The Devil of Delft in England

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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Photo by Aquiles Carattino on Unsplash

Photo by Aquiles Carattino on Unsplash