Descartes Centre Colloquium with Odile Panetta and Jarrik Van Der Biest

Universities in the Low Countries and the (un)making of confessional boundaries

The two papers will address an important topic in the history of universities: How were universities in the Low Countries impacted by, and in turn shaped, debates which were fundamentally entangled with confessional concerns? Despite sustained criticism, the paradigm of “confessionalisation”, first formulated by German social historians Wolfgang Reinhard and Hans Schilling, remains highly influential in early modern historiography. The term, especially popular among social, cultural, and religious historians, describes the process by which, across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, intensifying competition drove the three major European confessions—Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Reformed Protestantism—to sharpen their doctrinal identities and to enforce religious uniformity in cooperation with secular authorities. Recent scholarship within intellectual history has begun to reflect on how this process affected institutions of learning and the history of scholarship. Did universities reinforce confessional boundaries, or could they also provide spaces for contestation and exchange? 

Dutch Reformed universities and the debate over the ius circa sacra

Throughout the early decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was torn apart by a fierce confessional and political conflict, originating in a disagreement over predestination between two Leiden university professors, Franciscus Gomarus and Jacobus Arminius. The Arminian crisis, as it came to be known, threw up a number of questions around the role of the state in managing ecclesiastical affairs and settling theological controversies; and theology professors at the universities of Leiden and Franeker, in particular, were among the key participants in what came to be known as the debate over the ius circa sacra, or the state's right concerning matters of religion. Drawing on preliminary findings, this paper will explore the role of Dutch Reformed universities in this debate, as well as uncovering how the Arminian controversy in turn impacted the teaching of political theology within the Reformed academic curriculum. The Dutch case, as will be shown, offers an especially rich example of how early modern higher education could serve both as a confessional battleground and as a tool to promote and enforce orthodoxy, with important ramifications for contemporary political discourse.

Between Utrecht and Leuven: the early reception of Descartes in the confessional borderlands

After René Descartes moved to the Low Countries in 1629, his new philosophy quickly drew fire from theologians across the confessional divide. While scholars have long studied the opposition in both the Reformed Dutch Republic and the Catholic Habsburg Netherlands, confessional and nationalist historiography has obscured striking parallels between them. This presentation works towards an analysis of two major figures leading the theological backlash against Cartesian thought: Gijsbert Voet (1586-1676) in the Reformed North and Libert Froidmont (1587-1653) in the Catholic South. Despite the vicious polemics between them, these theologians shared key theological commitments. These were intimately tied to a specific concern for the formation of university-trained theologians as orthodox scientists and pastoral carers in the confessional borderlands. This paper argues that such theological common ground played a decisive role in shaping the early reception of Cartesian philosophy (and heliocentrism) in the Low Countries.

Short biographies

Odile Panetta is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford's Koch History Centre, where she is pursuing a project on the role of Dutch Reformed universities in shaping discussions about Church-state relations in the early decades of the Dutch Republic. She is broadly interested in the history of moral, political, historical, and religious thinking in early modern Europe, as well as the immediate and long-term impact of humanism on European culture; her research to date has focussed on various aspects of Protestant political thought in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and particularly on Protestant discussions about the legitimacy of different forms of punishment for both regular infractions and religious heterodoxy.

Jarrik Van Der Biest is a postdoctoral research fellow at KU Leuven's Lectio Institute. His project investigates the theological reception of René Descartes from a cross-confessional perspective, bringing together seventeenth-century material from Reformed Utrecht and Catholic Leuven. His interests lie in book archaeology, early modern Catholic debates on the relationship between free will and divine grace, and university history. Previously, he has worked and published on the teaching of theology at the sixteenth-century Faculty of Theology in Leuven, more specifically the regius lectures of Michaël Baius (1513-1589) on Sacred Scripture and Peter Lombard's Sentences.