ABSTRACT
In the mid-sixteenth century, persecution and warfare drove tens of thousands of Dutch Protestant refugees to the Holy Roman Empire. Considerable scholarship focuses on how these migrants reinvigorated or disrupted local economies and the extent to which they challenged local religious norms or converted local populations. Often inadvertently, such categorisations carry assumptions of morphological integrity of confessional or ethnic groups that, when used incautiously, might anachronistically imply clear political and religious boundaries that mapped onto modern national or religious identities familiar to readers. By comparing 11 of these migrant communities, this chapter shows that dynamism at the constitutional and demographic levels allowed a wide variety of forms of religious coexistence between migrants and their hosts. This chapter suggests that by understanding ethnic, religious, and political boundaries as flexibly maintained and negotiated, we can better understand distinct local patterns of religious coexistence.
