Measuring Social Integration

Some of the sources give us useful glimpses here and there. There are good records of the social tensions that resulted when large numbers of foreigners arrived. Pretty much everywhere that Dutch migrants showed up, locals complained about their arrival. They complained about rising rents and food prices, or that newcomers stole property, generally promoted disorder, even that they intended to take over.2 Meinert, Die Eingliederung, 43–44; Witzel, “Gewerbgeschichtliche Studien,” 181; Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten, 54–56, 60; Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 43; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 283–85. However, it’s important to recognize that locals expressed such concerns generally about all newcomers in the early modern era, so we should not assume that such concerns were specific to the confessional, linguistic, or demographic profile of this migrant movement in particular.3 Coy, Strangers and Misfits; Selwood, Diversity and Difference.

There are also indications that some Dutch migrants also developed more positive relationships with locals, even across confessional lines. Certainly, the ability to worship alongside hosts who subscribed to non-Reformed belief systems without widespread conflict is some indication of stable social relations. In Wesel, worshipping together was required by law, so we cannot treat such a practice as a sign of friendship or mutual respect. However, the fact that migrants and locals with different confessional allegiances celebrated the Lord’s Supper, baptized children, and attended sermons together without widespread social conflict or violence is remarkable in the context of the confessional hostilities tearing apart other communities in the late sixteenth century. In Frankfurt, too, from the late 1560s to the late 1590s, Dutch Reformed migrants were required to wed and baptize in the city’s Lutheran churches. The fact that no hostilities erupted over those ceremonies can be taken as evidence of a degree of stable coexistence, if not mutual respect.

More surprisingly, we also see some Dutch Reformed migrants attending services in Catholic churches as well. We have records of such activities because Reformed elders worked to monitor this practice and to punish errant members. But it is also relevant to point to the positive social relations that must have developed for such behaviors to take place. Reformed migrants, for instance, attended the funerals of their Catholic friends.4 For a discussion of debates about this practice, see chapter 4. Those who defended the practice argued that it marked one’s respect for one’s neighbors. While conflicts produce more documentary evidence than peaceful coexistence, such incidents point to a possible wealth of unrecorded quotidian interactions that sometimes produced relationships, and even friendships, built on trust, mutual interest, or respect.

There are other indications that some Dutch Reformed migrants maintained substantive and peaceful relationships with their neighbors. When Hubrecht van Coninxloo was accused of heresy in Cologne in 1573, a German Catholic roommate, Heinrich Faber, spoke to the city council on his behalf.5 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 74. In 1565 and 1567, Dominicus Pettitpas similarly relied on the testimony of his neighbors Martin Schneider and Ambrosius Meies as to his honor and good relations to save him from accusations of heresy.6 Monge and Muchnik, Early Modern Diasporas, 188. Elders in Frankfurt reprimanded the Reformed cloth shearer from Maastricht, Melchior de Coninck, for socializing with Catholics in the early 1570s.7 DNRM-FR-612. In 1590, Reformed silk merchants from the Low Countries in Cologne also signed a petition along with Italian Catholic silk merchants to advocate for their shared business interests. The following year, the Antwerper Jan Doussaert agreed to teach Italian-style silk weaving and dyeing to local citizens’ children.8 Koch, Geschichte des Seidengewerbes in Köln, 76. Dutch migrants participated in Cologne’s Gaffeln, which required annual feasts, rites of mutual support, and extensive political and economic cooperation.9 See chapter 2. Our point is not to ignore that members of Cologne’s Dutch Reformed community lived under regular threat of being arrested and expelled for heresy. Surely suspicious neighbors also sometimes informed authorities of Reformed migrants’ illegal activities.10 Monge and Muchnik, Early Modern Diasporas, 184–88. But it is also important to recognize that neither were they a wholly isolated or universally marginalized group.

Another way to examine social interactions might be to look at conflicts between ordinary migrants and hosts. For this examination, Wesel offers useful insights. There was periodic violence between migrants and Weselers, especially at the high point of confessional tensions in the early 1560s. On May 12, 1562, for instance, a group of local Lutherans walked through the city streets shouting “blasphemous words and songs” to protest a local ministers’ willingness to tolerate Reformed migrants. When the pastor chastised this immodest behavior, he became the target of verbal abuse. However, the worst conflicts were between Dutch immigrants of opposing confessional orientations, not between locals and migrants. In July 1564, a fight that broke out in a tavern between Dutch Lutherans and Dutch Reformed seems to have been limited to verbal abuse. In 1570, an argument between Dutch Lutherans and Dutch Reformed turned to violence after someone drew a sword, resulting in a bystander losing a couple of fingers.11 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 188. Direct hostilities between locals and migrants were a rarity in Wesel. However, we do see evidence of judicial conflicts between Netherlanders and Weselers. Since complete court records from sixteenth-century Wesel are lacking, we are left only with more serious infractions that had to be taken to the city council for adjudication. Of these, during the period of the greatest social and religious tensions between newcomers and their hosts—in the 1560s and early 1570s—most lawsuits were either between locals or between migrants. That is, because members of the two groups were largely doing business among themselves, when they show up in legal disputes, it was mostly the result of contractual and financial disputes that emerged from those day-to-day exchanges, as was the case after wine was damaged when Arndt de Beyer hired Otto de Man to transport it for him in 1577.12 SAW A3/59 fol. 11r. But into the 1580s, we see an increase in legal disputes between Dutch migrants and Weselers over matters like business disputes, property rights, and access to church pews.13 Spohnholz, “Calvinism and Religious Exile,” 9–10. Rather than seeing such lawsuits as evidence of social tensions, it is wiser to see them as symptoms of a broader pattern of stable social interaction.

Examining residency patterns can be another useful measure of social interaction, even if it cannot tell us much about the quality of those interactions.14 See also Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 21, 83–83; Esser, Niederländische Exulanten, 137–50; Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community, 150–51; Monge and Muchnik, Early Modern Diasporas, 148–66. When migrants moved in down the street or next door to locals, there were certainly more opportunities for conflicts, especially if locals were hostile to the newcomers’ religious convictions. But living in close proximity also provided opportunities for peaceful interactions, social integration, and cross-cultural fertilization. At the same time, of course, when immigrants lived in more homogenous neighborhoods, there was the possibility of building stronger ethnic and confessional identities among themselves.

As it turned out, the more socially, culturally, and linguistically similar the migrants were to their hosts, the more likely the Netherlanders were to live in streets and neighborhoods throughout the host community. While we do not have evidence from residency patterns for the smaller towns in Cleves, evidence from tax collections in 1568 and 1582 in Wesel suggests that Netherlanders lived in houses, apartments, and rented rooms that were well distributed throughout the town and its suburbs.15 The following summarizes from Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 191–94. Indeed, migrants lived in all city districts in roughly the same proportion as locals. They lived on practically every street. And hardline Lutheran critics of Reformed Protestants lived right next to Dutch Reformed migrants for years, without any evidence of interpersonal conflict. Such was the case with the Reformed migrants Hans Boots and Jan Fijch, who lived next door to Jan Bremer, Heinrich van School, and Lannert van Bellinckhoven, three leading anti-Reformed Lutherans. The Reformed elder Goert van Wesick also lived next door to the fervently anti-Reformed Johann van Heshusen. That’s not to suggest that tensions from this situation did not arise; but Reformed migrants and their hosts seem to have managed daily coexistence without widespread conflict or violence.

Meanwhile, in Cologne and Frankfurt, Reformed Netherlanders tended to live in tight-knit neighborhoods next to one another. In Cologne, most Dutch Reformed lived in a couple neighborhoods around the Breitestraße and Glockengasse in the center of town, or further north around the Machabäerstraße.16 Monge, Des communautés mouvantes, 193; Ennen, “Die reformirte Gemeinde,” 514. In Frankfurt, Dutch Reformed clustered around the spinning workshops, jewelry-cutting businesses, and dyeing operations that popped up between Alter Mainzer Gasse and Roßmarkt, close to their house church near the Weißfrauenkirche.17 Schindling, “Wachstum und Wandel.” Such proximity might have been prompted by the hostility they felt from local Catholics and Lutherans, respectively. But living together also had practical benefits. In cities where some did not speak the local language, where they shared close business relationships and friendships from back home, where they were responsible for caring for their own poor and sick, and where they had to arrange underground worship, living close together simply made life easier.

Frankenthal was the most extreme example of residential isolation. Residents there moved to a former friary granted to them by the Elector Palatine, and began building new houses in an undeveloped expanse of land with hardly any interactions with local Germans. Social interactions did start taking place after German immigration increased some twenty years after Frankenthal’s founding. But in that case, it was the Germans who had to find housing among the migrants. Initially, Netherlanders who migrated to Frankenthal made the explicit choice to move to an all-Dutch colony in which social interactions with people of other faiths, who spoke other languages and shared other cultures, were largely unnecessary.

Citizenship might be thought of as another relatively straightforward measure of integration of migrant families into host communities, but the reality proved remarkably complex. Host governments often encouraged wealthy immigrants to acquire citizenship because they would be more likely to stay. Such permanence, local authorities hoped, might encourage economic stimulus, including raising tax payments, providing locals with jobs, attracting other highly skilled migrants, and increasing contributions to local charities. Local governments also sometimes restricted citizenship for poor or unskilled immigrants so that they did not become eligible for local charity institutions.18 In Frankfurt, new citizens even had to promise not to claim poor relief from municipal charity institutions within the first four years of their residency, even though all residents were technically eligible for poor relief. Jütte, Obrigkeitliche Armenfürsorge, 214–17; Breustedt, “Bürger- und Beisassenrecht,” 607. Attaching an expensive fee to citizenship, or even to a residency permit, was one way that local governments discriminated based on economic ability, as was the case in Wesel, where citizenship fees could be exorbitant for those of means.19 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 289 n. 15. In contrast, Frankfurt had a set fee for new citizens but from 1578 set a minimum amount of property a new citizen had to possess. Breustedt, “Bürger- und Beisassenrecht,” 606–7. Prospective citizens also had to be cautious before making any commitment at the outset, because many communities charged expensive departure fees (Abzugsgeld) for those who later renounced their citizenship.20 Breustedt, “Bürger- und Beisassenrecht,” 604. When host communities wanted to encourage immigration, they sometimes waved such departure fees.21 As at Frankenthal, see Kaller, “Wallonische und niederländische Exulantensiedlungen,” 339; Dölemeyer, “Kapitulations und Transfix,” 48. Fears of heresy also encouraged local officials to restrict new citizens only to those willing to publicly profess allegiance to the city’s official church. There were such policies in place in all the cities of our study—and across the Holy Roman Empire—even if enforcement varied widely and the regulations did not always have the intended effects.22 De Meester, “Keeping Immigrants.” For England, Esser, “Citizenship and Immigration,” 237–52; Lien Luu, “Natural-Born versus Stranger-Born Subjects: Aliens and their Status in Elizabethan London,” in Goose and Luu, Immigrants, 57–75; Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community, 140–48.

From a migrant’s perspective, acquiring citizenship often lowered the tariffs that businessmen paid to local coffers for production or trade in goods, opened the way for guild membership, gave migrants and their families access to local charity institutions, and/or offered the opportunity to vote in local elections or hold municipal offices. Even when governments tried to encourage migrants to become citizens, however, some foreigners had no interest in acquiring citizenship. Even those who were firmly ensconced in the community could be disinclined to acquire citizenship if they retained hopes of returning home. Immigrants who had lived relatively mobile lives sometimes saw acquiring citizenship as unnecessarily restricting their options.23 Esser, “Citizenship and Immigration”; Poettering, Migrating Merchants, 46, 48. Being a citizen of another city might bring certain liabilities as well; a citizen living elsewhere might be held responsible for political acts or economic obligations of the city where they held citizenship.24 Prims, Antwerpse stadsschulden; Puttevils, “Ascent of Merchants,” 366. While in chapter 2, we treated citizenship within the framework of the legal parameters for the migrants’ stay in host communities, in this chapter we ask about the extent to which the decision to become a citizen of their host communities reflected Dutch Reformed migrants’ social integration.

In Catholic refugee centers, few Reformed migrants ever became citizens because their beliefs were deemed heretical and illegal according to local, territorial, and imperial laws. However, Catholic authorities proved willing to overlook such restrictions from time to time. We have identified five Dutch Reformed migrants who acquired citizenship rights in Cologne. Jan Dibbout did so only months after arriving from Antwerp.25 WMV 1/3, 336, 352. Christianus Quintin also took citizenship seemingly immediately upon arrival.26 DNRM-CL-716. Paul Mondekins from Oudenaarde became a citizen in 1581 even though he served multiple times as an elder on Cologne’s Dutch-speaking Reformed consistory.27 The other two were A. Gyer and H. van Remscheid. Meanwhile, Francois and Hubert van Coninxloo (from Brussels) were members of the Himmelreich Gaffel, one of the trade organizations central to the city government.28 DNRM-CL-36. DNRM-CL-123. See Militzer, “‘Gaffeln, Ämter, Zünfte.’“ Citizenship was not required for Gaffel membership, but Gaffel membership was required for citizenship.29 Jütte, Obrigkeitliche Armenfürsorge, 328–29. The Reformed merchants from Antwerp, Simon le Bruin and Anton Morneau, were members of the Buntwartern Gaffel.30 DNRM-CL-1954. DNRM-CL-1956. There are also examples of Anabaptists who were members of a Gaffel. Monge, Des communautés mouvantes, 209. Dominicus Petitpas, the merchant from Antwerp (and later church elder), also became a member of the Windeck Gaffel.31 Monge, “Communautés et indivus à Cologne,” 126 n. 34. Of the seventy Netherlanders who took citizenship in the Cleves town of Emmerich, we have confirmed that Berndt Eijckelbom from Doesburg (Guelders) and Thomas Vogel from Eeklo (Flanders) were full members of the Reformed congregation there. Eijckelbom was even an elder of this church.32 DNRM-EM-118. DNRM-EM-77. Especially in the case of Reformed elders becoming citizens, drawing attention to their religious deviance might put the entire congregation at risk. It seems that they felt confident that becoming a citizen would not do so.

A lack of surviving sources in other Catholic towns in our study has left us unable to determine whether there are similar examples elsewhere. But clearly, local authorities periodically allowed exceptions to restrictions on non-Catholic citizenship. At the same time, fear of attracting unwanted attention to their dissent probably discouraged Reformed Protestants from seeking citizenship status in Catholic communities, keeping these numbers low. But many Dutch Reformed migrants were probably not interested in gaining citizenship in Catholic cities in any case. After all, if citizenship and public recognition of social standing had been all that important to these people, they probably would not have moved to Catholic-majority communities where their religion was banned.

Dutch Reformed who moved to officially Protestant cities in our study acquired citizenship in greater numbers. A comparison between Dutch Reformed who became citizens in Wesel and Frankfurt proves instructive regarding the complex forces that shaped this kind of legal integration. For Wesel, we have identified 127 Dutch Reformed who became citizens between 1542 and 1600.33 These numbers are smaller than those in Jesse Spohnholz’s earlier study of Wesel because they are limited to only those Netherlanders who we can confirm as Reformed Protestants. We have also updated these numbers based on new research. The trends remain the same. Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 188–90. Nearly half (44 percent) of these were merchants—about twice the percentage as in Wesel’s Dutch Reformed population overall. In Wesel, Dutch merchants were never recognized as a foreign “nation” with special tax exemptions, as happened in larger trade cities.34 Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries; Poettering, Migrating Merchants. In this case, exemptions from excise taxes offered by citizenship proved an enticing lure to merchants.35 Sarmenhaus, Die Festsetzung, 22. Meanwhile, Wesel had a relatively weak guild system before the waves of migrants came, and citizenship was not required for guild membership.36 By the end of the sixteenth century, guilds were becoming stronger in Wesel, largely encouraged by Dutch immigrants. Sarmenhaus, Die Festsetzung, 47–60. As a result, craftsmen and artisans immigrating from the Low Countries did not have as much pressure to take on citizenship, as was the case for immigrants elsewhere.37 Ogilvie, European Guilds, 96–100. Further, except for a brief time in the early 1560s, confessional restrictions on citizenship were applied more flexibly than other migrant centers.38 Even during the period with clearly-defined confessional restrictions, from October 1561 to January 1565, Reformed Protestants became citizens either through ambiguity or strategic silence and inaction. Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 52–55, 188–90. Still, most Reformed migrants lived for years in Wesel without acquiring citizenship status. These people were not marginalized within the community; they attended church regularly, worked in crafts and trades openly, shopped at local markets, and otherwise participated in the city’s socioeconomic life. Thus, in Wesel, citizenship cannot be used as a measure of social integration of Dutch Reformed migrants within the larger urban community. The newcomers had lived alongside their hosts for years, and at some point in time, some opted to become citizens. But why?

Political and military events taking place outside the city walls convinced some migrants to make that move. The first uptick in Netherlanders acquiring citizenship in Wesel came in 1569 as the duke of Alba’s Habsburg army restored Catholic hegemony across the Netherlands following William of Orange’s failed rebellion of late 1568. At the same time, the city was rapidly building new fortifications to protect residents, should war spread to Cleves.39 Dieter Kastner, “Johann Pasqualini und die Anfänge der Festung Wesel—Der Bau des Flesgentorbastion im Jahre 1568,” in Prieur, Wesel, 83–121. It’s no surprise then that some, like the goldsmith and Reformed elder from Ypres, Jacques Matte, became a citizen in 1569 after having lived in Wesel for six years, or that Hans de Bloem, the Reformed cloth merchant from Antwerp, did the same. After all, that year, Protestants and rebels in both men’s home cities were being subject to brutal repression at the hands of Alba’s soldiers. A second uptick seems to have been sparked by a Habsburg military campaign in the Netherlandish civil war following the collapse of the Pacification of Ghent in 1578 and the failure of the peace talks in Cologne in 1579, which made it clear that the Habsburgs were not going to abandon their strict anti-Protestant policies.40 Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots, 166–211. Thus, Derick van den Berg, a tailor from Leuven (which had been captured by Habsburg forces in 1577) who had lived in Wesel for over a decade, became a citizen in 1579. So too did the merchant Wouter Buyssen, from ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which had just abandoned the States General and aligned itself with the Habsburg government.

The spark for the largest spike in Dutch Reformed becoming citizens in Wesel—between late April and early June 1583—was surely Alexander Farnese’s rapid string of military victories capturing cities across Flanders and Brabant in 1582 and 1583.41 Langhans, Die Bürgerbücher der Stadt Wesel, 146–47. Refugees from those regions living in Wesel now faced grim hopes that they might ever return to their homes. To make matters worse, in January 1583 rebel-held Antwerp faced a bloody attempted coup by the rebels’ supposed ally and “Protector of the Liberty of the Netherlands,” Francis, the duke of Anjou. By July, William of Orange’s decision to withdraw from Antwerp in favor of security in Holland may have dashed the hopes of refugees from Antwerp that they might ever return to their former homes.42 Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots, 311–19. At the exact same time, changing politics in Wesel incentivized refugees to become citizens. Twice in 1582, delegates from Wesel and the ducal court met to debate an order from Duke Wilhelm to expel all foreign Reformed Protestants. Wesel’s officials refused to pay their taxes if the prince interfered in local matters and warned that such expulsions would only spark the kind of unrest befalling the war-torn Netherlands. By the end of the year, the duke agreed not to compel anyone’s conscience.43 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 102–4; Dünnwald, Konfessionsstreit und Verfassungskonflikt, 256–60. To be sure, some of these new citizens were recent arrivals from cities captured by Farnese’s troops. But at least eighteen others were already elders and deacons of the local Reformed consistory and over a dozen more were long-time cloth merchants in the city. They included the Antwerp merchant Hans Six as well as the weaver from Ypres, Jan Ginnebar, the latter of whom had lived in Wesel for almost twenty years. These men were already socially and economically integrated into the city. Their decisions were not centrally about new policies adopted to attract wealthy immigrants. Neither were they the result of the immigrants’ desire for guild membership, a reduction in taxes, or access to civic charity institutions. Instead, becoming a citizen was a calculated move aimed at increasing their political and social security during a time of intense instability.

After 1585, few Dutch Reformed migrants became citizens in Wesel. By then, it seems, nearly all who had wanted to had become citizens, and likewise nearly all who preferred to move away had done that. In any case, we cannot treat acquiring citizenship as an inevitable or natural process of social and cultural assimilation alone. Rather, dramatic changes in the politics at home and in migrants’ host communities combined to shape their decision to acquire citizenship. Evidence in the following years—that Netherlanders began to purchase funeral markers in Wesel’s parish churches and hold civic offices—suggests that this level of social engagement continued in other areas of life as well, at least among migrants of higher financial means and social status.44 Spohnholz, “Calvinism and Religious Exile.”

The situation was rather different in Frankfurt. We have identified forty-seven Dutch Reformed immigrants who gained citizenship in Frankfurt between 1554 and 1600.45 Most of these we have identified from city council minutes. Making such identifications can be tricky, however, since city officials often used German spellings for Netherlanders. Thus, that number was likely larger. Meinert, Die Eingliederung. These numbers are also smaller than those discussed by Georg Witzel, who covered 1554 to 1562, because Witzel examined migrants from across the Low Countries (instead of Dutch speakers) and regardless of confessional orientation (instead of only who can be verified as Reformed). Witzel, “Gewerbgeschichtliche Studien,” 137–38. Of course, after 1562, becoming a citizen in Frankfurt was riskier for Dutch Reformed than in Wesel. But the key difference lay less in different laws than in the variable enforcement of similar laws. In both cities, residents were required to give formal profession of support for the city’s church and conformity to the beliefs articulated in the Augsburg Confession. In Wesel, however, councilors and pastors proved flexible about what it meant to conform to the Augsburg Confession, so long as migrants were clear about obeying local political and ecclesiastical authorities. By contrast, after 1562, Frankfurt’s clergy and oligarchs treated conforming to the Augsburg Confession invariata as an expression of obedience to local political and ecclesiastical authorities. In that situation, it is hardly surprising that the overall number of Dutch Reformed who become citizens in Frankfurt was smaller. In addition, some immigrants instead requested the status of resident alien (Beisass), which offered them some legal protections and increased access to poor relief but did not require abandoning citizenship status back home.46 Breustedt, “Bürger- und Beisassenrecht”; Jütte, Obrigkeitliche Armenfürsorge, 214–17. On nonresident citizenship in the Low Countries, see Decavele, “De Gentse poorterij en buitenpoorterij.”

Almost half the Dutch-speaking Reformed refugees we have identified as having gained citizenship—nineteen—did so in the years between the first arrival of Netherlanders in the city, in March 1554, and the large-scale departures of 1562. This number is likely much larger since, in all, over four hundred migrants from the Low Countries became citizens in these years, many of whom must have been Reformed Protestants. Meanwhile, the council never increased citizenship fees to exorbitant levels to reduce these numbers. While that period saw increasing confessional tensions, until 1560 the council proved remarkably willing to offer Dutch migrants citizenship. Since in Frankfurt citizenship was required for guild membership, and guild membership was required for participation in most trades, the council had to open the citizenship rolls widely if it hoped to encourage the Netherlanders to bring new business to the city.

In earlier studies, much has been made of the opposition from Frankfurt’s guilds to the Netherlanders’ arrival during these years.47 Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten, 52–59, 123–33. Guilds could be more welcoming to foreigners than scholars once suggested. Muylaert, “Accessibility of the Late Medieval Goldsmith Guild”; Maarten Prak et al., “Access to the Trade.” Guilds’ anti-immigrant policies should not simply be explained as knee-jerk xenophobia but also as an expression of their sense of the moral economy. Ulrich Niggemann, “Craft Guilds and Immigration: Huguenots in German and English Cities,” in De Munck and Winter, Gated Communities?, 45–60. Some guilds did indeed complain about Dutch craftsmen claiming to be too impoverished to pay the guilds’ entrance fees and thus working outside the guild system. However, some guilds that successfully forced the foreigners to pay the fees—the tailors, cabinetmakers, bakers, brewers, and cobblers––were among the strongest in Frankfurt and their trades were practiced by relatively few migrants.48 See Witzel, “Gewerbgeschichtliche Studien,” 149–50. Meanwhile, for a trade strongly represented among the immigrants—wool weaving—Netherlanders unable to pay membership fees or produce proof of birth (a so-called Geburtsbrief) were able to negotiate (with some mediation from the city council and the Dutch-speaking Reformed consistory) a one-year reprieve in 1556. This rule was not strictly enforced even after that deadline had passed.49 Witzel, “Gewerbgeschichtliche Studien,” 148–53. The worsted wool weavers, who organized separately, got an even better deal. Witzel, “Gewerbgeschichtliche Studien,” 159–65. Meanwhile, some Dutch workers faced no local opposition because they worked in trades that had no preexisting guild to oppose (like the tapestry weavers and passementerie makers) or because the newcomers paid the guild’s membership fees without complaint (like the linen weavers).50 Witzel, “Gewerbgeschichtliche Studien,” 178.

We do not believe that guild opposition was a central factor in limiting the numbers of Reformed migrants who became citizens of Frankfurt. No guild ever adopted laws requiring an oath to the Augsburg Confession invariata. Neither did any guild adopt policies that restricted entry to Netherlanders as such. Frankfurt’s guild ordinances look much like those of other large cities of the day. They regulated the quality and quantity of the production of goods; defined procedures for becoming an apprentice, journeyman, and master; and explained how migrants could join a trade.51 Schmidt, Frankfurter Zunfturkunden, vol. 1. Guild leaders did complain about Netherlanders who violated guild rules, but they also complained about locals as well as Italian and Portuguese immigrants who did so.52 Meyn, Die Reichsstadt Frankfurt, 203; Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten, 61 n.83. Max Scholz agrees, for different reasons. He argues guilds were not that powerful in Frankfurt, and patrician leaders usually did not respond to their pressure. Scholz, Strange Brethren, 76. It was not guild restrictions that limited the ability of Reformed immigrants to become citizens. It was the fact that—from 1562—the council required conformity to the Augustana invariata for citizenship. The fact that citizenship was required for guild membership meant that the magistrates’ decision limited Netherlanders’ ability to join local guilds. But guild opposition played no direct role here. The lower citizenship rates among Dutch immigrants in Frankfurt compared to Wesel was largely an outcome of religious disputes about Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, which resulted in the requirement of conformity to the Augsburg Confession for citizenship. By contrast, guilds were primarily focused on ensuring that they retained control over their crafts.

In fact, guilds were the primary draw for Dutch Reformed who became citizens of Frankfurt. Here, too, timing is a useful guide. In forty of forty-two cases we have identified, Dutch Reformed migrants became citizens within a year of the first record we have identified of their living in Frankfurt. Their speedy decision stems from the citizenship requirement for guild membership. Further, thirty-four of these men had occupations—merchants, wool weavers, goldsmiths, diamond cutters, and/or jewelers—whose guilds proved especially welcoming to newcomers. We have identified no spikes in Dutch Reformed taking citizenship around specific dates relating to external military or political developments in the Habsburg Netherlands or in or around Frankfurt. We don’t see many cases of refugees living peacefully in Frankfurt for years only to have some later event trigger a decision to become a citizen, as often happened in Wesel. For the most part, it seems, they made the choice soon after arriving, and those who did tended to have occupations that made it easier to do so.

After 1585, some of the Dutch Reformed migrants were marrying the widows or daughters of Frankfurt citizens to acquire citizenship. By January 12, 1589, concern that this practice was being used to undermine citizenship laws convinced the city council to ban the practice; at the same time, Frankfurt’s oligarchs banned citizens from marrying women from outside the city (on pain of losing their citizenship).53 Bott, Gründung und Anfänge, 35; Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 51. The concern seems to have been inspired by the large influx of immigrants following the consolidation of Habsburg authority in the southern Netherlands after 1585. By the 1590s, anti-immigrant sentiment led to increasingly restrictive measures. A turning point came in 1594, when the city expelled the Dutch Reformed pastor Franciscus Gomarus—himself a citizen of Frankfurt—for violating the 1589 law against marrying a woman from outside the city.54 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 52–53. While his expulsion has sometimes been depicted as an act of intolerance on the part of city magistrates, the fact that they recognized his role as the “Flemish preacher” for years before this suggests that city leaders were aware of and willing to tolerate his illegal preaching and officiating at the Lord’s Supper, so long as he obeyed local citizenship laws. It was his violation of Frankfurt’s marriage laws—and not his violation of laws against non-Lutheran worship—that triggered city oligarchs to expel Gomarus. In any case, such pressure encouraged many Reformed migrants to leave for Neu-Hanau, a new settlement not far up the Main River built by Count Philip Ludwig of Hanau-Münzenberg, to attract Reformed Netherlanders. By 1597, he convinced a sizeable population to move to Neu-Hanau, though the financial opportunities offered by the larger imperial city meant that a sizeable Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation remained in Frankfurt.55 Bott, Gründung und Anfänge; Kaplan, “Legal Rights of Religious Refugees”; Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 53–55; Müller, Exile Memories.

The difference between Wesel and Frankfurt with regard to patterns of Dutch Reformed migrants gaining citizenship is the result of a combination of geographical realities, political incentives, and economic structures shaping the two cities. Wesel was closer to the Low Countries. That means that it was less of an investment to move there (or to return) and easier to get news from home. Meanwhile, its weak guild system and accommodating ecclesiastical system made it easy for migrants to live there without making much of a commitment. Dutch Reformed migrants could participate in the city’s religious, cultural, and social life—which took place in a mutually comprehensible dialect—to the degree that they felt comfortable, whether the male head of household had citizenship or not. As a result, the decision to become a citizen was more a function of that man’s sense of immediate security and his hopes for the future. By contrast, refugees moving to Frankfurt had traveled much further away from home to a place where people did not understand their language, did not legally permit their form of worship, required submitting to guild regulations to ply a craft or trade, and required citizenship for guild membership. Simply put, moving to Frankfurt demanded more from a Dutch Reformed migrant. There were stricter rules about conforming to the local church, stronger guild oversight of the trades, and confessional requirements for citizenship status. In such a situation, questions about citizenship were indeed questions about how willing migrants were to integrate socially, religiously, and politically into the city. By contrast, citizenship in Wesel remained largely untethered from occupation or confession. In such a situation, the choice to become a citizen was more a function of political developments outside the city walls.56 For a comparison to Dutch migrants in England, see Fagel, “Immigrant Roots,” in Goose and Luu, Immigrants, 41–56.

In addition to looking at residency patterns and forms of legal integration to host communities, we have also looked for patterns of family life that might provide a sense of how Dutch Reformed migrants situated themselves within their host communities. To conclude this chapter, we examine the choice of whom to marry and what to name one’s children. There are two reasons for this: first, we have relevant sources with which to compare multiple communities and, second, because those choices are intimate, connected to religious belief, and expressive of the production and reproduction of social and familial networks. Let’s start with marriage patterns. Previous studies have largely looked for patterns in endogamy or exogamy of Dutch Reformed as a measure of assimilation. For the most part, such endeavors have treated the political, linguistic, and ethnic lines between “Dutch” and “German” as self-evident and stable.57 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 199–205. See also instance, Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community, 153. On migrants’ marriages in the early Dutch Republic, see Van Nierop, “De bruidegoms van Amsterdam,” 136–60, 329–44. For the linguistic impacts of intermarriage of immigrants in the Republic, see Hendriks, “Immigration and Linguistic Change.” For this project, we not only explored broader marriage patterns but also more nuanced understandings within these broad categories.

First, and least surprisingly, Reformed migrants seem to have married endogenously along confessional lines. Whether they lived in Reformed-, Lutheran-, or Catholic-majority host communities, Dutch Reformed Protestants married other Reformed Protestants. Certainly, pastors and elders promoted such confessional endogamy.58 EKAW Gefach 12,5 fol. 54r. Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 151. We have found a few examples of members of Reformed congregations who came from local families marrying other locals from different churches in Goch.59 In November 1583, elders in Goch investigated Trijnken van Sonssbeck for getting engaged to “an unbeliever.” Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:348. See also Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:374. In February 1591, Derick van Eilst, a member of Goch’s Reformed congregation from the neighboring village of Uedem, wanted to marry a non-Reformed woman in February 1591. Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:331–32. But we have not found any examples of those migrants who moved into these communities from the Netherlands marrying across confessional lines. Indeed, among the Dutch migrants in our study—including the 363 married couples we have identified in Cologne, the 314 married couples we have identified in Wesel, the 122 married couples in Frankfurt, or the 1,172 married couples in Frankenthal—we have not found any people marrying across confessional borders. This result is not surprising. In Cologne, Reformed congregations were illegal in the first place; so marrying outside one’s confession posed a threat to oneself and one’s entire church community. The same was true after 1562 in Frankfurt, except that here migrants married in city churches, rather than in their own congregations. Meanwhile, in Wesel, migrants were more integrated into the local community and all Protestants worshipped in the same churches. If cross-confessional marriages were taking place, they might not have been recorded as such. Still, the fact that no one complained about mixed marriages—even as many complained about multiconfessional communion and baptisms—suggests that they were not a concern.60 On mixed marriage in Wesel, see Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 199–201. Finally, in Frankenthal we have yet to identify a non-Reformed resident of the town, so there could be no confessionally-mixed marriages there. Thus, while the religious, social, institutional, and legal situations were distinct in each community, the pattern of endogamous marriage was the same. We cannot state with confidence that mixed marriages took place—some might feasibly have been celebrated in Catholic or Lutheran parishes and thus be invisible to us today. However, given that we have found no complaints from pastors, elders, or spouses’ relatives about this practice, we feel confident in concluding that confessional endogamy remained the rule.

The examples that come closest to cross-confessional weddings relate to Reformed Protestants involved with Anabaptists. Willem de Deckenmaker, a Reformed Protestant living in Emmerich, had a wife who attended Anabaptist services for several years. By October 1577, however, she joined the Reformed congregation.61 DNRM-EM-36. DNRM-EM-88. A case from Cologne involves Joos van de Scheuren and his wife Anna who had moved from Antwerp sometime after Alexander Farnese’s 1585 conquest of their home city. After ten years as a member of Cologne’s Reformed congregation, Joos joined an Anabaptist congregation (it seems that Anna remained with the Reformed).62 WMV, 3/1, 239, 252, 258, 296–97, 369, 373, 383. DNRM-CL-380. However, these exceptions only prove the general trend of confessional endogamy. Given the deep anxiety of sixteenth-century church officials regarding the dangers of mixed marriages for seducing the faithful away from the true church and the conflicts between families that confessionally mixed marriages often spawned elsewhere, it seems unlikely that such marriages were taking places without leaving any record.63 Kaplan, “Integration vs. Segregation”; Freist, Glaube - Liebe - Zwietracht.

For the most part, Dutch Reformed migrants also married people who came from the same city or region as themselves in their new homes. For Wesel, we have identified the geographical origin for both bride and groom among Dutch Reformed who married in Wesel in fifty-one cases. Of those, twenty (39 percent) originated from the same city. That number is pretty high considering the diverse geographical origins of Wesel’s migrant community. It suggests a preference among many to reproduce preexisting social networks and identities while living abroad. Of the remaining marriages, only three others married someone who came from their region, but not their hometown. There seems to have been a preference for marrying people who came from the same social circles in the same hometowns. But barring that, Dutch Reformed migrants living in Wesel made no distinction between marrying people from their region and those from far-flung territories, including French-speaking regions or parts of the Holy Roman Empire. A migrant to Wesel from Antwerp was more likely to marry someone else from Antwerp, but if they did not, they were just as likely to marry someone from Harderwijk, Delft, Lille, or Kleve. Thus, those migrants who did not re-­create connections to their hometown in marriage demonstrated no preference to re-create territorial or regional identities, to marry among people who spoke like them, or to re-create any kind of preexisting regional, “Dutch” or even “Netherlandish” ethnic or political identity.

The pattern is even more pronounced for Cologne, where we have identified the geographical origin for both bride and groom of 113 couples who married in the Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation. Of those, fully 61 (54 percent) came from the same home city in the Netherlands (mostly Antwerp). For them, marriage re-created the social networks of their hometowns. The wealthy merchant families in Cologne, the Van Uffel, Heymas, Boel, d’Ablaing and others largely intermarried among people of similar social status and place of origin while living abroad. Of the rest, however, couples in Cologne’s Dutch-speaking congregation were just as likely to marry someone from a different region entirely as to marry someone from a town nearby their own place of origin. Only nine couples married someone from the same territory as themselves but a different city (including one couple who came from the duchy of Jülich). And if a potential spouse was not from one’s home city, they were just as likely to marry someone from a distant territory, including from French-speaking regions or the Empire, as they were someone from a city or town near where they had grown up. Among the eleven Netherlanders who married people from the Empire, ten spouses were from Jülich, Cleves, Aachen, or the archbishopric of Cologne, and only one grew up in Cologne. Marriage choice was not a way of expressing or reproducing regional “Dutch” or “Netherlandish” identities. Marriages between people of diverse geographical origins also contributed to ethnic diversity within the Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation. Take, for instance, the example of Anna Benoit, from Brussels, who married Gillis Andries, a migrant to Cologne from Burtscheid (near Aachen) in 1597, who joined Anna’s Dutch church.64 DNRM-CL-1287. The Walloon migrant from Tournai, Michiel du Bouraigne, married Geertken Kocks, a woman from the duchy of Jülich in Cologne’s Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation.65 DNRM-CL-1259. DNRM-CL-1260. Such marriages only reinforce the conclusion that Cologne’s Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation was not neatly defined by linguistic, political, or ethnic boundaries. But it also suggests that once individuals married beyond existing networks from their hometowns, they made little distinction about whether that their marriage partner shared a dialect or native language, political allegiance, or regional identity.

Marriage patterns in Frankenthal differed significantly, where we have identified the geographical origin of both partners who married in the Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation in 287 cases. In those cases, only 4 percent of marriages (11) were between people who hailed from the same hometown. Of the rest, the majority (55 percent) came from the same territory—either both from Brabant or both from Flanders—but different cities. Meanwhile, we found sixty cases (22 percent) in Frankenthal in which two migrants from the Empire married in the Dutch-speaking church, even after a separate German-speaking congregation was established in 1583. Of those cases, only two involved partners from the same territory (in both cases, they were from different towns in the Palatinate). German-speaking migrants came to Frankenthal not only from villages in the Palatinate but also from Hesse, Saxony, Württemberg, Ansbach, Strasbourg, and elsewhere, and they built new families of German-speaking migrants with no preference for the origin of the spouse. Meanwhile, few Dutch speakers ever married German-speaking immigrants. Of the eight cases where someone from the Netherlands married a migrant from the Empire in Frankenthal’s Dutch-speaking church, seven involved one person from the Netherlands where German dialects dominated (like Luxembourg) or from regions in the Empire where Dutch dialects were prominent (like Cleves). In a few other cases, German pastors in the Palatinate married Dutch women in Frankenthal and brought them back to their hometown.66 Such was the case in December 1586, when the pastor at Nierstein, a village forty kilometers to the north, Conradus Arnoldi, married Beiken s’Ridders. Velden, Registres de l’Eglise, 2:15. However, those cases indicate nothing of social integration in Frankenthal, since the couple never lived in Frankenthal together. Meanwhile, although Frankenthal developed a substantial French-speaking population (and from 1578 a French-language congregation), we have only identified eleven cases of someone from the Walloon provinces or France marrying into the Dutch-speaking population. The general pattern is clear. Unlike in Cologne and Wesel, Frankenthal was more clearly socially divided between three language groups: a Dutch-speaking population, a German-speaking population, and a French-speaking congregation.67 It is not clear whether French and Walloon migrants—who shared a congregation—in Frankenthal intermarried extensively. In Southampton, the two communities remained endogamous despite sharing a congregation. Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community, 154. That is, in contrast to Wesel and Cologne, in Frankenthal, a shared “Netherlandish” or “Dutch” identity was indeed being reinforced by marriage patterns.

By the 1590s, the preference among the Dutch-speaking population of Frankenthal to retain its linguistic and cultural coherence in the face of increasing immigration from German- and French-speaking lands encouraged them to create a transregional Dutch marriage market. That is, families in the Netherlands and throughout the Dutch Reformed diaspora sent brides and grooms across vast distances to Frankenthal to create new marriage partnerships. Reformed Protestants in Cologne maintained a particularly vibrant relationship with Frankenthal over the years and, by the 1590s, were regularly supplying marriage-eligible women to men in Frankenthal. Such was the case when Christiana Kael, moved from Cologne’s Reformed congregation in 1598 to marry the widower Adriaen van Avoorde.68 Velden, Registres de l’Eglise, 2:40. The following year, the daughter of Guillaume Wijmout, a refugee from Antwerp and deacon for his current congregation, moved from Cologne to Frankenthal to marry goldsmith and city councilor Pieter de Meier, who likewise belonged to the Antwerp diaspora.69 Velden, Registres de l’Eglise, 2:42. By the end of the century, Reformed families living in Dutch Republic also supplied Frankenthal’s transregional marriage market. In April 1598, for instance, Janneken Aelbrecht moved from Middelburg to Frankenthal to marry Maillaert van der Meersch, whose family had fled Middelburg a generation earlier.70 Velden, Registres de l’Eglise, 2:39; Van Vloten, Onderzoek van ‘s Koningswege. The previous September, Margriet Comans made the same move from Middelburg to Frankenthal to marry Adam Strijckhout, a second-generation Netherlander living there.71 Velden, Registres de l’Eglise, 2:36. These migrants were not refugees escaping persecution but part of a diasporic social network that maintained their family ties across long distances well after the danger they faced as Protestants had passed. It’s not clear why Roeland Hendrix moved from the small Overijssel village of Wanneperveen to marry Elisabeth van den Bosch in the summer of 1597, but their families probably had some preexisting connections.72 Velden, Registres de l’Eglise, 2:35.

Another useful look into how the immigrants situated themselves within the community can be gained by examining the names they gave their children. After all, naming practices are inherently an expression of social identity and positioning.73 Aldrin, “Choosing a Name = Choosing Identity?” During the early modern era, choosing a baptismal name for a newborn could be a way of expressing one’s faith, status, or values but also of extending the implications of that decision throughout the child’s lifetime, even after the parents were gone.74 Wilson, Means of Naming, 185–214; Spierling, Infant Baptism, 224. As Renaissance humanism spread across Europe, some educated European elites began adopting classical Greek and Roman names for their progeny, such as Alexander and Hercules for boys and Diana and Helena for girls.75 We chose those examples because they appear in the migrant communities in our study. Scholars of the Reformation have noted that Reformed Protestants often favored names from the Old Testament, such as Abraham and Isaac for boys and Sara for girls.76 Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 505–6; Benedict, Rouen, 104–6, 256–60. For a parent, the latter decision not only entailed a self-conscious rejection of saints’ names and an embrace of biblicism but also identification with the ancient Israelites, God’s chosen people.77 Kist, “De Synoden,” 146; Leibring, “Given Names,” 206; Spierling, Infant Baptism, 141.

The practice of expressing new religious identity through naming stood in tension with other naming practices that promoted conservativism from medieval pools of names. First, was naming one’s infant after a godmother or godfather. Such a practice strengthened the relationship of fictive kinship and conferred honor on the godparent who might be responsible for the care and Christian education of an orphaned child.78 Spierling, Infant Baptism, 116, 144. Some Reformed rejected godparentage because it has no biblical precedent. That view, however, never became dominant. In addition, many families had a tradition of alternating first names between generations, a practice that was more common for boys than girls, given its symbolic role in emphasizing patrilineality.79 Leibring, “Given Names,” 207. Finally, minorities whose religious commitments put them at risk may have had strategic reasons to choose names for their children so they would not stand out.80 In Rouen, France, after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Reformed Protestants’ use of Old Testament names declined as they sought to keep a lower profile. Benedict, Rouen 149. Studying naming patterns thus allows historians to explore the ways in which migrants might have tried to blend in or stand apart from their hosts. Before proceeding, it is useful to note the uneven nature of the sources. Our most important sources for naming practices were baptismal registers, though they were supplemented by references to children in consistory protocols and correspondence. There exists a comprehensive baptismal register for Frankenthal, the only host community in which the Dutch Reformed operated an independent public parish church throughout the period of their stay. We excluded the names of those immigrants who came from the Empire. We were left with 1,281 names. We also have relatively good records from Cologne’s Dutch-speaking congregation, which operated independently (though covertly). However, in Cologne, many parents had their infants baptized in enclaves in nearby Reformed territories. There, too, we excluded the small number of individuals whom we have identified as migrants from the Empire. For Cologne, we counted 670 names. For Wesel’s multiconfessional church there are comprehensive baptismal lists from the 1570s, but those lists do not indicate whether the parents submitted to the discipline of the Dutch-speaking consistory or which parents were immigrants from the Low Countries or elsewhere. Thus identifying the geographical origin or confessional orientation of parents required matching names with other sources, such as consistory records. We were able to use our database to cross-reference those to identify 178 names. The other communities in our study lack comprehensive baptismal registers, so for this part of our study, we limited ourselves to Wesel, Cologne, and Frankenthal.

However, what is most notable about the naming patterns in these three Dutch-speaking Reformed communities is not the frequency of these previously unused Old Testament names, but their relative infrequency compared to other Reformed communities. Among boys, Abraham and David are the only Old Testament names that might be considered distinctly Reformed to appear with any frequency (8 percent and 4 percent, respectively) during this era. Other distinctly Reformed boys’ names used among Reformed Protestants elsewhere—Isaac, Moses, Noah, Samuel, and Benjamin—remained uncommon or absent in all three communities. Among girls, Susanna and Sarah were generally popular among Reformed Protestants. Such confessionally distinctive Hebrew names were more common for girls than for boys (at least in Frankenthal and Cologne). This trend might reflect the fact that boys’ names tended to change more slowly because of their connection to patrilineal inheritance. However, while several Old Testament or Hebrew names for girl were popular with Reformed Protestants generally—Susanna, Sara, Esther, Rachel, Judith, and Rebecca—such names appear in only 23 percent of cases in Cologne, 28 percent of cases in Frankenthal, and only 14 percent in Wesel. This frequency of Old Testament and Hebrew girls’ names was noticeably more common than comparable names for boys. Still, most Dutch-speaking Reformed parents opted for confessionally neutral names.

Further, it seems that a subset of parents was responsible for a disproportionately large number of the Old Testament names that do appear. Jan Claerbout, a tailor from Brussels who lived in Frankenthal (and Frankfurt), had children named Abraham, Rebecca, Jacob, Daniel, and Sarah. Jelis van der Abel, a Netherlander who became a citizen of Wesel in 1591, had sons named Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And Pieter van Dillenburg, the hatmaker who belonged to the Dutch-speaking congregation in Cologne, had children named Abraham, Isaac, and Hester. Concentrations of Old Testament names among certain families might suggest powerful connections these parents felt to the ancient Israelites, but it also underscores the fact that most parents adopted confessionally neutral names. Overall, parents did not primarily appeal to a personal connection to the ancient Israelites of the Old Testament in expressing identity. As Mirjam van Veen and Inge Schipper have argued elsewhere, invocations of an identity with the ancient Israelites belonged to a wider repertoire of intellectual resources to which Dutch Reformed referred in making sense of their experiences, and it was not necessarily the central component thereof.85 Van Veen, “‘Reformierte Flüchtlinge”; Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 214–24. See also chapter 6.

It is also useful to note the significantly lower number of confessionally distinct naming practices for girls in Wesel (14 percent) than for Cologne (23 percent) and Frankenthal (28 percent). This difference stands in contrast to boys, where between 15–16 percent of names were confessionally distinct names in all three communities. We have already suggested why this difference appears for girls rather than boys, that is, patrilineage meant that fathers’ names tended to stay in the family, often skipping a generation. Thus, naming a daughter offered greater opportunity to express nonfamilial forms of identity, including religious identity. However, why Wesel saw such lower expressions of confessionally distinct naming patterns for girls than the other two communities remains to be explained.

The key difference between Wesel and the other two congregations likely relates to the larger social integration into other arenas of life that we have seen among Reformed migrants in Wesel. In Frankenthal, Reformed migrants from the Low Countries were free to use baptismal naming as an expression of confessional identity, like naming their daughters Susanna or Sarah. After all, they were under no pressure to conform to preexisting social norms or expectations. By contrast, migrants in Cologne were under tremendous pressure to conform to preexisting social norms and expectations. Flouting the city’s Catholicism could get them expelled and their property confiscated. But because they worshipped clandestinely, they did not face those pressures at the baptismal font in the public church. It’s true that the name would get out once the infant left the birthing chamber, however, since they mostly lived in the same neighborhoods, and their illegal faith was largely a public secret, social pressures to conform in this way did not seem to dramatically affect naming patterns. In Wesel, however, Reformed migrants shared a language and a congregation with local Lutherans, and even some local Catholics, and they lived and worked beside them on a regular basis. Dutch-speaking elders spent considerable energy tamping down confessionally distinct behaviors that might endanger the city’s hospitality. Further, the baptismal ceremony took place in front of the entire multiconfessional congregation, such that social pressures promoting confessionally ambiguous behavior included the baptismal rite. These reasons may explain why we see higher levels of confessionally ambiguous naming patterns in Wesel than in Cologne and Frankenthal.