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The schoolmistress and best-selling poet Anna Bijns was one of the few laypeople in the sixteenth-century Netherlands who was prepared publicly to fight for the Catholic cause. This article contends that Bijns's work, exceptional as it was, reflects a "moral" understanding of the problem of heresy that was not unique to her, but that exemplified the way in which many clerics responded to the threat of Protestantism. They equated heresy with sin, and argued that this required a penitential response from all in society. Yet by contending that each "order" in society was best left to fight its own sins, and that "each should tend his own garden" their arguments also created the impression that heresy was first and foremost a clerical problem. This may help explain the "passive" way in which Catholics in the Netherlands, as well as in many other parts of Northwestern Europe, responded to the Reformation.

Most recent studies of Calvinist church discipline have used consistory records to attempt to quantify the intensity and the focus of early modern Reformed discipline. They do so on the assumption that consistory records form a representative record of disciplinary activity. This article questions that assumption. Using the journal of an Utrecht elder from the 1620s, it demonstrates, first, that his Reformed church kept no record at all of about 70 percent of the disciplinary cases that it handled. Secondly, it argues that the records give a flattering picture of the relationship between the church and the authorities, and of the relationships between ministers, elders, and deacons. Finally, it shows that much disciplinary activity was never discussed by the entire consistory, and that it was on the whole more informal in character than is usually presumed.

AbstractAlthough scholars have been aware for some time that women far out-numbered men in the Dutch Reformed Church of the Golden Age, it has proved difficult to explain why this was the case. By gaining a better understanding of which women joined the Churches, we may also get a better sense of why they did so. An analysis of the membership of the Utrecht Reformed Church in the early 1620s shows that two groups were over-represented, older unmarried women and young women who lacked paternal support. Single women being at high risk of incurring dishonour, this article suggests that they saw church membership as a way to enhance their ‘eerlijkheid’ (honour). Moreover, whilst religiousness was deemed particularly desirable for older women, society was quick to condemn female religiousness that was practised outside confessional boundaries. Thus, as well as benefiting women because it was a source of ‘eerlijkheid’, Church membership also legitimized their religiousness.