Like the rest of Northern Europe, the Low Countries experienced a wide variety of religious reform movements in the sixteenth century: humanism, Anabaptism, Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism and Catholic reform. In many respects, with its urban and rural diversity, the Netherlands could be seen as a microcosm of Reformation Europe as a whole. What made the case of the Low Countries distinct, however, was the political context: religious rebellion took place against the backdrop of the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Religious dissent grew inextricably entangled with political opposition to the centralising efforts of the Habsburg dynasty. This state of affairs led to the two key features of the Reformation in the Low Countries that distinguished from the rest of Europe: (1) an unusually harsh degree of official prosecution of Protestant heresy, and (2) the creation, by century’s end, of two distinct states, the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, because of the wars that Reformation at least partially instigated. Thus, while the ideas and qualities of the various reform movements in the Netherlands differed little from the rest of Europe, their outcome proved quite distinctive.

Saxony, home of Martin Luther, was the first country to be divided over the issue of the Protestant faith. While Ernestine Saxony became the heartland of the Reformation, the neighbouring principality of Albertine Saxony saw the beginnings of the Counter-Reformation. The two Saxonies provide almost perfect laboratory conditions for comparing contrary reactions to the Reformation. By investigating the lives, piety and politics of the Wettin princes, Frederick the Wise, John the Constant and George of Saxony the Reformation is revealed to have been a true game changer. Christian humanism, attempts at church reform and sympathy for the Reformation did not correlate neatly. Rather, the dynamics of religious conversion disrupted lines of continuity from the Middle Ages into the early modern era. That disruption testifies to the groundbreaking impact of Protestant ideas. At the same time, early resistance to Luther in Electoral Saxony proves that even in his homeland, Reformation and Catholic reform were alternatives right from the very beginning.

The chapter reviews the models – ideal and actual – of the ‘good bishop’ put forward at the beginning of the sixteenth century, models which inspired those conciliar fathers most inclined to reform. It also looks at the debate pursued throughout the three phases of the council over the source of episcopal authority, focusing on the disputes about the theological basis of the obligation of residence. Finally, it will analyse what was new about the regulations regarding the clergy and the reforming decrees issued above all in the last sessions of the assembly, when the discord between the Curia party and the reformers threatened to wreck the council altogether. Without actually embracing the episcopalian position, the council did at least restate the importance of the care of souls, which was the responsibility of the pastors of the diocese, but failed to curtail the scope for curial intervention, the secular authorities’ nomination rights or the privileges enjoyed by the male religious orders.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s interpretive synthesis, highlighting the major features of the Reformation in the Low Countries. It also offers a short comparative section in which the Netherlandish Reformation is placed in a wider European context and compared to other experiences of religious change in the sixteenth century.

This chapter traces the evolution of reformist ideas in the Netherlands during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. It describes a confessional turn – that is, the gradual emergence of three principal streams of religious reform: Mennonite, Reformed and Catholic. The Mennonite or Doopsgezinde stream arose out of Anabaptism; after the judicial reaction to the Muenster kingdom, Menno Simons and his followers eschewed the radicalism of the Melchiorites and turned inward, creating self-segregated communities focused on internal piety and moral reform. Meanwhile Reformed Protestantism made its way into the Low Countries and gained a substantial following by the 1560s. Both Mennonites and Reformed would develop confessional identities distinct from each other, including their own martyrologies and Bible translations. Meanwhile, Catholic reform came to the region through the Tridentine canons and the reorganization of the region’s bishoprics.

This chapter examines the most important religious consequence of the Revolt of the Netherlands, the splitting of the Low Countries into two confessional states: the Catholic Southern Netherlands and the Protestant Dutch Republic. In the Southern Netherlands Catholic reformation would pick up speed, as church, state and laity worked together to re-catholicize the region and marginalize its small Protestant minority. This would prove in the long term to be a successful effort, and the Southern Netherlands became a bulwark of Baroque Catholicism. The Dutch Republic would be an officially Protestant state with one public church, the Dutch Reformed, but its population was multiconfessional. A regime of toleration was put in place that managed both the privileged church and the private confessions. Thus the legacy of reformation continued in both states, but under very different guises.

Chatper 5 examines the growing influence of the papal Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in the administration of the Custody after 1622. It argues that its intervention reflects the importance given to the Holy Land as both a frontier, and spiritual center, of an increasingly global Catholic tradition.

The Swiss Confederation remained an enigma for the Frenchman John Calvin, and with good reason.1 This collection of territories was a unique and rather confusing political and cultural entity that had emerged piecemeal in the late Middle Ages. The very term Swiss, which makes sense to modern ears, hardly applied in the sixteenth century in a place where there was little sense of national identity.2 Humanists had begun to valorize Helvetia, and the wars against the Habsburgs and the Burgundians had done much to incite forms of patriotism, but loyalties remained largely local. Huldrych Zwingli had embraced a sense of the Swiss as the elect people of God, and even the young Heinrich Bullinger wrote of his countrymen as the Israelites of the covenant. The reality, however, was much less harmonious. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the newly expanded Confederation (with the addition of Basel and Schaffhausen) was a collection of 13 members bound by a series of alliances but divided by internal tensions. Not least was the problem posed by Zurich, which during the previous century had made repeated, and unsuccessful, attempts to expand its hegemonic interests.3