The Dutch Reformation is an exciting field of research that has captured the attention of scholars from both The Netherlands and abroad. The attraction may be the perceived uniqueness of the Dutch religious landscape in the early modern era, but scholars have argued more recently that whereas the Dutch situation was indeed unique, so was the situation in most European countries. Indeed, the belief that the Dutch Republic was exceptional stems largely from a Dutch self-congratulatory view of the tolerant nature of the Reformation in the Low Countries, a myth that Benjamin Kaplan, for one, has tried to deconstruct. In his Divided by faith: religious conflict and the practice of toleration in early modern Europe (Cambridge, Ma 2007) he explains how each European prince tried to deal with the specific religious constellation of his realms. Kaplan, who holds the chair of Dutch history at University College London, has made the religious life in the Low Countries, and more specifically the city of Utrecht, his field of study, but succeeds in connecting his research more broadly to Europe in the early modern era. The volume under review consists of fourteen articles that reflect his work in this field over the last twenty plus years.
The term ‘practice of toleration’ is a common thread in Kaplan's work. Moving away from intellectual history to analyse toleration in the early modern period (often focusing on the Enlightenment) Kaplan was inspired by social history to study the day-to-day arrangements of religious toleration. It has led him to study not so much the writings of philosophes but such issues as inter-confessional marriages, schuilkerken (hidden churches) and Auslauf (travelling to visit churches). The overarching theme of his work is that toleration was multifaceted and pragmatic.
In this way, Kaplan both builds on but also criticises two models that have characterised the historiography of the Dutch Reformation. The first one is Simon Groenveld's model of pillarisation, a sociological term to describe the fragmentation of early twentieth-century Dutch society into Protestant, Catholic, Socialist and Liberal spheres, each with their own political parties, schools and newspapers. Groenveld argued that a similar situation existed for confessional groups in the Low Countries between about 1650 and 1750. Kaplan's research partly substantiates Groenveld's model, such as in his article on inter-confessional marriage, which he finds was rather rare in the early eighteenth century. At the same time he suggests that in other areas such a rigid model of separation between confessions does not do justice to the practical associations of people of different beliefs.
This connects to the second model, Willem Frijhoff's notion of omgangsoecumene. The term denotes a practice in which people, whatever their beliefs and dogmatic convictions, interact in multiple ways in their daily and social lives. Although Kaplan criticises the term (because oecumene is a specific theological term to describe a move towards unity, rather than mutual toleration), in many ways his work substantiates Frijhoff's idea. People of different confessions may not have intermarried but they still lived in the same neighbourhoods, attended the same feasts and conducted mutual business.
The articles cover a variety of themes that all gravitate around the practice of toleration. In the first articles of the volume Kaplan focuses on Calvinism and Libertinism, the subject of his PhD research in the 1990s. In his view, Libertines do not form a coherent ideological group but share the view that the strict confessionalisation of Calvinists should be opposed. There are also articles on Dutch Catholicism, which has increasingly received attention from historians in recent years. Much of Kaplan's work is drawn to exploring liminality and borders, and quite a number of articles focus on the meeting of social worlds or the border space between them. This could be a very physical space, such as in his work on the borderlands of Vaals, or the schuilkerken, town houses with a discrete exterior that hide Catholic churches. It could also be conceptual space, such as the border between private and public spheres, which is studied in his article on embassy chapels. A remarkable case study is on Muslims in the Low Countries. As Kaplan shows, very few Muslims ever visited the Dutch Republic, but their presence in plays and paintings was rather a reflection of the Dutch self-image as tolerant and cosmopolitan. Self-perception is also the main theme of chapter viii on ‘Dutch religious tolerance: celebration and revision’. Although the vast majority of articles in this volume are case studies, which somewhat limits the appeal of this volume, this article takes on a bird's-eye perspective and tries to understand current views of The Netherlands as a tolerant society in the light of the historical trajectory and projections of the past.
In most of his work Kaplan shies away from making bold statements or confirming monolithic views such as Groenveld's pillarisation model. Whereas his conclusions are on the one hand very clear and focused, he prefers to stick to ‘description’ and exploration rather than constructing any new models. Taken together, the articles in this volume are a must-read overview of studies of toleration in the Dutch Republic, but because of its programmatic nature and methodological innovation also a must-read for scholars of early modern religion more broadly. All the articles are crisp, well-written and focused, and are relevant as interdisciplinary case studies and as part of an overall argument on the nature of the Dutch Reformation.
This volume is testimony to Kaplan's fruitful and focused line of research as well as the vivacity of research on Dutch religious life and its entanglements with European history. At the same time it is the very complex and multifaceted nature of religion in the Low Countries that may have prevented historians so far from producing a much needed up-to-date general overview of the Dutch Reformation for a wider readership.
