the true home of those whose lives had been so moulded. As they prepared to leave the shelter of Austin Friars for the busy streets of London, they sang Psalm 23’s promises of a place beside still waters, a table laden with food, protection even unto death, and an eternal dwelling place in God’s house.62 Whether around the table or as they made their way through the world, their voices gave thanks for God’s presence among them and made the strength of their community audible. As with the disciplinary liturgies, ritual gestures and the sound of human voices claimed Austin Friars as the Strangers’ own. Most importantly, however, the acts of passing a plate, eating bread, and listening to a preacher’s voice cast the congregation gathered around the table as the people of heaven. For individuals who had lost so much that was familiar, their gathering around a table signified that those whose voices were joined together in Austin Friars were forever a community, bound together as fundamentally as the particles of flour in their bread, no matter what befell them on earth.
Conclusion
The Strangers’ understanding of their community sheds new light on the well-known migration on which they embarked in 1553, when England became unsafe for evangelicals after the accession of Mary I.63 By the time of Edward’s death, the number of Dutch exiles in London had grown so large that not all could travel together. Their community, as a result, had to be divided. While hundreds of Strangers remained in England, a smaller group of 175 sailed for Denmark in September 1553. Soon, they too were separated as a storm blew them off course and onto the shores of Norway. When the group reached their destination in Denmark weeks later, they immediately came into conflict with local Lutheran leaders over their Eucharistic theology. The exiles were expelled and set sail once again. Lasco and Utenhove took one group to Emden, where the former had been instrumental to reforms during his earlier stay there. The others travelled to northern Germany and attempted to find refuge in Wismar, Lübeck, and Hamburg. Again and again, they refused to submit to local doctrines, and their efforts resulted in conflict and expulsion.
Finally, the Strangers were reunited in Emden in 1554, where they once again found a place of safety in which they could build their community anew. As the sounds and objects that structured their liturgy reveal, however, the particular location in which they established that community was ultimately of little importance. Throughout their journey, they had borne their liturgy and their psalters with them – objects that marked them as migrants, but also ensured that they carried all that they truly needed to practice their faith. No matter where they found themselves, the sound of voices singing the Psalms and reading the Word had the power to build a community and define a new space as their own. As they journeyed, those sounds provided assurance that heaven was the ultimate destination for the elect, no matter how much they might be forced to wander on earth.
In those psalms, we hear the anthem of the Strangers’ own exile. As they moved through the world, they sang in a place of their own making – indeed, a space carved out by the sound of song and the practice of their faith. The resonance of voices in an empty cloister and the sight of members gathered around a table defined Austin Friars as their own, and promised that no matter what befell them, they were forever bound to their true community. And ultimately, as the Strangers faced separation and were forced to leave yet another haven behind, those psalms promised them a home unlike any they could find on earth.
Raised together, their voices separate exile from any political geography, and they reshape our understanding of its objective. Those sounds demonstrate that exile entailed much more than travel from one place to another. Instead, the story of the Strangers’ expulsion was defined by what they carried with them. Exile, their liturgy and psalms reveal, entailed not only the loss of a home, but a continuous journey towards it – a journey endured with the familiar weight of a psalter in the hand and guided by practices that could make any place their own until they reached the true home of the elect in heaven. Most broadly, then, the sounds of the Strangers’ worship expose modes through which we can better understand the Reformation’s reshaping of sacred space. Singing together, they attune us not only to the physical settings of worship, but to the ways in which sacred spaces were imagined and enacted, seen and touched, and above all, heard.
Notes
1 These psalm quotations are selected from early editions of the Strangers’ metrical psalters. See Jan Utenhove, 25. Psalmen end andere ghesanghen diemen in de Duydtsche Ghemeynte te Londen, was ghebruyckende (Emden, 1557), 5–6, 34–35 and idem., Andere 26. psalme[n] Dauidis (Emden, 1559), 58. All biblical quotes in English are from the Revised Standard Version.
2 On conversion, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), chapter 10, and David M. Luebke et. al., eds., Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); on martyrdom, see Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
3 On exile in the Reformation, see Heiko A. Oberman, John Calvin and the Reformation of the Refugees, with an introduction by Peter A. Dykema (Geneva: Droz, 2009), Ole Peter Grell, Brethren in Christ: A Calvinist Network in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and most relevant to this chapter, Bernard Cottret, Terre d’exil: l’Angleterre et ses réfugiés français et wallons, de la Réforme à la revocation de l’édit de Nantes, 1550–1700 (Paris: Aubier, 1985), Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) and idem., Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
4 Alfred Erichson, ed., L’Église française de Strasbourg au seizième siècle d’aprés des documents inédits (Strasbourg: Librairie C.F. Schmidt, 1886), 21.
5 Barbara B. Diefendorf, ‘The Huguenot Psalter and the Faith of French Protestants in the Sixteenth Century’, in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis, ed. Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 42.
6 Jan Utenhove, Hondert Psalmen Dauids Mitsgaders het ghesangk Marie, t’ ghesangk Zacharie, t’ ghesangk Simeons, de thien Geboden, de artikels des Gheloofs, t’ ghebed des Heeren (London, 1561), 97v.
7 Ibid, 4v–5r.
8 Utenhove, Hondert Psalmen, 100r; see also Utenhove’s extensive list of the benefits of reading or singing the psalms, 3v–5v.
9 On psalmody in sixteenth–century England, see Robin A. Leaver, Goostly Psalms and Spirituall Songes: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535–1566 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
10 On the Reformation in the Low Countries, see Alastair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003). For a biography of Utenhove, see Fredrik Pijper, Jan Utenhove: Zijn Leven en Zijne Werken (Leiden: A.H. Adriani, 1883).
11 On the multiple reasons for migration in early modern Europe, see Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton, eds., From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2001).
12 Initially, the French and Dutch exile congregations shared Austin Friars, but they quickly outgrew the space and conflicted over its use. The French moved to a new space and left Austin Friars to the Dutch. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 36–37.
13 For an edition of the Strangers’ vernacular liturgy, see Marten Micron, De Christlicke Ordinancien der Nederlantscher Ghemeinten te Londen (1554), ed. with an introduction by W. F. Dankbaar, Kerkhistorische Studien VII (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956).
14 On the complexities of space and place, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977; repr., 2003).
15 On music’s role in a range of confessional experiences of the Reformation, see Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Alexander J. Fisher, Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580–1630 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); idem., Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Joseph Herl, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism_ Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Emilie K. M. Murphy, ‘Music and Catholic Culture in Post-Reformation Lancashire: Piety, Protest and Conversion’, British Catholic History 32 (2015): 492–525; Rebecca Wagner Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); and Jonathan Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites, and Identities (Farnham_ Ashgate, 2013).
16 Eric Wilson, ‘Plagues, Fairs and Street Cries: Sounding Out Society and Space in Early Modern London’, Modern Language Studies 25 (1995): 1–42.
17 Robert W. Scribner, ‘Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas’, in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 49–69. Also see Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
18 See above, n. 15, as well as Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 40–75.
19 Goostly Psalmes, especially chapters 3 and 5.
20 The only formal record of the daily life of the congregation before their Marian exile is a membership register; no consistory records survive. Apart from a few letters, which largely detail the interaction of the Strangers’ leaders with English reformers, printed texts provide the only sources for this period. Notably, many of these survive only in editions printed after the Strangers’ flight to the continent, and can only be presumed to record practices that were already in place in London. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 46.
21 John Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis, in Corpus Reformatorum_ Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, (Braunschweig: Schwetschke, 1864), 30: 4.1.9.
22 Lee Palmer Wandel, ‘Exile in the Reformation’, in Space and Self in Early Modern European Culture, ed. David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 202.
23 Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds., Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 2:559. For biographies of Lasco, see Henning P. Jürgens, Johannes a Lasco in Ostfriesland (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 2002), and Judith Becker, Gemeindeordnung and Kirchenzucht: Johannes a Lascos Kirchenordnung für London (1555) und die reformierte Konfessionsbildung (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
24 Although Lasco began to write the church order in London, it was not completed and published until 1555. See Michael S. Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church: John a Lasco and the Forma ac Ratio (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). On the French translations, see Leaver, Goostly Psalmes, 153–54. For Lasco’s text, see Forma ac ratio tota ecclesiastici ministerij, in peregrinorum, potissimum uero Germanorum Ecclesia instituta Londini in Anglia, per pientissimum principem Angliae [et]c (n.p.: n.d.); also in Joannis a Lasco Opera tam edita quam inedita duobus voluminibus comprehensa, ed. Abraham Kuyper, 2 vols. (Amsterdam_ Muller, 1866), 2:1–283.
25 Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church, 7.
26 Micron, Christlicke Ordinancien.
27 For a summary, see Leaver, Goostly Psalmes, 170–73.
28 On Dutch printers in London, see Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 84–96, as well as Elizabeth Evenden, ‘The Fleeing Dutchmen?: The Influence of Dutch Immigrants upon the Print Shop of John Day’, in John Foxe at Home and Abroad, ed. D. M. Loades, 63–78 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
29 Leaver, Goostly Psalmes, 160.
30 Jan Utenhove, [Psalmen 23, 101, 115, 128] (London, 1552).
31 Jan Utenhove, LXIIII Psalmen en[d] ander ghesangen, diemen in de Duytsche Ghemeynte te Londen was ghebruyckende (Emden: Gellius Ctematius, 1561), f. 1v.
32 Utenhove, [Psalmen 23, 101, 115, 128]; Martin Micron, Een claer bewijs, van het recht gebruyck des Nachtmaels Christi, ende wat men van de Misse houden sal (London, 1552); and idem., De cleyne catechismus, oft kinder leere, der Duytscher ghemeynte, die te Londen is (London, 1552). The Sammelband containing these three texts is held in the Special Collections of the library of the University of Amsterdam, OK 72–5.
33 On the power of congregational song, see Fisher, Music, Piety, and Propaganda, 32–34.
34 Leaver, Goostly Psalmes, 160 and 163. Utenhove’s sources have been a matter of debate. In addition to Leaver, see Samuel Jan Lenselink, De Nederlandse psalmberijmingen in de 16e eeuw van de Souterliedekens tot Datheen met hun voorgangers in Duitsland en Frankrijk (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1959). Lenselink’s attempts to cite specific songbooks as sources for Utenhove have increasingly come under scrutiny. For example, see Leaver, Goostly Psalmes, 163.
35 Leaver, Goostly Psalmes, 163.
36 Ibid., 168–69.
37 Micron, Christlicke Ordinancien, 73–74.
38 Ibid., 151–52.
39 Scholars have recently begun to rethink the role of discipline in Reformed communities. Most often, discipline is cast as a mechanism of social control, which created the austerity typically associated with the Reformed. See, for example, Raymond A. Mentzer, ed., Sin and the Calvinists: Morals, Control, and Consistory in the Reformed Tradition (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994). More recently, Heiko Oberman has suggested instead that discipline played a vital role in the construction of communal bonds. See John Calvin and the Reformation of the Refugees.
40 Micron, Christlicke Ordinancien, 112–40. On Lasco’s formulation of the Strangers’ discipline, see Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church, chapter 6.
41 Micron, Christlicke Ordinancien, 116–17.
42 Ibid., 121.
43 Ibid., 125.
44 Ibid., 127–28.
45 Ibid., 124.
46 Ibid., 134–35.
47 Ibid., 135.
48 Psalm 103:2, 5–7, 12; Micron, Christlicke Ordinancien, 135.
49 Like many other sixteenth-century songwriters, Utenhove used the process of contrafacture, in which a new text was applied to a pre-existing melody. As Rebecca Wagner Oettinger has demonstrated, the borrowed melody brought with it references to its original setting. See Music as Propaganda. On Dutch contrafacture more specifically, see Louis Peter Grijp, Het Nederlandse lied in de Gouden Eeuw: Het mechanisme van de contrafactuur (Amsterdam_ P.J. Meertens-Instituut, 1991).
50 Micron, Christlicke Ordinancien, 83.
51 Ibid., 83.
52 Ibid., 80.
53 On the shift from altar to table and the transformation of Reformed liturgical space, see Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 167.
54 Micron, Christlicke Ordinancien, 81.
55 Ibid., 95.
56 Ibid., 101.
57 Ibid., 96.
58 Micron indicates John 6 and 13–15. Ibid., 102.
59 Ibid., 103.
60 Ibid., 104. ‘… ghelyck gheen broot wesen can, dan doer veel granen t’samen vergadert ende met de moelen ghebroken: so laet ons ooc dincken, dat wy niet connen een broot des Heeren wesen … ghelyckmen de ghemalen granen suyueren moet om suyuer broot te hebben: so moeten wy ooc het grof gruys, doer t’ghebruyck der Christelicker straffen, wtseften, ist dat wye en suyuer broot in t’gesichte Christi willen wesen’.
61 Ibid., 104–105. ‘…gheylyckerwyse als de ghebroken ende ghesuyuerde granen in een deech met water vereenicht moeten wesen, om broot daer af te maken: also moeten wy, om een broot Gods te wesen, leuendichmakende water in ons ghegoten hebben…ghelyck dat deech gewrocht moet wesen tot een forme des broots, ende in een vierighen houen ghedaen, op dat het ghebacken werde, also moeten wy ooc ons gansche leuen lanck gewracht werden tot het voerbeelt Christi: so dat syn gedaente in ons daghelicx meer ende meer ghesien mach werden’.
62 Ibid., 105; for Utenhove’s psalm text, see LXIIII Psalmen, 7v.
63 For a primary account of that journey, see Jan Utenhove, Simplex et fidelis narratio de institvta ac demvm dissipata Belgarum, aliorumque peregrinarum in Anglia, Ecclesia: et potissimum de susceptis postreà illius nomine itineribus, in Bibliotheca Reformatoria Neerlandica, ed. S. Cramer and F. Pijper (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1912), 9:39–40. For scholarly studies, see Frederick A. Norwood, ‘The London Dutch Refugees in Search of a Home, 1553–1554’, The American Historical Review 58 (1952): 64–72 and Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism_ Six Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), 55–85, and most recently, Erin Lambert, Singing the Resurrection: Body, Community, and Belief in Reformation Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).