Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age.

Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia and H. F. K. Van Nierop, eds. Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. viii + 187 pp. index. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-521-80682-8.

Today, Holland is famous for its liberal lawmaking in ethically or socially controversial matters such as drug use, euthanasia, or gay marriage. These liberal views are partly motivated by reference to the nation's past as a freedom-loving and tolerant republic in absolutist and basically intolerant ancien regime Europe. Indeed, during its Golden Age, the Dutch republic had gained the reputation as a tolerant state, notably in religious matters, in the eyes of foreigners. This volume is dedicated to the making of Dutch religious toleration in its Golden Age, to its techniques and mechanisms and to its limitations.

Benjamin J. Kaplan discusses the myth of Dutch tolerance as it has been constructed from the sixteenth century onwards till now. He stresses that tolerance is a tricky historical concept, as our contemporary understanding of it has little to do with the early modern view that what was being tolerated was basically illegitimate. As Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia points out in the introduction, the underlying values of Dutch tolerance were the longing for social peace, discipline, and order. Willem Frijhoff explains how the Dutch "case" became a "model" for Europe. In the Dutch Republic the desire for a unified public Church was transplanted to the secular community. "Concordia," more than unity, became the basic principle of the state and public order, but it was the practice of ecumenicity in everyday life that set the norms for religious toleration. Here it is important to note that around 1600 large groups still did not belong formally to any church. Judith Pollmann elaborates this point, as she questions the hypothesis that by 1650 Dutch society was religiously segregated. Pollmann analyzes the case of the Utrecht lawyer and diarist Buchelius to illustrate the tension between "the intolerant discourse of confessionalism" and the "a-confessional religious culture" (58). Joke Spaans discusses the religious policies that led to toleration in the seventeenth century. She stresses the importance of the reorganization of poor relief in the second half of the seventeenth century. As each church had to take care of its own poor, this obligation strongly advanced the formation of strictly defined confessional communities. Christine Kooi points out that the degree of toleration of Roman Catholics was dependent on varying national politics and local circumstances. As, in theory, Catholic worship was banned in 1581, Roman Catholics had to develop strategies, ranging from corruption and bribery to the seeking of official forbearance and individual patronage, from the reliance on miracles to subterfuge, to be able to practice their religion. Henk van Nierop formulates the hypothesis that the toleration of Catholics despite anti-Catholic legislation was due to the existence of a strong legal culture in the Dutch Republic, which emphasized civic rights and civic privileges: "resourceful citizens still had an impressive array of legal devices at their disposal to avoid conviction" (109). Further on in this volume, Maarten Prak elaborates and qualifies this hypothesis, by pointing out that some cities outside Holland at least in theory denied citizenship to Catholics. He explains this by referring to the strong guild tradition in these cities. Samme Zijlstra discusses how the Mennonites gradually came to see tolerance as a solution for their own ideological divisions. Peter van Rooden puts forward the question of whether the Jews, who mainly lived in Amsterdam, were dealt with differently than the Christian "heretics." He concludes that there certainly were differences in the first half of the seventeenth century, but that these tended to disappear in the second half as the other religions were treated more like the Jews, as a result of the creation of fixed boundaries. Jonathan Israel demonstrates that the tolerance the different religious communities enjoyed was not expanded to the field of radical philosophy. The ideas of Spinoza and his followers were considered as subversive and disturbing as their goal was "to undermine the hegemony of theology in society and culture" (152).

Together these essays present a very valuable discussion of the practice of religious toleration set in the social and religious context of the Dutch Republic and confronted with the often very divergent principles of tolerance and intolerance. Because many viewpoints are formulated as preliminary hypotheses and the authors' perceptions of the limitations of toleration differ, this volume also invites further scholarship on this subject.

ANNE-LAURE VAN BRUAENE

Ghent University