INTE 003 Gelderblom, De Jong, Van Vaeck - The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs 2003

340 Pages·2003·1.61 MB·English

THE LOW COUNTRIES AS A CROSSROADS
OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

INTERSECTIONS
yearbook for early modern studies

volume 3 – 2003

Editorial Board
B. Blondé (University of Antwerp)
K.A.E. Enenkel (University of Leiden)
A.J. Gelderblom (Utrecht University)
J.L. de Jong (University of Groningen)
E.E.P. Kolfin (University of Amsterdam)
W. Neuber (Free University of Berlin)
H.F.K. van Nierop (University of Amsterdam)
P.J. Smith (University of Leiden)
M. van Vaeck (Catholic University of Louvain)

Advisory Board
K. van Berkel (University of Groningen), F. Egmond (National Archives, The Hague)
A. Grafton (Princeton University), A. Hamilton (University of Leiden)
G.L. Heesakkers (University of Amsterdam), H.A. Hendrix (Utrecht University)
F.J. van Ingen (Free University of Amsterdam), J.I. Israel (Princeton University)
M. Jacobs (Free University of Brussels), K.A. Ottenheym (Utrecht University)
K. Porteman (Catholic University of Louvain), E.J. Sluijter (University of Amsterdam)

THE LOW COUNTRIES
AS A CROSSROADS
OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

EDITED BY

ARIE-JAN GELDERBLOM
JAN L. DE JONG
MARC VAN VAECK

BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2004

Illustration on the cover: Theodorus Beza, Icones, id est Verae Imagines [...]. Geneva, Ioannes Laonius,
1580, emblem, no. 39: ‘Religio.’

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Low Countries as a crossroads of religious beliefs / edited by Arie-Jan
Gelderblom, Jan L. de Jong, Marc van Vaeck.
p. cm. – (Intersections, ISSN 1568-1181 ; v. 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 90-04-12288-5
1. Reformation—Netherlands. 2. Netherlands—Church history—16th century.
3. Reformation—Belgium—Antwerp. 4. Antwerp (Belgium)—Church history—
16th century. I. Gelderblom, Arie-Jan. II. Jong, Jan L. de. III. Vaeck, M. van.
IV. Intersections (Boston, Mass.); v. 3.
BR395.L69 2004
274.92’06—dc22
2004051821

ISSN 1568-1181
ISBN 90 04 12288 5

© Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written
permission from the publisher.

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use is granted by Brill provided that
the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright
Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910
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Fees are subject to change.

printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
........................................................................
vii

Introduction ....................................................................................
1
H��� ��� N�����

‘Totius Mundi Emporium’: Antwerp as a Centre for Vernacular Bible
Translations, 1523–1545 ..............................................................
9
P��� A��������

Protestant Conversions in an Age of Catholic Reformation:
The Case of Sixteenth-Century Antwerp ............................................
33
G���� M�����

Imagines Peregrinantes. The International Genesis and Fate of two
Biblical Picture Books (Hiël and Nadal) Conceived in Antwerp at the
End of the Sixteenth Century
..........................................................
49
R���� D��������

Justus Lipsius’s Treatises on the Holy Virgin ..................................
65
J������ D� L���������

The Religious Position of Abraham Ortelius
....................................
89
J���� H�����

The quandary of the Dutch Reformed church masters ........................
141
M�� M. M��������

‘A Serpent in the Bosom of Our Dear Fatherland’. Reformed Reaction
to the Holland Mission in the Seventeenth Century
..........................
165
C�������� K���

Obedience with an Attitude. Laity and Clergy in the Dutch Catholic
Church of the Seventeenth Century ....................................................
177
C������ H. P�����

Remarkable Providences. The Dutch Reception of an English Collection
of Protestant Wonder Stories ............................................................
197
F��� ��� L������

From Minister to Sacred Orator. Homiletics and Rhetoric in the
Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century Dutch Republic
................
221
P.J. S�������

‘Ardens Martyrii Desiderium’. On the Martyrdom of Anna Maria
van Schurman (1607–1678) ..........................................................
247
P���� ��� B���

Cornelis van Bynkershoek and Religion. Reflexions of a Critical
Mind in The Hague in 1699 and his Reactions to Crossroads of
Religious Beliefs
............................................................................
267
J.J.V.M. �� V��

L’âme amante de son Dieu by Madame Guyon (1717).
Pure Love between Antwerp, Paris and Amsterdam, at the Crossroads
of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy ..........................................................
297
A���� G���������-B�����

Notes on the Editors of this Volume ................................................
319

List of Contributors ........................................................................
321

Index Nominum ..............................................................................
325

vi
��������

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*

Figures 1 & 2 belong to the article by Guido Marnef:
1. Image of Our Lady, placed on the facade of the Antwerp City
Hall. Engraving in F. Costerus, De cantico Salve Regina septem medi-
tationes (Antwerp: C. Plantin), p. A1. (Reprinted with the kind per-
mission of the Ruusbroecgenootschap Library, Antwerp).

2. Description of a heretic, in J. David, Veridicus Christianus (Antwerp:
J. Moretus: 1601), plate 8. (Reprinted with the kind permission
of the Ruusbroecgenootschap Library, Antwerp).

Figures 3 & 4 belong to the article by Ralph Dekoninck:
3. Pieter van der Borcht, Abel’s murder by Cain, in Hendrik Jansen
van Barrefelt, Imagines et Figurae Bibliorum (Leiden: c. 1592) (Photo:
Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp).

4. Hieronymus Wierix (after Maarten de Vos), Adoratio Magorum, in
Hieronymus Natalis, Evangelicæ historiæ imagines, ex ordine Evangeliorum,
quæ toto anno in missæ sacrificio recitantur, in ordinem temporis vitæ Christi
digestæ (Antwerp: 1593). (Photo: Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp).

Figures 5–7 belong to the article by Jeanine De Landtsheer:
5. Justi Lipsi Diva virgo Hallensis (Antwerp: 1604), pp. 14–15. On p. 15
the interior of the church, with the miraculous statue, as Lipsius
saw it (Photo: Museum Plantin-Moretus Antwerp, B 1071).

6. The Sedes Sapientiae at St Peter’s Leuven.

7. Justi Lipsi Diva Sichemiensis (Antwerp: 1605), title-page of the first
edition (Photo: Museum Plantin-Moretus Antwerp, A 1371).

* The illustration section (Figs. 1–11) can be found at the end of the Introduction.

Figures 8 & 9 belong to the article by Mia M. Mochizuki:
8. Anonymous, Last Supper, ca. 1581, oil on panel. (Courtesy of the
Hervormde Gemeente Haarlem, Haarlem, The Netherlands).

9. Anonymous, Siege of Haarlem, 1581, oil on panel. (Courtesy of
the Hervormde Gemeente Haarlem, Haarlem, The Netherlands).

Figures 10 & 11 belong to the article by Fred van Lieburg:
10. Title-page of William Turner’s major work on remarkable provinces
(1697). (Photo: Library Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam).

11. Title-page of the Dutch translation of a part of Turner’s work
(1738). (Photo: Library Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam).

viii
���� �� �������������

INTRODUCTION

Henk van Nierop

In April 1527, the president of the Privy Council in the Netherlands,
Jean Carondelet, told a perplexed delegation of magistrates from
Amsterdam that he believed that ‘Lutheranism,’ by that time ram-
pant in their city, was mostly or even entirely due to ‘foreigners.’
The magistrates, he suggested, were reluctant to punish them severely
‘so as not to chase them away.’1 Even though the delegates indig-
nantly dismissed the allegation—had they not recently sentenced a
merchant from Bremen to the pillory for abusing a group of Friars?—
the president certainly had a point. The great commercial cities of
the Netherlands, such as Amsterdam and especially Antwerp, were
situated at a crossroads of important trade routes. Already in the
Middle Ages the Low Countries owed their wealth largely to their
fortunate geographical position straddling the estuaries of the rivers
Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt. Here the trade routes connecting the
Baltic, England, the Rhineland and the German hinterland, and the
Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean basin converged. It was
inevitable that not only cargoes of grain and timber, silk and spices,
woollen cloth and splendidly executed altarpieces were being exchanged
in the bustling seaports of the Low Countries, but also manuscripts
and books, news, information, ideas and gossip.
Thus the Netherlands were touched by the evangelical Reformation
movement at an early stage. Already in July 1523 Brussels witnessed
the first ever Protestant martyrs when two Augustinians were publicly
burnt as obstinate heretics. Several years later, despite the govern-
ment’s determination to crack down on heretics, the English ambas-
sador to the Low Countries thought that ‘if there be three men that
speak, the twain keep Luther’s opinion.’2 It was, however, not the

1 Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae, ed. Fredericq P.
(5 vols., Ghent and The Hague: 1889–1906) v, 207.
2 Quoted in Duke A., Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London and
Ronceverte: 1990) 80.

causa Lutheri that bedevilled the Habsburg government and the local
magistrates, even if ‘Lutheranism’ was to remain for decades to come
a convenient shorthand for many different heretical strands. Due to
the absence of influential local reformers such as Luther, Zwingli,
or Calvin, but also—and not in the last place—due to its wide-open
commercial economy, the Netherlands’ Reformation was essentially
an event that should be properly understood in its full international
context, as a broad stream fed by many different tributaries.3

The connection between trade networks and the interchange of
religious ideas was particularly strong in Antwerp, until 1585 by far
the most important commercial town. In 1545, for example, almost
three quarters of the total value of registered exports from the
Netherlands were shipped from that town.4 Apparently, religious ideas
followed trade. ‘A Babylon, confusion and receptacle of all sects
indifferently, the town most frequented by pernicious people’, was
how the Duke of Alva, admittedly not a sympathetic witness, described
Antwerp in 1568. A Spanish soldier who took part in the siege of
1585 claimed that the town sheltered ‘seventeen different religions
and ninety-four sects,’ and the Spanish humanist and theologian
Benito Arias Montano concurred with his judgement, complaining
about ‘Lutherans, Zwinglians, Anabaptists, Calvinists, Adamists, lib-
ertines, atheists and innumerable other pestilences.’5 Antwerp, how-
ever, did not only receive heterodox religious ideas; it also digested
them, processed them and sent them back into the wider world. As
one of Europe’s major printing centres Antwerp churned out an
innumerable number of books, bibles, pamphlets and prints for the
international market, many of them of dubious orthodoxy.
The situation changed after 1585, when the Spanish army cap-
tured the town and the Dutch rebels closed off the river Scheldt,

2
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3 Useful introductions to the Reformation in the Netherlands are Duke A., “The
Netherlands” in: Pettegree A. (ed.), The Reformation in Europe (Cambridge: 1992)
142–165; Bergsma W., “The Low Countries” in: Scribner B. – Porter R. – and
Teich M. (eds.), The Reformation in national context (Cambridge: 1994) 67–79, and
Woltjer J.J. – Mout M.E.H.N., “Settlements” in: Brady T.A. – Oberman H.A. –
Tracy J.D. (eds.), Handbook of European History 1400–1600. Late Middle Ages, Renaissance
and Reformation (2 vols, Leiden, New York, Cologne: 1995) II, 385–415.
4 Lesger C., Handel in Amsterdam ten tijde van de Opstand. Kooplieden, commerciële expan-
sie en verandering in de ruimtelijke economie van de Nederlanden ca. 1550–ca. 1630 (Hilversum:
2001) 33. The second export harbour, according to value, was Amsterdam, fol-
lowing at a huge distance with only 6 per cent of the value of registered exports.
5 Quoted in Marnef G., Antwerp in the Age of Reformation. Underground Protestantism
in a commercial metropolis 1550–1577 (Baltimore-London: 1996) xi.

thus strangling the town’s trade and prosperity and putting an effective
end to its leading position as an intellectual powerhouse. During the
following century Antwerp’s position as an international entrepot of
trade and ideas, philosophy and learning (religious and otherwise)
was taken over by Amsterdam. While Antwerp became a bulwark
of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Amsterdam, along with other
towns in the Dutch Republic, became a melting-pot, a laboratory
where many religious ideas flowed together, amalgamated and were
re-exported, both to Europe and the newly discovered worlds over-
seas. The political context could not be more different. If in Antwerp,
due to the ever-vigilant ecclesiastical authorities, heterodox ideas
could only be expressed in secrecy, the towns of the United Netherlands
did not only tolerate, but in certain cases even welcomed religious
fugitives and thereby actively promoted religious pluriformity.
The Reformed Church never succeeded in taking over the monop-
oly on organised religion formerly possessed by the Catholic Church.
Although its ministers constantly admonished the civil magistrates to
be vigilant against Protestant dissenters and—especially—Catholics,
their confessional drive was only partly successful. Thus the towns
in the Dutch Republic and particularly Amsterdam took over Antwerp’s
dubious reputation as a save haven for the unorthodox. ‘It is well
known,’ the Reformed Swiss military officer Jean-Baptiste Stouppe
wrote in 1673, ‘that in addition to the Reformed, there are Roman
Catholics, Lutherans, Brownists, Independents, Arminians, Anabaptists,
Socinians, Arians, Enthusiasts, Quakers, Borelists, Muscovites, Libertines
and many more . . . I am not even speaking of the Jews, Turks and
Persians.’6

The Low Countries thus played an important part in the early mod-
ern era as a crossroads for religious and philosophical ideas, serving
as an intermediary between different parts of the world. The third
volume of Intersections is devoted to this aspect of the ‘intertraffic of
the mind.’7 Its multidisciplinary approach is focused on the exchange

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3

6 Quoted in Hsia R.P.C., “Introduction” in: Hsia R.P.C., Van Nierop H. (eds.),
Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: 2002) 1.
7 Schoneveld C.W., Intertraffic of the Mind. Studies in Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch
Translation with a Checklist of Books Translated from English into Dutch, 1600–1700 (Leiden:
1983).

of ideas and the interactions between religious groups in the Low
Countries between ca. 1520 and 1750.
The thirteen essays in this volume are arranged in a roughly
chronological order. It is inevitable, given the economic and cultural
preponderance of the Southern provinces during the sixteenth century,
that the first essays explore ‘Southern’ topics—in most cases Antwerp
topics—and that the focus thereafter swings to the North.
In the first essay Paul Arblaster analyses the position of Antwerp
as a centre for vernacular Bible translations between 1523 and 1545,
by which date the town had lost its leading edge due to increasingly
severe government repression. He argues that Antwerp was not in
the first place a ‘crossroads’ where Bible translators such as Tyndale,
Pedersen and Lefèvre could meet and converse, but rather ‘a round-
about with traffic lights, where traffic in different directions was kept
carefully separate.’ Three different types of biblical translation, based
on different principles, appealed to different international markets.
Guido Marnef in his contribution focuses on the large-scale con-
versions to Catholicism and the reconciliations during the reign of
the Duke of Alva and again during the years following the capitu-
lation of the town in 1585. His figures of those who returned to the
old Church must be seen against Antwerp’s dramatically declining
population, which was not only a result of Protestants moving to the
rebellious provinces, but also of economic emigration. By the end of
the century, systematic religious education and propaganda con-
tributed to a specific Catholic identity. Antwerp subsequently ceased
to be a crossroads of religious ideas and became rather a frontier
of faith, a dam or barrier against Protestantism in the North.
Ralph Dekoninck compares the genesis and fate of two biblical
picture books published in Antwerp at the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury, one by Hendrik Jansen van Barrefelt, or ‘Hiël,’ the charismatic
leader of the ‘second’ Family of Love, the other by the Jesuit Hiero-
nymus Natalis (Nadal). The two books were to have strikingly different
fates, for Hiël’s book was to inspire spiritualists in the Dutch Republic
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whilst Nadal’s work was
to become a paradigmatic monument of Jesuit engraving and Counter-
Reformation spirituality. Yet the author argues that despite the obvi-
ous differences between Familist and Jesuit spiritualities the two works
shared a religious sensibility that was remarkably similar, and he
invites us to be sensitive to continuities spanning the break of 1585.

4
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The following two papers explore two significant individual cases
of religious convictions being shaped in an international context.
Jeanine De Landtsheer writes about Justus Lipsius, a culture-hero
and best-selling author of international stature. Lipsius after his return
from Leiden to Louvain and after his reconciliation with the Catholic
Church wished to demonstrate the seriousness of his intent by writing
several treatises on miraculous shrines of the Virgin Mary, to the
disgust of his Protestant admirers, especially in the Northern provinces.
De Landtsheer’s paper suggests that we should regard Lipsius’s
Counter-Reformation writings with a more dispassionate eye.
The religious position of Lipsius’s friend, the Antwerp geographer
Abraham Ortelius, is the subject of a paper by Jason Harris. His
elaborate and subtle scrutiny of the sources demonstrates that Ortelius
was not, as has been often alleged, a follower of the Family of Love.
Rather, from his early encounter with reforming ideas to his later
reading of the stoics, mystics, Jacobus Acontius and, above all,
Sebastian Franck, it appears that he maintained a life-long interest
in Reformation ideas without, however, ever embracing Protestantism.
Remaining in Antwerp, from where he kept in contact with corre-
spondents scattered all over Europe, he had little choice but con-
forming outwardly to Catholicism, whilst privately disregarding
confessional boundaries, insisting on internal rather than external
devotion, and dissimulating rather than facing martyrdom. His case,
too, suggests that there is more continuity beyond 1585 than is often
suggested.
All following papers deal with religious trends and developments
in the Dutch Republic. Mia Mochizuki discusses Dutch church dec-
oration after the break with Rome in the context of the ideas of
Erasmus, Zwingli and Calvin. Images were replaced by visual rep-
resentations of the Word. Mochizuki’s contribution focuses on a large
text panel in Haarlem’s main church. One side of this panel fea-
tures a text about the Avontmael (Holy Supper), while the other side
of the panel is dedicated to a description of the siege of Haarlem
by the Spaniards in 1572–1573. The panel reflects the ambivalent
position of the Dutch Reformed Church. On the one hand church
buildings were town property. The buildings were put at the dis-
posal of the Reformed community but the wardens were appointed
by the civic magistrates. The civic text therefore faced the nave, the
public side of the Church which was not only used as a place for

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5

preaching but also as a meeting place for citizens. The Haarlem
panel to some extent reflects the ‘ambivalent face of Calvinism in
the Netherlands,’8 where only a relatively small number of believers
became full members of the Reformed Church and took part in
Holy Supper, which was often celebrated in the church’s choir, from
where the panel’s Avontmael text could be seen.
The following two papers deal with religious identities of the
Reformed and the Catholics respectively. Christine Kooi explores
Reformed rhetoric against the activities of the Catholic mission in
the Dutch Republic. The verbal hostility of the ministers against
‘popery’ and ‘idolatry’ became a significant part of a specifically
Reformed confessional culture and it served the construction of a
Reformed self-image. This public hostility is difficult to square with
another characteristic of Dutch religious culture, diversity; yet inter-
action between Protestants and Catholics, Kooi argues, could be
quite amicable.
Charles Parker in his essay explores the relations between Catholic
clergy and laity in creating a Dutch Catholic identity. Basing his
research on the copious correspondence between lay leaders and
clergy in the archives of the apostolic vicars in Utrecht, Parker
sketches out some of the chief ways in which lay folk interacted with
their priests to suggest the importance of the clergy in Dutch lay
identity. His study suggests that the development of religious piety in
the seventeenth century was a negotiated process between laity and
clergy. Even without the support of the state, Tridentine Catholicism
firmly took root among the laity, and local lay leaders welcomed the
Holland Mission’s programme of clerical reform.
Fred van Lieburg discusses the reception in the Dutch Republic
of a translated volume of providential writings by the English Puritan
author William Turner. Studying the background, contents and recep-
tion of the Dutch translation Van Lieburg highlights international
traditions of religious communication. His paper suggests that Prot-
estants, however dismissive they may have been as to superstition
and idolatry, resembled Catholics in stressing the significance of divine
providence.
The paper by Jaconelle Schuffel explores the changing relation-
ship between Reformed homiletics and rhetoric. Taking a very long

6
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8 Duke, Reformation and Revolt (note 2), 269–293.