In her book, Carolina Lenarduzzi, a trained jurist who received her PhD in 2018 from Leiden University, analyzes the experience of individual Catholics as a religious minority in the Dutch Republic. She does so by distinguishing the various identities that a person in the given period could assume, in order to construct what she calls a “non-institutional perspective” (336). As the Dutch Revolt was entering its second phase, when followers of the Reformed religion consolidated their power, the Catholic faith had to surrender its place in the public sphere to the newly dominant Calvinism.

The book is divided into three large parts. In part 1, “From Mainstream to Marginal Culture,” the focus is on the real and the invisible borders that Catholics faced, particularly concerning their changing legal status. The book provides a good overview of these legislative developments over time. Another section in this part is dedicated to Catholics’ memory culture, which included, among other things, commissioning written histories of sites of former Catholic glory and paintings that reconstructed destroyed church interiors. Part 2, “The Catholic Behavioral Code,” deals with material culture. Particular emphasis is given to clothing: from the religious women (kloppen) in black dresses with white scarves to cover their heads, to priests and other religious dignitaries. The second chapter is dedicated to the topic of soundscape, very fashionable among scholars nowadays. Sounds were particularly important for Catholics, as the church bells dominated the areas where they lived and religious processions included singing. These had to be silenced once the Reformed Church became dominant. In this chapter Lenarduzzi reconstructs how the believers coped with these changes.

In part 3 “Dynamics,” the first chapter is dedicated to analyzing the differences in perceptions of the Catholics of the Northern Provinces, who became marginalized as early as the late sixteenth century, and their co-believers in the Southern Netherlands, in particular the province of Brabant, which became part of the Dutch Republic following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and was ruled directly by the States General (the so-called Generality Lands). It is particularly illuminating to see that although they shared the same religion, there seemed to be no particular similarity in perceptions between them. The second chapter focuses on conversion attempts by Catholics and the schism in the Catholic Church in the republic as a result of Jansenism and papal intervention. The book concludes with an epilogue in which the author draws the loose ends together. The conclusions are not entirely surprising in this sort of analysis of a large community. The various identities that the believers assumed for themselves (particular Catholic sympathy and local urban community, as part of the Dutch Republic) were often interchangeable, and one person could have more than one identity. As the author writes: “it was not either-or, but that-and-that” (338). Many of the Catholics felt part of the Dutch Republic and participated in its defense against foreign invasions, even when the invader was Catholic. The author also stresses that cooperation existed between Catholics and the Reformed. To do so, she uses an example of scholars working together, which of course was a common practice in the republic of letters.

The book is an important contribution to the understanding of the early modern Catholic experience in the Netherlands, a topic that has been explored in relatively recent years by Ch. Kooi, J. Pollmann, and others. The strength of this study, written with clear sympathy toward the Catholic minority, is in the extensive use of ego documents and other archival sources, which makes it rich and grounded. The detailed analysis of these firsthand sources lies at the core of this study, and the reader can appreciate the experience of the early modern Catholic in the Dutch Republic, though at times this analysis could benefit from a more critical view of these sources. The author creates a vivid picture of the period, illustrated by numerous pictures embedded in the text. Although written in Dutch, the language is accessible, and the line of argumentation well structured, making it a pleasure to read.