Mining the diaries, memoirs and poems written by Catholics in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, this book explores how Catholics experienced religious and political change in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens. The general aim of the book is to demonstrate that by problematizing the relationship between clerics and laypeople, we can gain a better insight in the changing fortunes of the Catholic Church. The Revolt that ripped apart the sixteenth-century Netherlands came at the expense of a civil war, that eventually became a war of religion. This book revolves around two questions. T ... More

Mining the diaries, memoirs and poems written by Catholics in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, this book explores how Catholics experienced religious and political change in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens. The general aim of the book is to demonstrate that by problematizing the relationship between clerics and laypeople, we can gain a better insight in the changing fortunes of the Catholic Church. The Revolt that ripped apart the sixteenth-century Netherlands came at the expense of a civil war, that eventually became a war of religion. This book revolves around two questions. The first concerns the passive way in which Catholics responded to Calvinist aggression in the early decades of the conflict; the second aim is to account for the very active support that laypeople in the Southern Netherlands, after 1585, began to show for a Catholic revival. The book argues that both phenomena can be explained by way in which the clergy interacted with the laity. Initially, clerics tried to contain the Reformation by presenting it as an internal problem, in which lay people should not become involved. This attitude changed around 1580. Traditional Christians began to radicalise and identify themselves as Catholics, while in Catholic exile centres, new relationships were forged between laypeople and clerics, who at last acknowledged the need to involve the laity. After 1585, priests and politicians in the Habsburg Netherlands devised a religious way for believers to ‘do their bit’ to end the war. In the process, this sealed the division of the Netherlands.