Negotiating Differences

This book explores the dynamics of peaceful coexistence in the Dutch Republic by tracing the literary responses to one of the key controversies between Protestants and Catholics – the role of religious imagery in worship. Why and to what extent were people in the Republic willing to reconcile theological differences and combine elements from their own religious cultural practices with those of another? The intermingling of practices, the author shows, was unexpectedly complicated in the Republic. Restraints were imposed on the use of images in religious literature of all denominations till 1650. Evidence of negotiations appears after 1650, however, as Dutch Protestants absorbed significant aspects of Catholic visual traditions into their own. Religious toleration had clearly become a matter of sharing rather than enduring for the Protestants, but retained features of a monologue since Dutch Catholics were then developing a new, idiosyncratic identity of their own.