ABSTRACT
Repression constituted an integral part of the governing strategies adopted by Utrecht’s Reformed magistrates. This chapter offers a qualitative and quantitative survey of the Reformed repression of Catholics by tracing how magistrates legislated anti-Catholicism on paper and prosecuted Catholics in practice. Between 1620 and 1672, Utrecht saw a certain tendency towards Reformed confessionalization of the public sphere. The Reformed Church persistently urged the political authorities to issue more anti-Catholic edicts and to submit more legal charges against Catholics, expelling them from urban public life. The magistrates, for their part, sometimes, but certainly not always, pursued this confessionalizing agenda by ‘legalizing’ Catholic discrimination and persecution. Politico-religious circumstances in and around Utrecht dictated the tides of stricter or laxer repression.
