In this meticulously researched work, Jesse Spohnholz presents us with a case of historical revisionism. The Convent of Wesel, which from the seventeenth century onward was regarded in the historical literature as a formative event in the evolution of early Netherlandish Reformed Protestantism, did not in fact take place at all but was in effect an invented tradition. The source for this presumed event was a single Latin document composed in 1568 in Wesel, outlining a list of articles for an envisioned Reformed church order followed by a list of over sixty names. Spohnholz exhaustively chronicles how misreadings of this document over the course of four centuries invented and then reinforced the belief that it represented the fruits of a formal ecclesiastical meeting, alternatively called “convent” or “synod,” of Reformed worthies in exile, that is, that it was a kind of prelude to the 1571 Synod of Emden. Not so, argues Spohnholz, who asserts that there was no single meeting at Wesel at all. Instead, the document, likely written by exiled preacher Petrus Dathenus, circulated in various exile centers collecting signatures. The document appears to have had little contemporary impact, and it languished in a London archive for fifty years until it was rediscovered.

This is a persuasive argument but, it turns out, not a new one. It was first posited by the eminent Dutch church historian and archivist J.P. van Dooren in a public lecture more than forty years ago in The Hague, in 1971. That Spohnholz does not reveal this information until two-thirds of the way through his book is puzzling, as is the fact that Van Dooren's Hague lecture does not appear to be specifically cited in the endnotes. Van Dooren only proposed the idea and then later abandoned it to come up with other interpretations, but it would have been perhaps more appropriate for the author to mention this previous, similar insight about the Wesel mystery earlier in his work.

Still, Spohnholz does what Van Dooren did not: pursue and support his argument with extensive and exhaustive archival spadework in Germany and the Netherlands. In the first part of the monograph he painstakingly scrutinizes the text, its signers and its context. He convincingly argues that the document was the product of a particular moment in the fall of 1568, when the military prospects of the rebel forces under Prince William of Orange seemed to portend the possible return of Reformed religious refugees back to the Netherlands. It was an auspicious time for Reformed exiles to meet and imagine a possible polity for a future Netherlandish Reformed church. This was no formal convent or synod but more an informal gathering of like-minded believers to hash out initial ideas in the excitement of a possible return. As the document was passed around for examination within networks of Reformed exiles in the ensuing months, it garnered more signatures (more of support than agreement, the author asserts), principally in Emden and London. But it appears to have had little actual impact: the formal church order that was drawn up by an actual Synod of exiles in Emden a few years later in 1571 did not include all the provisions of the Wesel document, suggesting that there had not necessarily been unanimity of opinion about such ecclesiological matters in the 1560s. Instead the Wesel document was the product of a chaotic and excited moment of the early exile years.

In the second part of the work Spohnholz describes the “emplotment” of the Wesel document, how historians over four centuries used and abused it to create an imagined Convent of Wesel that was of supposedly great significance for the early history of Netherlandish Calvinism. The document was not rediscovered until 1618, when it was published as proof of the orthodox pedigree of the Counter-Remonstrant side during the Arminian controversy that roiled the Dutch Reformed Church during that decade. Suddenly, the informal list of articles was turned into a national synod, with all the authority that term implied. Spohnholz artfully traces how this emplotment was also a result of archival choices, as the records of the Reformed Church were organized and inventoried during the course of the eighteenth century. By the 1800s, Wesel was caught up in various tangles of church politics as neo-Calvinists upheld the Synod as proof of the essentially Protestant character of the Dutch nation, while Rhineland Reformed Protestants commemorated Wesel in 1868 as a way to highlight their ecclesiastical distinctiveness from the Lutheran church establishment. As the academic professionalization of history took hold in the later nineteenth century, Wesel got demoted to a “Convent” as corroborating evidence of an actual, substantive gathering in 1568 proved hard to find. With the secularization of Reformation history in the contemporary era, Wesel began to diminish in significance among historians, as a consensus emerged that the document represented a kind of preliminary gathering that first proposed the church order that would eventually be adopted by Dutch and German Calvinists. As the tradition of the Convent of Wesel was constructed, so it was gradually deconstructed.

Spohnholz's interpretation of the document as representing what was in effect a non-event, or at least an event of marginal significance, is a persuasive one. This work is an impressive demonstration of painstaking archival research but also of how archival sources derive their meaning not just from their writers but also their readers. In the case of the Wesel document, its readers turned in it into an imagined event that proved to have remarkable staying power thanks to its stakeholders. The book is thus both an important contribution to the history of the Netherlandish Reformation and to the history of the transmission (and distortion) of historical knowledge. It significantly revises our understanding of the very early, inchoate history of early Netherlandish Calvinism.