TRANSFORMING THE URBAN SPACE: CATHOLIC SURVIVAL THROUGH SPATIAL PRACTICES IN POST-REFORMATION UTRECHT

Abstract

As we do in our postmodernizing world, the people of early modern Europe after the Reformations faced the urgent problem of religious coexistence. Numerous historians have depicted the 'Dutch Golden Age' - a term often used as a near synonym for the seventeenth century - as a herald of modernity, of which Dutch religious toleration is understood to constitute a significant part.1 In such narratives, Dutch Catholics are represented as a passive entity, as placid recipients of the toleration bestowed on them by Erasmian, pragmatic regents. The history of coexistence has often been portrayed from the top-down perspective of the tolerating and persecuting party, echoing modernization models such as the secularization thesis and the privatization of beliefs.2 Yet if we wish to rethink this historical narrative of coexistence critically, it is the tolerated and persecuted party that we must place in the foreground. The present article adopts the bottom-up perspective of the Catholic politico-religious minority in the Dutch Republic, focusing on seventeenth-century Utrecht, the main theatre of the confessional struggle between Reformed Protestants and Catholics on Dutch soil.3 It will argue that Catholics, through their spatial practices, both actively facilitated their Catholic way of life and played an indispensable role in transforming Utrecht into an early modern, multi-confessional city.