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  • Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635
  • Charles H. Parker
Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635. By Judith Pollmann. [The Past & Present Book Series.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xviii, 239. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-199-60991-8.).

Historical scholarship on Catholics and Catholicism in the past ten years has undergone a remarkable evolution, moving away from a focus on institutions and clerical offices that grimly drilled obedience into indifferent laymen and laywomen. Instead, studies on various territories across Europe have given attention to the eager involvement of the laity in religious revival, the ongoing vitality of traditional observances in programs of reform, and the power of devotion in inculcating a confessional self-consciousness among Catholics. Judith Pollmann’s exemplary treatment of Catholic identity in the Southern Netherlands represents the full flowering of these salutary revisionist trends. As important as institutions were, historians can no longer cast the Catholic Reformation, at least in northern Europe, as primarily a set of organizational responses to Protestantism. Pollmann also clears up misreadings about the state of lay piety in the Netherlands and sends scholarship on the Reformation in new directions.

The focus of her study is perceptions by laity and clergy from the middle strata of society about the religious and political movements that moved through the Southern Low Countries. In a remarkably succinct book, Pollmann accomplishes this task with great success in part because she [End Page 567] uncovered an amazing array of unpublished sources from clerics and from laymen and laywomen who experienced the upheaval of rebellion, war, and religious conflict. Largely overlooked by historians, these diaries, spiritual journals, poems, chronicles, and even a songbook, along with an extensive body of published narratives, form the bulk of her source material. She handles these sources with dexterity, extracting a great deal out of them yet without universalizing her evidence. Interspersing firsthand accounts throughout the various phases of the political and religious narrative enables Pollmann to contextualize the sources appropriately and to illuminate the critical moments of action from local perspectives. For example, she marshals Marcus van Vaernewijck and Nicholas Soldoyer to describe the execution of heretics and Willem Janszoon Verwer to elucidate the Spanish siege of Haarlem. As a result, compelling local insights and observations substantially enrich Pollmann’s inquiry into the advent of heresy, the call for reform, and the tumult of iconoclasm in chapters 1 and 2, the Hapsburg suppression of rebellion and Protestantism in chapter 3, the temporary Calvinist ascendancy in chapter 4, and the triumph of the Hapsburgs and the Counter-Reformation in chapters 5 and 6.

The book’s central argument is that Catholicism eventually triumphed in the Southern Netherlands and perhaps in other places as well, because clergy actually engaged laypeople, giving them reasons to reject heresy, providing them the means to develop their spiritual lives, and restoring to them a sense of sacred community. Thus, clerical collaboration with laity could bring about religious change for early-modern Catholics as much as it did for Protestants. She traces the developments that led regular and secular priests to the realization that they had to reach out to the laity. From the 1520s through the 1560s, clerics failed to equip the laity to answer Protestants, treating the Reformation as an internal church problem. After iconoclastic upheaval in 1566, the Hapsburgs responded by conflating religious orthodoxy with political obedience, spawning new resistance. Finally, after the defeat of Protestant forces in the south in the 1580s, political and ecclesiastical authorities promoted sodalities, the veneration of saints, and Eucharistic devotion, which found a ready constituency among lay Catholics. Thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and splendidly conceived, this book deserves careful attention from all students of the Catholic Reformation.

Charles H. Parker
Saint Louis University
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