Quo Vadis? Catholic Perceptions of Flight and the Revolt of the Low Countries, 1566–1609*

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines Catholic views of flight, exile, and displacement during the Dutch Revolt. It argues that the civil war in the sixteenth-century Low Countries generated a new imagery of exile among Catholics, a process that was to some extent similar to what had happened to Protestant refugees a few decades earlier. Yet the Dutch case also demonstrates that the contrasting outcomes of the revolts in the Northern and Southern Netherlands led to very different appreciations of exile in Catholic communities in both areas. Habsburg triumph and Tridentine militancy sparked a Counter-Reformation movement in the Southern Netherlands that glorified exile and presented refugees as exemplary forces of an international militant church. In the northern Dutch Republic the revolt created a more ambiguous Catholic identity, in which loyalty to an officially Protestant state could coincide with commitment to the Church of Rome.