Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520-1635

by Pollmann, Judith

• ISBN13: 9780199609918
• ISBN10: 0199609918
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Revolt that ripped apart the sixteenth-century Netherlands began as a rebellion against Habsburg authority but it eventually became a war of religion that resulted in the formation of two new states. Although the Southern Netherlands ultimately witnessed the triumph of the militantCatholicism of the Baroque, Catholics throughout the Low Countries found that the Revolt had changed their lives forever. Mining the unusually rich diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Netherlandish Catholics, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and politicalturmoil in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens. She investigates the initial passivity of Catholics in the face of Calvinist aggression, and asks why they actively supported a Catholic revival after 1585. By listening to the voices of individual Catholics, lay and clerical, Judith Pollmann offers a new perspective both on the Revolt of the Netherlands and on the formation of early modern Catholic identity. Exploring what it took to turn traditional Christians into the agents of their ownCounter-Reformation, she sees the dynamic relationship between priests and people as a catalyst for religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Author Biography

Judith Pollmann was educated at the University of Amsterdam and the Warburg Institute in London. From 1995-2005 she taught early modern European history at Oxford University, before relocating to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where she is currently Professor of the History and Culture of the Dutch Republic. Pollmann has published widely on the cultural and religious history of the early modern Low Countries and on the Dutch Revolt. She is currently directing a research project entitled Memory, oblivion and identity in the early modern Low Countries, 1566-1700.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
List of Maps	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
Acknowledgements	p. xv
A Note on Terminology	p. xvii
Introduction	p. 1
A pious people	p. 14
Each should tend his own garden: Strategies, 1520-1566	p. 44
Retribution and reform, 1566-1571	p. 68
'Catholics were not asked': Rebellion, 1572-1585	p. 94
Reconciliation and atonement, 1585-1598	p. 125
Marshalling the sacred, 1598-1621	p. 159
Epilogue: Tilburg, 1633	p. 192
Appendix: The principal Catholic diarists and memoirists discussed in the text	p. 203
Bibliography	p. 207
Index	p. 233
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.