Examines the diverse experiences of Reformed Protestant religious refugees fleeing war and persecution in the Netherlands for cities and towns in the Holy Roman Empire in the late sixteenth century. Starting in the mid-sixteenth century, widespread persecution and war forced tens of thousands of Reformed Protestants in the Netherlands to flee their homes for new communities in England and the Holy Roman Empire. This book follows those refugees who escaped to large cities and small towns to the east and southeast, up the Rhine River watershed. The comprehensive approach taken here examines these forced migrations from political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and linguistic perspectives, including using a large prosopographical database to track refugees' movements and experiences. It challenges scholars' claims that Reformed Protestants developed more doctrinal, volunteeristic, and well-organized churches particularly capable of surviving the challenges of persecution and exile. Instead, the authors show, refugees proved remarkably willing to compromise and adapt, even as they built new relationships with the unfamiliar people they met abroad. Based on an extensive collaboration between two senior scholars with different but complementary intellectual backgrounds—one a European trained in theology and intellectual history and the other a North American with expertise in social and cultural history—and the team of researchers they led, this book challenges conventional wisdom about refugees and forced migrations in early modern Europe. Upon publication, this book is openly available in digital formats thanks to generous funding from the Dutch Research Council. This valuable study makes a significant contribution to analysis of the complex relationship between early Calvinism and the experience of exile. Spohnholz and van Veen conclude that the long-term significance of these diverse migrant communities lies not so much with any causal role they played in shaping the Dutch Reformed Church in the sixteenth century but rather in how memories about this period of heroic exile later came to be understood within the Reformed tradition in the Dutch Republic. ― RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION This excellent study is not only a fuller, richer analysis of the experiences of exile, but it also continues to undermine the earlier, more simplistic understanding of the role of exile in shaping the religious culture of the post-Reformation Netherlands. The book is a welcome result of an important decade-long collaborative project: Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam van Veen demonstrate the value in such a large, comparative undertaking that moves beyond a single locality. This book's insights will help us reevaluate early modern religious culture. It furthers our understanding of the nature of forced migration on both the refugee communities and the host societies as refugees grappled with and accommodated themselves to the complex and diverse realities of religious coexistence. ― AUSTRIAN HISTORY YEARBOOK Jesse Spohnholz and Mirjam van Veen here share the results of their extensive multi-year research project tracking Reformed refugees who left the Low Countries for the Holy Roman Empire through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries. This is a rich, ambitious, deeply-researched, and important study. ― CHURCH HISTORY AND RELIGIOUS CULTURE The present study, based on the NWO-funded project Rhineland Exiles and the Religious Landscape of the Dutch Republic (c. 1550-1618) of Mirjam van Veen and Jesse Spohnholz and their team, is a very welcome addition to our knowledge and understanding of the many, often small Dutch exile communities in the Holy Roman Empire. The present co-authored monograph provides an important new quarry of information on eleven Dutch exile communities, of which the majority were situated in the Duchy of Cleves, bordering the Dutch Republic, as well as of those in the international commercial centres of the Holy Roman Empire: Cologne, Aachen and Frankfurt. ― LOW COUNTRIES HISTORICAL REVIEW MIRJAM VAN VEEN is Professor of Church History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. JESSE SPOHNHOLZ is Professor of History at Washington State University.