Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720 Christine Kooi Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720. Edited by Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, and Judith Pollmann. [Studies in Early Modern European History.] (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 274. $94.95. ISBN 978-0-719-07906-1.) Continuing a venerable tradition of Anglo-Dutch historical conferences that began in the 1950s, this volume publishes papers presented at a 2006 gathering comparing the experiences of the Dutch and British Catholic communities in the early-modern era. Topics addressed range from clerical-lay relations, confessional coexistence, and ritual to women, patronage, and art. As is sometimes the case with such comparative projects, there are little more than glancing comparisons made in the papers themselves, and so the heavy lifting of actually drawing parallels is left to the editors in a concluding essay. There were some obvious differences in the status of the Catholic faithful in each state—British Catholics operated under greater legal constraint and judicial persecution than their Dutch coreligionists—but the editors see more similarities than differences. Traditional notions of these Catholic populations as martyred victims of Protestant oppression have to be adjusted, as both groups demonstrated an adaptability to circumstances that allowed them to exercise their devotion in myriad ways. Increased reliance on the laity, especially women, the interiorization of piety, the adroit manipulation of patronage from Catholic powers abroad—English and Dutch Catholics employed all these strategies and more to carve out a place for themselves in Protestant polities whose official attitudes toward them ran from indifferent to hostile. As Willem Frijhoff notes in the introductory essay, the question that arises when these strategies are examined is whether they led to a distinctive group identity in minority Catholicism that differed from its majority counterpart. The answer from the various papers is mixed: some contributors see a dispossessed and diminished Catholic population, while others suggest that the internal focus that dispossession forced paradoxically allowed minority [End Page 572] Catholics to out-Trent Trent, as it were, in their devotion to religious discipline and reform. This division of opinion to some extent reflects the disparate self-images that the Catholic missions themselves propagated at the time; there were advantages to depicting their confessional communities as at once (or by turns) victimized and heroic. Both images proved useful in promoting internal cohesion and garnering outside support. They were also both products of the missions’ clerical establishment; how much the Catholic laity shared these self-images is another question. Several papers make it clear that in both countries informal, day-to-day interaction between ordinary Catholics and Protestants could be quite amicable. The confessional nature of their faith may have mattered more to their priests and prelates than to them. Happily, what the publication of this volume demonstrates is that the study of minority Catholicism has emerged from the historiographic backwaters and joined the renaissance of early-modern Catholic studies that has flourished so successfully in the last couple of decades. It is also a welcome addition to our understanding of the vagaries of confessional coexistence that followed ineluctably out of the upheavals and dislocation of the Reformation. Students of both subjects will want to consult this volume closely. Christine Kooi Louisiana State University Copyright © 2010 The Catholic University of America Press