Chapter Three
Strangers and Neighbors
While the previous chapter examined how the diverse and unstable constitutional situations of host cities contributed to dynamic and diverse conditions for the Dutch-speaking migrants, this chapter shifts to an examination of social experiences within host communities. While previous scholarship has sometimes accepted the differences between “Dutch” migrants and “German” hosts as stable and self-evident, our research suggests that more nuance is needed. Of course, historians have long recognized that the legal relationship between the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Netherlands was ambiguous and variable.
1 Arndt, Das Heilige Römische Reich, 154. Political identities in these lands were too.
2 Duke, “Elusive Netherlands”; Poelhekke, “Het naamloze vaderland”; Tilmans, “De ontwikkeling van een vaderland-begrip”; Groenveld, “‘Natie’ en patria’”; Robert von Friedburg, “‘Lands’ and ‘Fatherlands’: Changes in the Plurality of Allegiances in the Sixteenth-Century Holy Roman Empire,” in Stein and Pollmann, Networks, Regions, and Nations, 263–82. Language distinctions between Dutch and German were just as messy and did not match political boundaries.
3 Cornelissen, Kleine niederrheinische Sprachgeschichte; Tervooren, “Sprache und Sprachen am Niederhrein”; Giesbers, “Dialecten op de grens”; Bakker and Van Hout, “Twee vrienden: jij en ik?”; Mihm, “Rheinmaasländische Sprachgeschichte,” 143–44; Peters, “Mittelniederdeutsche Sprache.” In addition, the social and linguistic profile of each of these Dutch Reformed communities was remarkably different relative to each other as well as to those of their local host community.
We can use these differences to understand the mutual comprehensibility of hosts and migrants native tongues.
4 On confessional migration and language, see Majérus, “What Language Does God Speak?”; Murphy, “Exile and Linguistic Encounter”; Van de Haar, Golden Mean of Languages, 194–246; Christiaan Ravensbergen, “Language Barrers to Confessional Migration: Reformed Ministers from the Palatinate in the East of the Netherlands (1578),” in Soen, Soetaert, Verberckmoes, and François, Transregional Reformations, 333–61. Taken together with occupational profiles, information about city and region of origin can also help us understand just how socially and culturally different migrants were from their hosts.
5 Some scholars have noted the demographic specifics of individual migrant communities. Fagel, “Immigrant Roots,” in Goose and Luu, Immigrants, 43–56. Beyond the simple binaries of political, cultural or ethnic belonging, lies a more complicated sixteenth-century reality that played a critical role in shaping relations between migrants and hosts.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the further away the migrants traveled, the more likely their community was to be culturally, socially, and ethnically distinct from their hosts. Thus, while we organized chapter 2 around the host community’s relationship to the imperial constitution, this chapter is organized geographically. We begin with those host communities along the border, tracing increasing social differentiation between migrants and hosts in terms of language, social status, and cultural difference as we move further away. The chapter then shifts to a discussion that compares—insofar as sources allow—patterns of legal and social integration of migrants into their host communities. While scholarship sometimes treats the assimilation of migrants into local communities as a one-way, natural, or inevitable process, our approach suggests that it was highly variable, multidirectional, and shaped by a variety of local and nonlocal factors.
6 See the special issue of Church History and Religious Culture 100, no. 4 (2020) on “Rethinking the Refuge.” For heterogeneity in diasporas, see Muchnik and Monge, “Fragments d’exils”; Monge and Muchnik, Early Modern Diasporas, 167–92.