Abstract
Reviewed by: Jaap Geraerts, University College London, UK
In her Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age Christine Kooi sets out to examine the relationships between Catholics and Calvinists, and the form of religious tolerance (or co-existence) that was prevalent in Holland, the most important and most religiously plural province of the Dutch Republic. She firmly positions herself in the camp of historians who reject the perspective of intellectual historians (analysing the ‘advance’ of tolerance through the examination of the writings of enlightened philosophes), and instead study the practice of religious co-existence by looking at the everyday interactions between people of different faiths. Moreover, Kooi moves away from the older historiography which tended to emphasize the antagonism between various confessions by stressing that at many levels friendly interaction between members of different confessions was the norm, and not the exception.
The analysis of the interaction between Catholics and Protestants is informed by a conceptual model which makes a distinction between various spaces –namely the confessional, civic and private spaces. The first of these spaces was characterized by fierce antagonism between the Calvinist and the Catholic Church, whereas the civic space mostly consisted of friendly interaction between these religious communities. On a personal and individual level (the private space),the relationships between Catholics and Calvinists were even more affable than in the civic space, showing the remarkable degree to which people of different faiths peacefully interacted with each other on a daily basis. Even though Kooi rightly asserts that in the civic and private spaces religious differences sometimes did lead to conflicts, she concludes that peaceful co-existence was the norm, and that religious antagonism was largely confined to the sphere of rhetoric and polemic.
The structure of the book largely corresponds to this spatial model, and the various chapters deal with the interaction between Calvinists and Catholics in the various spaces. The first chapter introduces the ‘religious regime’ of the Dutch Republic and relates this to the particular political structure of the Dutch Republic, and in the second chapter the ‘confessional space’ is analysed. In this space the churches, mostly via their clergymen, competed with each other and were keen to attack and denounce their confessional rivals. The third and fifth chapters examine the relationships between Calvinists and Catholics in the civic and the private spaces, whereas the fourth chapter covers both of these spaces by studying the phenomenon of conversions.
In her study on the Arnoldus Buchelius, Judith Pollmann has made clear that individuals could be denouncing other confessions while at the same time enjoying friendship with members of exactly these rival confessions, and by employing a spatial distinction Kooi manages to show how confessional antagonism could exist next to peaceful co-existence in Dutch society at large. However, in some cases a somewhat more profound analysis could perhaps have been warranted: in the interesting chapter on conversions, for instance, one wonders how often these conversions occurred and who actually converted (e.g. what was the gender of the converts, the marital status, etc.). The same critique applies to the fifth chapter, in which personal relationships between Catholics and Protestants are examined. For although the examples Kooi gives are interesting and noteworthy, it remains unclear how often certain forms of interaction (e.g. mixed marriages, visiting services in rival churches, etc.) took place and how typical they were for relationships between Catholics and Calvinists. Although Judith Pollmann has stressed the difficulties of working with consistorial records in her article ‘Off the Record: Problems in the Quantification of Calvinist Church Discipline’ (Sixteenth Century Journal 33(2) (2002) 423–38), considering the fact that Kooi went through these records of various cities in Holland, the interaction between members of these confessions could have been mapped in more detail, and, for instance by discerning patterns (if there are any), she could have provided more insight into which forms of interconfessional interaction were common and which were not.
In the end, by employing this spatial model, Kooi offers a new way to look at and to examine the interaction between different confessions in the Dutch Republic. Written in a clear and elegant way, the book can serve as a good introduction to newcomers in this field, while also providing much of interest to more advanced students and scholars. Hopefully the book will inspire historians to examine similar topics in other, less well-studied parts of the Dutch Republic.