A Response to Philip Benedict’s ‘Of Church Orders and Postmodernism’

Abstract

In this discussion of BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review Philip Benedict reviewed Jesse Spohnholz’s book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 2017). While Benedict praises Spohnholz’s research and contributions as they pertain to the religious history of sixteenthcentury Europe, he criticizes Spohnholz for borrowing from scholarship associated with the ‘archival turn’ and postmodernist critiques of constructivist empiricism. In this response, Spohnholz defends his approach and its relevance for questions about writing the history of the Reformation in the twenty-first century. Spohnholz stresses the shared historical and methodological perspectives between himself and Benedict (and others), comments on the historical significance of his study, and clarifies the book’s intended audiences.

Full text

Published by Royal Netherlands Historical Society | knhg
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
doi: 10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10898 | www.bmgn-lchr.nl | e-issn 2211-2898 | print issn 0165-0505
bmgn — Low Countries Historical Review | Volume 136-1 (2021) | pp. 78-90
A Response to Philip Benedict’s ‘Of
Church Orders and Postmodernism’
jesse spohnholz
In this discussion of bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review Philip Benedict reviewed
Jesse Spohnholz’s book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 2017). While Benedict praises Spohnholz’s
research and contributions as they pertain to the religious history of sixteenth-
century Europe, he criticizes Spohnholz for borrowing from scholarship associated
with the ‘archival turn’ and postmodernist critiques of constructivist empiricism.
In this response, Spohnholz defends his approach and its relevance for questions
about writing the history of the Reformation in the twenty-first century. Spohnholz
stresses the shared historical and methodological perspectives between himself
and Benedict (and others), comments on the historical significance of his study, and
clarifies the book’s intended audiences.
In dit discussiedossier van bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review recenseert Philip
Benedict het boek van Jesse Spohnholz, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never
Was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 2017). Hoewel Benedict Spohnholz’
bijdrage tot het onderzoek over de religieuze geschiedenis van het zestiende-
eeuwse Europa prijst, bekritiseert hij diens gebruik van de ‘archival turn’ en de
postmodernistische kritieken van het constructivistisch empirisme. In zijn repliek
verdedigt Spohnholz zijn benadering en de relevantie van zijn monografie voor
vraagstukken rond het schrijven van de geschiedenis van de Reformatie in de
eenentwintigste eeuw. Spohnholz benadrukt de historische en methodologische
perspectieven die hijzelf en Benedict (alsook andere onderzoekers) delen.
Daarnaast becommentarieert hij het historische belang van zijn studie en licht hij
het beoogde lezerspubliek van zijn boek toe.

a response to philip benedic t
79
spohnholz
1 These tools even fit within the historical
guide of the famed empiricist Geoffrey Elton.
See Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History
(London1967).
Researching and writing The Convent of Wesel was exhilarating. It felt like
my own Sherlockian adventure. Solving this puzzle required hunting down
evidence in archival and print materials in multiple countries and languages,
which were often organized in ways that confounded my efforts. One key
moment for me came when I first learned that Abraham Kuyper, an editor
of a collection of sixteenth-century sources I had long relied upon, had
also been one of the most polarizing political figures in late-nineteenth-
century Dutch history, and that his scholarly interest in sixteenth-century
Protestant refugees had been connected to his controversial political and
religious objectives. To avoid aligning myself with protagonists of the past
with different goals than my own, I began reading Neo-Calvinist theology,
archival and memory studies, nineteenth-century historical manuals and, yes,
scholarship that was influenced by postmodernism and postcolonialism – all
subjects I had never studied before. These readings helped me find a solution
by learning first to recognize hurdles to solving the mystery that I had not
previously seen.
I came to see my exploration of this mystery as a salient example that
suited the scholarly moment I saw around me. By the 2010s, when I started to
research The Convent of Wesel in earnest, potent critiques of Eurocentrism had
transformed historical research and teaching broadly. How the Reformation
fits into this new world has not always been clear, in part because the
Reformation played a central role in older stories of Western civilization that
have become increasingly regarded as old fashioned (or worse). Solving this
mystery offered me an opportunity to contribute to this discussion. How
could we, as professional historians, provide a fertile intellectual atmosphere
to uncover more new histories from the sixteenth century beyond older
narratives? It seemed to me that we would need to start by being attuned
to ways in which many modern understandings of the sixteenth century
had been shaped by interventions made by individuals in the intervening
centuries. Would one need Indrani Chatterjee, Raymond Craib, Hayden
White, Carolyn Steedman, Prasenjit Duara or Michel-Rolph Trouillot (to
name some authors who provided me with inspiration) to solve the mystery
of the Convent of Wesel? By no means. The tools of classic historicism suited
me just fine for Part i of my book, chief among them the contextualization of
events, the systematic criticism of sources, understanding the contingency
of outcomes and searching for evidence that explains causality.1 Rather than
being beguiled by postmodernism, I merely count myself among the open-
minded historians looking for inspiration beyond conventional reading
lists within my subfield. The perspectives I gained from those new readings
allowed me to see more clearly how understanding centuries of historical
perspectives – layer upon layer – could explain the emergence of the mystery

discussion – discussiedossier
2 Constantin Fasolt, ‘Hegel’s Ghost: Europe, the
Reformation, and the Middle Ages’, Viator 39:1
(2008) 345-386. doi: https://doi.org/10.1484/j.
viator.1.100125; Berndt Hamm, ‘Abschied vom
Epochendenken in der Reformationsforschung.
Ein Plädoyer’, Zeitschrift für Historische
Forschung 39:3 (2012) 373-411. doi: https://doi.
org/10.3790/zhf.39.3.373; Ethan Shagan, ‘Can
Historians End the Reformation?’, Archiv für
Reformationsgeschichte 97:1 (2006) 298-306 .
doi: https://doi.org/10.14315/arg-2006-0115;
Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Die Reformation als Epoche’,
Verkündigung und Forschung 47:2 (2002) 49-62.
doi: https://doi.org/10.14315/vf-2003-0104.
3 Leopold von Ranke, History of the Reformation
in Germany, two volumes (New York 1966).
For a useful discussion of Hegel and Ranke,
see Frederick C. Beiser, ‘Hegel and Ranke:
A Re-examination’, in: Stephen Houlgate
and Michael Baur (eds.), A Companion to
Hegel (Malden 2011) 332-350. doi: https://doi.
org/10.1002/9781444397161.ch16.
4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,
second edition. Princeton Studies in Culture/
Power/History (Princeton 2008). doi: https://doi.
org/10.1515/9781400828654.
in the first place, the focus of Part ii. They also helped me to think about
how this example might offer useful perspectives for newer students of the
sixteenth century seeking to develop histories suitable for the twenty-first
century.
While the idea of reformatio existed in the sixteenth century – and
predated Martin Luther – the idea of the Reformation, in an epochal sense,
emerged out of a nineteenth-century Hegelian conception of historical
progress.2 Among professional historians, Leopold von Ranke played a key
role in connecting the Reformation (as epoch) to nineteenth-century values
such as nationalism and individualism.3 Following him, many nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century European and Euro-American scholars often
similarly measured the Reformation – and all of world history – relative to
modern Western standards. I found Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe
helpful in seeing alternatives.4 Chakrabarty pointed to the problem that
intellectuals in former European colonies treated modern Western ideas –
which were historically produced – as ahistorical and universal. I came to
see this perspective as useful for pre-modern European histories too. When
we actively try to see subjects outside pre-existing historical narratives,
sometimes we can develop previously unseen perspectives or alternative
interpretations.
Appreciating the value of such views does not entail dismissing earlier
historicist scholarship. As has been the case with so many historians before
me, my effort has been to expand upon questions of contextualization,
causality, source criticism and scholarly bias that Ranke placed squarely
within the realm of historical inquiry. Many critiques of historicism that I was
familiar with – including (but not limited to) Herbert Butterfield in 1931,
Charles Beard in 1935, Lucien Febvre in 1950, Edward Hallett Carr in 1961,
Hayden White in 1973, Joan Wallach Scott in 1986 and Prasenjit Duara in
1995 – were to a greater or lesser extent involved in a process of

a response to philip benedic t
81
spohnholz
5 Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (Shepton
Mallet 1982) 305-314.
6 Influentially, Jan Juliaan Woltjer, Friesland in
hervormingstijd (Leiden 1962); Alastair Duke,
Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries
(London 1990).
7 Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der
Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der
Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe
(Munich 1965); Willem Nijenhuis, ‘Variants within
Dutch Calvinism in the Sixteenth Century’,
in:TheLow Countries History Yearbook. Acta
Historiae Neerlandicae xi i (Dordrecht 1979)
48-64.doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-
6803-8_3.
‘out-Ranke-ing Ranke’. None, including Ranke, claimed to offer a method
guaranteeing epistemological certainty or absolute objectivity. But many
have challenged the assumptions of scholarship that preceded them,
encouraged new forms of source criticism, urged an appreciation of new
contexts, widened the array of sources worthy of study and embraced new
understandings of causality. The Convent of Wesel draws on this long tradition
of scholarship in applying historians’ tools to this mystery.
What is novel about The Convent of Wesel is not that it uses any new
tools of historical inquiry, but that it does this so intensively and expansively
around just one piece of evidence across space and time. As a result, as many
elements that shape historical interpretation as I could manage became visible
for the reader. I hope that the end product is both accessible to non-specialists
and capable of reaching across subfields (chronologically and geographically
designated) that could benefit from more dialogue with one another. I also
found that I needed to expose all those elements to explain the surprising
appearance and endurance of this mystery, and to explain my solution. In
the process, I found it effective to use concepts from authors whose work
is associated with postmodernism. I borrowed White’s language about
emplotment in Chapter 5, for instance, because it offered a useful way to
explain what I meant about the ordering of evidence in histories and archives.
But methodologically and epistemologically, I was using conventional tools of
historicism.
In terms of my historical conclusions too, my book draws on earlier
scholarship. I am not the first to warn about the dangers of prefiguring the
Reformation.5 I am also not the first to emphasize contingency of outcomes
in the Dutch Reformation.6 Nor am I the first to highlight that confessional
boundaries remained porous well into the sixteenth century.7 That is what
surprised me most about the mystery, and compelled me to both intensify
and broaden my reading. Despite these historiographical insights offered
40, 50, 60 and 70 years ago, the Convent of Wesel remained, either as a stand-
in for Dutch Protestant views or as an institutional moment in Reformed
confessionalization in the northwest of the Holy Roman Empire. My
question became: how could this idea survive despite the problems with the
evidence and a scholarly consensus capable of embracing what the evidence
demonstrated? The answer requires us – and thereby allows us – to see just

discussion – discussiedossier

An advertisement for the tercentennial of the Synod of Wesel in 1868, currently held at the National Library of the
Netherlands in The Hague. This advertisement is also depic ted on the cover of Spohnholz’s book © National Library
of the Netherlands, The Hague, kw 84 G6. Photo by Jesse Spohnholz.

a response to philip benedic t
83
spohnholz
8 As he wrote in 2017, ‘old paradigms overturned
leave ghost traces behind, and it is very hard
for historians to escape the sheer weight of the
intellectual traditions in which they are formed’,
Philip Benedict, ‘Global? Has Reformation
History Even Gotten Transnational Yet?’, Archiv
für Reformationsgeschichte 108:1 (2017) 56. doi:
https://doi.org/10.14315/arg-2017-0108.
9 On confession, Cornelis Augustijn, Kerk en
belijdenis (Kampen 1969). On reformation,
see Heiko Oberman, The Reformation: Roots
and Ramifications, translated by Andrew Colin
Gow (Grand Rapids 1994) 23-52. For concepts
such as doctrina, ecclesia and fides, see Natalia
Nowakowska, King Sigismund of Poland
and Martin Luther: The Reformation before
Confessionalization (Oxford 2018).
10 Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur:
Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte
des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen 2006) 102.
11 Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘The Production of Knowledge
about Confessions: Witnesses and their Testimonies
about Normative Years in and after the Thirty Years’
War’, in: Jason Philip Coy, Benjamin Marschke and
David Warren Sabean (eds.), The Holy Roman Empire,
Reconsidered (New York 2010) 93-106.
how hard it can be to systematically and exhaustively apply the tools of
historicism. I came to see The Convent of Wesel as an opportunity to offer non-
specialist readers (especially advanced undergraduate and graduate students)
with a perspective that might help them pursue new questions and adopt new
frames of reference, by suggesting that we can be better prepared to see what
lies hidden behind old paradigms by explicitly looking directly at, and then
around, through, over and under them.
To demonstrate this, after presenting my solution in Part i, I raised a
question: how did modern historians and record-keepers come to perpetuate
ideas that lacked evidence to support them? The problem is a challenge for
all historians seeking to understand events that happened over 400 years
ago, as Benedict has astutely pointed out elsewhere.8 How do we prepare
ourselves and our students to meet these challenges? This problem hangs
over many concepts we use to understand the religious history of sixteenth-
century Europe. That is true for the difference between modern terms such
as Reformation and confession, which do not have the same meaning as the
sixteenth-century words reformatio or confessio, whose connotations were
changing during the sixteenth century as well.9 A similar problem hangs
over sixteenth-century epithets such as ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Calvinist’. Initially,
these words were condescending, because they insinuated that another’s
‘truth’ merely reflected the subjective beliefs of an erring mortal, not the real
truth offered by the messiah. It was only by the mid-1560s that someone
such as the Braunschweig pastor Joachim Mörlin would proudly proclaim,
‘I am Lutheran and want to die as a Lutheran by God’s will’.10 By the early
seventeenth century, the moniker ‘Lutheran’ had become more common
as a positive expression of identity. Once such confessional identities had
developed, as Ralf-Peter Fuchs has shown, individuals often retrospectively
remembered confessional categories as discrete and totalizing as early as
possible.11 Advocates of Reformed orthodoxy such as Simeon Ruytinck

discussion – discussiedossier
12 Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam G.K. van Veen, ‘The
Disputed Origins of Dutch Calvinism: Religious
Refugees in the Historiography of the Dutch
Reformation’, Church History 86:2 (2017) 398-426.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640717000567.
13 See Matthias Pohlig, ‘Wahrheit als Lüge – oder:
Schloss der Augsburger Religionsfrieden den
Calvinsmus aus?’, in: Andreas Pietsch and
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (eds.), Konfessionelle
Ambiguität: Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als
religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit (Gütersloh
2013) 142-169.
14 Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed:
A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven 2002)
460-489; Jesse Spohnholz, ‘Exile Experiences and
the Transformations of Religious Cultures in the
Sixteenth Century: Wesel, London, Emden, and
Frankenthal’, Journal of Early Modern Christianity
6:1 (2019) 43-67. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/jemc-
2019-2002.
15 Willem Nijenhuis, ‘The Synod of Emden 1571’,
Ecclesia Reformata Volume ii. Studies in the
Reformation 16 (Leiden 1994) 101-124. doi: https://
doi.org/10.1163/9789004381957_008; Eduard
Simons, ‘Ein rheinisches Synodalschreiben
aus dem Jahr 1576’, Zeitschrift des Bergischen
Geschichtsvereins 36 (1903) 145-151. My thanks go
to Peter Gorter for this reference.
(described in Chapter 5 of my book) were engaged in a parallel process.
During the nineteenth century, when supporters of Reformed orthodoxy
warmly embraced the moniker ‘Calvinist’, another process of retrospective
crystallization happened.12 It is perfectly acceptable to use these terms in
their modern scholarly meanings. But when historians label sixteenth-
century Reformed Protestants as ‘Calvinists’ and supporters of the invariata as
‘Lutherans’, we need to take care not to inadvertently weigh in on debates that
remained unresolved in the later 1560s.13
Benedict and I fully agree that early modern producers and keepers of
records collected and arranged sources to promote doctrinal, ecclesiastical and
liturgical unity. I sought to convey their energy and enthusiasm to do so in
my book. I also found it instructive to ask: unity on whose terms? ‘Unity’, like
‘order’, is both aspirational (and almost never fully achieved) and subjective,
as one person’s unity is another’s schism. Within the Netherlandish Reformed
movement, there remained considerable disunity in the 1560s. Benedict
and I also agree that records of Reformed churches offer some of the best
evidence about nonconforming individuals and women that we have from
the sixteenth century.14 Our work and that of others has also demonstrated
that those records reveal values of the church officers who produced them.
But views expressed at ecclesiastical organizational meetings such as
Reformed synods might not sufficiently demonstrate the agreement of those
churches’ officers. Take, for instance, the synod held in Emden in October
1571. This meeting happened, and proved influential in later decades. But
it was only attended by a small group of delegates, since some of the most
important Netherlandish Reformed churches could not send delegates,
and its preparations and proceedings were marked by disagreements. Plus,
its provisions were not universally accepted or applied in the years that
followed.15 The example of the Convent of Wesel is more extreme, of course,
but the problem is similar. Historians studying such organizational meetings

a response to philip benedic t
85
spohnholz
16 Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility &
English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe
(Oxford 2019). doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/
oso/9780198812432.001.0001.
17 A point made in several contributions in Philip
Benedict, Hugues Daussy and Pierre-Olivier
Léchot (eds.), L’Identité huguenote. Faire mémoire
et écrire l’histoire (xvie–xxie siècle) (Geneva 2014).
should be cautious before accepting professions of agreement at face value,
lest we miss other germane historical developments.
These lessons also apply to how historians relate to archives, a point
brought home to me after an archivist first denied me access to the original 1568
articles because they were too important to Dutch church history. I respect the
need to preserve precious evidence from the past and appreciate that archivists
later welcomed me back. But that day is when I started thinking with greater
focus about archives. Looking beyond implicit narratives of archives does not
mean treating archives as abstract agents of history or simply acknowledging
the reasons why people built that archive in the first place. Rather, it means (as
I endeavored to do) exploring the choices and decisions made by archivists and
record-keepers that conditioned later interpretations of evidence. Recently,
Liesbeth Corens has offered another example of how early modern record-
keeping shaped historical discourses.16 Around 1700, English Catholics began
an impressive effort to collect primary sources from their history as a way of
creating what Corens calls a ‘counter-archive’ to English government officials’
efforts to preserve historical sources that stressed their State’s Protestant past.
While many Catholic collectors were part of the diaspora in Spain, Italy, the
Southern Netherlands and France, they only collected sources relating to
Catholics in England. They thus archived themselves right out of the history
– a process that explains why modern historians long underestimated their
importance. Corens’s English example contrasts to the French Protestant
tradition that Benedict studies. Huguenots who fled after the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes (1685) recorded mythologized narratives of their diaspora, often
ignoring inconvenient elements of that history. That legacy led to the creation
of nineteenth-century Huguenot societies in Prussia, England, the Netherlands
and North America, and leaves deep historical marks on history-writing about
Huguenots even today.17
As for how his perspective about remembering and archiving
the Reformation relates to The Convent of Wesel, for the period before the
eighteenth century, I focused on those key moments in the archival context
of these articles that affected ideas about them, not the other forms of
record-keeping to which Benedict refers. These were the initial archiving
of the articles at Austin Friars in 1569 (page 94), Simeon Ruytinck’s turn to
the archive in 1618 (page 125), the creation of a new archive for the Dutch
Reformed churches after the Synod of Dordt (1618-1619) that excluded
the articles (page 131), the transfer of the Latin original to a church archive
in South Holland (page 131), and Johannes Gysius’s sending of copies to
archives in Dordrecht, Breda and Wesel (page 132), all of which took place

discussion – discussiedossier

This gold coin was minted by the municipal government of Wesel for the quadricentennial of the Convent of Wesel
in 1968. It depicts the stranger from Matthew 25:35 depicted on the two gilded chalices that the Netherlandish
Reformed community gave to Wesel’s city council in a public ceremony in 1578. © City Archive Wesel, M1, No.3.
Photo by Jesse Spohnholz.

a response to philip benedic t
87
spohnholz
18 T he story of Calvin’s centrality to the Dutch
Reformation was influentially spread by Neo-
Calvinist church historians such as Abraham Kuyper
in the Faculty of Theology at the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam – the very institutional home where
I was warmly welcomed as I wrote much of The
Convent of Wesel. I am less inclined than Benedic t to
call Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer a Neo-Calvinist .
He died in 1876, before Kuyper had articulated a
coherent Neo-Calvinist agenda, though the two
men both advocated Reformed orthodoxy and
anti-revolutionary principles.
19 Philip Benedict, ‘ The Spread of Protestantism in
Francophone Europe in the First Century of the
Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte
109:1 (2018) 7-52. doi: https://doi.org/10.14315/arg-
2018-1090102.
20 Frederik Reinier Jacob Knetsch, ‘Church
Ordinances and Regulations of the Dutch
Synods “Under the Cross” (1563-1566) Compared
with the French (1559-1563)’, Studies in Church
History Subsidia 8 (1991) 187-203. doi: https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0143045900001642. For a similar
argument about French Reformed churches
relative to Geneva, see Glenn Sunshine,
ReformingFrench Protestantism: The Development
of Huguenot Ecclesiastical Institutions, 1557-1572
(Kirksville 2003). I admit that adding the word
‘merely’ to the sentence on page 103 that
Benedict cites would have improved its clarity.
21 Arie van Deursen, Bavianen en Slijkgeuzen:
Kerkenkerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en
Oldenbarnevelt (Franeker 1998); Leon van
denBroeke, Een geschiedenis van de classis:
Classicale typen tussen idee en werkelijkheid
(1571-2004). Theologie en geschiedenis
(Kampen2005).
before Quintinus Noortbergh produced his inventory (pages 140-143). All
the while, of course, office holders in Reformed churches were collecting
and distributing other church records, as Benedict points out. But it was not
until the ‘National Synod of Wesel’ found its way into dominant historical
narratives of the Dutch Reformation – a process that took place through
a back-and-forth between record-keeping and history-writing over two
centuries – that such kinds of record-keeping became critical to spreading
forms of knowledge about the articles that my book traces.
All this said, Benedict asks how this book encourages us to rethink
sixteenth-century church-building. He is absolutely right that it points
to Genevan and French influence on early Netherlandish Reformed
church-building.18 As he and I both point out, my study highlights that
Netherlandish Reformed churches were borrowing from presbyterial-synodal
precedents in ‘Francophonia’ (to use Benedict’s clever term)19 well before
1568. Still, as Frederik Knetsch has argued, Dutch Protestant leaders never
simply copied institutional frameworks developed elsewhere.20 Rather, they
adapted them to the political, ecclesiastical, social, cultural and economic
realities they faced. As Arie van Deursen and Leon van den Broeke have
demonstrated, the classis played a more important role for Reformed churches
in the highly urbanized but politically decentralized Dutch Republic than
similar bodies did in Reformed churches in France.21
In the period I focused on for this book – the 1560s – my approach
in The Convent of Wesel also highlights that the Netherlandish Reformed
churches were diverse ecclesiastically, theologically and liturgically, and

discussion – discussiedossier

This is the first page of the handwritten archival inventory produced by Quintinus Noortbergh in 1737, referred to in
Spohnholz’s book on pp. 140-144. It indicates that the articles from Wesel in 1568 refer to the ‘Authentic Synod Acts
from Wesel Anno 1568’. © Utrecht Archives with special thanks to Kaj van Vliet, Oud Synodaal Archief, 1401.1. Photo
by Jesse Spohnholz.

a response to philip benedic t
89
spohnholz
22 Willem Nijenhuis, Adrianus Saravia (c. 1532-1613)
(Leiden 1980).
23 Tobias Sarx, Franciscus Junius d.Ä. (1545-1602):
Ein reformierter Theologe im Spannungsfeld
zwischen späthumanistischer Irenik und reformierter
Konfessionalisierung (Göttingen 2007). See also
Nijenhuis, ‘Variants within Dutch Calvinism’.
24 Nijenhuis, ‘The Synod of Emden 1571’;
Maximilian Lanzinner, ‘Der Aufstand der
Niederlande und der Reichstag zu Speyer 1570’,
in: Heinz Angermeier and Erich Meuthen (eds.),
Fortschritte in der Geschichtswissenschaft durch
Reichstagsaktenforschung. Vier Beiträge aus der
Arbeit an den Reichstagsakten des 15. und 16.
Jahrhunderts (Göttingen 1988) 102-117; Benjamin
J. Kaplan, ‘“In Equalit y and Enjoying the Same
Favour”: Biconfessionalism in the Low Countries’,
in: Thomas Max Safley (ed.), A Companion to
Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World.
Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition
28 (Leiden 2011) 101-109. doi: https://doi.
org/10.1163/9789004216211_006; Jurjen Vis, Jan
Arentsz: De mandenmaker van Alkmaar, voorman
van de Hollandse reformatie (Hilversum 1992) 82-
83. In 1568 some hoped that French Reformed
would also sign the Augsburg Confession, see
Jonas van Tol, Germany and the French Wars
of Religion, 1560-1572. St Andrews Studies in
Reformation History 12 (Leiden 2018). doi: https://
doi.org/10.1163/9789004330726.
25 Benedict, ‘Global?’, 61.
shaped by a variety of international influences, despite church officers’
frequent recourse to the language of unity. Many Netherlandish Reformed
surely promoted Genevan- and French-style institutions. But William of
Orange selected the most prominent Netherlandish advocate for English-style
episcopalianism, Adrianus Saravia, as his military chaplain for his widely
watched 1568 campaign.22 Many Netherlandish Protestants also supported
signing the Augsburg Confession. Saravia was among this group, as was
Franciscus Junius, the other military chaplain serving Orange in his 1568
campaign.23 Many with these views were wary of theological precisionism
they felt threatened the broader Protestant challenge to Rome. Others
supported signing the Augustana for strategic reasons; they hoped to adopt
a biconfessional arrangement like the Peace of Augsburg in the Netherlands
(which was still formally part of the Reich) or to gain support from powerful
Protestant princes in the Holy Roman Empire.24 It was precisely because
these alternative futures for the Dutch Reformation looked conceivable as
Orange began his military campaign in autumn 1568 that Petrus Dathenus
and Herman Moded felt so much urgency to promote a church that aligned
with Geneva, the French Reformed churches and the church of the Palatinate.
But, as I argue in Chapter 3, not even all the signatories to these articles
seem to have understood their signing in the same ways that Dathenus
and Moded did. At this moment, many possible futures still existed. My
approach also casts light on the ways in which the Electoral Palatinate first
began influencing the shape of Netherlandish Reformed Protestantism in
the 1560s. Taken together, the book highlights the diverse and international
influences on Netherlandish religious cultures, some features of which get
lost when historians adopt only local, regional or nationals frameworks –
another point upon which Benedict and I agree.25 I endeavored to weave

discussion – discussiedossier
such historiographical interventions quietly into the chapters for specialists,
leaving the conclusion to consider the book’s message for non-specialists.
I continue to work to see what new narratives emerge when I
apply the lessons of The Convent of Wesel to my research and writing.
My current project seeks to understand sixteenth-century Protestant
refugees beyond and across political and confessional boundaries.26
I hope that The Convent of Wesel might also inspire others to uncover
historical narratives that have been there all along but require new
perspectives to come to light. To conclude, I thank Benedict not only
for the extensive attention he has given my book, but also for providing
me with inspiration through his earlier books and articles as I sought to
find my own path as a scholar. I hope that my books and articles might
similarly offer some nuggets that future historians might use to ask and
answer new questions as well.
Jesse Spohnholz is Professor of History and Director of the Roots of Contemporary
Issues Program at Washington State University. His research focuses on social
practices of religious coexistence in Reformation-era Germany and the Netherlands,
the experiences of religious refugees living through the confessional conflicts of the
sixteenth century and historical memory of the Reformation. His other books include
The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark 2011)
and Ruptured Lives: Refugee Crises in Historical Perspective (Oxford 2020). He is currently
co-director, with Mirjam van Veen, of the research project, ‘The Rhineland Exiles and the
Religious Landscape of the Dutch Republic, c.1550-1618’ funded by the Dutch Research
Council and based at the vu Amsterdam. E-mail: spohnhoj@wsu.edu.
26 These principles guide my collaboration with
Mirjam van Veen, titled ‘The Rhineland Exiles
and the Religious Landscape of the Dutch
Republic, c.1550-1618’ and supported by a research
grant offered by the Dutch Research Council
(Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk
Onderzoek).