Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment by Benjamin Kaplan (review)

In this exemplary microhistory, Benjamin Kaplan weaves together a story of local religious conflict with broader themes of Enlightenment, toleration, and the political and social history of the Netherlands and Germany in the eighteenth century. Based on a treasure trove of documents in the Dutch National Archives, Kaplan’s book connects the intimate details of a mixed marriage to the border politics of a confessionally mixed territory and the actions of the Dutch Republic’s ruling elite. In so doing, Kaplan has provided us with a fascinating view of eighteenth-century religious and social history that will be of interest to scholars and general readers far beyond the field of Dutch history.

The kidnapping of the title refers to two related acts in 1762. In the first, a young Catholic woman from Aachen by the name of Cunegonde tries to halt the baptism of her infant nephew in the Reformed (Calvinist) Church of Vaals, a small village on the Dutch-German border (today located at the “Drielandenpunt” where Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands come together). Her feeble attempt to seize the child is stopped. Temporarily imprisoned in Vaals, she is freed by a small gang of Catholics from Aachen. This double kidnapping results in a series of escalating acts of religious violence and judicial actions in Aachen and the Dutch Republic. The legal proceedings against Cunegonde and against the Catholic pastor Johannes Bosten (the presumed instigator) form the backbone of the book.

One of the great strengths of this book is Kaplan’s ability to use particular details from his story to present a larger social and intellectual portrait of the age. For example, the first chapter tells the story of the fraught marriage of the Reformed Sara Maria Effrans and the Catholic Hendrick Mommers. Kaplan writes about the couple’s difficulty in finding a clergyman willing to perform the wedding ceremony and, in so doing, paints a larger picture of the nature of intermarriage in a religiously diverse landscape. The chapter presents a rich account of the various legal, social, and political implications of mixed marriages in the period.

Likewise, Kaplan’s excellent chapter on the particular religious and political geography of Vaals and Aachen offers a fascinating discussion of borders in the early-modern period. Because authorities in Catholic Aachen forbade Protestant worship, Protestants traveled on Sundays to Reformed Vaals for services. Borders, Kaplan notes, were not just restrictive but offered a liberating effect, producing a sort of religious “deregulation.” The same freedom of movement that enabled the Catholic kidnappers to escape Dutch jurisdiction and offered occasion for religious violence also put pressure on ruling authorities to tolerate religious minorities who moved in and out of neighboring territories.

A later chapter takes the case all the way to the States General, which had final jurisdiction over the matter. In addition to offering a glimpse into the inner workings of the Dutch Republic, Kaplan presents an insightful discussion of the difference between local and national ruling elites as well as the various ways in which the Enlightenment affected political and religious decisions. In short, Kaplan’s book serves as a wonderful introduction to issues of religious conflict and coexistence in the eighteenth century, and serves as a worthy pendant to his well-received Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007).