Before concluding our discussion of religious worship, it is necessary to mention Frankenthal separately. We have not included Frankenthal in the previous discussion of how Dutch Reformed migrants managed worship in the Holy Roman Empire for two reasons. First, and most importantly, consistory records from Frankenthal’s church have not survived. The best surviving sources from the Dutch settlement in the Upper Rhine are city council and courts records, combined with extensive baptismal and marriage lists, as well as agreements with the central government in Heidelberg, and property and tax lists.
1 City council and court minutes, StAF 1/11/82–91. Baptismal and marriage lists, StAF 1/10/47, printed in Velden, Registres de l’Église. Agreements with the government in Heidelberg, StAF 1/1/1–6, 13. Property and Tax Records StAF 1/3/34, 1/52/466–68. Those are all valuable records, but they tell us little about worship in Frankenthal. We know that they used the Palatine liturgy, followed the Heidelberg Catechism, and used Petrus Dathenus’s translation of the Psalms. But beyond that, we are left with silence in the sources.
The second reason we did not discuss Frankenthal in this chapter until now is that, unlike the rest of the communities in our study, the town was officially Reformed and faced no barriers to managing its worship services as the Dutch Reformed migrants preferred. Dutch Reformed migrants in Frankenthal did not need to compromise on religious practice at all. Residents of Frankenthal did not cross political or confessional boundaries for rites of passage. And they maintained the universality of both the Lord’s Supper as a symbolic expression of both the confessional purity of their congregation and the social unity of their civic commune. Frankenthal existed as a kind of ideal of Reformed purity, guaranteed by its powerful Reformed prince. But what it gained in purity it lacked in a powerful economic base to attract and sustain Dutch Reformed migrants in large numbers. The town remained small and relatively marginal both to the Palatinate and the Dutch Reformed movement as a whole.