Kyle J. Dieleman sets out to study the establishment of a Reformed Protestant confessional identity as well as the ‘lived religious experience’ of members of Reformed congregations in the Dutch countryside. By doing so, Dieleman aims to add to the historiography on the Dutch Reformed Church which, as he rightly asserts, has focused mainly, albeit not exclusively, on urban churches and congregations. The six cases studies that are central in this book – Arnemuiden, Huissen, IJzendijke, Serooskerke, Sluis and Wemeldinge – include places that were formally cities (such as Arnemuiden) but which had a small population, thus markedly differing from more populous urban centres such as Amsterdam and Utrecht. The size of these places is of key importance: the book's central premise is that ‘lived religious experience as a whole was complicated by the small size and geographical isolation of rural communities in the early modern Low Countries’ (p. 41).
Divided into five chapters, the first one compares various national, provincial and local church orders. The church order drafted by Wemeldinge's consistory, which borrowed elements from other church orders, is, according to Dieleman, a clear indication of the agency of local churches and ‘underscores the emphatically local nature of religious formation and experience in Wemeldinge’ (p. 81). While local variation and agency are recurring themes in the book, the former in particular could have been brought to the fore by comparing the content of these different church orders instead of mainly having an eye for the structural differences between them.
The second chapter focuses on the election of deacons and elders. After an examination of the significance of these offices in the works of several Reformed Protestant theologians, the election process in the countryside is contrasted with its urban counterpart. One conclusion from Dieleman's analysis is that in rural congregations these offices were often held by a small number of people, simply reflecting the fact that the pool of suitable candidates tended to be limited due to the communities’ size. While its conclusion is not surprising, it emphasises the close ties between members of small communities in the countryside, thereby nicely setting up the third and fourth chapters that study the establishment of confessional identities and intra-confessional conflicts respectively. This is done by examining a number of case studies derived from the acta of consistories and classes, the main body of primary sources on which this book rests. Among other things, Dieleman shows the religious plurality of rural communities, the ways in which consistories tried to deal with full members (lidmaten) who wandered off the right path, the competing demands placed on people who simultaneously held public and ecclesiastical offices, and the rivalries within local Reformed congregations.
Arguably the fifth and last chapter, which focuses on Sabbath observance, does the best job in highlighting the particularities of rural Reformed churches. After studying the comments on Sabbath observance in two catechisms, again underscoring the variety within Dutch Reformed Protestantism, Dieleman shows how the practice of Sabbath observance differed in rural and urban communities. Based on the discrepancy between complaints about Sabbath desecration in the records of provincial synods and classes and the relative lack thereof in the consistorial acta of rural congregations, he concludes that ‘rural churches simply had more lax attitudes towards Sabbath observance’ (p. 219). Such diverging attitudes might well have been the result of the specific demands of living and working in the countryside. At any rate, the willingness of rural churches to tolerate a less scrupulous Sabbath observance shows, according to Dieleman, their ‘religious agency’ (p. 207). He rightfully concludes that ‘there was a complicated set of negotiations in which religious identity was not simply the adoption of theological principles, which themselves were diverse’ but rather the appropriation and adaptation of such principles so as to fit the ‘idiosyncratic lives of Dutch Reformed Christians’ (p. 222).
While Dieleman's focus on rural Reformed Protestant churches is commendable, unfortunately his book suffers from various shortcomings. First, his almost exclusive reliance on ecclesiastical archives, the acta of consistories and classes in particular, means that the institutional view of the Reformed Church is privileged. Dieleman's reflection in the introduction shows that he is aware of this issue, but one wonders why he did not opt to incorporate other archival sources to complement his analysis (even though, admittedly, these are likely to be scarcer in small rural communities than in populous cities). Second, it is regrettable that the consistorial records for each of the villages central to this study have not been mined more systematically so as to detect patterns that, possibly, could be compared and contrasted with the patterns discerned in urban congregations. Even if the study of the acta of urban consistories was simply not possible within the scope of this project, a more sustained interaction with the relevant secondary literature on urban congregations would have been helpful in highlighting the differences and similarities between urban and rural Reformed communities (although at times this has been done, for instance on pp. 118–19, 179–82, 190, 215). The analysis of the acta is also marred by the absence of a clear temporal scope – several remarks towards the end of the book (pp. 211, 220) suggest that the end of the Synod of Dordt (1618–19) functioned as some sort of cut-off point – as a result of which developments over time are not tracked, traced and examined.
A more thorough comparative approach in which the six cases studies were compared with each other as well as with urban congregations would have increased the book's analytic muscle and further increased its scholarly value by bringing out the specificities of rural congregations to a greater extent. As it stands, the many examples drawn from consistorial and classical acta are often presented in a contextual vacuum. For example, no information is given about the presence and (numerical) strength of other confessions in each of the case studies. To what extent was Wemeldinge's church order, with its emphasis on Sabbath observance and education, a direct response to the activities of rival confessions? Despite these imperfections, Dieleman's book does show the importance of focusing on religious developments in the countryside (which is lacking in the historiography on early modern Dutch Catholicism as well) and is likely to stimulate future research on this topic.
