Below is a woodcut showing the anatomical theatre at the Dutch University of Leiden. The University's medical school was closely connected with the city's English-Scottish community. Many of them, including the Pilgrims, had fled to Holland to escape persecution. The roots of the English
Reformed Church at Leiden reach back to 1607, when the growing English-Scottish
community petitioned the city government for a place of worship, meeting first
in St Catherine Gasthuis and then in the Jerusalem Kirk. With the arrival of a
new wave of exiles fleeing the Laudian persecutions and the war-torn British
Isles in the 1640s, the congregation moved into the larger and more centrally
located Begijnhof church, a former Catholic chapel, which, after the
Reformation, had been converted into a multifunctional facility. It housed the
medical school’s anatomical theatre (in the chancel), the university library
(on the upper floor), and, after 1644, the English church (in the nave). ‘These
three places make together a handsome building’, observed a passing
seventeenth-century traveller.
