R.I.P.? Death and Executions during the Dutch Revolt (FWO 2017-2022)

Burials were volatile matters in the sixteenth-century conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics insisted on the sacrament of the Last Anointing, a funeral mass and a burial in sacred ground, while Protestants rejected this ‘ritual industry’, defended a sober ‘ars moriendi’ and were interred in designated though not sacred cemeteries. For the Holy Roman Empire, the British Isles and France, it has been documented how burials thus precipitated confessional disputes and violence. Strikingly, sources for the early modern Low Countries do not register similar outbursts during burials, even during the Dutch Revolt. Hence, by inquiring to what extent symbolic and other violence has hitherto been overlooked and by determining more secular motives during contemporary pandemics, this project questions current categories applied to ongoing research on early modern religious violence. Therefore, in also examining the way in which religious violence was mitigated, it will screen the impressive body of statutes regulating burial in cities and in the countryside through the prism of religious violence/pacification. Finally, by introducing a bottom-up perspective, it will test if, how and to what extent this multi-level ‘management’ of burial pacified the religious polarization. As such, the Low Countries can provide a new conceptual framework to assess more generally why and how the deceased and the bereaved in the early modern era could (or not) rest in peace.

PhD-student Louise Deschryver is now preparing a thesis, examining the emotional and sensorial aspects of death during the Dutch Revolt. In February 2019, PhD-student Isabel Casteels has joined the team to examine executions in the Habsburg Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, from a crossconfessional perspective. 

 

 

Subproject 1: No rest for the wicked: Death, the Senses and Emotion in the Eighty Years War FWO-Fellowship, 01/10/2018 - 01/10/2022: Dra. Louise Deschryver

 

Through diseases, war and religious violence, the experience of death was omnipresent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time, the Reformation deeply divided Catholics and Protestants on theological conceptions of death, afterlife and the Last Judgement. Studies on theological treatises and liturgical texts in the Holy Roman Empire have documented how Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist clergy created diverging liturgical and emotional scripts for coping with death. Still, it remains an open question if collective emotional and sensory experiences of death also contributed to confessional community and identity formation ‘from the middle’. Introducing the novel field of ‘sensory history’ to the study of early modern emotions, this project will question to what extent collective responses to death and loss (due to natural and human causes) enhanced the formation and radicalisation of religious communities. Drawing from a vast corpus of narrative sources in manuscript and in print, as well as from the urban archives of three cities of the Low Countries, it contends that the emotional and sensory experience of death and funerals became a formative part of the ongoing Dutch Revolt and of patterns of confessionalisation and religious coexistence in the Eighty Years War. 

 

Subproject 2: Death, Executions during the Dutch Revolt.

01/02/2019-2021; Dra. Isabel Casteels

A project description will follow.


Conferences and papers
We host a panel on 'Death during the Wars of Religion' during the Ninth Annual Conference in Bologna, May 2019, see programme attached.


 

»  Panel Death and the Wars of Religion RefoRC Bologna 2019.pdf (PDF, 51.75 Kb)