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Catholic communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570-1720

Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, 1580-1720 is the product of a research agenda pursued jointly by co-editors Benjamin Kaplan and Judith Pollmann. Instead of producing a conventional volume in the old Britain and the Netherlands publication series, we enlisted other scholars to help us undertake a genuinely comparative exercise, applying a set of specific research questions to a phenomenon that could be studied in two distinct but broadly comparable settings in early modern Europe. The questions concerned the impact of minority status and repression on early modern religious groups, specifically on Catholic communities in Protestant states. Defining specific aspects of religious culture and life for investigation, we devised a series of themes, for each of which we paired an expert on Britain with one on the Netherlands. The process was fairly prescriptive, with us telling each expert what questions we wanted them to address. In an initial stage, the experts presented their findings (each pair, along with a commentator, constituting a panel) at a conference held in Amsterdam and Leiden in the autumn of 2006. We provided the experts with feedback on their work, first orally at the conference and then in writing after they prepared draft chapters for publication. We ourselves participated as experts, giving papers and then writing chapters. We also ensured that the pairs of chapters referenced and made comparisons to one another explicitly. When all the draft chapters had been received, we jointly wrote a conclusion for the volume that synthesizes the findings of the individual chapters. The work of the other two co-editors, Prof van Nierop and Prof Moore, mainly consisted, respectively, of hosting the conference and shepherding the volume through the publication process