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The Reformed Church and the Regulation of Religious Literature in the Early Dutch Atlantic World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 December 2018
Abstract
Catechisms, Bibles, and other printed works were critical for the successful plantation and growth of Dutch religion and culture in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. This essay examines the provision, regulation, and various controversies surrounding religious books and pamphlets in that period. Under the joint supervision of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed churches of the Netherlands, colonial clergy were supposed to teach everyone from Company soldiers and officers to European settlers, from Africans and African slaves to Native Americans. And the clergy certainly had some missionary achievements, especially where the Company’s power was greatest. However, colonial clergy and churches also faced tremendous difficulties and fell short of their original plans and goals. Studying the different tools they had at their disposal—studying the creation (and destruction) of their printed materials—helps us see the church’s own culpability in these difficulties and failures. Early seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism was restrictive enough and the churches of the Netherlands worried enough about deviance and heterodoxy that they unintentionally undermined their own mission and reduced the Dutch footprint overseas.
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- © 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University
Footnotes
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D. L. Noorlander teaches colonial American history, the Atlantic world, and European expansion at the State University of New York at Oneonta. His research and publications cover various aspects of the seventeenth-century Dutch experience in America and around the world.
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