Papers by Genji Yasuhira
史学雑誌 (Shigaku-Zasshi), 2022
This article examines confessional coexistence in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, focusin... more This article examines confessional coexistence in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, focusing on Catholics and citizenship in Utrecht. While suffering chronic fiscal problems throughout the early modern period, the city of Utrecht outlawed the practice of Catholicism in 1580 and had evolved into a bastion of confessionalism for the Reformed and Catholics by the mid-1630s. During the mid-seventeenth century, anti-Catholic discrimination was incorporated into the city’s requirements for citizenship; and from then on, Catholics were in principle excluded from acquiring citizenship.
This anti-Catholic policy stemmed not only from confessionalising demands on citizenship from the side of the Reformed consistory, but also from the city’s chronic fiscal problems. The confessional purification of the civic community, which the Reformed Church demanded, was strategically promoted by the city council as an economic policy for the rehabilitation of public finance. Since Utrecht’s magistrates understood citizenship primarily in the context of the urban economy, they also created loopholes for economically wealthy Catholics to obtain citizenship. Accordingly, from 1655 to 1679 a total of 131 Catholics applied for Utrecht citizenship and 110 were eventually registered as new citizens.
Relationships between these Catholics and the civic community of Utrecht enabled them to acquire citizenship, in spite of the anti-Catholic legislation. It was the Catholic members of the socioeconomic elite who had persuaded the Reformed magistrates to bestow citizenship on Catholic applicants. In their petitions, Utrecht’s Catholic citizens discursively appropriated the rights and freedom of conscience they had been granted as citizens, denouncing the “injustice” of the judiciary and reminding the political authorities of their duty to protect the citizenry, regardless of confessional affiliation.
As the Reformed Church decried Catholics as “enemies” threatening to harm the Reformed public order in the city, some Catholics responded by representing themselves as “good patriots” and “good citizens” who had made sacrifices for Utrecht, in particular, and the wars on Catholic monarchs in service to the Prince of Orange, in general. Some other Catholics found their devotion to Catholicism to be compatible with their loyalty to Utrecht.
The Reformed Church, the magistracy and Catholic citizens participated in the making of the early modern multi-confessional city of Utrecht, while possessing diverse ideas concerning civic community. In contrast to the previous research, which narrates the history of confessional coexistence only from the perspective of the persecuting and tolerating party, this article argues that we should recover the perspective of the persecuted and tolerated party for a better understanding of the history of religious coexistence in the Dutch Republic and beyond.
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Past & Present, May 1, 2022
This article argues that historians have underestimated the agency which Catholics, a politico-re... more This article argues that historians have underestimated the agency which Catholics, a politico-religious minority within the Dutch Republic, wielded in surviving the Reformed regime in seventeenth-century Utrecht, the main theatre of the confessional struggle between Calvinists and Catholics on Dutch soil. The Reformed public authorities strategically attempted to deprive Catholics of their spaces where they could live as Catholics, claiming that they were being Catholic too publicly even inside their private homes. Catholics, for their part, persisted in practising their faith not only in their houses, but also in public facilities, tactically deploying diverse spatial practices; they continued to use the urban space as they had in medieval times, and newly appropriated that space as they sought to adjust to the early modern environment of confessional coexistence. Through their spatial practices, Catholics not only actively facilitated their Catholic way of life, but also played an indispensable role in transforming Utrecht from a mono-religious medieval city to a multi-confessional early modern city. The Utrecht case thus bears witness to a hitherto neglected, yet surprisingly dynamic agency exercised by politico-religious minorities in shaping an urban landscape of coexistence.
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The East Asian Journal of British History, 2021
This essay seeks to offer some Dutch perspectives on the Glorious Revolution. To achieve this lim... more This essay seeks to offer some Dutch perspectives on the Glorious Revolution. To achieve this limited aim, it will first trace Dutch historiography on the revolution, explaining why this extraordinary event has attracted limited attention from specialists on Dutch history. Secondly, it will introduce and review recent work by David Onnekink on Dutch foreign-policy discourses in 1688 and 1689, and by Coen Wilders on the local patronage network in the Dutch Republic after 1688. The former sheds light on political and ideological discourses of Dutch foreign policy relating to the revolution, positioning them in the context of the Dutch Forty Years' War from 1672 to 1713. The latter focuses on the revolution's aftermath on local politics in the province of Utrecht. Thirdly, this essay will present new prospects for the future study of the Dutch Catholic perspective on the revolution. In this final section, I will offer some insight into my current research project, in which I attempt to examine Dutch Catholic survival tactics after 1685 vis-à-vis various types of immigrants and refugees pouring into the Protestant Republic.
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Church History and Religious Culture, 2019
In the Protestant Dutch Republic, Catholic priests were represented as one of the deadliest "enem... more In the Protestant Dutch Republic, Catholic priests were represented as one of the deadliest "enemies" in view of both their confessional doctrines and political inclination. Under pressure from the Reformed Church, numerous anti-Catholic edicts were issued for the prosecution of priests streaming like a swarm of "locusts" to the Utrecht city, the stronghold for Reformed and Catholic Churches alike in the Northern Netherlands. In theory, the policy of the political authorities barred priests from their pastoral duties to Catholics living in the city. In practice, however, the Utrecht magistracy publicly recognised, and non-publicly connived at, the presence of priests. Political practices of pro/persecution and toleration served to manage and regulate the precarious environment of confessional coexistence. In defying persecution and seeking toleration, Catholic priests tactically and discursively mobilised their civic status based on their and/or their families' close relationship with, and contribution to, the civic community of Utrecht.
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Early Modern Low Countries, 2019
This article aims to clarify Catholics’ survival tactics in discourses by analysing legal proceed... more This article aims to clarify Catholics’ survival tactics in discourses by analysing legal proceedings against them in the city of Utrecht from 1630 until 1659. This period saw a tendency towards Reformed confessionalisation, as is apparent from the rise in the number of such trials. However, despite the advent of anti-Catholic legislation under increasing pressure from the Reformed Church, Reformed confessionalisation was not completed, as the Catholic presence in the public sphere of Utrecht was never extinguished. Backed by their civic status, and with the aid of defenders in (supra-confessional) socio-judicial networks, accused Catholics developed a variety of discourses during legal proceedings. Obedient conformity to the existing norm of the public/private distinction was just one of the various discursive tactics for survival employed by Catholics in Utrecht. Despite the crucial discontinuity caused by the Protestant Reformation and the Dutch Revolt, Catholics continued to be actors in the constant and communal process of delimitation of the ‘public’. Members of the Catholic social elite in particular could actively create space for survival by discursively mobilising alternative interpretations of the ‘public’ and ‘conscience’ that retained medieval legacies, without conceptualising ‘privacy’ in the modern sense.
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EMLC 3.1, 2019
The latest issue of the multidisciplinary Open Access journal Early Modern Low Countries (EMLC) i... more The latest issue of the multidisciplinary Open Access journal Early Modern Low Countries (EMLC) is now available online! EMLC is dedicated to the study of the history and culture of the Low Countries between 1500 and 1830. It is published by Uopen Journals and appears twice a year. We will consider new contributions in the fields of history, literary studies, art history, and related areas of study.
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BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, Dec 21, 2017
The reorganization of the poor relief system in Dutch cities in the second half of the 17th centu... more The reorganization of the poor relief system in Dutch cities in the second half of the 17th century marked a new manner of confessional coexistence in which dissenting communities were entrusted to care for their own poor co-religionists. In the negotiations to solve the financial problems of Utrecht from the 1620s to the 1670s, which led to the separation of charity along confessional lines in 1674, Catholics did not remain passive. They were one of the actors, along with the Dutch Reformed Church and the political authorities. All the actors attempted to defend their own interests by referring to the term ‘public’ based on their own definition. Catholics actively created room for survival by participating in the delimitation of the ‘public’. The public sphere was a much more dynamic space and Catholics had much more active agency in the delimitation of the ‘public’ than previous studies have assumed.
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史林 (The Shirin or the Journal of History), Mar 1, 2015
Toleration is a topic that has attracted significant attention in the humanities. Previous histor... more Toleration is a topic that has attracted significant attention in the humanities. Previous historical studies concerning toleration have justified the modern West and the nation state while overusing the term ‘toleration’ without clarifying its actual meaning in describing the teleology of modernization and the essentialism of nationality based on an analysis of the ‘degree’ of toleration (how tolerant or intolerant). As a response to this state of the scholarship, this paper attempts to reform the existing understanding by strictly defining the term ‘toleration’ and by focusing not on the ‘degree’ but instead on the the ‘function’ of toleration (the influences of toleration on the relationships of those who tolerated and those who were tolerated).
As a case study, this paper deals with the Dutch Republic, which has been referred to as a ‘paradise of toleration’ since the early modern era, more specifically focusing on the interconfessional relationship between the Reformed and the Catholic congregations in Utrecht during the 1670s. In recent studies concerning toleration in the Dutch Republic, the division of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ has attracted considerable attention. This paper also tentatively hypothesizes that the borderline between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ was drawn between the inside and outside of houses. However, a recent study regarding the French occupation in Utrecht (1672-73), provided only limited information concerning the function of toleration, the behavior of the Catholics, and the process of the reorganization of the public sphere. In order to solve these problems, this paper focuses on the behavior of the Catholics in the public sphere and examines the function of toleration in practice in the political dimension. Through these analyses, this paper attempts to investigate the cause of struggle for the practice of faith, and to clarify the interconfessional relationship of both congregations and the transition of the public sphere.
Under the Dutch Republic, the Reformed congregation had the freedom of public practice of faith and the Catholics had the freedom of conscience as their vested right. Catholics, being deprived of the right to practice their faith in public, were relegated to keeping their faith in the schuilkerk (clandestine church), which referred to chapels within houses. In addition, both congregations wished to construct a homogeneous confessional community as a confessionalistic utopia. In other words, in the Dutch Republic, ‘toleration as connivance’ divided the ‘private’ from the ‘public’, constructed a fictional confessionalsitic utopia of the Reformed church in the public sphere, and concealed the hostility of the interconfessional relationship from the public sphere.
During the French occupation, Catholics demanded the implementation of their confessionalistic utopia. However, the French army, which was vital for realization of this utopia, transformed the actual situation into one that differed from the utopia sought by the Catholics. Contrary to the Catholics’ demand for the exclusive right of the public practice of their faith, the French army granted a ‘toleration as limited recognition (type α)’ to both congregations. This toleration revealed the hostility of the interconfessional relationship in the public sphere by breaking the single congregation’s monopoly on the public practice of faith, so the fiction collapsed. Although the secular authorities of Utrecht requested that both congregations accept ‘toleration as civic concord’ in order to control the hosility of the interconfessional relationship, their effort had limited effect.
After the French evacuation, Utrecht was restored to the Dutch Republic. ‘Toleration as limited recognition (type α)’ was abandoned and ‘toleration as connivance’ seemed to reconstruct the fiction of a homogeneous Reformed community in the public sphere as before. However, an influential Catholic priest J. van Neercassel perservered throughout the negotiations and acquired safe conduct, which is referred to as ‘toleration as limited recognition (type β)’ in this paper. Neercassel, who could serve more freely because of this type of toleration, attempted to revive the practice of the Catholic faith on the basis of his amical relationships with the secular authorities. In addition, lay Catholics protested the injustice of the oppression of the secular authorities who raided the schuilkerk by speaking up for the public practice of faith in order to defend their vested right. After the French evacuation, Catholics defined the ‘public’ for themselves and created opportunities to practice their faith actively. Although ‘toleration as connivance’ and ‘toleration as limited recognition (type β)’ reconfirmed the advantageous position of the Reformed congregation and once again concealed the the hostility of the interconfessional relationship from the public sphere, they constructed a fiction of a homogeneous Reformed community that differed from that before the French occupation.
Based on the aforementioned analyses, the following can be concluded. In Utrecht during the 1670s, the fiction of a homogeneous confessional community collapsed during the French occupation and was reorganized after the French evacuation. Under these conditions, the interconfessional relationship between the Reformed and the Catholic congregation was regulated by toleration in practice in the political dimension in forms that were either connivance, limited recognition (type α and β), or civic concord. In Utrecht during the 1670s, a religious and pluralistic society existed in which the Reformed and the Catholic congregations refused to abandon the desire for their own confessionalistic utopia, maintained a hostility that was based on their antonomic wishes, and originally defined the ‘public’ but managed to coexist in struggling and negotiating for the practice of faith.
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Conference Presentations by Genji Yasuhira
The Protestant Reformation and the Counter-/Catholic Reformation began in early modern Europe, an... more The Protestant Reformation and the Counter-/Catholic Reformation began in early modern Europe, and then reached Asia and the Americas. The “Reformations” of Christianity not only spread globally in the early modern era, but also affected and even shaped modern historiography as an academic discipline in the West as well as Japan. This roundtable will discuss and historicise historiographies on religions, especially Christianity and Buddhism, in early modern and modern Europe, Japan, and North America. By so doing, it attempts to go beyond the barriers between sub-disciplines of Western history, Japanese history, history of Christianity, and history of Buddhism and to seek the current frontier of the history of early modern and modern religions.
・Free / Registration Required
・Time: 10:00-13:00 JST, 10th December 2020 / 19:00-22:00 CST, 9th December 2020
・Venue: Zoom (registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYpcuGorDMrHdCTt3GAIT6msyfUpNxVLE_5)
・Language: English
Speakers:
・Peter Lake (Vanderbilt Univ.; History of Post-Reformation England)
・Tomoe Moriya (Hannan Univ.; History of Buddhism in Modern Japan and the United States)
・Seiji Hoshino (Kokugakuin Univ.; History of Religions in Modern Japan)
・Chair: Hiroki Kikuchi (Univ. of Tokyo; History of Buddhism in Medieval Japan)
・Organiser: Genji Yasuhira (JSPS / Musashi Univ. / Utrecht Univ.; History of Christianity in the Early Modern Netherlands)
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The interdisciplinary joint seminar, which took place at the University of Kyoto on 1st and 2nd J... more The interdisciplinary joint seminar, which took place at the University of Kyoto on 1st and 2nd June 2019, compared perceptions of Japan and the Ottoman Empire in the Holy Roman Empire during the Early Modern Period. By doing so, the seminar responded to a researched desideratum: While perceptions of the Ottoman Empire have been the focus of research for decades, interest in the perception of Japan is recent and research has focused mostly on Jesuit missions and the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Comparisons of Japan and the Ottoman Empire, however, are lacking. Organised by Haruka Oba (Kurume University, Japan), Arno Strohmeyer (ÖAW, INZ, Vienna and University of Salzburg), Marion Romberg and Doris Gruber (both ÖAW, INZ, Vienna), the seminar brought together specialists from Europe and Japan as well as their broad material base, ranging from diplomatic correspondence to travelogues, plays, and sculptural and pictorial sources.
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The interdisciplinary joint seminar will compare the perceptions of Japan and the Ottoman Empire ... more The interdisciplinary joint seminar will compare the perceptions of Japan and the Ottoman Empire in the Holy Roman Empire in a workshop taking place at the University of Kyoto from May 31st to June 3rd, 2019. The research situation is as diverse as the focused regions: In the German-speaking lands research on the perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the Holy Roman Empire has long been established and is increasingly being promoted. More systematic investigations as well as new methods are being undertaken, which in particular use the new possibilities of digitization and digital humanities: FWF projects “The Mediality of Diplomatic Communication: “Habsburg Envoys in Constantinople in the middle of the 17th Century“, (2017–2021); “Perceptions of the Other in Travelogues 1500–1875 – A Computerized Analysis”, (2018–2021); “Continent Allegories in the Baroque Era”, (2012–2016).
While perceptions of the Ottoman Empire are increasingly being investigated, those of Japan have so far hardly been analyzed. The research interest is recent and first results are published in highly selective studies. The few studies that deal with relations between early modern Japan and Europe focus on the missionary work of the Jesuit order in the 16th and 17th centuries and the work of the Europeans in the wake of the Dutch East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries in Japan. The Joint Project "Japan on the Jesuit Stage: German-speaking Areas and Beyond" (2017–2019) shows the added value of such international projects as well as their necessity.
Within the framework of the joint seminar, the varied material basis of these projects, ranging from diplomatic correspondence to travelogue to sculptural and visual sources, will now be presented comparatively in view of the articulated perceptions of the Ottoman Empire and Japan. Through their systematic and comparative study, the mechanisms of perceptions of otherness and its representations in the Holy Roman Empire can be analyzed much more clearly than before.
Ultimately, the joint seminar will enable a deepening of scientific cooperation between Japan and Austria as well as further development of methods and results of each participants. The importance of the seminar also lies in the challenges of today. Each of us is constantly confronted with diversity due to global phenomena such as globalization and international migration. The analysis of the treatment of otherness in the past offers historical orientation for today and tomorrow.
The Joint Seminar is financed cooperatively by the Austrian Science Funds FWF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
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Books by Genji Yasuhira
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Full PDF here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/90589
Even in adversity, Catholi... more Full PDF here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/90589
Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. This book explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the medieval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.
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Leo Lucassen, Lex Heerma van Voss, Marjolein ’t Hart, Manon van der Heijden & Nadia Bouras (eds.), Nog meer wereldgeschiedenis van Nederland (Amsterdam: Ambo Anthos 2022, ISBN: 9789026354489), Oct 2022
In de zestiende eeuw begon de Rooms-Katholieke Kerk een wereldwijde campagne tegen 'ketters' en '... more In de zestiende eeuw begon de Rooms-Katholieke Kerk een wereldwijde campagne tegen 'ketters' en 'heidenen'. Een onderdeel daarvan was de Hollandse Zending van 1592, die de Nederlandse Republiek opnieuw rooms-katholiek poogde te maken. Dankzij internationale katholieke netwerken en samenwerking tussen geestelijken en vooraanstaande leken, kon de Nederlandse katholieke gemeenschap voortbestaan.
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Papers by Genji Yasuhira
This anti-Catholic policy stemmed not only from confessionalising demands on citizenship from the side of the Reformed consistory, but also from the city’s chronic fiscal problems. The confessional purification of the civic community, which the Reformed Church demanded, was strategically promoted by the city council as an economic policy for the rehabilitation of public finance. Since Utrecht’s magistrates understood citizenship primarily in the context of the urban economy, they also created loopholes for economically wealthy Catholics to obtain citizenship. Accordingly, from 1655 to 1679 a total of 131 Catholics applied for Utrecht citizenship and 110 were eventually registered as new citizens.
Relationships between these Catholics and the civic community of Utrecht enabled them to acquire citizenship, in spite of the anti-Catholic legislation. It was the Catholic members of the socioeconomic elite who had persuaded the Reformed magistrates to bestow citizenship on Catholic applicants. In their petitions, Utrecht’s Catholic citizens discursively appropriated the rights and freedom of conscience they had been granted as citizens, denouncing the “injustice” of the judiciary and reminding the political authorities of their duty to protect the citizenry, regardless of confessional affiliation.
As the Reformed Church decried Catholics as “enemies” threatening to harm the Reformed public order in the city, some Catholics responded by representing themselves as “good patriots” and “good citizens” who had made sacrifices for Utrecht, in particular, and the wars on Catholic monarchs in service to the Prince of Orange, in general. Some other Catholics found their devotion to Catholicism to be compatible with their loyalty to Utrecht.
The Reformed Church, the magistracy and Catholic citizens participated in the making of the early modern multi-confessional city of Utrecht, while possessing diverse ideas concerning civic community. In contrast to the previous research, which narrates the history of confessional coexistence only from the perspective of the persecuting and tolerating party, this article argues that we should recover the perspective of the persecuted and tolerated party for a better understanding of the history of religious coexistence in the Dutch Republic and beyond.
As a case study, this paper deals with the Dutch Republic, which has been referred to as a ‘paradise of toleration’ since the early modern era, more specifically focusing on the interconfessional relationship between the Reformed and the Catholic congregations in Utrecht during the 1670s. In recent studies concerning toleration in the Dutch Republic, the division of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ has attracted considerable attention. This paper also tentatively hypothesizes that the borderline between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ was drawn between the inside and outside of houses. However, a recent study regarding the French occupation in Utrecht (1672-73), provided only limited information concerning the function of toleration, the behavior of the Catholics, and the process of the reorganization of the public sphere. In order to solve these problems, this paper focuses on the behavior of the Catholics in the public sphere and examines the function of toleration in practice in the political dimension. Through these analyses, this paper attempts to investigate the cause of struggle for the practice of faith, and to clarify the interconfessional relationship of both congregations and the transition of the public sphere.
Under the Dutch Republic, the Reformed congregation had the freedom of public practice of faith and the Catholics had the freedom of conscience as their vested right. Catholics, being deprived of the right to practice their faith in public, were relegated to keeping their faith in the schuilkerk (clandestine church), which referred to chapels within houses. In addition, both congregations wished to construct a homogeneous confessional community as a confessionalistic utopia. In other words, in the Dutch Republic, ‘toleration as connivance’ divided the ‘private’ from the ‘public’, constructed a fictional confessionalsitic utopia of the Reformed church in the public sphere, and concealed the hostility of the interconfessional relationship from the public sphere.
During the French occupation, Catholics demanded the implementation of their confessionalistic utopia. However, the French army, which was vital for realization of this utopia, transformed the actual situation into one that differed from the utopia sought by the Catholics. Contrary to the Catholics’ demand for the exclusive right of the public practice of their faith, the French army granted a ‘toleration as limited recognition (type α)’ to both congregations. This toleration revealed the hostility of the interconfessional relationship in the public sphere by breaking the single congregation’s monopoly on the public practice of faith, so the fiction collapsed. Although the secular authorities of Utrecht requested that both congregations accept ‘toleration as civic concord’ in order to control the hosility of the interconfessional relationship, their effort had limited effect.
After the French evacuation, Utrecht was restored to the Dutch Republic. ‘Toleration as limited recognition (type α)’ was abandoned and ‘toleration as connivance’ seemed to reconstruct the fiction of a homogeneous Reformed community in the public sphere as before. However, an influential Catholic priest J. van Neercassel perservered throughout the negotiations and acquired safe conduct, which is referred to as ‘toleration as limited recognition (type β)’ in this paper. Neercassel, who could serve more freely because of this type of toleration, attempted to revive the practice of the Catholic faith on the basis of his amical relationships with the secular authorities. In addition, lay Catholics protested the injustice of the oppression of the secular authorities who raided the schuilkerk by speaking up for the public practice of faith in order to defend their vested right. After the French evacuation, Catholics defined the ‘public’ for themselves and created opportunities to practice their faith actively. Although ‘toleration as connivance’ and ‘toleration as limited recognition (type β)’ reconfirmed the advantageous position of the Reformed congregation and once again concealed the the hostility of the interconfessional relationship from the public sphere, they constructed a fiction of a homogeneous Reformed community that differed from that before the French occupation.
Based on the aforementioned analyses, the following can be concluded. In Utrecht during the 1670s, the fiction of a homogeneous confessional community collapsed during the French occupation and was reorganized after the French evacuation. Under these conditions, the interconfessional relationship between the Reformed and the Catholic congregation was regulated by toleration in practice in the political dimension in forms that were either connivance, limited recognition (type α and β), or civic concord. In Utrecht during the 1670s, a religious and pluralistic society existed in which the Reformed and the Catholic congregations refused to abandon the desire for their own confessionalistic utopia, maintained a hostility that was based on their antonomic wishes, and originally defined the ‘public’ but managed to coexist in struggling and negotiating for the practice of faith.
Conference Presentations by Genji Yasuhira
・Free / Registration Required
・Time: 10:00-13:00 JST, 10th December 2020 / 19:00-22:00 CST, 9th December 2020
・Venue: Zoom (registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYpcuGorDMrHdCTt3GAIT6msyfUpNxVLE_5)
・Language: English
Speakers:
・Peter Lake (Vanderbilt Univ.; History of Post-Reformation England)
・Tomoe Moriya (Hannan Univ.; History of Buddhism in Modern Japan and the United States)
・Seiji Hoshino (Kokugakuin Univ.; History of Religions in Modern Japan)
・Chair: Hiroki Kikuchi (Univ. of Tokyo; History of Buddhism in Medieval Japan)
・Organiser: Genji Yasuhira (JSPS / Musashi Univ. / Utrecht Univ.; History of Christianity in the Early Modern Netherlands)
While perceptions of the Ottoman Empire are increasingly being investigated, those of Japan have so far hardly been analyzed. The research interest is recent and first results are published in highly selective studies. The few studies that deal with relations between early modern Japan and Europe focus on the missionary work of the Jesuit order in the 16th and 17th centuries and the work of the Europeans in the wake of the Dutch East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries in Japan. The Joint Project "Japan on the Jesuit Stage: German-speaking Areas and Beyond" (2017–2019) shows the added value of such international projects as well as their necessity.
Within the framework of the joint seminar, the varied material basis of these projects, ranging from diplomatic correspondence to travelogue to sculptural and visual sources, will now be presented comparatively in view of the articulated perceptions of the Ottoman Empire and Japan. Through their systematic and comparative study, the mechanisms of perceptions of otherness and its representations in the Holy Roman Empire can be analyzed much more clearly than before.
Ultimately, the joint seminar will enable a deepening of scientific cooperation between Japan and Austria as well as further development of methods and results of each participants. The importance of the seminar also lies in the challenges of today. Each of us is constantly confronted with diversity due to global phenomena such as globalization and international migration. The analysis of the treatment of otherness in the past offers historical orientation for today and tomorrow.
The Joint Seminar is financed cooperatively by the Austrian Science Funds FWF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Books by Genji Yasuhira
Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. This book explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the medieval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.
This anti-Catholic policy stemmed not only from confessionalising demands on citizenship from the side of the Reformed consistory, but also from the city’s chronic fiscal problems. The confessional purification of the civic community, which the Reformed Church demanded, was strategically promoted by the city council as an economic policy for the rehabilitation of public finance. Since Utrecht’s magistrates understood citizenship primarily in the context of the urban economy, they also created loopholes for economically wealthy Catholics to obtain citizenship. Accordingly, from 1655 to 1679 a total of 131 Catholics applied for Utrecht citizenship and 110 were eventually registered as new citizens.
Relationships between these Catholics and the civic community of Utrecht enabled them to acquire citizenship, in spite of the anti-Catholic legislation. It was the Catholic members of the socioeconomic elite who had persuaded the Reformed magistrates to bestow citizenship on Catholic applicants. In their petitions, Utrecht’s Catholic citizens discursively appropriated the rights and freedom of conscience they had been granted as citizens, denouncing the “injustice” of the judiciary and reminding the political authorities of their duty to protect the citizenry, regardless of confessional affiliation.
As the Reformed Church decried Catholics as “enemies” threatening to harm the Reformed public order in the city, some Catholics responded by representing themselves as “good patriots” and “good citizens” who had made sacrifices for Utrecht, in particular, and the wars on Catholic monarchs in service to the Prince of Orange, in general. Some other Catholics found their devotion to Catholicism to be compatible with their loyalty to Utrecht.
The Reformed Church, the magistracy and Catholic citizens participated in the making of the early modern multi-confessional city of Utrecht, while possessing diverse ideas concerning civic community. In contrast to the previous research, which narrates the history of confessional coexistence only from the perspective of the persecuting and tolerating party, this article argues that we should recover the perspective of the persecuted and tolerated party for a better understanding of the history of religious coexistence in the Dutch Republic and beyond.
As a case study, this paper deals with the Dutch Republic, which has been referred to as a ‘paradise of toleration’ since the early modern era, more specifically focusing on the interconfessional relationship between the Reformed and the Catholic congregations in Utrecht during the 1670s. In recent studies concerning toleration in the Dutch Republic, the division of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ has attracted considerable attention. This paper also tentatively hypothesizes that the borderline between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ was drawn between the inside and outside of houses. However, a recent study regarding the French occupation in Utrecht (1672-73), provided only limited information concerning the function of toleration, the behavior of the Catholics, and the process of the reorganization of the public sphere. In order to solve these problems, this paper focuses on the behavior of the Catholics in the public sphere and examines the function of toleration in practice in the political dimension. Through these analyses, this paper attempts to investigate the cause of struggle for the practice of faith, and to clarify the interconfessional relationship of both congregations and the transition of the public sphere.
Under the Dutch Republic, the Reformed congregation had the freedom of public practice of faith and the Catholics had the freedom of conscience as their vested right. Catholics, being deprived of the right to practice their faith in public, were relegated to keeping their faith in the schuilkerk (clandestine church), which referred to chapels within houses. In addition, both congregations wished to construct a homogeneous confessional community as a confessionalistic utopia. In other words, in the Dutch Republic, ‘toleration as connivance’ divided the ‘private’ from the ‘public’, constructed a fictional confessionalsitic utopia of the Reformed church in the public sphere, and concealed the hostility of the interconfessional relationship from the public sphere.
During the French occupation, Catholics demanded the implementation of their confessionalistic utopia. However, the French army, which was vital for realization of this utopia, transformed the actual situation into one that differed from the utopia sought by the Catholics. Contrary to the Catholics’ demand for the exclusive right of the public practice of their faith, the French army granted a ‘toleration as limited recognition (type α)’ to both congregations. This toleration revealed the hostility of the interconfessional relationship in the public sphere by breaking the single congregation’s monopoly on the public practice of faith, so the fiction collapsed. Although the secular authorities of Utrecht requested that both congregations accept ‘toleration as civic concord’ in order to control the hosility of the interconfessional relationship, their effort had limited effect.
After the French evacuation, Utrecht was restored to the Dutch Republic. ‘Toleration as limited recognition (type α)’ was abandoned and ‘toleration as connivance’ seemed to reconstruct the fiction of a homogeneous Reformed community in the public sphere as before. However, an influential Catholic priest J. van Neercassel perservered throughout the negotiations and acquired safe conduct, which is referred to as ‘toleration as limited recognition (type β)’ in this paper. Neercassel, who could serve more freely because of this type of toleration, attempted to revive the practice of the Catholic faith on the basis of his amical relationships with the secular authorities. In addition, lay Catholics protested the injustice of the oppression of the secular authorities who raided the schuilkerk by speaking up for the public practice of faith in order to defend their vested right. After the French evacuation, Catholics defined the ‘public’ for themselves and created opportunities to practice their faith actively. Although ‘toleration as connivance’ and ‘toleration as limited recognition (type β)’ reconfirmed the advantageous position of the Reformed congregation and once again concealed the the hostility of the interconfessional relationship from the public sphere, they constructed a fiction of a homogeneous Reformed community that differed from that before the French occupation.
Based on the aforementioned analyses, the following can be concluded. In Utrecht during the 1670s, the fiction of a homogeneous confessional community collapsed during the French occupation and was reorganized after the French evacuation. Under these conditions, the interconfessional relationship between the Reformed and the Catholic congregation was regulated by toleration in practice in the political dimension in forms that were either connivance, limited recognition (type α and β), or civic concord. In Utrecht during the 1670s, a religious and pluralistic society existed in which the Reformed and the Catholic congregations refused to abandon the desire for their own confessionalistic utopia, maintained a hostility that was based on their antonomic wishes, and originally defined the ‘public’ but managed to coexist in struggling and negotiating for the practice of faith.
・Free / Registration Required
・Time: 10:00-13:00 JST, 10th December 2020 / 19:00-22:00 CST, 9th December 2020
・Venue: Zoom (registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYpcuGorDMrHdCTt3GAIT6msyfUpNxVLE_5)
・Language: English
Speakers:
・Peter Lake (Vanderbilt Univ.; History of Post-Reformation England)
・Tomoe Moriya (Hannan Univ.; History of Buddhism in Modern Japan and the United States)
・Seiji Hoshino (Kokugakuin Univ.; History of Religions in Modern Japan)
・Chair: Hiroki Kikuchi (Univ. of Tokyo; History of Buddhism in Medieval Japan)
・Organiser: Genji Yasuhira (JSPS / Musashi Univ. / Utrecht Univ.; History of Christianity in the Early Modern Netherlands)
While perceptions of the Ottoman Empire are increasingly being investigated, those of Japan have so far hardly been analyzed. The research interest is recent and first results are published in highly selective studies. The few studies that deal with relations between early modern Japan and Europe focus on the missionary work of the Jesuit order in the 16th and 17th centuries and the work of the Europeans in the wake of the Dutch East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries in Japan. The Joint Project "Japan on the Jesuit Stage: German-speaking Areas and Beyond" (2017–2019) shows the added value of such international projects as well as their necessity.
Within the framework of the joint seminar, the varied material basis of these projects, ranging from diplomatic correspondence to travelogue to sculptural and visual sources, will now be presented comparatively in view of the articulated perceptions of the Ottoman Empire and Japan. Through their systematic and comparative study, the mechanisms of perceptions of otherness and its representations in the Holy Roman Empire can be analyzed much more clearly than before.
Ultimately, the joint seminar will enable a deepening of scientific cooperation between Japan and Austria as well as further development of methods and results of each participants. The importance of the seminar also lies in the challenges of today. Each of us is constantly confronted with diversity due to global phenomena such as globalization and international migration. The analysis of the treatment of otherness in the past offers historical orientation for today and tomorrow.
The Joint Seminar is financed cooperatively by the Austrian Science Funds FWF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. This book explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the medieval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.