The Expansion of Tolerance : Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624-1654)

Abstract

Tolerance in the early modern Dutch Republic is a topic that has fascinated generations of scholars, and continues to do so.After decades of merciless laws against religious dissidents under Emperor Charles V (1515-56) and his son King Philip II, and periods of strong persecution, the iconoclastic movement which swept the Low Countries in 1566, and the subsequent Revolt against Spain, altered the religious landscape of the Netherlands.The pluriformity of denominations was acknowledged as a permanent feature of society, while the Union of Utrecht in 1579 famously guaranteed that nobody was to be persecuted or investigated for religious reasons.Although the rebels and their leader -and champion of toleration -William of Orange had to concede the provinces of Flanders and Brabant to the Spanish armies, and hence to Catholicism, in the 1580s, freedom of conscience was eventually established in the seven northern provinces that were to form the Dutch Republic.The Reformed Church, as it became the dominant religious force in this new and unprecedented political entity, did not acquire the exclusive status previously enjoyed by the Catholic Church.Calvinists only comprised a small minority of the population of the Dutch Republic, and the church was never able to enforce a position analogous to Protestant churches in some territories of the Holy Roman Empire after the Peace of Augsburg.Despite being the official church of the United Provinces, it had to accept freedom of conscience, and to some extent freedom of private worship, for Lutherans, Anabaptists, and even Catholics.Strict Calvinists, while not advocating confessional diversity, were well aware of the limitations of their authority in religious affairs, with many people in the Dutch Republic rejecting their beliefs and their insistence on church discipline.Tolerance, in the long run, proved to be the best and most pragmatic solution to the problem of religious pluriformity, and, as the seventeenth Engraving in Reysboeck van het rijcke Brasilien (1624), showing how the Dutch lacked detailed cartographical and geographical knowledge of Brazil before their conquest of Pernambuco in 1630.It optimistically shows the rich rewards to be expected from the capitanía Pernambuco.In the middle of the composition Recife is depicted (E), to the extreme right is Olinda.The sugar plantation on the left is inspired by Theodore de Bry's engraving of sugar production in Brazil (see the illustration on page 48).Joan Blaeu, Map of Brazil in his Atlas Maior (Amsterdam 1662).Late nineteenth-century portrait of Padre António Vieira, based on seventeenth-century illustrations.

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