Pragmatic Toleration

It has long been known that Antwerp, the mushrooming metropolis of the early sixteenth-century Low Countries, was a more congenial location for religious dissent than the letter of its laws might suggest. Rose Hickman’s description of the governor of the English House in Antwerp—‘though he was a Papist yet he was no persecutor nor cruel Papist, for he was contented to bear with my husband so far as he might without being seen to do it’—would have fitted many others in positions of authority in the city. In this book, Victoria Christman examines this attitude, and its limitations, through a number of instances in which the civic magistrates of Antwerp put the law into practice selectively, reluctantly or not at all. The first chapter gives an overview of the increasingly stringent laws against religious deviance decreed by Charles V. The second chapter describes a secret conventicle that was unearthed in Brussels in 1527, to give an idea of the sort of group that the legislation targeted. No Antwerp conventicle is similarly well documented, but no Antwerp conventicle would have had the links to courts and councils that made the Brussels case so scandalous and so well reported. The third chapter examines how (and why) Anabaptists were beyond the pale as far as Antwerp’s civic elite was concerned, although even there the emphasis was on exemplary punishment of ringleaders rather than elimination root and branch. Chapter Four looks at the repeated failure to prosecute heterodox printers with vigour—sadly without drawing on Andrew Hope’s illuminating work on the printers who supplied the English market for Lutheran books, although touching on some of the same figures. Chapter Five considers the Chambers of Rhetoric, recitation and drama guilds that were prominent in civic life but were also among the hotbeds of religious dissidence. The sixth and final chapter looks at the arguments that Antwerp’s magistrates put forward to avoid promulgating Charles’s decree expelling Portuguese New Christians. Ultimately unsuccessful, their attempt does provide some very early statements of the economic, political and religious rationales for erring on the side of mercy

Archaeology · Dissent · Dissenting opinion · Elite · Heresy · Heterodoxy · Legislation · Orthodoxy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Toleration · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious Education and Schools · Religious studies · Religious Studies