A Brill Calendar: November 12

The Birth of Richard Baxter

Few scholarly and academic disciplines equal the social and cultural importance of Theology within universities during the 17th century.

Previously, during the High Middle Ages, the faculty of this domain of teaching and learning was generally considered to be a ‘primus inter pares’, the first among equals. Classifying, analyzing and disputing transcendental and religious concepts and texts were now running in the veins of all European societies; whether in a largely Roman Catholic South, or in a predominantly Protestant North; a North with a mainly Lutheran East and a Calvinist West.

The Theological Faculty served a crucial purpose: it functioned as the ideal environment to recruit and educate preachers and ministers for Christian communities; both existing ones and new brother and sisterhoods, in a spiritual atmosphere that showed precious little patience with ‘godless individuals’.

It is seldom that one meets with an individual who illustrates the era better than Richard Baxter (November 12, 1615 – December 8, 1691), an English Puritan and a prolific writer, with some two hundred spiritual works to his name, and a committed peacemaker among the fractious Protestant denominations as well.

The cultural, intellectual and political ties and controversies between England and Holland during his life-time were as close as ever, since (despite numerous regime changes in a turbulent era of British politics), they were always easily maintained across the North Sea. Many groups of British people even made Holland their home away from home; the young Republic was far more lenient in matters of faith than successive British monarchs or even the Lord Protector would allow.

But when the ‘Speedwell’ and ‘Mayflower’ left Europe to bless America with its Founding Fathers in 1620, their departure was hardly regretted in Leyden, it would seem. Sometimes, tolerance is next of kin to indifference.