Calvinists and Catholics During Holland's Golden Age: Heretics and Idolaters

This book examines the social, political, and religious relationships between Calvinists and Catholics during Holland's Golden Age. Although Holland, the largest province of the Dutch Republic, was officially Calvinist, its population was one of the most religiously heterogeneous in early modern Europe. The Catholic Church was officially disestablished in the 1570s, yet by the 1620s Catholicism underwent a revival, flourishing in a semi-clandestine private sphere. The book focuses on how Reformed Protestants dealt with this revived Catholicism, arguing that confessional coexistence between Calvinists and Catholics operated within a number of contiguous and overlapping social, political, and cultural spaces. The result was a paradox: a society that was at once Calvinist and pluralist. Christine Kooi maps the daily interactions between people of different faiths and examines how religious boundaries were negotiated during an era of tumultuous religious change.

Author: Christine Kooi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 04/30/2012
Pages: 258
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781107023246

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2013

About the Author
Kooi, Christine: - Christine Kooi is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden's Reformation, 1572-1620 (2000) and her articles have appeared in numerous journals including the Sixteenth Century Journal and Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte.