Religioensvrede and Mariage

Marriages are often regulated from both a civic and a religious perspective. In the Religioensvrede, the fourteenth article provided rules on marriage. It states that earlier Catholic rules should be maintained for the whole Low Countries. Protestants would have to abide to them as well. These rules mainly set the acceptable levels of affiliation between partners. But the rules in the Religioensvrede do not discuss marriages between Catholics and Protestants. In the Low Countries, especially in the North, marriages between people from different religions were not exceptional. Throughout the seventeenth century, no state regulations about marriage were imposed. When a Catholic and a Protestant wanted to get married, they had to develop an arrangement on their own. Priests, pastors or preachers and family members often influenced them. But laws did not provide ready-made rules to deal with such a situation. Several scenarios could take place. Wives or husbands could convert, or each hold to their original faith.
In marriages that remained mixed, the faith in which to raise children was an important subject. As a rule, Catholic priests would only consecrate a mixed marriage when the couple promised to raise their children as Catholics. However, in practice this was not always so. For example, some mixed couples in the region of Friesland educated their first child as a Catholic and their second as Reformed, and continued alternating with following children.

The Religioensvrede (1578) was an arrangement to allow the living together of Catholics and Protestants in the Low Countries. The Low Countries were a region that roughly covered current day Belgium and The Netherlands. In the years before 1578, the government of the Low Countries had only allowed Catholicism and had prosecuted Protestants. In regions taken over by Protestants, Catholics were treated badly and they encountered violence.
The army of Spain supported the Catholic government of the Low Countries. The army’s soldiers fought Protestants, but also harassed many Catholics. Moderate Catholics and Protestants from the Low Countries made peace with each other joined together in their opposition to the Spanish army. To sustain that peace, they developed a set of rules, obligations and prohibitions to facilitate that Catholics and Protestants could live together. These various measures were listed in the Religioensvrede.

16th century

Europe

Netherlands

Religioensvrede

Benjamin J.Kaplan, ‘Intimate Negotiations: Husbands and Wives of Opposing Faiths in Eighteenth-century Holland’. In Dixon, C.S., Freist, D. and Greengrass, M, (eds) Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe , Ashgate Publishing, 2009
Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, Harvard University Press, 2009

Christophe Schellekens