Chapter Five
Living in Diaspora
While the previous three chapters have examined the diversity of constitutional, social, and religious experiences of Netherlandish migrants covered by this book, this chapter looks at the transnational, transregional, and regional networks that members of these congregations developed to sustain a sense of community and mutual fellowship in the face of the social fracturing created by forced migration. In our usage here,
transnational refers to links among the Dutch-speaking Reformed diaspora across the Low Countries, England, and the Holy Roman Empire.
1 A useful model is Grell, “Creation of a Transnational, Calvinist Network.” We recognize that the concept of ‘transnational’ might anachronistically imply the existence of nation-states. However, we find it useful, to contrast the connections across regions of the Empire to the broader diasporic connections that we mean when we use this word. By contrast,
transregional networks refer to long-distance connections developed across political borders within the Empire, especially between the Lower Rhine and Upper Rhine regions.
2 On transregionalism, Soen et al., “How to do Transregional History.” We recognize that this distinction does not match Violet Soen’s exactly, but we find it useful for our study. By
regional, we mean communities located in a variety of polities that were bunched together around nodes of activity. These communities might be separated by as up to eighty-five kilometers, but they were close enough to make recurring personal visits feasible. As we will argue, while historians have often stressed the importance of transnational networks among the Dutch Reformed diaspora, the transregional and regional networks proved much more important among the congregations in our study.
Before proceeding, it is helpful to reflect on two kinds of past scholarship on this topic. First, many scholars of Reformed Protestantism have stressed that the experience of persecution and exile encouraged a distinctly international or transnational identity that some scholars refer to as “international Calvinism.”
3 Robert M. Kingdon, “International Calvinism,” in Handbook of European History, Brady Oberman, and Tracy, vol. 2, 229–45. See a correction in Mack Holt, “International Calvinism,” in Holder, John Calvin in Context, 375–82. For many, the internationalism of the Reformed tradition distinguished it from other religious traditions.
4 Grell, Brethren in Christ; Graeme Murdock, Beyond Calvin, 2; Prestwich, “Changing Face of Calvinism,” 144. As scholars have rightly shown, intellectual, personal, and political ties bound Reformed Protestants together over vast distances. However, historians have sometimes been taken in by the unifying rhetorical strategies of the actors of the texts they are reading, which can belie more complicated pictures.
5 Muchnik and Monge, “Fragments d’exils”; Pohl, “History in Fragments.” See also Van Veen, “‘Reformierte Flüchtlinge.” Additionally, as recent scholarship has stressed, Catholics, Lutherans, and Anabaptist traditions also had their own substantive international networks binding people together across vast distances, multiple languages, and diverse polities.
6 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization; Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal; Rublack, Reformation Europe, 64–66; Monge, Des communautés mouvantes, 154. In a world in which most people grew up in the medieval Christian church, which embraced an international—even universal—identity, the presence of transnational religious networks across vast distances should perhaps not surprise us. After all, it was tying one’s faith to a specific polity that was the novelty of the sixteenth century, not the internationalism of religious networks and identities. In that sense, the transnationalism of Reformed Protestantism was very much the rule. A focus on International Calvinism also risks prioritizing one form of identity over others. As Johannes Müller has argued, migrants developed multiple, overlapping identities without any sense of contradiction or disorientation.
7 Müller, Exile Memories. See also Onnekink, “Models of an Imagined Community”; Muchnik and Monge, “Fragments d’exils.”Rather than measuring transnationalism of this Reformed diaspora using malleable categories like identities, in this chapter we examine the networks of mutual association that Reformed Protestants developed among themselves as well as with other coreligionists in the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands. Thus, our approach, much like that adopted by Johannes Arndt, treats Reformed Protestantism as a kind of social network defined by interactions among the individuals who led and belonged to these congregations.
8 Arndt, Das Heilige Römische Reich, 26–28. One advantage to this approach is that it is capable of recognizing multiple identities, as well as integrating ambiguities, tensions, and flexible adaptions within these networks. Moreover, while this chapter privileges the perspective of pastors and elders, this approach does not assume a top-down model of causality or assume that the efforts of church leaders had any necessary effects among congregations or others. Finally, this method has the potential to identify how local conditions—like those explained in chapters 2 through 4—shaped relationships across transnational, transregional, and regional networks.
9 On this point, see also Poettering, Migrating Merchants.A second body of scholarly literature relevant to this topic has been written by historians of the Dutch Reformation, who have emphasized the transnationalism of Reformed Protestantism to explain the role of Dutch Reformed refugees in providing personnel, ecclesiastical models, and printed propaganda for promoting the evangelical cause and otherwise providing the foundation for the construction of the Dutch Reformed Church starting in the 1570s.
10 Andrew Pettegree, “Coming to Terms with Victory: The Upbuilding of a Calvinist Chruch in Holland,” in Pettegree, Duke and Lewis, Calvinism in Europe, 160–80; Fitzsimmons, “Building a Reformed Ministry.” Janssen, “Verjaagd uit Nederland.” According to this understanding, living abroad not only bound migrants together in an international community whose members shared the experience of persecution. It also stressed that they developed a shared goal of building Christ’s Church in the fatherland. Recently, Silke Muylaert has countered that from 1560, foreign congregations in England were more focused on supporting one another and preserving a good relationship with English political authorities than they were on building Reformed churches in the Low Countries. Muylaert also points out that the Dutch-speaking congregations in England were often roiled by disagreements and demographically unstable, so that such coordinated action would have been challenging, even if that had been their primary goal.
11 Muylaert, Shaping the Stranger Churches. Our findings for the congregations in the Holy Roman Empire largely support Muylaert’s conclusions. Our study of the international ecclesiastical networks developed by these congregations suggests that, rather than imagining them as living primarily as foreign staging grounds to build an imagined Dutch Reformed Church, their leaders also aimed to build multilingual, regional, and transregional communities of support among the faithful, often prioritizing more immediate local and regional needs.
This chapter proceeds in four sections. The first examines the ecclesiastical institutions in which these Dutch Reformed congregations in the Empire participated across the diaspora. Here we see a developing tension between efforts to create a new Dutch-language Reformed church that might serve as the public church for the rebel-held territories of the Low Countries starting in 1572 and the creation of multilingual, regional ecclesiastical institutions in the Empire. The second section looks at the role of migrant congregations in providing pastoral care for coreligionists both in the Netherlands and across the diaspora. Here again, we see a tension developing between the needs of local and regional congregations and the interests of the churches in the rebel-held regions of the Low Countries. The third section examines charitable efforts across the diaspora. We find that the Reformed congregations in our study were more oriented toward aiding one another across a transregional network of congregations in the Empire than they were at interacting with churches in the emerging United Provinces of the Netherlands. The fourth section examines written correspondence between congregations, especially focusing on letters of attestation for church members migrating from one place to another. Here we find the strongest evidence for transnational networks binding congregations together across the Low Countries, England, and the Empire. However, as we will see, in practice, letters of recommendation proved far less important than often imagined in holding communities together or monitoring migrants moving across the diaspora. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of two other forms of transnational ties that other historians have examined—support for the Protestant military cause and the spread of Reformed printed literature—both of which played a very minor role in the activities of the congregations in our study. In sum, this chapter shows that the religious networks of Dutch Reformed migrants were weaker and less focused on supporting the Dutch Reformed Church than previously understood. Instead, they adapted to serve local, regional, and transregional needs, including helping one another in cooperation with French- and German-speaking coreligionists in their area.