The Reformation Era · c. 1570-1650 · Netherlands
Dutch Further Reformation & Refuge Culture
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About This Movement
The Dutch Republic won independence from Spain as a Reformed country, but a strange one. The Reformed church was the public church while a large minority never joined it, and the Republic became the printing house and the shelter of much of Europe's religious dissent. English separatists, French and Flemish refugees, Jews expelled from Iberia, and books that could be published nowhere else. Inside the Reformed church itself a movement of preachers pressed for something beyond correct doctrine, urging precise, examined, daily godliness on their congregations; contemporaries called it the Nadere Reformatie, the further or closer Reformation. It was a movement of pastors and their books rather than of institutions, and historians still argue whether it is a tradition in its own right or the devotional temperature of a whole society.
Sources
- The Nadere Reformatie corpus: Teellinck (The Path of True Godliness, Eng. trans. 2003), Voetius's practical works, Udemans (primary) — Precision piety, in its own authors' words — most of it remains untranslated.
- Anna Maria van Schurman, Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated (trans. Irwin, Chicago, 1998) and correspondence (primary) — A woman's learned voice within this piety. Her later Labadist work, the Eukleria, belongs to a later period.
- Consistory and refuge records: Dutch Reformed kerkeraad minutes (Amsterdam and provincial towns); stranger-church records of Emden, London Austin Friars, Norwich (primary) — Congregational discipline and refugee administration recorded in the communities' own books.
- Judith Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic (1999), with Fred van Lieburg's Dutch-piety scholarship (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 8 'The second wave of Protestant expansion' (Benedict) (reference) — The Netherlands falls within this chapter's broader scope.