Religious Policies in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

Abstract

There is a general and long-standing agreement among historians that the Dutch Republic was tolerant on the issue of religion. Still, it is not at all easy to determine how this celebrated toleration actually worked out in practice. It is evident that religious toleration was a hotly debated issue. Jonathan Israel has recently mapped out these discussions and the shifts in their focus. This makes religious toleration an obvious object of study in the history of ideas. The leap from these ideas and discussions to the practicalities that ruled interconfessional relations in the Dutch Republic is seldom attempted, partly because our knowledge of toleration in practice, and why it worked the way it did, is still highly impressionistic.