What is it about?
The Dutch glasspainter David Joris (or George, 1501-1556), was the Netherland’s most infamous spiritualist who internalized religious experience, depreciated the written scripture, condemned confessional conflict, and promoted the idea that the devil did not exist external to a person’s mind. While influencing the ideas of the Dutch-English Family of Love, Joris had no English followers, yet English writers condemned him with increasing frequency over the seventeenth century. Surveying 139 works available on Early English Books Online that cited Joris, this paper reveals that for most writers Joris was the exemplar of the dangers of visionary mysticism unrestrained by ecclesiastical oversight. Catholic writers added that Joris’s turn to extreme spiritualism was merely the logical outcome of Protestantism. Most significantly it appears that English writers remained largely unaware of Joris’s denial of demons until ca. 1647, and thereafter they attacked the idea, but in ways that helped unintentionally to publicize it. Such polemical dissemination had decades earlier helped to calm fears of demonic witchcraft in the Dutch Republic. English writers did not become aware of Joris’s demonology until the publication of a critical biography of Joris in 1642, leading to shocked condemnation thereafter. Joris’s heresy as expressed by polemicists may also have influenced the demonologies of various English nonconformists that suddenly appeared around 1650. _x000D_ _x000D_
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Why is it important?
This article shows that even though the English had no real reason to write about the Dutch Anabaptist/Spiritualist David Joris, they did. Why? They blamed him for the rise of new religious groups, such as the Family of Love or the Seekers in their own country, and for inspiring atheism and disbelief. Their use of Joris to condemn their own religious opponents reveals the extremes to which English writers -- Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic -- would go to oppose new dissenter movements. And, it reveals that as they attacked Joris, they unintentionally helped spread some of his more unusual ideas, such as that the Devil did not exist outside of the human conscience. This we see arising in some new sects, like the Muggletonians, just as the polemicists were attacking it in the late 1640s, and as the country was suffering from its major witch panic.
Perspectives
I found the results of this research surprising. First, that English writers would spend much time at all on Joris, since he had no group in England nor any of his works published there. Second, that just as the English became aware of and began attacking Joris's unusual demonology (denying demons a place in the natural world), we see the idea being expressed by various dissenters, such as the Muggletonians. Third, I discovered just how much polemical discourse can have unintended results. I really enjoyed researching and writing this paper.
Gary Waite
University of New Brunswick
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This page is a summary of: The Devil of Delft in England, Church History and Religious Culture, October 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/18712428-bja10016.
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