The sixteenth-century Reformation demolished the myth of a united Christendom, handing rulers a new tool – confessions of faith – to increase authority over their subjects, a process described as ‘confessionalization’. The result was a century of religious conflict and warfare forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homelands. Among these were sizeable groups of Netherlandic Protestants (followers of Calvinism) fleeing the violence, impoverishment, and religious persecution caused by the Spanish occupiers of the Southern Netherlands. What did that experience do to them, and to their religious identity and confessional cohesion? How could they maintain a community of faith as strangers in a place dominated by other confessions?

Peter Gorter’s published dissertation from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam offers an incredibly detailed case study of Dutch religious migrant communities in three German cities. His findings challenge some of the conclusions made by Heiko Oberman in his influential 2009 essay, ‘The Reformation of the Exiles’ which had argued that the experience of living as refugees led Calvinist communities to develop an ‘exultantentheologie’ focused on strict disciplinary practices and adherence to the doctrine of divine election (predestination) as means of maintaining group cohesion in the midst of strangers. This theology, Oberman argued, then shaped the Dutch Reformed Church back home. As Gorter’s meticulous analysis of the records of Netherlandic Calvinists in the imperial free cities of Frankfurt am Main, Aachen, and Cologne reveals, this theory requires reconsideration.

Gorter relies on the migrants’ own documents: consistory protocols (kerkenraadsprotocollen) recording discussions of elders and preachers on various membership and disciplinary cases; correspondence; synod records; published polemics; and confessions of faith. These reveal significant differences in experience among the three migrant communities which together totalled about 2,500 members. Those differences, Gorter argues, were primarily the result of the specific political and religious character of their host cities. Against Oberman’s exulantentheologie thesis, Gorter discovered that it was not the act of migration per se, but the ‘everyday circumstances’ in each city that shaped the religious identity of these Netherlandic groups. The relationships of the migrants with each city’s council and other Protestant fellowships were the strongest determinants of whether they would be allowed to reside as distinct Reformed communities.

The author’s comparative approach bears rich rewards. He begins with Lutheran Frankfurt where the first group of mostly Southern Netherlandic migrants arrived in 1555 with the city council’s permission to worship distinct from the other Protestant churches. Aggressively promoting their Reformed identity, they provoked the Lutheran ministers to demand the Dutch sign onto the Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530, which was the standard for Protestants in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg granting them legal rights in the Empire. The Netherlanders refused, offering up a different, more conciliatory confession (Philip Melanchthon’s Confessio Saxonica of 1551) instead. Constant bickering with the French-speaking Reformed Walloon refugees further irritated the city council, which shut down the Dutch church in 1561. When the second wave of migrants arrived in 1570, its leaders wisely agreed to the city’s demand to confine their rituals of baptism and marriage to the Lutheran churches. They also avoided polemical engagement with the Lutherans, thus adapting nicely to a Lutheran environment.

The second chapter focuses on Aachen, a Catholic city with a large Protestant population. Here the Netherlanders survived by joining their German coreligionists. It was only in 1598 that the experiment ended, when the emperor, fearing the strength of non-Lutheran Protestantism, demanded that the city shut down the Reformed church. Gorter’s subsequent chapter on Cologne reveals how the Dutch could survive in a Catholic city that formally outlawed the Reformed faith. Here Calvinists adopted a clandestine approach to their worship and ritual, working collaboratively with not only Lutherans but also Anabaptists to keep a cemetery for their use outside the city walls. Since Calvin had despised such dissimulation, the Dutch aligned themselves with the more accommodating Reformed community of Heidelberg, rather than with Calvin’s Geneva. Here also the Reformed mercantile and familial networks were crucial for the survival of the Cologne migrant community.

Gorter’s subsequent chapters compare the migrant fellowships’ approaches to church discipline (chapter four), ecclesiastical organization and pastoral leadership (chapter five), and ritual practice (baptism, the Lord’s Supper, marriage, and funeral rites). The final chapter explores the relationships of each community with other Reformed groups and with the homeland. He concludes that these migrant communities played little role in shaping attitudes toward confessional definitions and disciplinary practices for the Reformed Church of the Dutch Republic. Instead, these groups were focused primarily on their own survival within their exile cities. He finds little evidence to argue that migration in and of itself fostered any particular form of theology.

Gorter takes his analysis to the personal experiences of the dozens of preachers who ministered under extremely difficult circumstances. Most of them, Gorter discovered, did not return to the Republic with a stricter form of Calvinism. Instead, the diverse experiences and need to compromise with other confessional groups and civic leaders led many to be promoters of more moderate approaches. Of particular note was the case of the very prominent preacher for the Frankfurt community, Petrus Dathenus who, after a stint in a Dutch prison in 1583 for criticizing the Dutch Stadholder, abandoned his preaching office, became a medical practitioner in North Germany, and turned to the spiritualism of David Joris. Joris himself had been an infamous dissimulator in Basel and wrote prolifically against the kinds of confessionalism and theological conflict that Dathenus had spent his career pursuing (p. 123). While Gorter explores some interaction between Reformed preachers and Anabaptists, he does not pursue the degree to which the Netherlandic migrants came across such spiritualism, which was prevalent along the Lower Rhineland. In the end, some migrants returned home with a sharper Calvinism, others with an appreciation for collaboration and compromise. On the whole, Gorter’s remarkable study is a model of archival research, careful analysis, and clear and persuasive argumentation. A concise English summary is helpful for non-Dutch readers. Highly recommended.