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8 - Reformations in the Low Countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2024

Henry A. Jefferies
Affiliation:
Ulster University
Richard Rex
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Like the rest of Northern Europe, the Low Countries experienced a wide variety of religious reform movements in the sixteenth century: humanism, Anabaptism, Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism and Catholic reform. In many respects, with its urban and rural diversity, the Netherlands could be seen as a microcosm of Reformation Europe as a whole. What made the case of the Low Countries distinct, however, was the political context: religious rebellion took place against the backdrop of the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Religious dissent grew inextricably entangled with political opposition to the centralising efforts of the Habsburg dynasty. This state of affairs led to the two key features of the Reformation in the Low Countries that distinguished from the rest of Europe: (1) an unusually harsh degree of official prosecution of Protestant heresy, and (2) the creation, by century’s end, of two distinct states, the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, because of the wars that Reformation at least partially instigated. Thus, while the ideas and qualities of the various reform movements in the Netherlands differed little from the rest of Europe, their outcome proved quite distinctive.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reformations Compared
Religious Transformations across Early Modern Europe
, pp. 167 - 189
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Augustijn, Cornelis, ‘Niederlande’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie 24 (1994), 474502Google Scholar
Decavele, Johan, De dageraad van de Reformatie in Vlaanderen, Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1975Google Scholar
Duerloo, Luc, Dynasty and Piety: Archduke Albert (1598–1621) and Habsburg Political Culture in an Age of Religious Wars, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012Google Scholar
Duke, Alastair, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries, London: Hambledon Press, 1990Google Scholar
Marnef, Guido, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation. Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis, 1550–1577, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996Google Scholar
Pettegree, Andrew, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollmann, Judith, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soen, Violet, ‘Which Religious History for the (Two) Early Modern Netherlands before 1648?’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclesiastique 112 (2017), 758–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spohnholz, Jesse, The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Veen, Mirjam, Een nieuwe tijd, een nieuwe kerk. De opkomst van het “calvinisme” in de Lage Landen, Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2009Google Scholar

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