Afterword

This book has been an effort to retell these migrants’ stories, severed from the historiographical shadows that have long haunted them, whether they expressed some fundamentally “Calvinist” character or stood in stark contrast to some fundamentally “Dutch” character. Both claims about sixteenth-century Dutch-speaking refugees anachronistically essentialize confessional or nationalist characteristics in ways that obscure efforts to understand who they were. While historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sometimes did this in abashedly jingoistic or Romanticist prose, in recent years, these claims have remained remarkably resilient, if more matter of fact.

As we have seen time and time again in this book, the categories of analysis that historians use, often inherited from intervening centuries, can sometimes obscure elements of the experiences of these migrants that are critical to understanding the reasons why they left (chapter 1), the terms of their arrival (chapter 2), the relationships they developed with their hosts (chapter 3), the forms of their worship (chapter 4), the ties they developed across the diaspora (chapter 5), and their decision whether or not to return to the Low Countries (chapter 6). To be honest, with each chapter we struggled about how to sever our own history from the legacies of intervening centuries. Of course, modern historians (including ourselves) still greatly profit from the diligence of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century record collectors and historians for compiling, preserving, and publishing sources. However, this dependence on earlier materials sometimes also makes it difficult to look across categories of difference, whether those were confessional, political, linguistic, national, or otherwise as well as to critically assess the extent to which printed primary source collections might have played a role in highlighting some voices and silencing others. We hope that this book offers one model for how others might be able to dispel some of the shadows that obscure elements of their historical quarry, too.

In the end, the research presented here offers little to contribute to the historiography of toleration in the Dutch Republic or to the development of Reformed orthodoxy in the Dutch-speaking world. It’s clear enough that the experience of being a refugee, exile, or forced migrant played no essential role in shaping these migrants in the ways that scholars have sometimes suggested. As a group, they did not become more tolerant or less tolerant, more Calvinist or less Calvinist, more committed to state supervision of religious life or less. They did not possess a shared ethnic or political identity. Neither did they possess a shared commitment to the Dutch Revolt or a shared political ideology. While these conclusions are largely negative, their significance lies in that they challenge much of what has been previously written.

Indeed, what most characterized the Dutch Reformed refugees of the late sixteenth century is their diverse range of experiences. As we explained in chapter 1, people fled for a wide range of reasons, with multiple push and pull factors shaping their decision-making process. Their travels were not just one way; migrants sometime moved back and forth between the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire or between various cities within the diaspora. Once they arrived, a range of local forces shaped what terms host governments demanded for their stay, including the local balance of confessional groups, how people understood the boundaries between those groups, how magistrates understood and applied imperial law, as well as the interventions of nonlocal powers. In chapter 3, we learned that treating all these migrants using the same confessional and ethnic categories obscures much about migrants’ relations with their hosts. Diversities in refugees’ experiences mean that scholars need to be cautious about markers of foreigners’ social integration into host populations. An action that might be taken as indicative of assimilation in one community might have meant something very different in another. The compromises required for preserving sacred devotions also depended greatly on location, as we saw in chapter 4. Dutch Reformed migrants chose from a range of options, including traveling to nearby territories, worshipping in private houses or barns, or worshipping in services alongside people of different confessions. This last category of compromises proved easier for rites of passage than for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, but there were even diverse ways to manage communion services. For all this variety, of course, the Dutch-speaking Reformed migrants in our study maintained important ties to one another, sharing ecclesiastical institutions, pastors, social welfare, and correspondence, as we showed in chapter 5. They were deeply committed to the welfare of fellow believers across the diaspora, imagining themselves to be part of a community of faith that was not only well-defined but also connected to a universal, divine, and eternal spiritual community. But not only were the networks they developed to support that community less oriented to Netherlands than historians have often assumed, but the political, social, cultural, and religious arrangements still had to be developed according to local demands, meaning that diversity of experiences still reigned.

Facing this range of experiences, migrants drew on preexisting personal, intellectual, and emotional resources to make sense of what they were going through, as explained in chapter 6. They did not understand those experiences through the same lens, and they certainly did not all understand them as traumatic or exilic. One of the most surprising conclusions of our study is that, when faced with the opportunity to abandon the compromises required in their new homes, return to the Netherlands, and join the new public Dutch Reformed Church, most did not do so. Even for those who did go to the Dutch Republic, few experienced this move as returning “home.” Rather, their move was yet another remigration, impelled by a variety of political, economic, and familial factors. It was only after several generations that a shared memory culture of these forced migrations started to emerge. Over the centuries, that memory culture developed into a single historical narrative, first among coreligionists either celebrating their own ancestors or seeking to integrate themselves to the migrants’ descendants. Later, that narrative got picked up by critics of Reformed orthodoxy, for whom the same story served opposite purposes—presenting them as introducing a foreign intolerance into an otherwise tolerant Dutch society.

When we pan out from national narratives and consider this book’s contributions relative to the recent scholarship on early modern migration, our research takes on a different light. Rather than exile promoting more tightly defined, militant, and rigid thinkers, perhaps it just as often promoted habits of living and thinking that encouraged flexibility, creativity, and a willingness to compromise. The anthropologist Anton Blok has suggested that such life-changing challenges like fleeing one’s home as an exile and or living in social exclusion as a stranger can lead to what he calls the “blessings of adversity” (de zegeningen van tegenslag) that allow for high degrees of creativity.4 Blok, De vernieuwers. Peter Burke has similarly suggested that the experience of exile can promote a “deprovincialization” that can spur on innovation and creative hybridization in thinking for both migrants and their hosts.5 Burke, Exiles and Expatriates. Regarding sixteenth-century Reformed refugees, Nicole Grochowina and Michael Bruening have both recently suggested that sixteenth-century Reformed refugee communities were places where heterodox, nonconfessional, and even tolerant ideas could flourish.6 Grochowina, Indifferenz und Dissens, 402–3; Bruening, Refusing, 188–92. This claim points to the exact opposite of Heiko Oberman’s argument about an Exulantentheologie.

For the refugees in our study, there is something to commend such an interpretation. First, their experiences in the Empire required these migrants to flexibly adapt the ways they thought, behaved, worshipped, and communicated with remarkable creativity and resilience. One can see traces of this trend in every chapter of this book, from the decisions to flee or to creatively recast themselves as adherents to the Augsburg Confession in order to secure their stay. We see it too in the diverse liturgical compromises they developed depending on local needs, or the kind of alliances and collaborations they made with German- and French-speaking coreligionists abroad, but also at times with Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Catholics. We can also see it in the ways they adapted practices used by Reformed Protestants elsewhere—including disciplinarily procedures, letters of attestations, and purposes of classis institutions—to serve their distinct needs. Earlier historians have argued that a strict system of ecclesiastical discipline, a well-structured theology, and a strong pattern of coordination across vast distances proved critical to the Dutch Reformed diaspora. In fact, it might have been the ability of these migrants to adapt locally in ways that were often not well coordinated that proved critical.

Second, it was not just relations across the diaspora that held it together but the migrants’ ability to build substantive relations with those outside the diaspora. In that sense, rather than seeing refugee communities as isolated in a foreign land, we need to understand the constructive associations that they built with others, which many carried with them through their entire lives. Here too, we see examples in every chapter. It certainly was true for those who studied at the University of Heidelberg. It was also true for those who developed international correspondence networks while living in the Empire. We can also see it in the cooperation that they built with refugees from France, as well as coreligionists from the Empire. It was also true in the patrons they developed among political and religious elites within their host communities. We see it in the friendships and mutual dependencies they developed that allowed some to look the other way at their unorthodoxy. We can see in in the critical alliances they built with influential German Reformed princes who proved crucial to providing protection, finances, and worship spaces for the migrants. The most important of these, until his death in October 1576, was Elector Friedrich III of Palatine. Other noble patrons included members of the Neuenahr, Myllendonk, and Goor families.

There is a critical limitation to this interpretation, though: those who fled were already likely to be both more adaptable and more connected to the wider world. After all, migrants rarely traveled to a new community unless they already knew that place existed, already had some knowledge about how to get there, and had the means to make such a trip happen. Dutch Reformed who fled, that is, were more likely than those who stayed to be educated, to know travel routes, to be in contact with family or friends who had already fled, and to have occupations that relied on specialized skills rather than (for instance) the possession or use of a specific tract of land. In that case, life as a refugee merely exacerbated preexisting attributes. Further, there is no real evidence of any particularly innovative intellectual productivity in any of these refugee communities. Their discourses for describing suffering were part of conventional Christian repertoires. Yes, they learned to compromise, but learning to grudgingly compromise with religious difference was part of a general experience in post-Reformation Europe, not something specific to refugees. While a few influential Dutch Reformed leaders came out of these communities—Arent Cornelisz and Werner Helmichius, instance—their impact did not stem from their intellectual creativity or originality but from their energy, focus, and organizational skills.

The experience of life in the Empire, though, did provide these migrants extensive practice with multilingualism and expanded opportunities to interact with people from different backgrounds. If these “blessings of adversity” did not have direct intellectual impacts on the refugees themselves, such assets may have had intergenerational impacts. As Johannes Müller has shown, second-generation descendants of the Dutch Reformed migrants who stayed in Frankfurt emerged as important translators and publishers of new nonconfessional forms of pious literature that began offering alternatives to the dogmatic confessionalism of earlier generations.7 Müller, “Transmigrant Literature.” In that sense, if Nicholas’s Terpstra was right that the sixteenth century saw the first emergence of religious refugees as a mass phenomenon, then perhaps the consequential creation of intellectual and cultural creativity promoted by exile was also only long term and intergenerational. After all, later commenters on these forced migrations assigned specific meanings to refugees’ experiences. And in later centuries that subsequent meaning-making proved generative of new identities that shaped varieties of local, regional, and national politics. Of course, before such conclusions can be sustained, there remains much research to do. We need deeper understandings of the relationships between refugees across language and culture systematically. We need more studies by scholars capable of working in the full range of languages that the refugees they study used. And we need more collaborative projects, like this one, that can grapple with the enormous challenge of working against the archival grain.

If we have been cognizant that politics of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries has deeply shaped the study of sixteenth-century refugees, we are also aware that our own scholarship is shaped by the politics of our moment in history. Today, exile and migration in early modern Europe have become an important focus of scholarly attention, largely inspired by increasing debates about refugees and immigrants in Europe and the United States. These migrations have challenged some self-understandings of people in the West and provoked deep debates that seem to be reshaping global politics. The stakes of that migration could be high, as movements of people from the Global South challenge Western political and economic dominance that began just about the time that our own study of migration begins: in the mid-sixteenth century. Like today, the forced migrations of the sixteenth century sparked debates about the nature of political and economic order. They also forced similar questions also about whether the cultural and religious changes that necessarily accompany migration should be welcomed or minimized, and about whether the ways we manage the misunderstandings and disagreements that result are sustainable and constructive or volatile and dangerous. Certainly, the study of early modern migration makes it clear that questions about the relationship between the culture of settlers and settled, and related questions about religious coexistence, are much older than we are often inclined to think. Of course, historians cannot solve contemporary challenges or resolve debates about the causes and consequences of migration and refugee resettlement today. But historians can contribute to contemporary debates by providing critical context necessary for a more mature understanding of both ourselves and others. In that sense, we hope our book helps readers check themselves from the easy lure to categorize members of an ethnic, religious, or national group of migrants according to some preset assumption about who they are, why they are leaving, how they experience their migration, or possible future impacts of their travels. Thus, we see this book not only as part of a scholarly discussion about the sixteenth century but a way that we can offer historical perspective that might allow others—in Mirjam van Veen’s home in Europe, Jesse Spohnholz’s home in the United States, or otherwise—to consider their views on refugees and forced migrations in more thoughtful, more self-critical, and more generous ways.