In past tellings, the Revolt of the Netherlands has often been an exceedingly Protestant story, which followed the first stirrings of evangelical dissent to the outbreak of full-scale religious protest in the 1560s to a civil war that created an entirely new Protestant state, the Dutch Republic. The Catholic Church played a role in this version of the story, mostly as a handmaiden to Habsburg religious persecution, and the ordinary Catholic faithful seemed to function mostly as an anonymous audience or backdrop to a more interesting and more dramatic Protestant narrative. Consequently, the attitudes of Catholic layfolk toward the conflict have gone largely unstudied (in striking contrast to recent work on the French religious wars). Now, in this fine study, Judith Pollmann presents us with the voices of some of those ordinary Netherlandish Catholics living in the midst of revolt and reformation. To that end she has marshaled evidence from scores of contemporary Catholic diarists, memoirists, chroniclers, and poets, and has analyzed what they had to say about the religious tumult unfolding around them. In her examination of these primary documents she seeks to answer two related yet paradoxical questions: why were Netherlandish Catholics initially so passive in the face of aggressive Protestant dissent, and why did Catholicism enjoy such a successful revival in the Habsburg south after 1585?

In answering these questions, Pollmann deliberately eschews writing about the Catholic church per se—this is no ecclesiastical history—but she does see the key to them lying in the relationship between laity and clergy. In effect, she argues, priests initially counseled believers to practice individual penance instead of collective action as a response to the Protestant challenge. Only when the course of the war installed Calvinist regimes in various localities and disestablished Catholicism, did the lay Catholic response become more vigorous and more organized, led by an archducal Habsburg regime that sought to fuse religious identity to political loyalty. The result was a thoroughly Catholicized Spanish Netherlands after 1585, which resulted in a permanent split with the northern Calvinist provinces and the effective creation of two entirely new states on the European political map.

Pollmann rejects an older historiography, exemplified chiefly by Jacques Toussaert, that argued for a declining and decaying Catholicism in the Netherlands on the eve of the Reformation. Yet her sources reveal sixteenth-century Netherlandish Catholics to be committed and active believers. Their clerics, however, preached to them that the best response to heresy was a kind of quietism, of tending one's own spiritual garden, rather than risk exposure to its infections. Reform, they insisted, was better left to the clergy. Such an approach did not engage the laity's help or energy in combating heresy, and, unlike their French confreres, the Netherlandish Catholic clergy lost an opportunity to mobilize traditional Christians effectively in the early days of the revolt and reformation.

It was only when war brought Calvinist religious regimes to power in various parts of the Netherlands, Pollmann asserts, that a sense of Catholic party began to develop. Netherlandish Catholicism in effect became confessionalized as religious and political polarizations made it impossible to remain quiet or neutral. The Habsburg regime, which had until then relied principally on military means to prosecute the war against heresy, now recognized that it could use a confessionalized Catholicism both to marshal loyalties and bolster its legitimacy. The archducal government of Albert and Isabella subsequently harnessed the devotion and fervor of lay Catholics, directed it toward saints and martyrs, processions and shrines, and transformed the Spanish Netherlands into a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation. The split between the Protestant north and Catholic south became permanent by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The revitalized Catholicism that might have checked heresy's progress only appeared after the damage had been done.

Pollmann is arguing against a school of thought that has portrayed Netherlandish Catholics as either passive or indifferent, and indeed her sources reveal that there were at least some believers who took their faith seriously. Yet for all the agency ascribed to them, Catholics were also very deferential to their clergy. And that clergy, Pollmann argues, sent them very mixed signals over the years: agreeing there was a need for reform while not making it clear where reforming efforts, individual or collective, shaded into heresy. The clergy's uncertain response to Protestant dissent created in turn an ambiguous lay response. A generation later, however, it was individual priests and new religious orders (such as the Jesuits) that helped to galvanize traditional believers against heresy. Thus, according to Pollmann, lay agency still relied very much on priestly stimulus. The church may have needed its laity, but it was equally true that the laity required the clergy for guidance. In the end one gets the impression that the real actors in this particular telling of the Catholic experience of the Netherlandish revolt and reformation were priests rather than layfolk.