ABSTRACT
By participating in the communal process of delimiting the public and manifesting their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters wielded a wider agency not only in their survival in the city and in Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic, but also in the making of a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands. Comparing the Utrecht case with others, the Conclusion seeks to identify the factors that determined the nature of the politico-religious majority’s governing strategies and the politico-religious minorities’ survival tactics. Delimitation of the public is proposed as a new analytic framework for the early modern history of religious coexistence, allowing us to shed brighter light on minorities and their agency.
