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Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672 book cover

1st Edition

Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672

By Genji Yasuhira Copyright 2024
426 Pages
by Routledge

426 Pages
by Routledge

Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics... Read more
Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, Note on References, Introduction, Part I. Reformed Governing Strategies, 1. Repression: Dynamics of Anti-Catholicism, 2. Toleration: Limited Recognition and Connivance, Part II. Catholic Survival Tactics, 3. Foundational Infrastructure: Social Status and Networks, 4. Spatial Practices: The Making of the Urban Landscape of Coexistence, 5. Discourses of Self-Representation: Public, Private and Conscience, Conclusion, Appendices, Bibliography, Archival Primary Sources (Het Utrechts Archief [HUA]), Published Primary Sources, Secondary Literature

Biography

Genji Yasuhira is a senior lecturer at Kyoto University, Japan. In 2019 he earned his PhD with distinction from Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Prior to his appointment at Kyoto University in 2023, he held a position as Cross-border Postdoctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

“Yasuhira’s most important contribution to the question of agency lies in his impressively deep dive into the criminal records of Utrecht to uncover what the legal prosecution of the city’s Catholics reveals about their degree of agency. […] While the legal prosecution of early modern Dutch Catholics is a known phenomenon, his is the first study to tackle these criminal cases in such depth of detail. The author’s careful examination of the legal sources thus reveals that Utrecht’s Catholics could sometimes quite nimbly defend themselves against religious persecution. He brings out, quite vividly, their voices and their agency, and this is the great value of the book.”

- Christine Kooi (Louisiana State University) for Early Modern Low Countries 8:2 (2024), pp. 307-309, here especially, 308.

“Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic is a significant intervention in the intertwined histories of religious toleration and coexistence in early modern Europe. […] The two halves of the book operate in dialogue with each other. Together they illustrate that seventeenth-century Dutch Catholics were not ‘passive entities’ or ‘placid recipients’ of the toleration (p. 19) bestowed upon them by regents and magistrates, but rather important actors in negotiating their place in the urban landscape. […] In sum, this is thought-provoking contribution to the rich body of historiography on this important and timely topic. It deepens our understanding of how early modern Europeans came to terms with the pluralism engendered by the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

- Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge) for Church History and Religious Culture 105:3/4 (2025), pp. 471-473, here especially 471, 473.

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