Dutch Reformed Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire, c. 1550–1620. A Reformation of Refugees, by Jesse Spohnholz & Mirjam van Veen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the newest areas of research into Reformation history is the experience of exiles, refugees, and other involuntary migrants.It's perhaps inevitable that a movement defined so thoroughly by questions of freedom of the will in matters spiritual ended up forcing so many individuals and groups on the road precisely for exercising that freedom; toleration, whether merely sufferance or acceptance, was still far in the future.One aspect of the burgeoning literature around this phenomenon of forced mobility has aimed to determine more precisely how the categories of exile, refugee, and involuntary migrant were defined and populated.It's not an inconsequential point, though it seems to skirt along the sidelines of the main dynamics rather than get at their heart.The broad term "refugee" itself may be anachronistic if used before the eighteenth century, and the narrow term "exile" is predicated on specific acts of expulsion which may never have taken the form of legislation or decrees.Yet such terms are only ever heuristic rather than ontological, and the debates around them seem less urgent than the existential choices around flight and survival that many involuntary migrants faced.Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam van Veen here share the results of their extensive multi-year research project tracking Reformed refugees who left the Low Countries for the Holy Roman Empire through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries.They frame their analysis with three questions of identification: who is Reformed?who is Dutch?who is a refugee?The category of "Reformed" was fluid and came to be associated more exclusively with Calvinism only in the nineteenth century.Moreover, Reformed churches themselves had multiple categories of membership based as much around payment, class, and discipline as around doctrine, and so a narrow definition will inevitably miss many who considered themselves Reformed even if they didn't appear as such on formal church rolls.The category of "Dutch" here becomes linguistic, which is to say it involves Dutch speakers rather than French-speaking Walloons, whose experience and flight engaged France more than the Holy Roman Empire.With regard to the category of "refugees", Spohnholz and van Veen distinguish push and pull factors, note the many problems of using terms that contemporaries used about themselves or that historians have applied to them, and end up advising that it's best to avoid rigid distinctions in view of the fact that most people failed to fit neatly into only one or another category.Working with a wide range of primary sources from municipal and ecclesiastical administrative records (council, consistory, and synodical minutes, legal
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".