1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Jan van de Kamp Filling up the gap? The use of Lutheran devotional literature by German Reformed Protestants in Early Modern times 1. Introduction When it comes to the question of how much of the ideas and practices of Luther and his followers was received within the Reformed confession, devotional lit- erature seems to have been more open to infiltration by Lutheranism than was dogmatic literature. 1 Although no clear boundaries between the two genres can be drawn, the latter aims more at informing the reader on doctrine, the former more at instructing on living in accordance with that doctrine (Köpf: 1999, 1386– 1388; Weismayer: 1999, 1390–1391). Investigation into the area of devotional literature seems to be important for the overall theme of this conference, for in seventeenth-century Europe devotional literature comprised about a quarter of the total book production (Eybl: 2006, 391). Research in the past few decades into devotional literature in Early Modern Europe has shown that devotional works from a specific confession, however much they contained of confessional propria or however much they were in- tended as a means of religious disciplining by the church and by the confessional state, always stood in relation to the literature of another confession. First, they could be offered as an alternative to literature from another confession, as was the case with devotional literature in England and the Netherlands about 1600, which was intended as an alternative to pre-Reformation or Roman Catholic equiv- alents – very popular as they presumably still were among Protestants (Walsham: 2000, 104–107; Op ‘t Hof: 2001, 375–376). Second, devotional writings or elements of them were exchanged between confessions: between Roman Catholics and Protestants, such as the Jesuit Herman Hugo’s Pia desideria (1624) (Daly/Dimler: 1 Alexander Thomson MA (Dordrecht) deserves many thanks for correcting this article re- garding English grammar and style, my student assistant Matthias Loeber for formalizing the literature references and bibliography.