In the mid-1860s, as Britain enjoyed global power thanks to coal-fueled industrial capitalism and as American industrialization was poised to take off, George Perkins Marsh of Vermont in America and William Stanley Jevons from Liverpool in Britain published books that warned unsustainable use of natural resources threatened to impoverish future generations. Their Reformed Protestantism upbringing, descended from forebears’ Puritanism, had instilled in both Marsh and Jevons perspectives and values that informed their analyses and solutions. Since their publication, their books’ reputation has risen with concern for the environment and about limits to growth. They remain valuable and relevant today.

This chapter examines the wars that broke out in the Netherlands, at least partly because of reformation, during the final third of the sixteenth century. Militant Reformed Protestantism established itself in the Low Countries, especially in the western provinces, by the early 1560s. In 1566, the “wonderyear,” political and religious protest erupted into the open, as nobles protested Habsburg religious policy and Reformed militants sacked churches in an iconoclastic fury. This in turn caused Philip II to install a military regime, led by the Duke of Alba, in order to suppress rebellion and heresy. In 1572 the rebels won territory in the north, and by 1580 gained control of the northwestern half of the region, where Reformed militants instituted a revolutionary reformation to root out Catholicism. Sectarianism in turn caused a breakdown of the rebel alliance, and by the mid-1580s the Habsburg had successfully retaken most of Flanders and Brabant. By 1590 a military stalemate had bifurcated the Netherlands, with the rebels in control of the seven northern provinces and the Habsburgs in control of the ten southern provinces. Each region would follow its own religious trajectory.

This chapter traces the evolution of reformist ideas in the Netherlands during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. It describes a confessional turn – that is, the gradual emergence of three principal streams of religious reform: Mennonite, Reformed and Catholic. The Mennonite or Doopsgezinde stream arose out of Anabaptism; after the judicial reaction to the Muenster kingdom, Menno Simons and his followers eschewed the radicalism of the Melchiorites and turned inward, creating self-segregated communities focused on internal piety and moral reform. Meanwhile Reformed Protestantism made its way into the Low Countries and gained a substantial following by the 1560s. Both Mennonites and Reformed would develop confessional identities distinct from each other, including their own martyrologies and Bible translations. Meanwhile, Catholic reform came to the region through the Tridentine canons and the reorganization of the region’s bishoprics.