John Raimondo has an MA in History from Brock U, where he studied with with Prof. John Bonnett. In his major research project he explored the potential of a deep-map narrative as an innovative genre for the expression of historical data. By looking at the ways deep maps can be created and conceived in augmented and virtual reality, John hopes to demonstrate to historians their value beyond the deep maps constructed to-date using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He created a virtual deep map of the National Historic Willowbank Estate in Queenston, Ontario, Canada. The Brock News featured his project in an article from August 2017. His research interests include digital history, deep maps, spatial narratives and architecture. He is currently working in the Niagara Region as a freelance writer and researcher.
For the Amsterdamnified Project he worked with Matt Milner and Mike Driedger to make a list of Baruch Spinoza’s contacts for use in NanoHistory. The list is based on the data from https://spinozaweb.org/, which John supplemented with information from printed scholarship.
Below is the table of contents for the just-published collection of essays from a Sept. 2016 conference at London’s German Historical Institute (GHI):
Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform, edited by Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2017).
The conference was very productive for promoting dialogue among the invited researchers, but we want to open up the debate. The publication will, we hope, spark a broader set of discussions. Please feel free to join our debates online. (UPDATE 2021: In the introductory essay to the Special Issue of Church History and Religious Culture 101: 2-3, Gary Waite and Mike Driedger revisit many of the issues they began addressing in the 2016 GHI conference; see the announcement elsewhere on this website for details).
Three Amsterdamnified team members have essays in Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform:
Gary Waite, “The Drama of the Two-Word Debate among Liberal Dutch Mennonites, ca. 1620-1660: Preparing the Way for Baruch Spinoza?”
Mirjam van Veen, “Dutch Anabaptist and Reformed Historiographers on Servetus’ Death: Or How the Radical Reformation Turned Mainstream and How the Mainstream Reformation Turned Radical”
Mike Driedger, “Against ‘the Radical Reformation’: On the Continuity between Early Modern Heresy-Making and Modern Historiography”
From the 18th to the 21st of July Gary Waite and Mike Driedger participated in a conference on “Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Reformation Era” in Nuremberg, Germany. For more conference information, go to http://www.nuremberg2017.org/.
In 1641 an English Puritan complained that his country was being “Amsterdamnified” as laypeople presumed to speak authoritatively on religion. This new research program will explore how a growing public discourse on religion and philosophy in England was greatly influenced by the many heterodox groups that for decades had flourished in Amsterdam and other cities of the Dutch Republic. It will reveal how their debates significantly challenged and reshaped traditional beliefs on the eve of the Enlightenment, especially on the critical questions of the interpretation of the scriptures and the natural world. They also encouraged inter-confessional dialogue and crafted new forms of social organization. Led by ordinary urbanites, these interrelated groups included Dutch Doopsgezinden (aka Mennonites), English Baptists, spiritualistic Familists, anti-Trinitarian Socinians and English Quakers, to name a few. In the Dutch Republic some met together formally in the gatherings of the Collegiants and reached out to Amsterdam’s Jews. They viewed innovation positively thanks to an approach to religious identity known as spiritualism which emphasized the personal inspiration of the Holy Spirit over the letter of scripture; some – including a number of Mennonites – went so far as to deny the existence of a creaturely devil, a key marker of Enlightenment thought.
It is therefore important to examine the kind of “Amsterdamnified” freethinking leading up to the groundbreaking publications of Baruch de Spinoza (d. 1677) whose rational critique of revealed religion was formulated within Amsterdam’s climate of religious variety, interaction and debate. When in 1656 Spinoza was expelled from his synagogue he sought out such Collegiant-Mennonite nonconformists to assist him to push for toleration and individual liberty. Utilizing a social history of ideas approach, this research program explores how elements of the innovative ideas of Spinoza and other Enlightenment philosophers were drawn from these radical religious groups. This will require analysis of dissenter publications from both Holland and England and careful delineation of their interactions, readership and publisher networks; for example, Spinoza’s major publisher, Jan Rieuwertsz, was a Mennonite. It will detail the changing reception of nonconformist writings and reveal the changes in attitudes that assisted the crumbling of a providentialist worldview, the promotion of religious accommodation and experimentation with new forms of social and political organization.
As part of our Amsterdamnified! Project, we are seeking to collaborate with other scholars who are working in the area of spiritualism and spiritualists in Early Modern Europe. To do so, we have created an email listserv, and invite all interested scholars and graduate students interested in the subject to join this virtual research group, simply by emailing waite@unb.ca.
Our goal is to begin discussions, raise research questions and seek answers, and provide a forum through which to push research and discovery in the field. We may do this by email, or we may switch to a FaceBook group or blog, perhaps through the Amsterdamnified! website, but those decisions will be made by the group. We can also discuss plans for meetings, symposia, or conferences.
The Amsterdamnified! Team is exploring spiritualism within a wide array of groups and individuals, to trace their personal, correspondence, and publishing networks, and see how the attitudes and approaches of particular writers/groups (Franck, Schwenckfeld, Joris, H. Niclaes & Familists, Coornhert, Castellio, liberal Doopsgezinden, Quakers, etc.) were taken up by others, reshaped, disseminated and utilized.
If you are interested in joining the Spiritualist listserv, simply email Gary Waite with a request to join: waite@unb.ca
Gary Waite is a prolific, internationally known scholar and author/editor of seven books and over fifty scholarly articles and chapters. He began his research in the Protestant Reformation, and especially its radical variants (Anabaptism and spiritualism), and his subsequent research projects have revealed the interconnectedness of fields typically studied in isolation. He has published not only in the history of religion and religious reform, but also in Dutch literature and drama, demonology, magic and witchcraft, and on Jews and Muslims in the early modern world. Building on his award winning dissertation and then monograph on the Anabaptist career of the Dutch artist and lay religious leader David Joris (c.1501-1556), Waite remains the acknowledged international expert on this controversial individual. Waite has since become interested in Joris’s later spiritualistic career and the reception of his controversial ideas, such as his depreciation of institutional religion or of a literal devil. Branching out from this work, Waite in 1988 embarked on his first SSHRC supported research on the Chambers of Rhetoric, the Netherlands’ influential amateur literary and drama societies, especially in how they adapted and then propagated reform ideas during the first half of the 16th century. Requiring broad reading in the field of drama studies, extensive archival research and the analysis of over 50 early-modern Dutch scripts, Reformers on Stage was the first English-language monograph on these influential dramatists which one reviewer, the specialist Peter Arnade, noted “does double duty as a valuable synthesis and fresh interpretation” that is “of exceptional value to Low Country historians, historians of the urban Reformation, and scholars of popular culture and theatre studies” (Sixteenth Century Journal 33 [2002], 919-20). Waite has subsequently published two chapters elaborating on specific themes from this research, the more recent, “Rhetoricians and Religious Compromise during the Early Reformation (c.1520-1555),” (in Urban Theatre in the Low Countries, 1400-1625, eds. Peter Happé and Elsa Strietman, 2006, 79-102), emphasized the confluence of spiritualistic ideas and urbanites’ desires for prosperity and peace in the unusual drama of the Rhetoricians.
Waite’s subsequent research program (SSHRC, 1993-96) successfully brought together the fields of the Reformation and the witch hunts. With two books and no fewer than fourteen scholarly articles and chapters, Waite is now the acknowledged expert on this subject. Situated at the intersection of popular and learned elite cultures, Waite’s Eradicating the Devil’s Minions (2007/09) compares the persecution of 16th-century Anabaptist heretics with that of witches in early modern Europe. Demonizing propaganda against and persecution of real Anabaptists fed fears of other imagined diabolical conspiracies, although Waite explains why the Dutch Republic was an anomaly due to its unique policy regarding religious conformity. In subsequent publications (most recently his “Sixteenth Century Religious Reform and the Witch-Hunts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack, 2013), Waite has explained the puzzle of the gender difference between the two sets of accused, as most arrested Anabaptists were men while witches were predominately women. With this project Waite extended his chronological expertise well into the 17th century on the subjects of demonology, magic and witchcraft, and he is well able to conduct the research on the reception of spiritualistic demonology that is part of this research program.
In 2006 Waite embarked upon his third SSHRC funded project on “The Religious Other in Seventeenth-Century Europe” exploring vernacular publications and governmental records by Flemish, Dutch and English writers relating to Jews and Muslims in the 17th century. He has completed this research, presented nine papers and published seven referred articles/chapters, and aims to finish the monograph during his sabbatical in 2014-2015. In this study Waite discerns important differences in tone and content among the three regions, revealing that the distinctiveness of the Dutch related to their rejection of enforced religious conformity within their borders that then affected how they regarded non-Christians, and this, he argues, was related to the confluence of artisanal and merchant priorities, urban culture and spiritualistic currents flowing through the realm.
Mike Driedger is a widely acknowledged expert on European Anabaptists and Mennonites from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. His revised and published dissertation on the Mennonite minority in Lutheran-dominated Hamburg in the 17th century (Obedient Heretics) was short-listed for the 2003 Wallace K. Ferguson Book Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. After establishing his teaching career, he worked in the late 2000s on several projects that resulted in numerous essays, including several overviews of Anabaptist and dissenter historiography for audiences of early modern historians and students, as well as two longer texts: 1) a co-authored book that provides an important reinterpretation of Anabaptist rule in the early 16th-century city of Münster (a case study that is often cited – even in contemporary terrorism studies – but is understood poorly by Reformation historians and most other commentators alike); and 2) a co-edited essay collection featuring the latest in scholarship on early modern Anabaptism. In recent years his research project on the important and even leading (but now largely forgotten) role that many Mennonites played in the Dutch high Enlightenment and Dutch revolutionary activity of the 1780s and 1790s has won him funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) (2007) and the SSHRC (“Mennonite revolutionaries: religion, enlightenment and radical politics in early modern Holland,” 2010-2013). He has recently presented at conferences in Amsterdam, Groningen, London, Jerusalem, and Utrecht.
For the “Amsterdamnified!” project Driedger will play several roles. First, as the project’s expert on both Mennonites and the later Enlightenment, he will provide a broadening and long-term perspective. Secondly, for his research on his most recent SSHRC project on Mennonite revolutionaries Driedger developed significant knowledge and skills in tracking intellectual, business and family networks in the early modern Dutch Republic, and he has published several essays and presented numerous papers on Mennonite associational activities in the 17th and 18th centuries. He has already done significant preliminary research on late 16th-century and 17th-century Dutch dissident publishers, ground-work that will help the new collaborative research project get off to a quick start. Thirdly, he has published several articles/book chapters that examine the entanglements and structural parallels between early modern Jews and Mennonites. This work includes an essay on Collegiant-Mennonites in Spinoza’s immediate circle in the 17th century. Finally, he has spent considerable time in the last three years developing skills for the use of digital analytical and visualization tools (e.g., tools for text analysis, timeline construction, spatial and network mapping, genealogical charting). As part of this work he has developed a Dutch “stop-word” list that includes early modern Dutch spelling word variants; this tool will make possible the keyword analysis and visualization of key digitalized texts. Driedger will coordinate the database and online components of the project.
“Amsterdamnified” was a neologism created by the prolific English poet, public relations pioneer and pamphleteer John Taylor (1580-1653) in a short 1641 pamphlet, Religions enemies. Taylor was a defender of the King and tradition who engaged enthusiastically in the pamphlet wars that were growing quickly in the early 1640s in the battles between King and Parliament. On the 6th and final page of Religions enemies Taylor wrote that “Religion is made a Hotch potch, and as it were tossed in a Blanquet, and too many places of England too much Amsterdamnified by several opinions….” To learn more about Taylor and the context for his pamphlet, see the bibliography at the end of the post.
Taylor is worth highlighting in large part because he provided a clear, effective statement of a very widely held 17th-century view on the dangers of innovation, diversity and toleration. In addition to Religions enemies, he also wrote a large number of other noteworthy works. We are including title page images from two more pamphlets from about the same period as the 1641 pamphlet that is the focus of this post (note that Taylor reused the image from Mad fashions in his more famous 1647 pamphlet The world turn’d upside down). All three images are from the 1870 edition of Taylor’s works.
The longer title of Religions enemies and its image highlight Taylor’s concerns with social and religious innovation. An additional handwritten note on the title page of the copy at the British Library (not shown here) was added by a 17th-century reader to summarize the source of danger he was decrying in Religions enemies. According to the additional note the enemies of religion were “all Independents”.
After this initial introduction and a first look at Religions enemies, readers might assume that Taylor devoted most of the text to an attack on and analysis of the various groups he thought endangered Christian social order. Is this the case? What is the text about?
These kinds of very general questions face all readers when they first open up a new text. If you have a digital version of a text at hand, one way to read it initially is to use computer tools for visual text analysis. A cirrus (aka word cloud) is one such tool. Wordle is one web program for this purpose. I prefer Voyant Tools, in comparison to which Wordle is a toy not a tool. Here is a Voyant frame with a cirrus of Religions enemies (note that stop words have not been excluded; but by moving your cursor over the right-hand corner of the frame you can choose the options and set stop words):
One of the particularly valuable features of Voyant Tools is that the program allows any reader of this Blog to analyze Religions enemies quickly and effectively by hovering over key words and clicking on the ones that might be most significant. A new window with a variety of analytical frames should open up for you. Try it!
You can experiment with the analytical options in Voyant. To learn more about the various tools available, go to Stéfan Sinclair’s page on “The Rhetoric of Text Analysis.”
In an earlier version of this post I included an interactive Voyant frame of the links tool for Taylor’s 1641 text. That frame is not working well since Voyant Tools has been updated. Below is a screenshot of the output I made with the earlier version of Voyant’s links. As with the word cloud, the relative size of each term indicates its frequency in the text. The lines linking words indicate how they cluster together in the text.
There is no substitute for a close reading of any text, but I believe that the visual, interactive summaries of the Voyant windows are valuable in part because they are an attractive, intriguing invitation to further and deeper reading. On the substantive level, these kinds of visual summaries are also a useful way to prepare for a more detailed examination of the text. The evidence from the word cloud and word links suggests a more complicated picture than the one that I sketched out after first introducing the text and presenting the title page. For example, we can all recognize immediately that “church,” “God,” “true” and “Christ” are the most frequent terms. Presumably, they — not heresy — are the primary subjects of the pamphlet. Is this the case?
An obviously important task for a close reading is figuring out how Taylor defined “church.” To help answer this question, we could use the contexts tool (previously called keywords in context [KWIC]). Here’s a screenshot of a contexts output from Taylor’s 1641 text.
Created with Voyant Tools, 23 Nov. 2017
When we look a little more closely at the analytical frames, we can also notice that the next tier of frequent terms (e.g., “bishop,” “physician,” “lawyer,” “law,” “government,” “body,” “preservation”) seems to be about the management of a healthy body-politic. Did Taylor subscribe to an organic picture of society? How much space in the text is actually devoted to dissenters? In the visual, symbolic “language” of the title page, perhaps the actual subject of the pamphlet is not the figures on the four corners of the blanket but rather the Bible in the middle of it? In just a few minutes we can gather a richer collection of questions and hypotheses to consider when reading the text more carefully. In short, Voyant is a great aid to close reading because it can encourage more active, thoughtful reading.
Of course, we should acknowledge the limitations of these visualizations. The visualization tools do not help us understand Taylor’s specific ideas, unless we also make the effort to use the tool to guide us to places in the text where we can read more closely. Furthermore, some significant terms might slip through its filters. Glancing through the entire text (which is conveniently short) you might notice that Taylor used a wide variety of terms for religious deviants. Because they are not repeated, Voyant does not highlight them, even though they might collectively be quite significant. After our pre-reading, however, we should have enough questions in our minds to notice the significance of these varying terms as we read through the text more carefully.
Another limitation is that you need a clean digital text that you can insert into Voyant or another visual analysis tool. Arranging such a text sometimes takes some effort. You can find a digital version of the Works of John Taylor in an online digital version through archive.org. I am including a cleaned up version here; you can use this text to try out other tools available through Voyant Tools. Note that I have edited the text of Religions enemies to correct scanning mistakes and modernize spelling in case the older, inconsistent spellings interfere with the Voyant analysis. Another important detail is that I have added “hath” and “shall” to the standard Voyant English stop word list before I linked the analytical frames to this page. But note: If you wanted to analyze Taylor’s use of language, it might be important to include all of these words (including stop words).
Please note that Voyant Tools works best on a desktop or laptop computer rather than a mobile device.
One last note: Special thanks to Keith Grant, a PhD candidate at the UNB-Fredericton, for originally pointing Gary Waite and me to Taylor’s text.
ONE LAST, LAST NOTE: This post was last updated on 23 Nov. 2017.
REFERENCES
Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578-1653 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).
Bernard Capp, “John Taylor ‘the Water-Poet’: A Cultural Amphibian in 17th-Century England,” 11:1 (1989): 537-44.
David Cressy, “Revolutionary England 1640-1642,” Past & Present, no. 181 (November 1, 2003): 35–71.
Tim Harris, “Charles I and Public Opinion,” in The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited, ed. Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), 1-25.
David Loewenstein, Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013).
John Taylor, Works of John Taylor, the Water Poet, Not Included in the Folio Volume of 1630 (Manchester: The Spenser Society, 1870).
Ruben Buys is quickly establishing himself as an innovative scholar whose ground-breaking research on urban culture and vernacular knowledge-creation provides a theoretical structure for this research program, epitomized in his published dissertation, De kunst van het weldenken (The Art of Thinking Right) of 2009. He has also made important contributions to the influence of 16th-century spiritualists, such as Coornhert, upon Enlightenment approaches to reason and scriptural interpretation. His current research is focused on urban culture in the Low Countries in the first half of the 16th century, but this will continue to inform our analysis of the later sources.
Mirjam van Veen is one of the Netherlands’ leading scholars of the Dutch Reformation, with books and articles on Calvin and Calvinism, spiritualism, Coornhert and Castellio to her credit. Beginning with her published dissertation of 2001 entitled Verschooninghe van de roomsche afgoderye (Whitewashing of Rome’s idolatry) on Calvin’s polemics against the spiritualists, and especially Coornhert, van Veen has explored the broad and long term influence of spiritualists and their attitudes, as well as the vociferous attacks of their orthodox opponents. Her current research (undertaken together with Jesse Spohnholz from Washington State University) focuses on “External Threats to Dutch Tolerance? Religious Fugitives from the Rhineland (1550-1618).” The research question of the Rhineland project is to investigate under what conditions refugees became radicalized, what what effects their religious and political engagement had in the development of the young Republic. She will contribute to the “Amsterdamnified!” project through her ongoing work on the history of religious attitudes, tolerance and polemics, and by helping to trace the networks among spiritualists and their audiences.
Congratulations to Mirjam and Jesse! Their Rhineland project has been funded by the Dutch NWO to the tune of 750,000 euros!
