A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park. We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer.
That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us. Learn how at ontario.ca. Pay for by the Government of Ontario.
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works.
There's so many fantastic books, you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's S-P-R-I-N-G-50 at press.prinston.edu. This day I'll only last for a month.
So go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome to new books in Christian Studies, the podcast on the new books network. I'm your host Ryan Shelton and today it's my privilege to be joined by Silca Millert, post-doctoral scholar at the Frei University.amsterdam and author of Shaping the Stranger Churches, Migrants in England and the Troubles in the Netherlands, 1547 to 1585.
Published in October 2020 by Brill, Silca, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us. Hi Ryan, thanks for having me. Well congratulations on the wonderful book.
I'm really excited to talk with you about it, but to start off I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about yourself. And there's from your bio that you started off your academic career studying Goldsmiths and how did you end up writing a book on foreign churches in Elizabeth England? That sounds like an interesting journey. Yeah, that's right.
So I'm actually a Belgian and so I started studying the digital Goldsmiths in British. And I started noticing how many of these people migrated. There's a whole network between the Holy Roman Empire and the Flanders in England. And so many of them migrated in the 16th century to England.
Because there was a market there for Goldsmith whereers and they need to squeeze. And then I realized, well, this is actually quite interesting topic. Why don't I delve a little bit into migration from Flanders to England? But then I saw myself attracted to the sort of late 16th century migration part where I noticed that some of these migrants were actually fleeing.
And that there were actually churches that they could attend. And that's how I got into the Stranger Churches. Well, that's so interesting. Now let's get a little background into these Stranger Churches.
Who were the Stranger Churches? You know, what led Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformers to invite continental Protestants in to London? And how did they fit into the Church of England structure? Well, that takes us way back, of course, with the Reformation.
And the fact that so many people found themselves thinking very differently from the people they lived with. Some of them became Lutheran, Calvinist, other types of Protestantism. And in low countries too, a Catholic area. Some people started to have that Catholic Church.
Some adopted Reformed thoughts and about the thoughts and so on. But of course, because low countries were Catholic, things became difficult for them. The Spanish ruler of low countries took it upon them to make sure that the low countries stayed Catholic. So many of them became executed, were persecuted and had to flee.
When they went to England, they found a sort of free haven where they could be themselves, in part religiously. But at this point in England, Edward, the 65550, the 1, Edward, the 6 had taken over from his father, died in 1547, Henry VIII. And Henry VIII had of course started the Reformation in England. What direction that went in wasn't always very clear from the start.
But Edward's 6 and his father certainly took it in a Reformed direction. And to help them do that, they invited Protestants from all over Europe. And some of those Protestants realized that there was actually quite a big group of co-religionists from low countries in England. And they were allowed to form strange churches.
So they could practice a form of Reformed religion in their native language. One of the things that I thought was really interesting in this portion of your book, where you're talking about this origin story, is that there was a desire to have these Reformed foreign churches as a way to prevent maybe some more radical groups from taking root in the English Protestant Reformation. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so of course, by that point, we had many other Baptists also fleeing low countries.
Of course, London, where they went to, was so well, not relative to the hey, but by those standards would rather be large. So they could live there for sort of in the freedom that they wouldn't have in their smaller times that they came from. More anonymity. So that's why many of them actually went to London and London, they started seeing this problem because they sort of saw the Anabaptists as a sect.
And if they could bring more and more people into the Reformed Church, that would mean that fewer people might be seduced into what they would say, seduced into a sect like Anabaptism. So the straighter churches were also a useful tool for the government, the English government, to control the foreigners and to make sure that these foreigners did not have any, and the Baptist Church or any other tool they considered to be sect like. It's very interesting, so there's this interruption in the story of the stranger churches, isn't there? After the Protestant Edward dies in 1553, his Catholic sister Mary succeeds him.
What happens to these foreign Protestant churches that had been relatively autonomous for a period? How does their status change when they leave and then return with Elizabeth going into the 60s? I think the main difference is that, under Edward, they also had a say in some of the debates that were happening at that point about surpluses and so on, about kneeling at communion. Because one of them, their leader John Alasko, was quite a charismatic leader, he was a friend of Grandma and Hooper.
So he intervened from transiting debates. Of course, when Mary came to the throne, they had no other option of leaving, not immediately, but they did leave. And some of them actually stayed behind, some other groups they pretended very quiet about being there. But the others, they went on a long boat tour at the start and ended up all over Europe, eventually founding other stranger churches in the Holy Roman Empire.
When they came back, so when Elizabeth came to the throne, they saw an opportunity to reestablish those churches. However, it had to be on the terms that Elizabeth dictated. Elizabeth didn't allow too much space, not in the sense of Edward for those strangers, because she had not invited them for religious, archaeological help, supporting forming the churches. They just came back and they asked for the privileges back, but they didn't get everything they wanted.
This time it had to be supervised by the Uncle Bishop of the Bishop of London for the long stranger churches. And that I think is the main difference. So from that point onwards, they really had to do it fall in line and have to be careful, to be able to stay there and to be able to keep the government happy with them. Well, after this, they've now come back in this Elizabethan settlement, in chapter three, you start to compare and contrast a couple of scenes.
On the one hand, from kind of 1560 to 1565, there's this growing unrest from Protestants across the North Sea and the low countries. What was mobilizing this kind of religious and political unrest? And then how were the strangers, the strangers churches back in England, how were they responding to what was happening? It seems like this was creating tension between these refugee churches who were now in England.
So in the low countries, at that point, we had two things creating tensions. First of all, we had the reformers who were becoming bigger and bigger in group size, those were more vocal. Because they were more vocal, they were also being persecuted more intensely, so increasing executions and so on. And because of those increasing numbers of executions, more and more of the reformers also started fleeing.
We see this in the 1560s and it increases throughout those years. They fled to England or to the Little Moon Empire where other foreign churches. But of course, when they got to England, they still heard about executions, about fellow brethren bringing in prison. And within those communities, both in the country, but also in England, a growing anger started to develop.
And we see that, first of all, in the countries, the prisons where reforms were held well being broken open by the brethren. So they tried to help them escape and there was one faint escape, actually, that was like a couple of people from the Stranger Church in Sandwich in England, where they actually crossed the channel by boat, they broke open the prison, brought the prisoner back, and then came to Sanhooon to sandwich. So that kind of action took place by people in the foreign churches, but also by people that were in the blue countries. We see that this tension was getting problematic because at some point, those people in the foreign churches were also at home asked, well, can we actually do this?
Should we really be liberating and using violence and so on? Because that is basically sin if we use violence against secular authorities because God had ordained them. So this debate starts to transpire about what should be happening. And a lot of the strangers had different opinions about what should be done to ease the tension or to help people who were imprisoned.
Then people in blue countries are people from some of the sort of Stranger churches, sources of the sandwich. I think very important in those debates was a difference in how to handle that situation. And especially you see a difference between the Saint's churches in London who want to diplomatically help those prisoners. And they say, we will just ask our bishop to send letters to the Netherlands to see whether we can free them and so on.
So they try to get in between, they try to release them in a peaceful way using diplomatic skills, their diplomatic skills. Well, at the same time, other people from sandwich with also people in the country, so we're like, no, we shouldn't be dealing with them in this way. We should just liberate them. And we should just demand what we want, which is that these people are not being persecuted.
I think one of the things that's so interesting about this portion of the story is one of the things that you highlight is that there's always this tension within the Reform tradition over the role of the magistrates and religion. And some of this tension was actually maybe exacerbated by the fact that some of these original leaders of the strangers' churches were themselves. Both religious reformers and aristocracy. Could you talk a little bit about how that tension really foreshadows this growing rift between the response of religious reformation and political revolt and how that's starting to cause some of this tension?
That is a very good point actually. I haven't gone into detail about that too much. And I think lots of work remains to be done on that point, but I believe that what you see in many of the leaders of the stranger churches, or especially those in London, is that they indeed had a more aristocratic upbringing, or they were often also more intellectually stimulated to see that some of them had medication. What you don't see, what you see in those other, the more prevention stranger churches in England, because the stranger churches are on the old over South East-Says of England.
There are several of them there. I think about 151819, something like that, depending on the time we think of. What you see in the more provincial ones is that most of the ministers that were serving communities there came from a more, a poorer background, let's say, not a more working class background. So I think that maybe made it a different in the way they viewed the struggle between the struggle for authority and struggle with authorities.
So yes, that's a very good point. Some people like Jogbittu over Kultrithung Bingen, they had a very different connection to authority and secular authority in that than people who came from poorer backgrounds and became ministers. Well, there's a big turning point in your story, and that's the year 1566. So maybe could you talk a little bit about what happened, and then what was the role of some of the anti-Catholic writings that had come out of this earlier stage in the stranger churches in this outburst of iconoclasm?
And how does that start to change the story of the tension within these churches? The tension that we talked about concerning whether violence towards secular authority should be committed to really came to a boiling point in 56, when in the summer of the year, a group of reformers who had come over from the sandwich, and so in England from the foreign churches, had started preaching towards a crowd in Henschbreechings in West, the Westward, the West of Londers. And at this point, the people who were listening had become so agitated that they had started destroying the churches in surrounding areas. So they were cleansing the churches of everything that was visibly Catholic.
They were cleansing of images of saints, which they would call idols. They were destroying also some relics of secular authority and so on. So we have cleansing churches, and this happened in several churches, and it spread. So Reformed groups started, throughout the low countries started desecrating these churches.
They started destroying these idols within it. Some of those desecrations were very well organized. Others were conspicuous in their lack of organization. Now, this has always been seen as something that was organized from England, which has also made many historians say, well, actually what happened in England was these people radicalized.
They radicalized, and they wanted to make sure that the churches were prepared for Reformed services in the low countries. Now, this is a big turning point for everyone. I think the people in England and the low countries were shocked about what happened there. In London, we see that, well, very soon after this, or within a year after this, iconoclastic period, as I call it, it's like conicalism.
People started flocking into England because they were being persecuted for their participation in the iconoclasm. So we see a wave of migrants going to England, but in England, at that point, you see a clash. You see that that problem with violence became to the surface once more. You see a clash between the people who were serving the church of the church in London, that were saying, well, actually, what you committed there is a sin.
And even in 1570, they were still preaching against what happened against the iconoclasm. Of course, among the people listening to these sermons, they were preaching. One of the people who had participated in it, and they felt very insecure and sometimes angry about that as well, because they believed in many ways that they were only practicing what was preached. Of course, the reformers had been preaching against the images.
They had been preaching against the saints. So why would they not be allowed to now go and class the churches? And yet that again made those, some of the ministers especially in London, especially called Sri Kambhina of the London Dutch church, feel like, well, no, that was not the message. You should go into the church, but you should do it in an orderly manner.
So you see, you have those deferring views and clashing views, and these clashing views were eating the church from inside out in a way. They were really making life hearts in the Dutch church in London between 1567 and 1570. But also the relationships between the church of London and that of sandwich where part of the relation of part of the ministers had actually allowed this to happen and even initiated it. So it was very hard for a little bit to be on the same line about what happened there.
And this story that you're telling of great tension in the strangers' churches between how they want to respond to what's going on in these revolts only gets more pronounced with around the person of William of Orange. So what did the stranger churches, especially those in London, think of his revolt and how did the London churches and the other refugee churches differ on their attitudes about this political revolt that he's leading? Reformers in general felt quite uneasy for many years about William of Orange because the William of Orange had during the 1560s had not always been on their side. In fact, he wanted to make sure that religious landscape looked a little different.
He wasn't a reformer, and he only became one really in the 5070s. So they were very much feeling ambiguous about his goals for this revolt, his political ambitions, but also the religious ambitions that were potentially intertwined with that. Next to that, you also have the problem that William of Orange needed money. So he was constantly asking money to these stranger churches and stranger churches as church institutions went, did not necessarily have that kind of money, while some of the members of stranger churches probably did.
So you get a question about whether it was actually lawful for Orange to be rattling against Philip of Spain and so on. Even in 1570, 1572, some of the foreign churches thought it was unlawful what he was doing. And some of them would have rather actually stayed loyal to the Spanish king to Philip II, if only they would receive freedom of religion. So at the same time that there's a lot of conflict over how to relate with William of Orange, there's a little more agreement in your final chapter in chapter 6 that's happening during the same period over how they want to respond, if not to the revolt, just to the church reformation.
So how did the strangers' churches respond to the institutional changes that were also happening in the Dutch church, especially during this period? The scholars have actually gotten assertive that the building of the reform churches in the low countries was initiated or very much influenced by the exiled churches. Instead we see that very often religious changes came from the growing churches in the low countries in the 5070s and were implemented in England rather than the other way round. And what we see is that the English church churches, they started to struggle very economically, they had many poor people to look after at the same time they had to contribute to their fold, but they also had to remain faithful to their English government.
So they needed to be careful in supporting Orange at times and not supporting Orange at different times. But what they could do and what they felt more happy about was supporting three former churches that were growing in low countries by sometimes sending them money, but also sometimes sending ministers their way. They did get proportionally many questions from those churches for money and for ministers, those other types of supports. So they just couldn't handle all of those requests to be there, and that is but also made their efforts towards the information they were about, which is just very difficult.
They couldn't do both, and at the same time keep their own churches alive, because some of those churches were really struggling with a lack of money. So instead they focused on helping their full church, so if you're usually big rationally, you kind of feel, you know, it's a kind of feeling, like, oh, they ask me for money again, are you asking to spend some money again? We can't do this for the hundreds of five, we don't have, we don't have that money. Well, by way of kind of wrapping things up, this is a period that's been well studied by a whole array of scholars.
It's a very interesting story, but I'm curious, how have you tried to shape the story that's being told about the relationship between the stranger churches and the events in the low countries? What has been the prevailing narrative, and how have you tried to correct it? Well, I feel like I have shown a bigger range of responses from the foreign churches. Usually historians have tried to show how the stranger churches shaped the revolt and the formation of the other countries, but I have shown that quite as often what happened in the low countries actually shaped the stranger churches.
It impacted them quite a lot, and they weren't always quite sure what to do with that. If I divided them internally, it made things, it made us our hearth of them to support the reformation and revolt in the countries. What that does is also showing that with the industry and the churches, you see that people did not necessarily radicalize. The examples that have been used to show, hey look, for instance, the one in 56 to 6, where people came over from England to in the state of the iconoclasm, but that was only a small part of the larger movement.
I've done everyone for that way. Those examples are usually used to show these people have just radicalized in exile. This is what I say a bit to them. When there's actually a much larger picture to consider, and that's what I feel I have contributed to in this book.
Well, it's a very great book and I really enjoyed reading it. I hope our readers go and get their copy of Shaping the Stranger Churches, but now that it's written and it's published, what have you turned your attention to? What are you working on now? Well, that's an interesting question.
Thank you. I feel that in many ways the projects I am working on right now is a result of the book I have grown here. I was interested in what happens to these migrants because we do know that a part of them moved to the low countries, moved back to the low countries, usually not to flounders or barbeques or place they came from, but often to Holland. The next part of the general thesis about what happens to these people is that they have a huge impact on the church and the Dutch Republic.
However, we see that that huge impact, well, that study has sometimes been described as a little, and we thought it was time to actually look at the impact of those migrants. Was it radicalization? Did they actually bring over extreme ideas and middle of the sea? Did they bring over a broader view on the religious landscape and what it should look like?
So we're looking at, because I'm doing this as a team effort, we're looking at what types of migrants come back, can we call them exanerophages, whatever, how many do actually return and what do they bring to the landscape of the Dutch Republic or do not bring? Well, that sounds like a great project. I'm looking forward to watching how that new book develops and maybe we can have you and the team on the new book network to talk all about it once it's ready. Thank you very much, Ryan.
That would be exciting. Well, this has been a conversation with Silka Millart, author of Shaping the Stranger Churches. You can get your copy from Brill. Thanks so much, Silka.
And thanks to our listeners for tuning in to this episode of New Books and Christian Studies. Visit newbooksnetwork.com to browse our catalog of over 10,000 interviews and of course, share this episode with a friend. That's it for now. I hope you have a great day.