The early modern Dutch Republic is traditionally considered to be one of early modern Europe's most vibrant breeding grounds of religious diversity and coexistence. While older scholarship focused on the various confessional cultures as closed entities, a renewed interest in this atypical religious and cultural landscape has gained momentum in recent decades: scholars such as Willem Frijhoff and Judith Pollmann have studied the permeability of these religious discourses and the various ways in which individuals could participate both in confessional and a-confessional discourses. More recent studies have examined the transfer of religious ideas and genres and the relations between various groups, especially in the fields of literary and book history. The present volume departs from these interrelationships and connections between different confessional discourses and contains contributions on early modern Calvinists, Mennonites, Catholics as well as Spiritualists and Pietists of various confessions.

Published as a Festschrift for Piet Visser, Professor of Anabaptist and Mennonite History at the Free University of Amsterdam, many of the contributions revolve around the interactions of Dutch Anabaptism with its various surroundings. Gary Waite reevaluates the impact of Anabaptists on religious and intellectual cultures of the early modern Northern Netherlands, stressing their theological creativity. As he argues, their religious innovations were essential for the emergence of the climate of pluriformity commonly associated with the Dutch Republic. Chapters by Mary Sprunger and Anna Voolstra examine the voluntary aspects of Dutch Mennonite culture that resulted from the practice of believers' baptism. Both chapters show the complexities of religious choice and the various social factors informing it. Fred van Lieburg and Willem op't Hof highlight parallel developments in Reformed and Mennonite religious life in Evangelical and piety movements during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Op't Hof argues that the literary cultures of piety were similar in the various confessions while Van Lieburg examines the role of Mennonite preachers in interconfessional encounters, sometimes resulting in Mennonite sermons being delivered in Reformed church buildings.

Other contributions are dedicated to art and to book historical factors. Walter S. Melion studies the transformation of older pictorial models of the Annunciation by the Mennonite artist Karel van Mander, pointing to the specific role of Mennonite notions of Christ's human nature. Chapters by August den Hollander's and Wim Francois address the wide variety of early modern Dutch Bible translations, a topic that has only recently received the attention that it deserves. Willem Heijting examines the intriguing case of Christian Hoburg, a German preacher who changed his confession several times in his life and became an author and publisher of religious emblem books in Amsterdam. As Heijting shows, Hoburg's emblem books combined images from Catholic emblem books with Lutheran texts and were subsequently spread by a multi-confessional network between Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

Some of the chapters in this book concentrate on highly idiosyncratic religious issues, such as the spirituality of Hendrik van Barrefelt, also known as Hiël. Mirjam van Veen evaluates the erastian ideas of Caspar Coolhaes in relation to his views on minority groups outside the public Church. The volume also contains contributions that address larger historiographical questions, such as the role of religion in the early Enlightenment. In a critical evaluation of Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment trilogy, Douglas Shantz argues that the culture of religious ‘innovation’ in the Netherlands and Germany during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries paralleled and also informed the early Enlightenment. While this argument draws heavily on Pietist and Evangelical social engagement and could have been enriched by the identification and examination of more factors, Shantz's point is important and it supports the revisionist approach to Enlightenment thought as exemplified by Jonathan Sheehan and others.

Despite its wide range of topics and approaches, this volume manages to evade the problems typically associated with the Festschrift-genre, avoiding far-fetched contributions as well as well-trodden paths. It reflects the quite recent de-confessionalisation of Dutch religious scholarship and shows that trans-confessional perspectives can offer new and fruitful insights. Bringing leading experts on early modern Dutch minority groups together and inviting them to engage in approaches that transcend the historiographies of the various confessions, this volume is a welcome contribution to the religious and cultural history of the Dutch Republic.