Cunegonde's Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment by Benjamin J. Kaplan

Abstract

Cunegonde's Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment, by Benjamin J. Kaplan. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014. xvii, 290 pp. $30.00 US (paper). In this fascinating micro-history, Benjamin Kaplan explores the unique features of religious life in an early modern Dutch-German borderland where religiously mixed marriage was tolerated and religious dissenters enjoyed special freedoms. His study takes place in Vaals, a village in the extreme southeast of the Dutch Republic, located in the modern-day province of Limburg. The community was part of a small and isolated Calvinist Dutch enclave surrounded by Catholic territories, the largest and most important of which was Aachen, a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire. Borderlands were often areas of complex religious mixing, and this was definitely the case for Vaals. Residents were largely Catholic and yet the distribution of churches appeared to suggest the opposite, the village was the site of just one Catholic church and four Protestant churches. Protestant congregants lived in either Aachen or the surrounding countryside and travelled to Vaals on Sundays. Kaplan explains that Protestants were forbidden to worship where they lived, Vaals offered a sanctuary, and the Protestant churches in Vaals were actually built for their use (12). The story that Kaplan tells begins in 1762 with a mixed marriage and an attempted baby-snatching. Cunegonde, the feeble-minded sister of the baby's father, a German Catholic journeyman labourer, burst into the Vaals Reformed Church as her Calvinist sister-in-law's baby boy was about to be baptized. Snatching the baby, she attempted to carry him off to the Catholic church for a proper baptism. She did not get far. She was immediately arrested and placed under guard. Two nights later a large group of Catholic farmhands and labourers staged an armed raid to free Cunegonde and carry her off to the safety of Catholic Aachen. A few days after that the band of peasant boys (104) who had liberated Cunegonde returned to Vaals to stage a mock-military parade, thumbing their noses, as it were, at the Calvinist authorities in Vaals. The religious dispute took on a political dimension following Cunegonde's rescue. The actions of her liberators constituted a direct challenge to the authority of the Dutch government. In response the Dutch authorities sent in the army, closed the Catholic church in Vaals, recaptured Cunegonde, and arrested the Catholic priest of Vaals, Father Johannes Wilhelmus Bosten, who was accused of orchestrating the baby snatching. At this point the village's Catholic residents, who outnumbered the Protestants, took control of the streets, beating and stoning Protestants on their way to church. …