Making Publics in Early Modern Europe

People, Things, Forms of Knowledge

Bronwen Wilson, Paul Yachnin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135168926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" — the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of association, cultural producers and consumers challenged dominant ideas about just who could be a public person, greatly expanded the resources of public life for ordinary people in their own time, and developed ideas and practices that have helped create the political culture of modernity. Coming from a number of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, art history, history of religion, history of science, and musicology, the contributors develop analyses of a range of cases of early modern public-making that together demonstrate the rich inventiveness and formative social power of artistic and intellectual publication in this period.

Part I
People

1
Religion Inside Out

Dutch House Churches and the Making of Publics in the Dutch Republic

Steven Mullaney, Angela Vanhaelen, and Joseph Ward

When visiting Amsterdam in 1663, Balthasar de Monconys, counselor to the king of France, attended a Roman Catholic Mass. As De Monconys describes it, the religious service took place “in a middle-class home, where one entered and exited only two at a time.”¹ This brief and cryptic comment is intriguing: Celebration of the Mass had been outlawed in the northern Netherlands since 1581, yet De Monconys, a stranger in the Calvinist city, seemed to have had no trouble discovering a place where he could observe the forbidden practices of his faith. Like many Roman Catholic visitors, he found a Dutch huiskerk, or house church. Open to local and foreign Catholics, yet shrouded with at least the semblance of secrecy, these private spaces allowed the maintenance of banned religious practices and identities. Sir William Temple, British ambassador to the Netherlands and keen observer of its social customs, described this particular form of Dutch religious tolerance in this way: “Every man enjoys the free exercise [of religion] in his own Chamber, or his own House, unquestioned and unespied.”² According to both De Monconys and Temple, then, within the Calvinist Dutch Republic, diverse religious groups could actively practice their faith in a manner that was both clandestine and licensed.

Analysis of the interlinked tensions between openness and secrecy and orthodoxy and dissent is one of the threads that run through this essay, which seeks to address larger questions: how does the peculiar social formation of the house church contribute to early modern definitions of a public? Could worshipers attending Mass in a huiskerk constitute a public? In working through these issues, we encountered a series of oppositions, and the essay explores the complex relations between tolerance and divisiveness, between actual and virtual publics, and between the private and public spheres. How did small local gatherings of the faithful conceive of themselves in connection or in counterdistinction to a larger virtual public? And what were the links between private space, private identity, and the making of a public? As we thought through these interrelated questions, we discovered that the case of the Dutch house church offers more insights into the potential ways that a public emerges, coalesces, interacts, and grows or fades away, than the familiar, classic, Habermasian version of an Enlightenment “bourgeois” public sphere. Our immediate focus is religion, our larger enterprise, the making of early modern publics and other forms of public sociability. The case of the house church demonstrates how the particular forms of public assembly that emerged in the post-Reformation period sometimes produced mutations in private as well as public spaces, even hybrid articulations of private and public as a single, paradoxical entity, and suggests that early modern publics owed some of their character and vitality to such mutations or hybridities.

THE HUISKERK

As Temple noted, the Dutch guaranteed freedom of conscience to each individual, as long as that freedom was exercised in private. Citizens were not required to attend services at the official Calvinist church, but no other public churches were allowed in Dutch towns and cities—that is to say, no other openly identified and outwardly identifiable places of worship, no buildings adorned with crosses or signs or any other architectural markers of faith, were allowed. The private household chapels that emerged in the late sixteenth century were originally known as huiskerken or house churches. Modern scholars often refer to them as schuilkerken, hidden churches, but the term is an anachronistic one, dating from the Catholic emancipation movement of the nineteenth century. Its suggestion of a hidden or clandestine activity is in many ways misleading,³ especially if it encourages an oversimplification of a phenomenon that looks to be a complex permutation within, and between, the private and public realms of early modern Europe. In densely populated urban neighborhoods, most residents knew of the existence of a house church, even if those who attended did so discreetly, entering and exiting only two at a time. Indeed, huiskerken were such “open secrets” that Calvinist magistrates sometimes played a role in the selection of a new priest.⁴ Hidden in plain sight, these were not the clandestine or illicit spaces that the anachronistic, nineteenth-century term schuilkerken would suggest. Their full ambiguity as religious spaces and sociological entities is well captured, in fact, by the term the period used for them: they were house churches, home-chapels, a new conundrum in the social habitus involving a significant expansion of the private or domestic realm to include activities formerly understood as public, in the sense of open, manifest, officially promulgated, or out in the public eye.

As legal preserves for the exercise of a free religious conscience, huiskerken were originally intended to serve individual families and not larger groups. Thus they were exactly what their name suggests: rooms (or spaces within rooms) in the family home where those who lived in the house could worship in private. If equipped with an altar, family income and the overall size of the domicile would determine whether the altar was portable or fixed, the room fully devoted to the celebration of the Mass or designed to allow for multiple uses. A huiskerk as such would be strictly a family affair, a private, domestic space in which a single household could practice a form of worship no longer allowed in public. In many cities, however, huiskerken evolved into much larger places of communal worship, located not in the family residence but in other kinds of buildings designated for the purpose,⁵ where multiple families, indeed an entire congregation or parish, could meet for Mass and share in the communal experience of faith.

On the outside, such huiskerken were anonymous structures, undistinguished from the residences or warehouses alongside them, whose everyday facades they adopted as their own. Inside, however, they could be large and lavishly appointed spaces, graced with all the rich Baroque adornment— from altar to rosewood tabernacle, separate side pews for prominent parishioners, carved panels and oil paintings—that one would expect in a Catholic church of the period. In some cases, the walls were hung with paintings specially commissioned for the purpose, depicting scenes from biblical history or the lives of local saints, which were of pointed significance to a shuttered Catholicism, denied any overt or public recognition of their long history in the Netherlands.⁶ In such artwork, collective memory combined with worship in the space of the huiskerk, embodying a new, quasi-clandestine and quasi-licensed sense of community and identity. And the community involved could be quite substantial. Some huiskerken, such as “the Hart” in Amsterdam, seated over 150 people. This is quite possibly the church attended by De Monconys. By 1700, there were about twenty Roman Catholic house churches in Amsterdam alone, eleven in Utrecht, and seven in Haarlem.⁷

It was not just the Roman Catholics who established these quasi-hidden churches; almost every non-Calvinist religious group in the Republic relied on some form of house church for the continuance of their specific religious practices.⁸ Moreover, as Benjamin Kaplan has recently pointed out, the Dutch house church had thousands of counterparts throughout Europe, making it clear that such permutations in what is private and what is public—and what is significantly or ambiguously in-between—were key components in the practice of religious tolerance.⁹ The development of private churches in the Netherlands thus suggests one way that the accommodation of religious dissent and difference could precipitate the emergence of new forms of public association and collective identity.

TOLERANCE AND DIVISIVENESS IN THE POST-REFORMATION PERIOD

The Reformation was divisive on many levels: it divided states; it divided communities; it divided selves. Diarmaid MacCulloch suggests that during the sixteenth century, Latin or Western Christendom, “previously unified by the pope’s symbolic leadership and by possession of that common Latin culture, was torn apart by deep disagreements about how human beings should exercise the power of God in the world, arguments even about what it was to be human. It was a process of extreme mental and physical violence.”¹⁰ As a statement intended to set the stage for a grand narrative of the Reformation, MacCulloch’s assertion seems apt. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time when “religious discourse was a, if not the, predominant means by which individuals defined and debated issues” in public.¹¹ Throughout Europe, the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation changed forever the ways in which private individuals negotiated their sense of collective identity. This was the period when European Christendom fractured along fault lines that divided one realm from another, one region from another, one town, one generation, one neighbor, and one family member from another. Emergent Protestantism(s) and retrenching Catholicism(s) redefined the virtual as well as the physical spaces in which religious faith could be practiced. New dimensions opened up within the social imaginary; new forms of public sociability developed, while older or traditional forms were eliminated or driven under cover or out of sight. New kinds of affiliation evolved on every level of the social, from the familial to the regional to the national. The period was one of intensely rooted contradictions that conditioned not only what was debated in public but also what and how people thought of themselves in relation to others, whether kin or neighbor or stranger, whether fellow members of “the” one true faith (in all its fragmented multiplicity) or followers of another Christianity, another equally exclusive, absolute, and monotheistic rival. Each country, each town or city or local community, indeed, each family and individual experienced its own kind and range of changes, but it is safe to say that no one alive at the time in Europe was untouched by such transformations of religious beliefs and practices.

The fragmentation of religion contributed to a public political discourse that was messy, volatile, fractious, and contentious.¹² It was a great deal more heterogeneous and multivocal and included a far wider range of social classes than the Habermasian model. “It is important to acknowledge the existence of competing publics,” as Geoff Eley has suggested, “not just later in the nineteenth century, when Habermas sees a fragmentation of the classical liberal model of Öffentlichkeit, but at every stage in the history of the public sphere and, indeed, from the very beginning.”¹³ A public sphere is born from a productive disunity rather than a preexisting consensus; it emerges only when significant difference and disagreement exists among differing interests and groups, with diverse, partisan, and conflicting collective identities. “If people have the same views,” notes Craig Calhoun, “no public sphere is needed.”¹⁴ A public sphere is the product of competing publics and hence, implicitly, of counterpublics, too. For the early modern period, it is especially important to keep in mind the fact that each of these publics and counterpublics had histories of their own and independent existences, whether or not they ever achieved, in conflict and concert with one another, the kind of synaptic density that can be called, according to one definition or the other, “a” or even “the” public sphere.

It is not unusual, among English historians at any rate, to emphasize the emergence of Protestantism, with its dismantling of priestly power, vernacular translation of scripture, and other assertions of lay authority, as a key factor in the development o...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I People
• Part II Things
• Part III Forms of Knowledge
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index