Calvinists and Catholics during Holland's Golden Age
Heretics and Idolaters

This book examines the social, political and religious relationships between Calvinists and Catholics during Holland's Golden Age.

Christine Kooi (Author)

9781107023246, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 April 2012

258 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.5 kg

'Christine Kooi's new volume is a very welcome addition to this burgeoning field.' Kenneth Austin, Huguenot Society Journal

This book examines the social, political and religious relationships between Calvinists and Catholics during Holland's Golden Age. Although Holland, the largest province of the Dutch Republic, was officially Calvinist, its population was one of the most religiously heterogeneous in early modern Europe. The Catholic Church was officially disestablished in the 1570s, yet by the 1620s Catholicism underwent a revival, flourishing in a semi-clandestine private sphere. The book focuses on how Reformed Protestants dealt with this revived Catholicism, arguing that confessional coexistence between Calvinists and Catholics operated within a number of contiguous and overlapping social, political and cultural spaces. The result was a paradox: a society that was at once Calvinist and pluralist. Christine Kooi maps the daily interactions between people of different faiths and examines how religious boundaries were negotiated during an era of tumultuous religious change.

Introduction
1. War and peace
2. Priests and preachers
3. Persecution and toleration
4. Converts and apostates
5. Kith and kin
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]