Jesse Spohnholz’s research while affiliated with Washington State University and other places

This collection offers a fresh assessment of John Calvin and the tradition of Calvinism as it evolved from the sixteenth century to today. The essays are written by scholars who present the latest research on a pluriform religious movement that became a global faith. The volume focuses on key aspects of Calvin’s thought and its diverse reception in Europe, the transatlantic world, Africa, South America, and Asia. Calvin’s theology was from the beginning open to a wide range of interpretations and was never a static body of ideas and practices. Over the course of his life his thought evolved and deepened while retaining unresolved tensions and questions that created a legacy that was constantly evolving in different cultural contexts. Calvinism itself is an elusive term, bringing together Christian communities that claim a shared heritage but often possess radically distinct characters. The handbook reveals fascinating patterns of continuity and change to demonstrate how the movement claimed the name of the Genevan Reformer but was moulded by an extraordinary range of religious, intellectual, and historical influences, from the Enlightenment and Darwinism to indigenous African beliefs and postmodernism. In its global contexts, Calvinism has been continuously reimagined and reinterpreted. This collection throws new light on the highly dynamic and fluid nature of a deeply influential form of Christianity.

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.

The Battle for the Sabbath in the Dutch Reformation: Devotion or Desecration? By Kyle J. Dieleman. Reformed Historical Theology, 52. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019. 255 pp. €64.99 cloth. - Volume 88 Issue 3 - Jesse Spohnholz

This essay compares the experiences of Netherlandish Protestants who fled Habsburg persecution in the late sixteenth century in their three largest exile communities – Wesel, London and Emden. Previous scholars have emphasized that exile encouraged Netherlandish Protestants to develop more confessionally Calvinist ideas and to embrace a more volunteeristic understanding of faith, which could (and should) operate independent from government oversight. Further, scholars have suggested that Calvinism flourished in exile because its strict church discipline held fractured communities together. This essay reassesses these conclusions by examining the diversity of ideas circulating in exile communities, the flexibility of migrant churches to local conditions, the continued frustrations of pastors and elders in achieving their disciplinary objectives, and the repeated assurances among exile leaders of their obedience to political authorities. It concludes by suggesting that a newly founded exile community, Frankenthal, might be the closest to the model Reformed community proposed by scholars, but notes that it only ever attracted few Netherlandish Protestants.

Making Manslaughter: Process, Punishment and Restitution in Württemberg and Zurich, 1376–1700. Susanne Pohl-Zucker. Medieval Law and its Practice 22. Leiden: Brill, 2017. x + 336 pp. $134. - Volume 72 Issue 4 - Jesse Spohnholz

Pleading for Diversity: The Church Caspar Coolhaes Wanted. By Linda Stuckrath Gottschalk. Reformed Historical Theology 44. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 314 pp. $100.98 cloth. - Volume 87 Issue 3 - Jesse Spohnholz

According to historiographical convention, the experience of exile by Protestants from the Habsburg Netherlands between the 1550s and the early 1570s played a critical role in promoting confessional Calvinism in the early Dutch Republic. But there are too many problems in the evidentiary basis to sustain this conclusion. This essay traces the historiography on the Dutch Reformation in order to isolate where and why this idea emerged. It demonstrates that no specific role for religious refugees in the development of Dutch Calvinism can be found in historical writing from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Only in the late nineteenth century, during a debate about the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands, did the experiences of religious refugees come to take on a specific role in explaining the development of Dutch Calvinism. The idea first emerged among Neo-Calvinists who critiqued state supervision of their church. By the twentieth century, it came to be used by orthodox and moderate Reformed Protestants, as well as liberal and secular academic historians. This paper thus demonstrates that this key interpretive framework for understanding the Dutch Reformation was the product not of developments in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Netherlands, but of religious politics in the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century.