Acknowledgments
Our collaboration began when we accidentally bumped into each other, intellectually speaking. In March 2011, we had been assigned to the same panel by another colleague at a scholarly conference in Montreal, Quebec. At the time, we knew one another only casually. First, Jesse Spohnholz presented about a series of pastors and other Reformed churchmen who were refugees in Wesel (the topic of his first book). Next, Mirjam van Veen presented on a series of opponents of orthodox Calvinists who rejected dogmatic forms of religion (the topic of her first book). As it turned out, our papers were on the exact same people! Many of the Dutch Republic’s most notorious so-called libertines had spent time in refugee communities in the Holy Roman Empire in the 1560s and 70s. Did these examples demand that we rethink the commonplace treatment of exile as a contributor to doctrinaire and steadfast forms of orthodox Calvinism? Why had scholars—including ourselves—failed to see these counterexamples before? Through conversations that followed, we began asking all sorts of new questions and wondering what would happen if we started looking at a fuller spectrum of refugees’ experiences and impacts.
Over time, we developed a collaborative research project. Our goal was to understand the diversity of exiles’ experiences and to see if we could make sense of the resulting impacts of those experiences. We did not set out to prove that exiles were either more or less tolerant than anyone else, or that exile had any particular effect on migrants, their hosts, or their future homes. Instead, we were driven by an open curiosity. In 2014, the Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) awarded us a grant to investigate our questions and develop answers to them.
We wish to thank a number of colleagues who provided particular help as this project developed. They include (alphabetically) Ana Barnes, Kora Baumbach, David de Boer, Daniel Herbert Fogt, Paul van Geest, Martin van Gelderen, Jaap Geraerts, Peter Gorter, Aza Goudriaan, Craig Harline, August den Hollander, Geert Janssen, Carina Johnson, Benjamin Kaplan, Susanne Lachenicht, Andreas Mühling, Johannes Müller, Silke Muylaert, Inge Schipper, Herman Selderhuis, Violet Soen, and Nicholas Terpstra. We would like to give a special thanks to the librarians and archivists who made this book possible, including Gerhard Nessler and Martin Roelen. This project has been collaborative from start to finish, and we value the contributions made by those who helped in that spirit.