The Dutch Republic was home to many religious communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In managing them, deciding questions of tolerance, balancing the desires of the public Reformed Church against the needs of other sects, the Dutch record was mixed. On the one hand, episodes like the Arminian controversy and the subsequent Synod of Dordrecht demonstrate an impulse and ability to quash dissent. On the other, examples of quiet tolerance abound, especially in Amsterdam (where one might even discard the word “quiet”). As the Dutch gradually embraced the enlightened Christianity that characterized the eighteenth century, tumult declined, but the road was long, with frequent, intermittent stops at controversy and concord. For the modern historian, making sense of Holland's religious journey is a difficult task.

Els Stronks and Joke Spaans approach these issues by studying the meaning and use of religious images in the Republic. “The result,” as Spaans describes her book, “is not quite church history, art history, media history, the history of ideas or political history.” Rather, “it borrows something from each” (3). And despite a few minor problems, this appraoch works. Both authors provide a close, careful interpretation of individual illustrations and prints, beautifully reproduced by the publisher; both find hidden patterns of behavior that expand our understanding of tolerance and religious change among the early modern Dutch.

For all that they share, the two books are complementary, not competitive. Covering nearly two centuries and dealing with many more images, Stronks is mainly concerned with what they say about identity formation and Protestant-Catholic relations. She also cares more about the absence of images. Indeed, her study began with the realization that early Dutch devotional literature contained none of the illustrations found in comparable English sources from the same period. Why did Dutch readers not enjoy the same visual aids? Why were the Dutch different? Stronks found that, even if at first they were reluctant to mix image and word, even if some first preferred a sharp break from the Catholic past, opinions and publishing practices changed over time. Eventually, she argues, “the intermingling of traditions was unexpectedly complicated in the Republic” (18). Central to her work is the assumption that there was a link between literature and conflict management, literary exchange and peaceful coexistence.

Stronks begins with a brief overview of the ideas and issues that limited the production of religious literature in Holland, including ideas about the senses and their proper relationship to worship, about the role of emotion and how it was best evoked, and the problem of representing the invisible (for example, God) using a mortal, corrupt imagination. She then divides the narrative into five periods, each with its own chapter. The period of greatest constraint, when one finds little religious imagery in Dutch publications, lasted about thirty years, from 1600 to 1630. Far more common in those decades were works that favored the ear over the eye: printed sermons, prayer books, and hymnbooks. After 1630, Dutch Reformed preferences continued to dominate, though “the various denominations became much more outspoken in articulating their specific identities” (171). Reformed authors eschewed allegory and emblem, only adopting Bible illustrations that represented their subjects literally. Catholics began printing illustrated religious material from older works, books published in the Spanish Netherlands, but they often altered or disguised it. Open expressions of Catholicism still met with serious resistance.

The first signs of change appeared in the 1650s and 1660s, when Catholics no longer had to conceal their identity and Protestants superficially espoused Catholic visual traditions by using emblematic images, for example, on title pages. More profound adoptions did not occur until after 1678, the start of Stronks's fourth stage. In that year Jan Luyken published his Jezus en de ziel, “a milestone in an ongoing process of appropriation and reconciliation” (242). Like other books soon to follow, it contained allegorical, emblematic imagery based on Catholic examples. Authors were less concerned now with denomination; their works were interconfessional and personal, intended for Protestants and Catholics alike. “After 1678,” Stronks concludes, “the nature of toleration changed from enduring to sharing” (269). Though Catholic practices also changed or evolved, indicating a continued separation, religious quarrels declined and religious imagery became an important means of social instruction among Dutch Protestants.

Ultimately Stronks fails (or perhaps more accurately, she does not try) to answer the question that piqued her curiosity in the first place. Why were the Dutch so extraordinarily hesitant to mix image and word? She returns to the problem in the end, but leaves the reader hanging, as if there are no answers at this point. Perhaps she could have at least suggested some possibilities with more context: while she gives the necessary background for the individual images and emblems that she dissects, Stronks avoids major political, religious, and military developments in the Netherlands. When she first writes in chapter 3, for example, that the Dutch suddenly stopped producing picture Bibles in 1617, she explains nothing about the Arminian controversy and the extra-volatile religious climate of that period, leaving readers to wonder about the change. Similarly, she writes little about the war with Spain, which came to an end in 1648. Anyone familiar with that date will not be surprised that, according to her chronology, in the 1650s Catholics became more assertive and Protestants began adopting Catholic emblems. Yet she barely touches important events and turning points that could shed light on the turning points of her book, possibly limiting its appeal to those who already know Dutch history. The Republic's relative youth and its never-ending war with a Catholic enemy probably had a lot to do with the religious sensitivity that puzzles Stronks.

In Graphic Satire, Joke Spaans focuses on the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century, beginning her work at about the point where Stronks found the first serious Protestant appropriations of Catholic tradition. But Spaans is dealing with somewhat different issues and a smaller source base: specifically, satirical prints, which she uses to identify and understand a “conversation” or “discourse” about religious controversy, about the nature of religion and what it should be, about the flaws of established churches, and religious change (8, 29). Besides the use of images, “change” is what most links the two books under review. If, as Stronks maintains, rigid boundaries gradually gave way to sharing in the Republic, Spaans would have us believe that satirical prints had something to do with it. They offered a subtle, safe way to critique the status quo and promote a different vision, acting as bridge between the passionate quarrels of the seventeenth century and the more peaceable religion of the next.

Spaans embraces the historical context that Stronks avoids. Sometimes, in fact, she can go too far, as in chapter 2, where most readers will probably get bogged down in the incredible detail of Zeeland's ecclesiastical disputes and forget the two prints that are supposed to be at the center of the analysis. But Spaans's occasional forays into the swamp do not diminish the value of her interpretations, which unfold in each chapter in a relatively consistent manner: she examines one or more ambiguous images and the textual clues the authors or creators supplied to guide viewers, then she tries to determine what the images would have meant to contemporaries by reconstructing the controversial events that inspired them in the first place. Examples include various ministerial appointments in Holland and Zeeland, the Fifth Monarchy movement, and the publication of Balthasar Bekker's Betoverde Wereld.

Taken together, Spaans's prints communicate a consistent message of frustration with the recent past. They disclose a segment of Dutch society that distrusted religious enthusiasm and superstition, disliked factionalism and the scheming and plotting that sometimes took place in consistories on behalf of preferred candidates. Critics also despised the deep-rooted resistance to anything labeled “novel” in matters of scripture and doctrine, and they wanted Dutch authorities to have enough power to maintain order. Though the prints are too few and dispersed to really be in dialogue with each other, they are likely echoes of conversations that took place in the homes of certain elite and other private settings. Through the veil of satire, Spaans argues, people could say publicly what might otherwise trigger the very conflicts they wanted to avoid.

Negotiating Differences and Graphic Satire are useful additions to the field of early modern European history. Students of the Dutch Republic should read them, as should anyone who studies tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and religious change. Their value lies in their unique use of religious imagery, which allows the authors to glimpse relations, behaviors, and attitudes that are harder to find in traditional, textual sources. Stronks and Spaans show that Holland was not just a diverse place where people coexisted, sometimes bickering, sometimes tolerating one another. They also crossed lines; they mingled and shared and engaged in quiet conversations that ultimately created a different world.