Scholars have long presumed that Dutch exile congregations in England provided crucial support for the Dutch Revolt. Silke Muylaert argues that we must reassess this assumption, and in her book, Shaping the Stranger Churches: Migrants in England and the Troubles in the Netherlands, 1547–1585, she tells a much more complex story of the life of Dutch stranger churches in England and their interactions with the European mainland. She finds that the stranger congregations in England did not unilaterally support revolt, but were instead often quite conflicted and even divided within themselves. By exploring those tensions, Muylaert provides new insights into the life of the stranger churches, the forces that propelled the Dutch Revolt, and the nature of religious identity in the early modern period.
Muylaert considers the religious and political activities of Dutch stranger communities in England under Edward VI and Elizabeth I, with particular focus on the Elizabethan period up to the de facto independence of the northern Netherlands in 1585. She finds significant variation in the Dutch migrants’ attitudes across these decades. Under Edward VI, Dutch exiles were an important force in a Reformation that was fundamentally international in character. By serving as sites for Reformed theological writing and book production, Dutch exile communities in England helped to foster the development of Reformed culture on both sides of the Channel. While their congregations looked outward in this early period, the Elizabethan period marked a turn toward internal affairs. At the same time, however, relationships with their counterparts on the mainland became increasingly complex as the rising tide of the Revolt brought theological and political questions about obedience and resistance to the fore. Throughout the period, Dutch churches and their members found themselves torn “between sin and godly zeal” (1), or between their desire to support revolt on one hand and their duty to submit to authority on the other.
Muylaert's argument refines and revises earlier scholarship, which suggested that the stranger churches proceeded cautiously in an effort to protect the favor they received from the English crown. Muylaert reveals that disagreements within the stranger churches were a much more significant reason why they sometimes distanced themselves from affairs in the Netherlands. While some leaders on the mainland urged the Dutch congregations in England to adopt the classis system, the stranger churches themselves often prioritized autonomy. Muylaert finds ample evidence of communication between stranger churches, but she emphasizes that connections between them did not necessarily equal cooperation. Individual opinion within the churches was similarly varied, as some members came under scrutiny for their support of iconoclasm and the activities of groups such as the Sea Beggars, which jeopardized their church's public position against violent, subversive activity. Even when the stranger churches sought to aid efforts in the Low Countries, a host of factors shaped the ways in which they did so. Often, their own circumstances precluded the provision of significant financial contributions, and thus the stranger churches offered spiritual support instead.
These complexities unfold over the course of six chapters, which are generally organized chronologically. The exception is chapter 2, which treats relations across the Channel over the course of the entire period under consideration, providing the necessary foundation for the argument of the remaining chapters but somewhat disrupting the flow of the whole. As she notes, Muylaert does not aim to bring new sources to light, and she relies on archives that have long been familiar to scholars of the Dutch Reformation and early modern exile: the records of the London consistory and municipal records from smaller Dutch congregations elsewhere in England, as well as letters and published tracts that originated from authors and printers in stranger communities. Muylaert's research demonstrates that there is still much to be learned from such sources, and the innovation of her project lies in the way in which she places these archives in conversation with one another. Earlier studies of Dutch congregations in England have typically focused on individual communities, with a particularly strong bias toward the churches in London. London often looms large in Muylaert's analysis, too, simply by virtue of the extraordinary strength of the archive. But by placing the London churches in relation to congregations in cities such as Sandwich, Norwich, and Southampton, Muylaert reveals the diversity of experience and opinion within and among Dutch communities in England.
Most broadly, Shaping the Stranger Churches provides rich insights into central questions in the historiography of early modern Christianity: what was the nature of religious identity, and how did religious identities take shape? Efforts to define orthodoxy within the stranger churches demonstrate that confessionalization was a powerful force. Within the broader context of Reformed Christian culture, the stranger churches played important roles in defining ecclesiology and setting precedents for involvement in military and state affairs. Yet, Muylaert's research at the same time insists that confessionalization was not an inexorable process, and we cannot presume that it engendered monolithic identities. Within the stranger churches, there was no single experience of “exile,” a category Muylaert seeks to complicate. By revealing the plurality of experiences and opinions within the stranger churches, Muylaert demonstrates that migrants’ identities, as well as their continuing relationships with the Low Countries, were far more varied than many studies of exile have admitted. At the same time, Muylaert reveals how generalization about the religious zeal of migrants has also oversimplified our understanding of radicalization. While the stranger churches certainly included militant members, we cannot presume any direct relationship between exile and radicalization. Shaping the Stranger Churches thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship that calls for us to attune ourselves to the variegation within early modern Christianity and consider what that diversity means for confessional narratives. It is a work that demonstrates how turning a fresh eye to even the most well-trodden sources can lead us to redefine the very categories on which our existing narratives rest.
