Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam van Veen have continued their exceptionally fruitful and engaging collaboration in their ongoing project, which follows early modern Dutch migrants into the German lands as far as the sources allow. Incorporating evidence from their database of more than 19,000 individual refugees, the study offers a convincing combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, laying out a fresh and nuanced depiction of the late sixteenth-century experiences and challenges facing eleven of the Dutch-speaking Reformed refugee communities in the Holy Roman Empire.

The book’s subtitle hints at the interpretive approach that Spohnholz and Van Veen intend to confront. Heiko Oberman’s phrase “the Reformation of the Refugees” (Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 83, 1992) had tapped into a traditional interpretation arguing that Calvinist views of providence and the experience of exile were indeed formative of Reformed, and particularly Dutch Reformed, Christianity. In 2017, Spohnholz and Van Veen reconstructed the roots of discussions of religious exile as formative for Dutch Calvinism, discovering modern—rather than early modern—origins (“The Disputed Origins of Dutch Calvinism,” Church History 86:2); in this book, they shift their lens from the historiography onto the practical experiences of Dutch Reformed communities in the Holy Roman Empire to enhance our understanding more richly still of the complexities of life for these refugees, exiles, and migrants compelled to live away from their homelands. The book’s persuasive presentation of the varieties of Dutch Reformed experiences certainly justifies the subtitle’s removal of Oberman’s definite articles.

The variety of “push” and “pull” factors—for example, fleeing persecution, economic opportunity, or family connections—make it difficult to generalize universally about the motivations for departing home or the reasons for settling in a particular city. This, of course, complicates the uses of words such as “refugee,” “exile,” and “migrant.” The study is a helpful reminder of this difficulty, though the authors do not attempt to impose rigid distinctions on the usage of terms, noting instead the ways that congregations and individuals self-defined compared to the descriptions imposed by authorities or legal frameworks.

A significant amount of scholarship on refugees leaving the Habsburg Netherlands in the sixteenth century has focused on those who traveled northward, especially those moving to England or to the imperial county of East Friesland. This project’s attention to a variety of smaller exile congregations located south and eastward reduces any homogeneity of experience that might be mistakenly implied by studies limited in scope to refugees in, say, London or Emden. As they built their database of refugees from the surviving sources, Spohnholz and Van Veen directed their attention to eleven cities that can be grouped into three categories: (1) three Free Imperial Cities (Cologne, Aachen, and Frankfurt); (2) seven towns in the borderland duchy of Cleves (Wesel, Emmerich, Goch, Gennep, Kalkar, Rees, and Xanten); and (3) the Dutch Reformed colony of Frankenthal, which was established on land around a closed Augustinian monastery in Electoral Palatinate. The host cities’ mix of confessions (Lutheran or Catholic majorities in the Free Imperial Cities for instance), size, economic and trade connections, linguistic proximity to Dutch, housing patterns, and demographics created a wide range of experiences for the often underground Reformed congregations. Frankenthal was an exceptional example—established for Dutch refugees, where they did not deal with a host community—and provides an interesting juxtaposition to the other refugee cities.

While broad Dutch networks of communication and movement did clearly exist—along with the propaganda that fostered earlier scholarship developing a concept of an “International Calvinism” striving to support a Dutch Reformed church in the Netherlands—this study convincingly demonstrates that refugee congregations strongly prioritized local needs or regional networks in the Holy Roman Empire. Revealing the exiles’ focus on adapting to local life in exile, the book finds a low level of support for military or political campaigns against Habsburg rule in the Low Countries. In fact, this massive prosopographic study indicates that most migrants, when the opportunity arose, did not return to the Netherlands; and even those returnees often did not consider it a move “home” but rather another migration.

Carefully structured chapters are organized in a way that enables the reader to understand the difficulties of the refugee experience from beginning to end (if an end occurred). Several case studies illustrate that the variety of tipping points of “push” factors which might compel one to leave home could differ based on individual religious, familial, gender, political, economic, or military factors. Likewise, complicated “pull” factors, including pre-existing networks and proximity (such as geographic or linguistic) to the host city, contributed to settlement patterns. The variety of confessional differences and relationships with authorities certainly impacted refugees’ experiences, from where they could live within the city and how they interacted with their neighbors to how they worshipped. On this latter point, the book details the different approaches to baptism, weddings, funerals, and the Lord’s Supper that were experienced and adjusted to across these cities within varied confessional settings. The Dutch exiles generally revealed a remarkable flexibility in dealing with imposed restrictions and allowances. Rather than uncovering a sort of doctrinally or liturgically pure Reformed experience then taken back to the Netherlands, the book’s snapshots of refugees—which vary from host city to host city and often within local congregations—reveal the exiles’ willingness to compromise in their refugee homes.

This excellent study is not only a fuller, richer analysis of the experiences of exile, but it also continues to undermine the earlier, more simplistic understanding of the role of exile in shaping the religious culture of the post-Reformation Netherlands. The book is a welcome result of an important decade-long collaborative project: Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam van Veen demonstrate the value in such a large, comparative undertaking that moves beyond a single locality. This book’s insights will help us reevaluate early modern religious culture. It furthers our understanding of the nature of forced migration on both the refugee communities and the host societies as refugees grappled with and accommodated themselves to the complex and diverse realities of religious coexistence.