Embodied Piety: Sacrament Houses and Iconoclasm in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries

Abstract

On the eve of the Beeldenstorm, a great number of churches in the Low Countries had a sacrament house, a shrine for the Corpus Christi, often metres high. These monstrance-like tabernacles were nearly all destroyed by iconoclasts between 1566 and 1585. This essay discusses the dialectics between the construction and destruction of sacrament houses before and after the Beeldenstorm. It argues against a strict divide between material devotion and spiritual belief by highlighting the intertwining of Catholic and Calvinist embodied pieties. Fuelled by their opposing conceptions of the Eucharist, Catholic devotees and Protestant iconoclasts both engaged with sacrament houses and other expressions of the Corpus Christi devotion (processions, miracle cults et cetera) in a deliberate and intensely physical manner. Belichaamde vroomheid. Sacramentshuizen en iconoclasme in de zestiende-eeuwse NederlandenAan de vooravond van de Beeldenstorm stond in heel wat kerken in de Nederlanden een sacramentshuis, een vaak metershoge toren met het uiterlijk van een reusachtige monstrans, waarin het Corpus Christi werd tentoongesteld.Deze tabernakels werden haast allemaal vernield door iconoclasten tussen 1566 en 1585. Dit artikel bestudeert het samenspel tussen het optrekken en afbreken van sacramentshuizen voor en na de Beeldenstorm. De centrale stelling luidt dat we af moeten van een strikte scheiding tussen materiële devotie en spiritueel geloof. Zowel katholieken als calvinisten beleefden hun geloof op een belichaamde manier en hun handelingen waren steeds verweven. Vrome katholieke leken en protestantse beeldenstormers hadden sterk conflicterende ideeën over de eucharistie, maar juist daarom gingen ze op een heel bewuste en uiterst lichamelijke manier om met de sacramentshuizen en andere uitingen van sacramentsvroomheid zoals ommegangen en mirakelcultussen. embodied piety van bruaeneEvoking iconoclasm in his own parish church in Ghent, Marcus Van Vaernewijck, one of our most reliable and prolific witnesses to the 1566 Beeldenstorm, writes:Also, the sacrament house, a sophisticated Gothic one (as mentioned) -polychromed in some places -that reached to the top of the arch of the church, was demolished right down to the pavement, just as one chops down a tree.Still, good little women were doing their devotion thereabouts. 1 The opposition is set between, on the one hand, the violent iconoclasts who tore down the sacrament house as if it was a sacrilegious tree and on the other, the simple but devout female parishioners who continued to kneel and pray in the midst of the debris. Although obviously partisan, Van Vaernewijck's remark demonstrates the point I want to make in this essay: the Beeldenstorm was a physical and material reaction of Calvinists to the physicality and materiality of Catholic devotion. 2 I use the words 'physical' and 'material' twice, because the evident opposition between iconoclasts and devotees must not conceal their common ground. Both experienced religion as an embodied piety: their spiritual belief was ...