We recommend that in preparation for the seminar, you pre-read the selected materials.
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, “Embodied Piety: Sacrament Houses and Iconoclasm in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 1 (2016): 36-58.
Thursday Mar 27, 2025, 4:00 pm
Regents Room, Goldring Student Centre Room 206,
150 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 1K5
Abstract:
In ‘The Rites of Violence’ (1973), Natalie Zemon Davis famously drew attention to the logic of popular violence in the French wars of religion. During the same period, because of the rise of Reformed Protestantism and general political unrest, the Low Countries similarly faced religious violence. In this region, however, violence was primarily directed against material objects rather than people. The most notorious episode was the Beeldenstorm in 1566, a chain of iconoclast destructions in churches all around the Low Countries. Only recently have historians begun to explore the dynamics between perpetrators, victims and the contested material culture. This can partly be explained by the fact that the thoroughness of the Beeldenstorm, later waves of iconoclasm and Counter-Reformation decoration campaigns have left us with very few material traces. Moreover, traditional religious history has largely ignored the role of objects. However, the material turn in cultural history has led to the development of a more integrated methodological framework. In this seminar, we will discuss a variety of sources, including chronicles, polemical texts, judicial sources, political prints, visual representations of church rites and surviving material objects.
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene
Professor of History, Ghent University
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene is a professor at Ghent University in Belgium, where she specializes in early modern cultural history and urban history. Her primary focus lies in exploring urban culture in the Low Countries from approximately 1450 to 1650. She boasts an extensive publication record, including two monographs: one delving into urban chronicles (1998) and another investigating urban literary societies (2008). Additionally, she has co-edited and co-authored a comprehensive synthesis titled City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100-1600, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Presently, her research efforts are dedicated to a book project centred around Lucas d’Heere (1534-1584), a multifaceted figure known as a Renaissance painter, poet, and Calvinist propagandist.
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene also serves as the co-editor of the book series “Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800).” Her contributions to academia have earned her several prestigious awards, including Belgian scientific prizes in 2000 and 2005, as well as the William Nelson Prize from the Renaissance Society of America in 2006. Moreover, she was a visiting fellow at prominent institutions such as the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies in Toronto in 2005 and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2016. In the Fall semester of 2024, she will hold the Pieter Paul Rubens Chair for the History and Culture of the Low Countries at UC Berkeley.
