This study, which was Marianne Roobol's 2005 dissertation at the University of Amsterdam, presents a painstakingly detailed reconstruction of the remarkable public religious disputations that took place under the aegis of the States of Holland in the midst of the Dutch Revolt. The main point of these disputations, Roobol alleges, was not to demonstrate the government's even-handedness and tolerance in matters of religion and conscience, but rather to affirm the public status and legitimacy of the Reformed Church. The significance of these debates made them into a matter of national importance, giving Roobol's dissertation its original title (‘Landszaken’, i.e. ‘matters of national importance’). Roobol places these debates – one in Leiden (1578), the other in The Hague (1583) – triggered by Coornhert's critical writings, in a European context of disputations and Religionsgespräche held in France and the Holy Roman Empire. Reformed ministers actively promoted the debates, but the States of Holland took their organisation upon themselves, regarding the intended silencing of Coornhert as a service to the commonweal. In their communications with the States leading up to the great 1583 disputation in The Hague, the Reformed ministers emphasised that an enemy of the Reformed religion was also an enemy of the ‘common cause’, i.e. the ongoing struggle against Spain. Whereas in its highly detailed account of these disputations, Disputation by decree is invaluable, its interpretation is tendentious and one-sided. Throughout, but especially in chapter ii, Roobol makes the sweeping claim that these debates have nothing to do with tolerance and that, indeed, the whole notion of tolerance and Coornhert's supposed preoccupation with it is anachronistic and untenable. Trying to link the debates with tolerance, she claims, is a misrepresentation only too common in past characterisations, which depended too much on Coornhert's own distortion in his accounts of these matters. Countering what she labels the ‘Coornhert cult’ of Hendrik Bonger and others, Roobol appears to commit the same sins of tendentiousness and reading between the lines that she attributes to the former. She appears too intent on discrediting ‘old approaches,’ and in doing so slips into an opposite bias, for whenever she reads between the lines of Coornhert's accounts (which are still our chief sources on the debates), it is almost invariably in ways that are injurious to the latter and put him in a negative light, whereas the Reformed ministers are portrayed at times as near paragons of inclusiveness and, yes, tolerance. With regard to the purpose of the debates themselves, Roobol convincingly demonstrates their political importance, but she does not prove her point that tolerance plays no role whatsoever. After all, the side that the States were on was never in question, and yet they allowed Coornhert to have ‘his day in court’, and explicitly wanted to appear to the public as impartial arbiters in the proceedings. The authorities went to great lengths to avoid the appearance of partisanship, and the outcome of the debates could hardly have been claimed as an undivided Reformed victory. What in part motivated the States of Holland to allow the debates was to end accusations that they trampled on people's freedom of conscience: Roobol states this herself (p. 55) as their first rationale. The authorities seem duplicitous in trying to appear impartial at these debates (see, for example, p. 252, ‘they maintained the screen of impartiality in religious affairs that was so precious to the States’), while at the same time wanting to guarantee a favourable outcome. It is this ambivalence of purpose that helped to doom the debates from the start. Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert's own motivation for these debates cannot, as the author suggests, be seen as separate from his struggle against religious constraint. The increasing hegemony of the Reformed Church was, he believed, in the process of gutting the concord and unity of the new nation in the face of its Spanish foe. He engaged the Church in debates on points that he believed would erode and emasculate her claim to be a true Church, and thus he hoped to prove that she did not deserve the magistrate's backing. Since it is clear that Coornhert did not advocate a return to Catholic hegemony either, we must conclude that he wanted a ‘suspension of judgement’ and, in the meantime, an ‘open playing field’ for religion. Coornhert's words, uttered at the very beginning of events leading up to the Leiden debate and quoted by Roobol (p. 89), indicate the central place accorded in Coornhert's thinking to tolerance in connection with the debates, since he speaks of his fear of constraint, in Holland and Zeeland, in matters of conscience. Discouraged from speaking on tolerance at the debates, he engages the Reformed Church on its status as a Church. Roobol presents Coornhert's later claim – that the only reason that he still agreed to debate in Leiden, despite the cards being stacked against him, was his ‘crusade against constraint’ – as a deliberate distortion (p. 135). She fails to see that these themes, for Coornhert at least, were intertwined, for if he could prove that the Reformed claims were built on sand, he could unmask the States' support for this official Church as unwarranted force. Although indirectly, through the prism of theology, it is for Coornhert definitely constraint that is on trial in Leiden and The Hague. Indeed, evidence of the centrality of this theme for Coornhert cannot be suppressed in Roobol's own analysis, despite its thrust, for she relates that Coornhert ‘identified freedom of conscience as “one of the most desirable fruits acquired by us through the harmful and bloody war in the Netherlands”’ (p. 181). Finally, what one looks for in vain in Roobol's conclusions, is an answer to the question whether the debates served their purported purpose. She states that by the time of the Leiden disputation, the official, favoured status of the Reformed Church was already a given (pp. 34, 114). So what was gained by these disputations, considering that they did not produce a clear winner? The States showed ambiguity in their attitude, for on the one hand they did not want to (be seen to) take sides in the disputations, yet on the other hand these debates were, from the start, meant to support and strengthen the position of the Reformed Church as the public Church. In the end, one could argue that the debates, in the absence of a clear winner, only served to give Coornhert a widely publicised opportunity to vent his criticisms of the favoured Church, and thus eroded rather than bolstered the claims of the Reformed Church as public Church.