Religion and Latin Drama in the Early Modern Low Countries

Jan Bloemendal

This essay explores the relationship between religion and neo-Latin drama in the Low Countries from the mid-sixteenth until the early part of the seventeenth century and argues that the central importance of Neo-Latin drama to the teaching of early modern students reveals much about contemporary attitudes towards religion and theology. To explore the relationship between plays and religious teaching more fully, I discuss representative works by both Protestant and Roman Catholic authors, shaped by different experiences in the northern and the southern parts of the Netherlands. Before moving to a more focused analysis of specific plays, which range from the 1530s to the 1610s, I define the terms religion and theology as used in this study and address the immediate historical and religious contexts of the period, identifying in particular how social and political changes in the region affected the writing of neo-Latin drama and the education of boys and young men.

A Historical Context

The sixteenth century witnessed tumultuous changes in the Low Countries urbanization, which led to a kind of nouveau riche class of merchants in the cities. Socially and intellectually ambitious for their offspring, these men wanted their children to be educated according to the latest pedagogical trends, and it was humanists who were able to provide that new education, with the result that the medieval parish and chapter schools were gradually reformed into new city schools where programmes of humanist teaching could be efficiently carried out. The main objectives of these new institutions were that pupils should turn as soon as possible on entering the schoolroom to reading classical authors, and to practising communication in Latin, and that they should also learn Greek, albeit to a far lesser extent. These educational developments were inevitably influenced by changes in religious loyalties in the Netherlands during the same period, when the Roman Catholic Church lost its absolute power and some of its former faithful converted to reformed denominations, as was happening across contemporary Europe. The most famous of these denominations, of course, which proved to be extremely significant in the Low Countries, was that started by Martin Luther (1493-1546) in 1517, when he published his ninety-five theses and nailed them to the doorposts of the chapel in Wittenberg, but there were also several other important religious reform movements active in the region, such the Anabaptists, the Millenniarists, Johannes Hus and the Antwerp House of Love. Just as influential for the growth of regional theology and neo-Latin drama were those movements which remained firmly rooted within the Roman Catholic Church, such as the devotio moderna found throughout the northern Netherlands and parts of Germany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the new strands of thought arising from the Counter-Reformation, devised in reaction to the Protestant reforms, in the earlier seventeenth century.[footnoteRef:1] [1: On the devotio moderna, see, e.g., R.R. Post, The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 1968); Hein Blommestijn, Charles Caspers and Rijcklof Hofman (eds.), Spirituality Renewed: Studies on Significant Representatives of the Modern Devotion (Leuven: Peeters, 2003); John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Elias H. Fllenbach, Devotio Moderna (I. Christianity), in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 6, cols. 716-17; Pierre Debongnie, Dvotion moderne, in Dictionnaire de spiritualit (Paris: Beauchesne, 1957), vol. 3, cols. 727-47.]

Intertwined with all of these religious movements was the educational and intellectual current of humanism. The most famous humanist from the Low Countries, the theologian Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), was one of the foremost critics of the Catholic Church and its representatives we might think of how he mocks monks, priests and prelates in his Praise of Folly (first printed in 1511) who wanted to change the Church but not to leave it. Erasmus also influentially linked his educational programme, as exemplified by works like the De Ratione Studii [On a System of Study; 1511] and De Pueris Instituendis [On the Upbringing of Boys; 1529] to this ideal of religious reform. Ultimately, for many of those thinkers preoccupied both with theology and education, the religious reformation movements and biblical humanism met in the motto ad fontes: back to the [written] sources of classical civilization as well as to the fount of Christianity, the Bible, which reformers famously argued should be readby educated people and not only by the clergy. In his Paraclesis ad lectorem pium [Preface to the devout reader; 1516], one of the prefaces to his edition and translation of the Bible, to cite just one important example, Erasmus argued for making the Bible available to all nations and to all people, including to laymen and women:[footnoteRef:2] [2: See Paraclesis ad lectorem pium, ed. by Charles Bn, in Erasmi Opera omnia, vol. 5:7, 290 (ll. 90-3). ]

Optarim vt omnes mulierculae legant euangelium, legant Paulinas epistolas. Atque vtinam haec in omnes omnium linguas essent transfusa, vt non solum a Scothis et Hybernis, sed a Turcis quoque et Saracenis legi cognoscique possint.

[I wished that all women would read the Gospel and the letters of Paul. I also wished that they would be translated into all languages of all people, so that not only the Scots and the Spaniards, but also the Turks and the Saracens could read and understand them].

Erasmus biblical humanism, as well as his classical textual interests, would have a marked impact on the development of neo-Latin drama in the Netherlands, as we shall see.

Following these academic and theological upheavals expanding throughout the sixteenth century in the wake of the reformation, however, in the seventeenth century, life in the Netherlands had become somewhat more settled. Out of religious, economic and political motives the Low Countries had revolted against Habsburg dominion, embodied in the Ghent-born Emperor Charles V (1500-1555) and his son Philip II (1527-1598), in the so-called Dutch Revolt or the Eighty Years War (1568-1648). The Southern provinces (which corresponded more or less to modern-day Belgium) had been re-conquered by the Roman Catholic Habsburgs, who by then resided in Spain. In 1581, the Northern and Southern Provinces had been divided when the Northern portion (which approximated the area covered by the present-day Netherlands) declared itself the independent Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Southern provinces were re-catholicized, whereas the Republic had become principally Protestant in a process of confessionalization. The two main sixteenth-century changes we have described the economically-driven need to educate the new urban elites, and the religious developments which issued from the Reformation met in Latin drama, a medium often written by humanists to educate students in Latin, morality and Christianity, which therefore had a religious impact. In the Low Countries, we see the division between North and South, and the confessionalization connected with that separation, clearly mirrored in contemporary Latin plays in particularly striking ways. In the Southern provinces, drama produced by the Catholic religious orders, and especially by the Society of Jesus, prevailed, while in the North Protestant drama dominated. To explore the role of religion and theology in neo-Latin drama in the Low Countries in greater depth, I will now turn to some important examples of plays by Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist dramatists, which should serve as evidence of various trends and tendencies within the region across the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.[footnoteRef:3] [3: A recent overview of neo-Latin drama from the Low Countries may be found in Jan Bloemendal, Neo-Latin Drama in the Low Countries, in Jan Bloemendal and Howard B. Norland (eds.), Neo-Latin Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293-364.]

Religion, Theology and Drama

In its relation to dramatic expression, the complex and wide-ranging concept of religion needs some careful definition; religion here is taken to include peoples beliefs on the one hand, and their practice on the other, which are both reflected in the neo-Latin plays of the period. . Belief often stems from how an individual might answer questions such as who is God?; what is the relationship between God and humankind?; what is a persons role in the universe?; what role should religion play in ones life?, and so on, but such individually determined answers and convictions might not necessarily coincide with the official doctrines of the Church, as was also the case in some forms of late medieval lay piety. Practice can be characterised as whatever a person does in everyday life that might have a religious motivation or underpinning: depending on ones affiliation, this might include attending Catholic mass or Protestant service, praying, making the sign of the cross, reading the Bible, and the like.

Despite its specific academic remit, theology is of course intimately associated with religion. We might characterise here as a broadly scientific way of looking at religion,[footnoteRef:4] which, even if we limit it solely to Christianity, is also multifarious, and perhaps the most influential form it takes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is biblical theology. Early modern theologians made a considerable intellectual effort to discern the beliefs and prac