Cunegonde's Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History) Hardcover – Illustrated, October 28, 2014

Whole nations used to go to war because they considered their opponents to be of the wrong branch of Christianity. Then came the Enlightenment and tolerance, and that sort of nonsense stopped in the eighteenth century, or that’s how the story goes. Tolerance wasn’t just a way of getting along; Voltaire and Rousseau and others emphasized that it was a virtue that Christians ought to practice and it was the way a civil society ought to operate. Of course, tolerance didn’t just happen all at once, all over the place. In 1762, there was a cycle of religious violence in the village of Vaals, Catholic vs Protestant, and its story had not been fully told until now. Benjamin J. Kaplan, a professor of Dutch history at University College London, came across a huge misfiled dossier when he was searching the electronic records of the Dutch National Archive in The Hague. It was his dream of finding buried treasure fulfilled. He has from these files and other archives brought forth _Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment_ (Yale University Press), a surprising and comprehensive history of an isolated event (I learn here that this is called a microhistory) that throws light on the progress of the Enlightenment or lack thereof, and on human nature itself.Because there was a mix of Catholics and Protestants in the border village of Valls, and they had business and social dealings with each other, there were friendships and even marriages between those of different faiths. And so it was that Sara Maria Erffens, a member of the Reformed Church, married Hendrick Mommers, a poor Catholic cloth shearer, in 1761. To get their marriage official, Hendrick and Sara had made different promises about their offspring, and counter-promises, but to Sara’s church went the infant son born on 13 April 1762. This seems to have been agreeable to both Hendrick and Sara, but Catholics generally didn’t like it. In fact, the Catholic priest of Vaals, Johannes Wilhelmus Bosten, may have suggested to Cunegonde, sister of Hendrick, that she was to bring the baby to him for a Catholic baptism. Whether he exerted such influence or not upon Cunegonde, who everyone agreed was a simpleton, was to be the focus of legal proceedings that went on for years after Cunegonde took action. She went to the Protestant church where the Baptism was being held, and grabbed for the baby, not once, but twice. This was a sacrilegious disruption of a sacrament, and she was arrested. Then Catholic youths stormed the tavern serving as her jail, and antagonism between Catholics and Protestants heated up. Although it wasn’t much of a war; there were riots (one person died), threats, and reprisals. Cunegonde and Bosten were put in jail for years before their trials, and then both were convicted.Kaplan says that by the time of the sentencing, elite Protestants may have been influenced by thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire, and that there was a feeling of sympathy toward the accused. This might not have caused any change of feeling within the populace. What really changed that was that the French eventually took over the area that had been full of religious squabbling, and declared that Protestants and Catholics were equal citizens. One can guess there was still prejudice even then, but Kaplan wisely points out that there were countless examples of members of the two religions getting along well together; this story only got started, after all, because of a Catholic and a Protestant who overcame obstacles to getting married. “Ordinarily, though,” he writes, “when Catholics and Protestants got along with one another, it left no documentary trace. The problem is a general one for historical inquiry: while conflict echoes loudly in the historical record, peace does not.” The Enlightenment did eventually come to Vaals; we have our Catholic / Protestant prejudices still but no longer wars between the camps. Religious violations of Enlightenment principles are coming from another direction these days, making the strife in this absorbing story seem almost quaint.

Kaplan has done a wonderful job of detailing a religious war between Catholics and Calvinists in the late 18th century Dutch/German border of Vaals. He gives an engrossing account of how the birth of Mathias to Sara and Hendrick, both belonging to different churches resulted in Cunegonde, Hendrick's sister, trying to kidnap the baby Mathias from a baptism ceremony in a Protestant church - resulting in a full blown religious conflict later on.Kaplan covers how the conflict between different churches was already there in Europe despite the beginning of Enlightenment and Cunegonde's incident happened in that context.A page turner, with enough maps from 18th century and photos of churches involved, making it a one of a kind.

Arrived on time well packaged a very good read reccomended