Among its many consequences, it is now well established that the Reformation provided early modern women with a new space of ‘agency’ in which they could find room to intrude into the traditional male sphere(s) and often to voice their opinions, thus ‘disturbing’ early modern patriarchal society – Protestant and Catholic alike.Footnote 1 This was not a linear process and often traditional gender roles were reasserted and renewed. We can see that women's opportunities to engage across established bounds of gender segregation in religious discursive practices peaked during the first decades of religious reform.Footnote 2 The complexity of early modern women's condition is well exemplified by the emergence of a new category of ‘domesticity’, with a new understanding of the household as a private and intimate sphere. This new category reinforced the traditional prohibition of women's public speech, but also allowed for the gradual emergence of new public spheres which offered new opportunities for expression that women used to make themselves heard.Footnote 3 The early modern Netherlands – both the northern Dutch Republic and the southern provinces under the Spanish rule – provides many examples of women who entered male-dominated public spheres. ‘Nederlanders’ showed ‘attitudes towards women and gender that were among the more female-friendly in Western Europe’, which does not mean that ‘women were not constricted by patriarchal norms’, but rather that ‘their range of activity was wider than historians often assume’.Footnote 4 It is not surprising then that many scholars from several fields have paid increasing attention to the early modern Low Countries – particularly the Dutch Republic – in examining women's economic activities, their literary and artistic works, their legal status and position in marriage, as well as the depiction of women and ideals of femininity by male authors.Footnote 5
Despite the many studies and the increasing scholarly attention, there are aspects of women's history in the Netherlands that have received less attention. Women's religious activities there and a comprehensive examination of their political writings are among these.Footnote 6 The former appears particularly remarkable when considering that women were the majority of church members among the Reformed and the Mennonites and Doopsgezinden.Footnote 7 And, despite the substantial growth of publications related to women's contribution to fields such as philosophy, literature, religion and political thought in the early modern period,Footnote 8 Jacqueline Broad emphasised that ‘in the standard intellectual histories, we rarely hear about the opinions of early modern women’.Footnote 9 The reason why Dutch women's political ideas seemed to have received less attention appears to be that they expressed them in genres that are outside the usual canon of political writings, such as poetry, plays and devotional texts.Footnote 10 But religion was women's main motivation and provided fora for activity outside their conventional roles and thus their political ideas were often expressed in religious poetry and texts.Footnote 11 This article aims to contribute to our understanding of how Dutch women intervened in both religious and political discourses at the same time. The focus is on the historical and intellectual significance of a Dutch poet named Gesine Brit (ca. 1667–1747), who wrote a poem in 1705 to denounce the persecutions stirred up by the Dutch Reformed Church against her co-religionists.
Brit was a Doopsgezind living in Amsterdam. There she also had ties with an aconfessional group, the Collegiants.Footnote 12 In other words, she belonged to one of those Protestant groups that did not align to seventeenth-century confessional traditions and often reacted against them to defend freedom of conscience.Footnote 13 Belief in the spiritual equality of men and women was one of the main tenets of the Collegiants, and thus women were actively engaged in organising meetings or in providing financial support to the group.Footnote 14 Therefore, it should not be surprising that Gesine Brit took upon herself the task of denouncing the persecutions suffered by the Collegiant group in Groningen. But she did not confine herself to exposing the sufferings of the Groningen Collegiants. She also made a plea for political concepts such as freedom of conscience and of religion, while arguing for state control over the Church. The first section of this article gives an account of the Collegiant movement and of the group in Groningen as a means of contextualising Brit's poem, while the second provides biographical information on Brit herself. The third section examines her remarkable poem, which in many ways appears to contribute to key Enlightenment political and philosophical values. Brit was part of a tradition of Nonconformist writers and intellectuals who shaped an early Dutch Enlightenment culture in which opposition to religious constraints, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression were key principles.Footnote 15 Such a tradition includes several male writers, but only a small number of females. Brit and her poem are thus crucial to expanding such a canon.Footnote 16 The appendices include the first English translation, with footnotes, of her poem, as well as a transcription of the Dutch version.
The Collegiant movement and its oppression in Groningen
Among the many religious groups born in the decades following the Reformation, the Dutch Collegiant movement is one of the most fascinating. They were a Protestant group, founded without clerical or governmental oversight. Their meetings were called collegien (‘colleges’), from which came the Dutch name Collegianten (‘Collegiants’) for their members. They were also called Rijnsburgers, after the village of Rijnsburg, near Leiden, where they established their first college sometime between 1619 and 1620 in the aftermath of the Synod of Dordrecht.Footnote 17
The name collegien for their meetings derives from similar religious meetings within Protestant churches. ‘College’ was indeed the term used to designate religious assemblies directed or overseen by church ministers where a small number of congregants met to read and interpret scriptural passages.Footnote 18 However, the Collegiant meetings in the Dutch Republic had characteristics that made them unique. Firstly, there was no minister from any existing church designated to oversee and administer the meeting. Secondly, the colleges established by the Collegiants advanced specifically a method of meeting based on communal dialogue that was egalitarian in nature, because each participant – regardless of gender, social background and confessional belonging – was entitled to freedom of conscience and of expression. Their meetings revolved around the practice of free prophecy, or freedom of prophesying, a mode of utterance based on the free interpretation of scriptural passages and the free expression of religious views. The goal of such a practice was mutual religious edification. This meant that women participated in these meetings together with men, and that Reformed people were gathering with Mennonites, Remonstrants with Socinians, Quakers with Christians belonging to no Church, debating and exchanging ideas on a variety of religious topics. Heterodoxy was largely accepted at such meetings, at times even explicitly cherished as a value. In this sense it is legitimate to describe the Collegiants not as a religious group or Church in the ordinary sense – focused or established on common doctrines and insisting on doctrinal conformity – but rather as a movement or community founded on practices advancing a form of public sphere.Footnote 19 In short, colleges were aconfessional urban spaces where proto-democratic values were put in place, as all sorts of people could gather there to practise egalitarianism, freedom of expression and toleration in real terms.Footnote 20
Many colleges were founded in several Dutch cities in the course of the seventeenth century.Footnote 21 This had far-reaching consequences for the Doopsgezinde and Mennonite communities in the Dutch Republic, as many Doopsgezinden participated in the Collegiant meetings. In Rotterdam, for example, five preachers were expelled from the United Flemish Doopsgezinde community in 1655 and joined the Waterlanders, because of disagreements over the manner of conducting the college within the Flemish community.Footnote 22 Moreover, the participation of many United Flemish Doopsgezinden in the Amsterdam college – notably the deacon Cornelis Moorman, and the preachers Galenus Abrahamsz and David Spruyt – gradually led to what is now known as the Lammerenkrijgh – ‘the war of the lambs’, after the name of the Amsterdam Doopsgezinde church ’t Lam (‘the Lamb’). The dispute between the two parties – those who sympathised with the Collegiants and those who opposed them – began in the mid-1650s and was fought out through sermons from the pulpit and a large number of pamphlets from both sides. At the heart of the dispute was the claim by Abrahamsz and Spruyt that the Doopsgezinde church could not prove to be God's true Church, nor could its offices and ceremonies be the same as those of the Apostolic Church. Therefore, confessions of faith – including doctrinal statements on Christology and the Trinity – should not be a determining factor in deciding who could take part in the ceremonies of the Doopsgezinde church and who should be excluded. Nor should confessions of faith be regarded as essential to attain salvation, because only the essential doctrines included in the Apostle's Creed were necessary for this purpose. The dispute reached its climax in 1664, when the United Flemish split into two groups, the ‘Lamists’ – namely the groups following Abrahamsz and Spruyt – and the ‘Zonists’ – the opposing group which began to meet in a former brewery, ‘de Zon’ (‘the Sun’).Footnote 23
It should be noted that the Collegiants were also associated with Socinianism by their opponents – namely with the doctrinal system based on the views of the Italian Nonconformist Fausto Socinus.Footnote 24 In the early modern polemical literature, however, Socinianism had become a broad term of scorn used to denounce Nonconformists or, more generally, one's opponents, regardless of whether or not they were close to or even sympathetic to Socinus’ ideas.Footnote 25 It should come as no surprise, then, that the Reformed ministers of Amsterdam referred to the local Collegiants as ‘Socinians’ from the very beginning when trying to stop them and denouncing them to the local burgomasters.Footnote 26 And the opponents of Abrahamsz and his group also frequently accused them of being nothing but Socinians. These accusations were particularly dangerous in the Dutch Republic after September 1653, when the States of Holland and West Friesland issued a decree against Socinianism. Punishments for spreading Socinian ideas, and for publishing and trading Socinian texts, included heavy fines and banishment from the province of Holland.Footnote 27
The disputes that led to the schisms between Lamists and Zonists and the dangers following charges of Socinianism lie at the heart of the case of the Groningen Collegiants. In Groningen the college was established only later in the century, when most of the other Collegiant groups had been already active for a few decades. Sometime in 1688, eleven Doopsgezinden – seven men and four women – were banished from their congregation when they refused to cease holding a college within the Doopsgezinde church. From that time onwards, those banished would hold separate assemblies independently from any church control, following the practices and ideals of the Rijnsburgers. The Groningen college was thus born; at first it counted mostly Doopsgezinde members.Footnote 28
It might have been expected that the Reformed church in Groningen would oppose the establishment of a new heterodox group in their city as soon as it began meeting independently. However, for more than a decade, the Reformed church appeared to pay no attention to it. Two reasons can explain this: firstly, they considered the Collegiants as a subgroup or separate group of Doopsgezinden that would not attract Reformed members; secondly, as we will see, it appears that they considered the college private enough to not cause any real threat. However, the situation changed suddenly in early 1700. On 6 March the consistory summoned one of their members, Thijes Textor, who, ‘misled by a certain vagabond named Carel Cats’, had joined ‘the sort of Mennonites who call themselves Collegiants’.Footnote 29 Examined on doctrinal points related to the Remonstrant religion and to Socinianism, Textor denied being a follower of either Arminius or Socinus. The consistory then admonished him to avoid the Collegiants, ‘people who taught temptation’, but Textor refused ‘to promise that’.Footnote 30 At the next consistory meeting, on 28 April, the Reformed ministers reported ‘how the so called Collegiants, who originated from the Mennonites, took the liberty to treat of all religious points in a Socinian manner in a public assembly’.Footnote 31 Moreover, not only did they attract one of their members, making explicit reference to Textor, but they were also inviting others through such ‘publycke tsaemenkomsten’ (‘public meetings’). These two minutes from the book of the Reformed consistory and their use of the term ‘public’ are certainly revealing. It was exactly when Reformed members began attending the assemblies of the college and when these were becoming too popular that the Reformed consistory decided they could not tolerate this Nonconformist group anymore. And thus, they decided to appeal to the city council. The burgomasters had to ‘take away this liberty from the abovementioned Collegiants’; moreover, these person had to make a profession of faith to prove that they were not Socinians.Footnote 32
In the following months the consistory tried to secure support from the burgomasters. In August the city council commissioned the advocaat-fiscaal – a judicial officer whose role could be compared to a modern public prosecutor – to find information on the college meeting place and on the doctrines discussed there. The fiscaal made some inquiries, but it is likely he was not giving priority to such a task.Footnote 33 Indeed, almost a year later, on 29 May 1701, the consistory clerk revealed that the burgomasters had not taken any measures against the Collegiants yet, even though their buitensporicheden (‘extravagances’) were in front of everyone's eyes.Footnote 34 At the insistence of the consistory, on 6 December 1701, the burgomasters enacted an ordinance against the Collegiants. Repeating the reasons why the consistory decided to oppose them in the first place, the Collegiants were identified as ‘a new sect from the Mennonites’, who ‘lure people from this community to their doctrine by going in [their] houses’. Their opinions on the fundamentals of religion were regarded as ‘very dangerous and deviating’. For this reason, the Collegiants were ordered to exhibit a written confession of faith on such doctrines, which concerned the nature of Christ and of his office.Footnote 35
The Collegiants fulfilled this order on December 19. In a written statement delivered to the burgomasters, they denied the accusations made by the Reformed and detailed their religious opinions, reminding the burgomasters that they had been able to exercise their beliefs freely in Groningen for some years. Therefore they asked that they might continue ‘unhindered to live up to our conscience’, while guaranteeing their full obedience to their authority at the same time.Footnote 36 However the city council delivered this document to the Reformed consistory, which rejected all the Collegiants’ theological positions and listed eight doctrinal points on which the Collegiants had to make a clearer declaration.Footnote 37 The burgomasters drafted a new ordinance on 30 January 1702, asking for a new statement on these eight points within two weeks,Footnote 38 but this time the Collegiants refused. They asked to be relieved from handing over a second statement and to be allowed to exercise their vryheid van conscientie (‘freedom of conscience’). This request was rejected and on 15 February the burgomasters formally forbade the Collegiants from holding any meetings until they fulfilled the city authorities’ orders.Footnote 39
Despite this, the Collegiants did not stop their activities. On 25 May 1704, the Reformed ministers reported that ‘notwithstanding the Lords of the council had forbidden such [meetings] by ordinance, they [the Collegiants] notoriously go against the prohibition of the magistrate’ and ‘still continue stoutly in their assemblies and this in their old place, where their number first increased, then decreased’.Footnote 40 Facing a new city ordinance, the Collegiants attempted to appeal to the separation between the forum conscientiae and the forum externum, pledging obedience to the city authorities in all civil matters. However, ‘concerning the refraining from their religious meetings, they [the Collegiants] knew in [their] conscience that these were commanded by God and Christ, [whose command] prevailed’.Footnote 41 In other words, they were not willing to cease the meetings of the college, as it was not within the power of the burgomasters to decide over religious matters. Unsurprisingly, the city authorities were not of the same opinion and commanded the Collegiants to fulfil the terms of the previous ordinances.Footnote 42 They also ordered the bailiff to inquire into the college meetings and if they were still held, the city fiscaal should take measures against them.Footnote 43
Sometime in January or early February 1705, the Collegiants complied with the burgomasters’ decision and delivered two new statements of their beliefs.Footnote 44 The first was longer and signed by many, the other shorter and signed only by a Collegiant named Jan Cornelis. Both documents were then handed over to the Reformed consistory in early March, which immediately charged both statements with Socinianism.Footnote 45 On June 11, at the consistory's insistence,Footnote 46 the burgomasters enacted a new ordinance and ordered the bailiff to remove all the chairs and benches from the college meeting place, so as to stop their assemblies.Footnote 47 It seems that such a measure bore some fruit. On 30 August, the consistory stated that ‘this pernicious assembly is thus far beaten’.Footnote 48 The news of the measures taken against the Collegiants in Groningen likely spread across the provinces and cities of the Dutch Republic, certainly among Doopsgezinde communities and Collegiant circles. Hearing what her fellow-Collegiants endured in Groningen, a Doopsgezinde-Collegiant poet living in Amsterdam decided to put pen to paper and write a poem denouncing the acts of persecution by the Reformed Church and the civil authorities who obeyed them. Her name was Gesine Brit.
Gesine (or Gesina) Brit (ca.1669–1747)
The biographical information about Gesine Maartens BritFootnote 49 is meagre.Footnote 50 She was born sometime between 1668 and 1669 in Blokzijl, a small village in the north-east part of the Netherlands, in the province of Overijssel.Footnote 51 Her father was Maarten Hendriks Brit, while her mother's name was Baartje Roelofs. She also had a younger brother, Roelof Brit, who was born sometime between 1676 and 1677.Footnote 52 We do not have much information on her parents either, besides the fact that they were Doopsgezinden. They moved to Amsterdam for unknown reasons in early 1682, carrying an attestatie Footnote 53 from Blokzijl and registering at the Lamist church, now called ‘bij ‘t Lam en Toren’, in February 1682.Footnote 54 There is no exact information on Maarten Brit's death, but this occurred before 1710, as on the burial certificate of Baartje Roelofs, dated 16 January 1710, she was mentioned as the widow of Maarten Brit.Footnote 55 It is likely that Baartje Roelofs remarried after her husband's death and that she had at least another daughter. In the first version of her will, Gesine Brit mentioned ‘Gilles Hogeveen, the son of her half-sister's husband’, as one of her heirs.Footnote 56 The nineteen-year-old Gesine Brit had officially joined the Doopsgezinde community on 15 February 1688, when she was baptised in the ’t Lam en Toren church with her parents as witnesses.Footnote 57 Her brother never joined the Doopsgezinden, as he preferred to become a member of the Amsterdam Remonstrant Church on 24 May 1729.
Unfortunately, there is no information on Gesine Brit's upbringing and education.Footnote 58 The hypothesis that she contributed to Doopsgezinde songbooks in her early years cannot be dismissed. After all, the Dutch Doopsgezinden had a rich and growing singing culture, producing numerous songbooks to which Brit might have contributed anonymously. If so, Brit would be following in a tradition that included Doopsgezinde song- and hymnwriters such as Soetken Gerijts and Judith Lubberts.Footnote 59 Jacobus van Nieuweveen's foreword to the reader of a new Dutch edition of Elizabeth Jocelin's The mothers legacie,Footnote 60 published in 1699,Footnote 61 acknowledged those who took part in this editorial project, and he listed Brit as ‘the honorable Geesje Brit, a not unexperienced lover of the art of poetry’.Footnote 62 Brit contributed to this edition by writing a sonnet which was placed immediately after the foreword by Van Nieuweveen, and three poems, added as appendices to the book.Footnote 63 These were not Brit's first published verses. In 1697 she had published a poem in Herman Schijn's Salomons Tempel-Bouw.Footnote 64 Between 1699 and 1711 Brit published other verses, contributing to the works of Doopsgezinden such as Adriaan Spinniker and Jan Huygen, as well as to a collection of poems by the Reformed preacher Gerard Outhof.Footnote 65 It is quite significant that Brit cooperated not only with both Lamists and Zonists – Schijn belonged to the latter, while Spinniker to the former – but also with a Reformed church member.Footnote 66
We have no information on Brit's financial means. Perhaps hers was a well-off family and she could dedicate herself freely to poetry, living off her father's inheritance. This might also explain why she married quite late in her life. In 1711, Brit married Jacob van Gaveren with her brother as witness: he was thirty-two years old and she was forty-three.Footnote 67 Another unusual feature of in Brit's marriage is that Van Gaveren did not belong to her Doopsgezinde community. Born in Leiden, he had moved to Amsterdam and joined the Zonists, being baptised in their church on 5 November 1702.Footnote 68 There is no evidence suggesting that either of the two spouses left their community to join the other, so it is likely that each one kept attending church services and ceremonies in their own church. This might suggest that Brit kept some liberties when marrying Van Gaveren, without being confined to the privacy of the household. This suggestion is supported by the facts that she was also an active member in Collegiant circles and that she did not comply with another common Dutch custom according to which women writers were generally unmarried and often stopped writing after their marriage.Footnote 69 Yet, Brit kept writing and publishing after marrying Van Gaveren.Footnote 70 In 1723, she had contributed to the Stichtelyke zinnebeelden, a posthumous emblem collection by the Lamist painter and writer Arnold Houbraken. Her name even appeared on the title page of the edition.Footnote 71 She began working on this project in 1718, when Houbraken's former pupil Jacob Zeeus died without completing his task:
After a good while … I was introduced to the ingenious poet Gezine Brit, wife of Jacob van Gaveren, famous for the making of several excellent poems. She was earnestly asked by me and her brother to resume what Zeeus had been negligent about, which she granted me and also fulfilled in a short time, because that matter flattered her nature.Footnote 72
In November 1727 Van Gaveren died, leaving the now almost sixty-year-old Brit without children.Footnote 73 There is no evidence that she ever remarried. In a notarial act dated 27 January 1728, she chose her brother as the legal person authorised to handle her affairs.Footnote 74 She also named him as her only and universal heir in her will, drafted on 24 January 1732, and signed in front of the notary Isaak Angelkot. She made an exception only concerning her linen and wool clothes, which were to be given to Harmpje Jacobs who lived in Rijnsburg. In turn, Jacobs had to distribute them between herself, Aaltje Alberts Visser in Blokzijl, Aaltje Alberts Visser in Hoorn, Aleintje Martens Room, Stintje Jonge Jans, and Grietje, Aaltje, and Geesje Stuurman. Her brother, if he died childless, was also to leave an inheritance of 2,500 guilders to the same women (and to two men, named as Adriaan Hendriks and Jacob Rem).Footnote 75 The sum was to be distributed equally, or at least to those still alive. Brit also left a Bible to the abovementioned Gilles Hogeveen, the stepson of her unnamed half-sister.Footnote 76 Six years later, Brit changed her will, according to which Roelof Brit was the only and universal inheritor of all his sisters‘ goods, without any reference to the persons mentioned before. However, she retained the authority to designate furthers legatees.Footnote 77 The reasons for this change in her will are unknown.
In her later years Brit was still close to Collegiant circles. On 1 June 1737, she decided to donate a house to the orphanage De Oranjeappel in Amsterdam, administered by the local Collegiants. There is no mention of the house's worth, but it was located on the Nieuwendijk, at the south side, on the east corner of Smaksteeg.Footnote 78 Around the same period she was also still active as a poet. In 1735 and 1736 two editions appeared of the stamboek – a book wherein the names of one's friends are written – of the Lamist Joanna Koerten (1650-1715), a widely admired knipkunstenares.Footnote 79 Brit contributed four poems to the 1735 in-octavo edition, including her widely famous pastoral poem Koridon.Footnote 80 The 1736 edition in quarto included only two of Brit's poems from the previous edition, one being Koridon, but she added a translation of a Latin poem dedicated to Koerten and written in 1696 by Martin Crell, nephew of the Socinian theologian and preacher Johan Crell.Footnote 81 These editions are clear proof that in her later life Brit was still deeply involved in the intellectual life of her own Doopsgezinde circles and, more broadly, in Enlightenment Dutch culture. She died in October 1747,Footnote 82 but the Koridon and the several reprints of the Stichtelyke zinnebeelden made sure that her fame would last for decades.
‘On the persecution of the Collegiants in Groningen’
Brit's poetry is known as being mostly religious in nature, treating biblical and moral subjects, and emphasising the significance of a Christian education for children. But she composed at least one poem which had a clear political stance, written to denounce the persecution by the Reformed Church in Groningen of local Collegiants. Brit was not the first Dutch woman to use poetry to write about religious and political issues of her time. Other famous examples include Anna Roemers Visschers and Cornelia Tellinck.Footnote 83 And in years closer to Brit, Cornelia van der Veer, Katharina Lescaijlie and Henrica van Hoolwerff also engaged with political issues in their poetry. The latter, for instance, authored two poems in 1696 and 1701 against Louis xiv.Footnote 84 Brit's poem is titled ‘On the persecution of the Collegiants in Groningen’ and was penned sometime in 1705. The poem itself provides evidence to date its writing. In one passage, speaking directly to her fellow Collegiants, Brit mentioned ‘your confession / so recently given to your sovereign’, while a few lines earlier she stated that the Collegiant meeting place had been ‘violated, ruined, and deplorably plundered’ by order of the city authorities.Footnote 85 These are clear references to the document that the Groningen Collegiants delivered to the burgomasters in early 1705 and the measures taken afterwards, when the bailiff was ordered to remove chairs and benches from their meeting place. The poem was then published, posthumously, in 1775 by Elias van Nijmegen, the first historian of the Collegiant movement.Footnote 86 But it did not receive any further consideration afterwards. In the library of the Mennonite Community of Amsterdam, kept in the Allard Pierson Museum, there is a manuscript copy which has some variants from the published version.Footnote 87 Thus, this manuscript version must be regarded as a pre-print copy, even though there is no definitive proof that it is in Gesine Brit's own hand. The following brief analysis is based on the manuscript copy because the specific variants make it more likely that it is closer to the original than the published edition. In one case, for instance, the latter has the Dutch word staat (‘state, condition’), while the manuscript has haat (‘hate’), which makes more sense in the specific context of the passage. The poem consists of twenty-five quatrains following an ABAB rhyme scheme, for a total of one hundred lines. One can divide its content into three main themes: Brit condemned the endeavours of the Reformed ministers to stop the Collegiants; she advocated for freedom of conscience and religion; and she urged the Groningen civil authorities to avoid following the dictates of the Reformed Church.
The first aspect is perhaps the most prominent throughout the poem. Brit attacked ecclesiastical authorities by using a double comparison. At first, she likened the Reformed Church – and the city authorities who followed its dictates – to a wild beast ravaging the body of true Christians. As already mentioned, she wrote that the college had been ‘violated, ruined, and deplorably plundered / on the command of the legitimate sovereign’. And such actions were comparable to ‘a wolf, a fierce winter bear’ that ‘unexpectedly falls upon the innocent flock … in order to ravish, to rob the defenceless nest’. All this was the result of the ‘poking of the Calvinist rule’. The use of the sexual verbs schenden (‘to violate’) and schaaken (‘to ravish’) to describe actions that have no sexual content – namely the removing of chairs and benches from a house, and the attack by a wolf or a bear upon a nest – aims to intensify and give emphasis to the immorality of measures taken by both the Reformed Church and the city authorities, an accusation that is further strengthened by the fact she is a woman making an analogy to rape. And the use of the term weerloos (‘defenceless’) is used in the same way. This is a key term used to refer to the Doopsgezinden, who were advocates of non-resistance – that is, they condemned the use of violence in resisting evil and repelling violence. Mentioning the ‘defenceless nest’, Brit made clear who was the object of the Reformed persecution – the Doopsgezinden-Collegiants, who would never oppose the legitimate sovereign authority's command and actions, even when these were clearly morally wrong. Brit then reinforced her criticism of Reformed ministers by drawing a second comparison, this time with the Spanish Inquisition. Reminding her readers of the period preceding the Dutch revolt, she wrote that the Reformed Church itself complained that popery and the Inquisition ‘would fetter her free neck’ in those decades. This comparison with Spanish violence and tyranny would certainly strike a chord in Dutch readers, as anti-Spanish propaganda had been a fundamental part of Dutch cultural life in the decades following the Dutch revolt. Cornelia Tellinck, for instance, authored four patriotic poems against the Spaniards and the so-called Spanish fury.Footnote 88 Brit used a similar rhetoric, but changed the characters of the oppressor and the oppressed and directed this anti-Spanish sentiment against the Reformed Church itself. Moreover, according to Brit, even at the time, when facing the Inquisition – ‘the monster from Hell’ – Christians were not allowed to resist and rebel, because ‘in Christ's school [it] is severely commanded / to be loyal, even [to] harsh magistrates’. Therefore, she asked rhetorically: ‘is it not a disgraceful intemperance / that people [the Reformed] who have inferred precisely / the preaching of the Gospel and the martyrdom / put their feet in the shoes of a cruel tyrant?’ And the hypocrisy of the Reformed is emphasised even more by their sorrow for the Huguenots in France. Here Brit did not make explicit reference to the Edict of Nantes, but the analogy to the persecutions of the French Calvinists is clear. And yet, the Dutch Reformed were now persecuting other Christians too.
The Reformed ministers were not her only target. According to Brit, the successful attempts of the Reformed ministers to make the city authorities take action against the Collegiants made the city of Groningen itself, implicitly likened to a woman, lose ‘her first virtue and fame’, namely the fact that it ‘never defiled her hands / with martyr blood, even in spite of Popery / when the Spanish force crashed our Netherlands’. In other words, not only had the Reformed acted immorally, but they also made the very city of Groningen immoral. The first four quatrains are meant to emphasise the sorrowful condition of the city when compared to her glorious past and to the broader atmosphere of freedom permeating the Netherlands. One can perceive this clearly when Brit rhetorically asked: ‘How does it come that now she [Groningen] forges / fetters for the conscience free from constraint / In this time when everyone, sat in peace and silent tranquillity, freely experiences their religion and freely professes it? Can that go together with justice and freedom?’ Indeed, her fellow Collegiants in Groningen ‘are forbidden to exercise religion publicly’. Brit's advocacy for freedom of conscience and religion grew in the course of the verses, and thus she wrote again that the ministers’ and burgomasters’ deeds could not be regarded as ‘otherwise than violence, and tyranny, and oppression of the free conscience’. However, while the criticism against ecclesiastical authorities was always fierce and clearly stated, Brit appeared more hesitant in condemning the burgomasters. This was functional to her direct address to the city authorities of Groningen, where she made an erastian argument about sovereignty and Church-State relations: ‘But Thou, who preserves Groningen's law / thou, magistrates, … / restrain those fellows who show themselves / so fierce, so schismatic in Christ's Church / who would wish to live alone in the country / just as the chosen … Israel.’ The erastian tone of these verses is evident. Not only should civil authorities not follow the dictates of the Church, but they should also restrain it, when its action goes beyond the religious sphere. This did not mean that Brit favoured the restraint of the Reformed religion per se – as if she advocated toleration for her own coreligionists but constraint of conscience for others. Like many other champions of religious freedom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she argued that civil authorities had to guarantee religious pluralism by keeping the Reformed under control when they exhibited intolerant behaviour. Only in this way could they stop ‘the hate of the spiritual guild’ (‘den haat van't geestlijk gild’). Referring to the maxim of the Rasphuis – the prison in Amsterdam, whose entrance read ‘wilde beesten moet men temmen’ (‘wild beasts must be tamed’) – and thus resuming the previous beast comparison, Brit reinforced her arguments, writing that ‘taming that of which everyone is scared and before which everyone trembles’ is a sign of bravery and honour. In other words, if the civil authorities were to ‘tame’ the Reformed, they would give proof of virtue and they would be praised by pious citizens.
These three main themes in Brit's verses might suffice to prove the modernity of her writing at a time when ideas of and pleas for freedom were certainly strengthening and growing in intellectual circles, but they were not yet fully shared and established. On the contrary, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic witnessed the anti-Socinian campaign, as well as opposition to philosophers and intellectuals such as Descartes, Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker.Footnote 89 But Brit's poem is not significant only for its political stand for freedom of conscience and religion. There are verses that are more of a philosophical nature, revealing both Brit's learning and her awareness of the changing times. For instance, after writing that Groningen had never oppressed anyone and only recently begun persecuting people for religious reasons, she suggested that someone might want a ‘proof’ (‘bewijs’) of what she said. And she gave such a proof, dividing it in two parts following a schematic and logical methodology: ‘The first part of the thesis is fulfilled … the other …’ These lines suggest a sensibility to logical and scientific arguing, if not philosophical training. There are also other instances of such a technical language scattered in the poem, as when she said that the Reformed ‘have inferred precisely’ the preaching of the Gospel. When providing the proof of her assertion, Brit also revealed her learning, quoting the Dutch historian Pieter Cornelisz Hooft to sustain her assertion. Then she seemed to play with the Dutch word reen – which means ‘course, gallop’, but could be also a variant for rein, which means ‘purity’ – to express a sort of motion set off by ‘the Christian multitude that defends / the free prophesying in God's Church’. This hints at a movement towards an advancement of human agency in religion as a form of purity, which is also a gendered virtue.Footnote 90 Brit here seemed to suggest that this movement had been momentarily stopped by the Reformed in Groningen, but it would eventually resume its course. This awareness of the changing times is clearer in the last quatrains. Before concluding her poem with a classical praise of martyrdom and suffering following Christ's example, Brit invited her fellow Collegiants to fear not, because something new was ahead: ‘But you who suffer oppression for the faith / Oh Christian multitude … / … / Take courage, a wind, begotten in the quiet south / Which refreshes the dry ground with its splendour / Comes after the raging of the previous wild northern … storm.’ Given that concepts such as egalitarianism, and freedom of conscience and religion, would soon become fundamental Enlightenment values, we can read Brit's poem as an early champion of this new era.
Recent studies on early modern women and their writings have revealed that women from different social background and with diverse religious and political affiliations contributed to shaping forms of public debate in a variety of networks.Footnote 91 Protestant pious practices sometimes also encouraged women's writing, which could break the division between the domestic private (the female sphere) and the public (the male sphere).Footnote 92 And even when women's writings were not published but circulated in manuscript form in larger or smaller networks, they were still intervening in a civic and public discourse that was broadly reserved for men. This is especially true for the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, when the Habermasian public sphere was not yet fully developed and other types of publics were forming.Footnote 93 Brit certainly contributed to stirring discussion around the religious persecutions occurring in Groningen in the early eighteenth century and, more broadly, around freedom of conscience and religion through her poem. There is no evidence to establish exactly how widely her verses circulated, but one can assume that they were well known at least in her own influential network. Thus, she took part in a tradition of Dutch women engaging in public discourse, offering a gendered perspective on crucial themes of her age. Poetry was a powerful means used to express both religious and political ideas.Footnote 94 Like Cornelia Tellinck, for instance, Brit assumed an unconventional position of power and was very outspoken.Footnote 95 But she was speaking against circumstances less grave than those denounced by Tellinck – the removal of chairs and benches from the Collegiant meeting place does not seem comparable to the Spanish violence exerted in the Netherlands – which might suggest how important freedom of expression and religion were to her and her fellow Collegiants. Indeed, Brit vehemently opposed the Reformed Church and urged the burgomasters to act otherwise than they had done in the name of freedom. And she did so without styling her voice via gendered stereotypes – for instance, she did not present herself as submissive and meek to justify her capacity to counsel and command.Footnote 96 She simply uttered her opinions, defending spiritual freedom and liberty of conscience and thus posing a threat not only to the magisterial Churches, but more broadly to paternal and husbandly authority.Footnote 97 Therefore, her poem is also an important contribution to expanding the boundaries of what can be considered a political text beyond the classical canon of treatises and books by early modern male philosophers, theologian and jurists.Footnote 98 Brit offers to scholars another instance of an early modern woman, her writing contributing, in innovative ways, to the formation of Enlightenment political ideals.Footnote 99
APPENDIX I
On the persecution of the Collegiants in Groningen
Something strange, just on the overseas wind,
Strikes now our ears with grief and sorrow,
Groningen, so laudably famous,
Lost her first virtue and fame so quickly!
That city, which never defiled her hands
With martyr blood, even in spite of Popery,
When the Spanish force crushed our Netherlands
With fire and sword and massacre of souls;
How does it come that now she forges
Fetters for the conscience free from constraint
In this time when everyone, sat in peace and silent tranquillity,
Freely experiences their religion and freely professes it?
Can that go together with justice and freedom?
And if anyone wants to look for a proof of [these] points.
The first part of the thesis is fulfilled
In the excellent work of Hoofts’ books of History.Footnote *
The other, the Christian multitude that defends
The free prophesying in God's Church
With the force of a gallopFootnote † as clear as day can now
Learn with sorrow to hold on in Groningen.
There, oppressed with reproach and slandering,
They are forbidden to exercise religion publicly,
There that much is contrived
By the poking of the Calvinist rule.
That goes further and against all purity.Footnote ‡
The house, set aside for their godliness,
Is violated,Footnote § ruined and deplorably plundered
On the command of the legitimate sovereign.Footnote **
As a wolf, a fierce winter bear,
Unexpectedly falls upon the innocent flock
In the open field, in calm and pleasant weather,
In order to ravish,Footnote †† to rob the defencelessFootnote ‡‡ nest.
Now, who, free from blind prejudice
To disguise vice with no mask of the state,
Can call that otherwise than violence and tyranny,
And constricting of the free conscience?
It goes further. Thus spoke the church in the sorrowful
Torments of Popery, that it would fetter her free neck,
When the Inquisition, the monster from Hell,
Tried to uprootFootnote §§ godliness to the ground,
That was the Plague, the firebrand who formerly
Brought our land blindly, miserably to shame,
Who has even snatched from their hands the staff
Of the highest administration of the law, the Spanish lord.
Yet, that must not be used
To defend rebellion and sedition.
Far from it. In Christ's school [it] is severely commanded
To be loyal, even [to] harsh magistrates.
But alas, is it not a disgraceful intemperance
That people who have inferred precisely
The preaching of the Gospel and the martyrdom
Put their feet in the shoes of a cruel tyrant?
Whereas they were to be the theatre and object
Of affliction and disgrace, and of the most exquisite miseries,
When once the Roman power came here
Only to tack the course of the helm of the state;
Whilst the stench, the stifling air of the faggot,
Which made their community suffocate in France,
Even to this day [has] filled their nose and ears
With sorrowful weeping, and misery, sigh upon sigh.
But Thou, who preserves Groningen's law,
Thou, magistrates, if you still live in the footsteps
Of your fathers, those laudable footsteps, and stir
Your generous blood in the veins to the people's salvation,
Restrain those fellows who show themselves
So fierce, so schismatic in Christ's Church,
Who would wish to live alone in the country
Just as the chosen Israel.
May your authority teach their proud spirit,
Which they consult spitefully in spiritual matters,
So that the hate of the spiritual guild no more
Beats the drum to the detriment of your citizens.
Thus, the maxim in front of the house of discipline,Footnote ***
At the river of Amsterdam, shall stick to the purpose here indeed.
It is said, taming that of which everyone is scared and before which everyone trembles
Is a virtue of the pious conscience.
Thus, you will excite a sincere delight and joy
In the multitude of your pious citizens,
Whilst your name, your diligent conductFootnote ††† and virtue
Will become clear in honour and glory to everyone.
But you who suffer oppression for the faith,
Oh Christian multitude, even though the reasonableness of your confession,
So recently given to your sovereign,Footnote ‡‡‡
Has suffered no opposition from anyone,
But uncorrupted, it knocks malice on the mouth
Take courage, a wind, begotten in the quiet south,
Which refreshes the dry ground with its splendour,
Comes after the raging of the previous wild northern storm.
You know the nature of the sublunary spirit.
What misfortune and mounting plagues
From the cradle of the world the pious in particular
Must endure to maintain the truth.
You know what fate your Savior came across,
How He, chased, persecuted on all sides,
Climbed the pinnacle of the endless rejoicing
As soon as his sorrow in this world came to an end.
You have a rather clear example that you,
After the end of your pain and troubles for His name,
Will triumph with him in the three-time blessed light,
Century after century.
APPENDIX II
Op de vervolging der Collegianten te GroningenFootnote *
Wat vreemde maar uit de overzeese lucht,
Slaat nu met smert en droefvenis onze ooren,Footnote †
Heeft Groeningen, zo loffelijke berucht,
Zijn eerste deugd en roem zo ras verlooren!
Die stad, die zelfs in spijt der Paperij,
Toen't Spaanse geweld, ons Nederland verplette,
Met vuur en swaard en zielen moorderij,
Haare handen nooit met martelbloed besmette.
Hoe komt het nu dat zij, in deezen tijd,
Daar elk, in vreede en stille rust gezeten,
Zijn Godtsdienst vrij beleeft, en vrij belijd,
De kluisters smeed voor't dwangeloos geweeten?
Kan dat met recht en vrijheid zaamen gaan?
En wil men naar bewijs van zaaken zoeken.
Het eerste lit van't voorstel word voldaan,
In't heerlijk werk van Hoofts Histori boekken.
Het and[e]re, kan de Christelijke schaar,
Die in Godtskerk, het vrije profeteeren,
Met klem van reen verdedigd, zonneklaar,
Nu met verdriet in Grunoos vesten leeren.
Daar zij,Footnote ‡ verdrukt met smaad en achterklap,
De Godsdienst, daar zo veel aan is geleegen,
Door't wroeten van't kalvijnse meesterschap,
In't openbaar verbooden werd te pleegen.
Dat verder gaat en tegen alle reen.
Het huis tot haare Godsvrucht afgezonderd,
is, op't bevel der wettige overheen,
Geschend verwoest en deerlijk uitgeplonderd.
Gelijk een wolf, een felle winterbeer,
Om't weerloos nest te schaaken, uit te schudden,
In't openveld, bij stil en lieffelijk weer,
Op't onversienst valt op de onnooz[e]le kudden.
Wie kan nu, van een blind vooroordeel vrij,
Om de ondeugd met geen staatgrijns te verbloemen,
Dit anders alsFootnote § geweld en dwing[e]landij,Footnote **
En ’t prangen van het vrij geweeten noemen?
’t gaat vast. Dus sprak de kerk in't droef gekwel,
Van't Pausdom, dat haar vrijen hals wouw boeien,
Toen de Inquisitie, ‘t schrikdier van de hel,
De Godsvrucht tot den grond zocht uit te roeien,
Dat was de plaag, de stooker, die verblind,
Wel eer ons land erbermlijk bracht te schanden,
Die zelfs den staf van’t hoogste rechts bewind,
Den Spaansen Heer, gerukt heeft uit zijn handen.
Nogtans, dit moet niet worden toegepast,
Om muiterij en oproer te verweeren.
T'zy ver. In Christus school, word scherp belast,
Getrouw te zijn, zelfs ook den harde Heeren.
Maar is ’t helaasFootnote †† geen eerloos onbescheid,
Dat menschen, die het Evangeli preeken,
En ‘t martelschap nauw hebben afgeleid,
Hun voeten zelfs in wreedaards schoenen steeken?
Daar zij wanneer de Roomse macht, den lijn,
Van't staatroer hier maar eens kwam om te wenden,
Een schouwtooneel en ’t voorwerp zouden zijn,
Van kruis en ramp, en de uitgezochste ellenden;
Terwijl de stank, de bange mutsaard lucht,
Die hun gemeente in Vrankrijk deed versmooren,
Met droef geween, en jammer, zucht op zucht,
Zelfs heeden nog vervuld hun neus, en ooren.Footnote ‡‡
Maar gij, die ’t recht van Grunoos stad behoed,
Gij Heeren, zo in't spoor van uwe vaderen,
Dat loff[e]lijk spoor, u't eedelmoedig bloed,
Tot heil van't volk noch leeft en speeld in de aderen,
Houwd aan den band, die maats, die zich zo fel,
zo scheuringziek, in Christus kerk betoonen,
Die even als ’t verkooren Israel,
Alleen in't land wel zouden willen woonen.
Dat uw gezach, hun trotsen moed verleer,
In ‘s Hemelszaak met wrevel gaan te raade,
Op dat den haatFootnote §§ van't geestlijk gild, noit meer,
Den trommel roerd, tot uwer burg[e]ren schaade.
Dus zal de spreuk voor't tuchthuis, aan den vloed
Van Amstels stad, hier wel ter sneede klemmen.
Die zegt, het is een deugd van't vroom gemoed,
Het geen, daar elk voor schrikt en beeft te temmen,
Dus zult gij een recht schapen lust en vreugd,
Verwekken, in uw vroome burgerschaaren,
Terwijl uw naam, uw kloekbeleid en deugd,
Bij elk in eer en glori op zal klaaren.
Maar gij die, om't geloof verdrukking lijd,
O Christen schaar, schoon uw belijdenis reden,
Uw overhee[n] zo onlangs toegewijd,
Geen tegen spraak van ymand heeft geleeden,
Maar ongekreucht de nijd klopt op de mond;
Schepmoed, een lucht, geteeld in't stille zuien,
Die met haar glans verkwikt den dorren grond,
Vold op't geraas der guure noorder buien.
Gij kend den aard van de ondermaandse geest.
Wat kommernis en opgehoopte plaagen
Van ’s waerelds wieg den vroomen allermeest,
Om't voorstaan vande Waarheid moesten draagen.
Gij weet, wat lot uw Heiland overkwam,
Hoe hij veryaagd, vervolgd aen alle zijden
Zo haast zijn leed op aarde een einde nam,
Ten toppunt klom van eindeloos verblijden.
Gij zyt met een wel duidelijk bericht
Dat gij, na ’t eind van uwe smerte en kwaalen
Om zijnen naam, in't driemaal zalig licht
Met hem, eeuw in eeuw uit zult zegepraalen.
