ABSTRACT
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.
