Unravelling death’s repertoires – understood here as a set of available actions in a particular cultural context – reconnects with the crucial plea of Annales historians to contextualize death within the history of mentalities and practices, emotions and fears, bodies, and their gestures.3 These historians drew attention to death’s anthropology, rather than solely charting a demographic north-western European death pattern with high mortality – in childbirth, infancy, or recurring epidemics.4 Since then, Reformation historians have argued for the far-reaching consequences of confessional divisions in theological conceptions of death and the afterlife, as well as in liturgy and burial practices in sixteenth century Europe.5 After the Council of Trent, Catholics insisted on the sacrament of the Extreme Unction, elaborate funerals and commemorative masses led by a priest, and interment in sacred ground. Protestants, however, vehemently rejected this ‘ritual industry of death’, and came to defend a sober ars moriendi and a plain burial, in designated though not sacred churchyards. Rather than being equal before the only certainty in life, Catholics and Protestants became divided according to their views on predestination, the Last Judgement, and the afterlife, and segregated in their burial sites and practices.6 These anthropological readings prove crucial in understanding religious conflict on the ground. As Susan Karant-Nunn has demonstrated for example in her Reformation of Feeling, Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist clergy across the Holy Roman Empire tried to mould the deathbed feelings and mourning of their parishioners along confessional lines: Catholic priests continued to value crying after the passing of a loved one, even if they gradually rejected the medieval tradition of hiring ‘wailing women’. Lutherans and Calvinists alike regarded outward crying as a lack of trust in or acceptance of God’s judgement.7

Similarly, Natalie Zemon Davis’s influential conceptualization of the ‘rites of violence’ has invited historians to consider how dead bodies and the stealing and discarding of corpses became a part of the religious violence between Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth-century France.8 In Davis’s wake, historians of the Holy Roman Empire, France, and the British Isles have revealed the ritual repertoires behind confessional violence against the dead, turning it into a quintessential element of Europe’s Wars of Religion.9 Recent contributions on the Dutch Revolt have also shown how growing confessional debates on a ‘good death’ and the afterlife turned death into one of the most fiercely debated rites of passage between the various confessional groups.10 In the Dutch Republic, the Reformed Church was installed as the sanctioned public religion, but not as its state church. As a result, inhabitants were confronted with the unique situation of a multi-confessional landscape of funerary practices, which had significant consequences for the development of distinctive Calvinist and (more clandestine) Catholic burying and mourning repertoires.11 Judith Pollmann has shown how the emotional attachment of Catholics to the church as the burial site of lost loved ones caused them to remain resentful of their loss of sacred space, while Calvinists found the presence of Catholic funeral processions in the public sphere hard to bear.12

Although the lion’s share of historiographical attention has probably been paid to the radical shifts from the late medieval Christian repertoires of dying and death proposed by Reformers, recent scholarship has drawn attention to how medieval liturgical and sacramental life also proved resilient in cycles of life and death. Most importantly, in his The Work of the Dead, Tom Laqueur reminded us once again of the ‘deep history’ of man’s dealing with mortal remains since the Greeks.13 Indeed, as Van der Haven discusses in his essay, in the post-Reformation Low Countries both Catholics and Calvinists still mediated their grief through biblical stances, urging them to make timely preparations for death; passages from both the Old and the New Testament figured as anchor points in dealing with death across the confessional divide. Andrew Spicer, moreover, has drawn attention to Calvinists’ continued longing to be buried in traditional communal burial spaces and even churches, despite their renouncement of the theological concept of ‘holy ground’.14

Emphasizing that repertoires of dealing with death were embodied by the living, this volume puts the physical experience of death in the church, the city square, and at home centre stage.15 Wauters’s analysis of the rubbed noses of sixteenth-century memento mori pendants reveals how early modern men and women dealt with the ever-threatening and growing presence of death in society with tactile and olfactory devotional practices. As Suykerbuyk shows in his essay, Catholics and Protestants increasingly engaged in entirely different sensory ways with the materiality of funereal culture in churches. Where Protestants physically destroyed tombs and funerary monuments during the iconoclasm of 1566, Catholics responded by also transferring memorials to another medium: from stone to paper. Moreover, as Casteels points out, the awareness that prisoners for religion could wield a sensory power with which they might seek to appropriate the rituals surrounding their execution, and thus the sympathy of the watching crowds, led the authorities in Antwerp to drown prisoners in the dark city’s dungeons rather than expose them to the light of public immolation. The execution prints discussed by Warren materialised the fleeting execution spectacle on the walls of well-to-do homes, their visualisation of gruesome death fleshing out examples of political and religious otherness to see and contemplate on a daily basis. Finally, as Van der Haven shows, reading and writing elegiac poems shaped feelings of loss in both Reformed and Catholic communities, and directed the senses both through inner contemplation or hearing these poems being read aloud. Hence, the senses were as important as theology and liturgy in death’s confessional refashioning.16

Scholars of sensory studies argue that the use of the senses is a social construct, shifting over time, a practice that must be reconstructed within in each historical context.17 In early modern times, natural philosophical conceptions of sensory experience were framed by the Aristotelian heritage of the fivefold categorisation of the senses and the unilateral sensorial perception. In daily life, however, sensory experience was more often understood to be a dialectic dynamic between contexts and individuals than a straightforward process of information exchange. As Chris Woolgar has crucially argued, in late medieval times sensory experience was thought of as a physical two-way process between the perceiver and the perceived, in which not only sensory information but also qualities of sacredness or perniciousness might be exchanged.18 In this volume, Wauters scrutinises the smell of death in Antwerp’s Church of Our Lady and illustrates how the putrid stench of decaying bodies was thought to contaminate all those who physically inhaled them. The seventeenth-century mourning poetry discussed by Van der Haven, on the other hand helps us to understand the subtle interaction between the bodily eye and the mind’s eye in commemorating the sight of the corpse, transferring this visual image from the lyrical ‘I’ to the poem’s audiences.

The contributions to this volume stress that, from a sensory perspective, the experience of death changed significantly in this period, as the formation of new political and confessional identities affected the sensory impact of rituals surrounding death. Suykerbuyk reminds us that both Protestants and Catholics cared deeply about the ‘sensescape’ of death in church, but that they had very different ideas about their materialisation and sacralization. Even if liturgical death practices proved remarkably resilient throughout the Reformation, the multiple options that late medieval Christianity had offered slowly transformed into more demarcated choices. Building on the genre of the ars moriendi, which had originated in in the fifteenth century, a dying person could either incorporate all available protective rituals and objects – including burning candles and incense, viewing, clasping, or kissing the crucifix, and being blessed with holy water – or opt for a sober deathbed ritual, in which Bible readings figured most prominently. With the Reformation, however, these sensory options became deliberate choices, in which lay men and women often reconstructed their take on devoutly sensing death with bits and pieces of older repertoires. Studying the omnipresence of death in early modern times from a sensorial perspective illuminates how people became increasingly aware of the significance of the sensory for their final moments and their eagerness to embody these in the best possible way.19

The growing importance of confessional choices led to a corresponding effort to ritually stage death and executions. Amidst the political and religious turmoil in the early modern Low Countries, how one died and how one remembered the dead became one of the most visible markers of the growing distance between confessional identities. The five essays in this volume all take account of this heightened awareness of ritual repertoires and show that these were no longer left to chance or individual interpretation, but instead became carefully staged performances. New norms were negotiated visually through death and violence, as executions, martyrdoms, and the smashing of images combined powerfully to formulate new divisions and allegiances between confessional and political groups.

By the sixteenth century, the Low Countries already had a history as a ‘theatre state’, as characterized by the elaborate visual culture and political rituals of the Burgundian- Habsburg court, cities, citizens, and guilds.20 The display of death, such as in carefully staged funerals, processions, requiem masses, and public executions, was central to the visual culture of the ruling elite.21 With the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt, the staging of death became ever more important, as is exemplified by the exceptionally high numbers of commoners who were executed as martyrs for the Protestant faith on the eve of the religious wars, and the ‘shocking’ executions of leading aristocrats such as the Counts of Egmond and Hornes on the market square in Brussels.22 At the same time, the spectacular funeral processions of the stadtholders remained politically and confessionally ambiguous, as the state tried to accommodate a divided audience into the ritual.23 Ensuring that criminals suffered publicly was at the heart of the penal system in the Dutch Republic, and this encapsulated after-the-fact visualisations as well.24 The fact that the Low Countries had quickly become the hub of the information technology that had reshaped the media landscape of early modern Europe played a crucial part.25 This allowed more people than ever before to fashion the rituals of death on paper, as the many martyr books, printed funeral sermons, and execution pamphlets and prints suggest. The Dutch Revolt appears in many ways as if it were a ‘media war’, in which the visualisation of violence and executions, such as the murders and rapes committed during the Spanish Furies, played a constitutive role in the forging of new identities.26 Therefore, the ‘spectacle’ of death can only be understood as a performative experience, considering the interplay between the staging of death and its spectators.27 As this volume suggests, the mediated representations of death rituals might even have become more important than the events themselves.

Strikingly, all of the essays reveal that the crowd, audience, or bystanders shaped the performance of death rituals. In entering the church, Wauters’s late medieval urban parishioners chased both the worldly and spiritual stench of sinful corpses away, by praying for their salvation in requiem masses fragrant with incense. As both Suykerbuyk and Casteels show, seeing death memorialized in tombs or staged during executions made viewers – consciously or not – complicit in the event. Rather than simply refusing to continue to look at material artefacts staging death, the Protestant onlookers discussed by Suykerbuyk could take control by physically smashing images, or at least by damaging their appearance. Casteels argues that execution audiences appropriated the visual repertoires of capital punishment, spinning the memory of the execution ritual such that it is no longer recalled as a spectacle of justice. Even those executions carried out in secret were made visible by those who opposed them. Warren identifies the daily viewing of printed images of death and dismemberment in the domestic sphere as a signpost of political and confessional loyalties. Finally, the elegiac poems studied by Van der Haven dwell on ‘the bystanders, defeated and horrified in the soul, /[who] Try to calm their mourning by complaining’, playing ingeniously on the outward and inward lamentation of souls, fashioning the performance of grief and the loss of their intended audiences.

The power of death to make or break communities came into sharp focus in the early modern Low Countries, which accommodated part of Europe’s new confessional frontiers.28 Although age-old traditions, liturgies, and sacraments were not easily erased, and early modern people often managed to live together in a world divided by faith, the sensory repertoires of staging death became important rallying points for the various confessional and politically opposing groups in society.29 During the Dutch Revolt, the iconoclasm in churchyards and churches caused ruptures and visual wounds to appear in sacred spaces.30 The damaged face of the statue of Isabella van Bourbon on her funeral monument, which was erected in Antwerp’s St. Michael’s abbey, remains a visual reminder of what was at stake. Choosing between an austere and spiritual or a more lavish funeral, to (overtly) cry or not to cry while mourning a lost one, or even how willingly one mounted the scaffold to be publicly burned – these were all confessional markers. Moreover, how to die and experience death came to signify something more than religious views alone, as the fashioning of death became closely intertwined with political and ideological views. New and gradually diverging ways of seeing and sensing death were now being transmitted from generation to generation, and they carried with them implications of confessional allegiance, which had no accounted precedents in the fifteenth century. Choosing how to die would itself become a decision that could make a difference between life and death for surviving family members in the Habsburg Netherlands, where ‘heretical’ deaths continued to be punished and investigated. In the Dutch Republic, the distinction between Catholic and Reformed families in being able to have public funeral ceremonies had far-reaching consequences, although Catholics found ways to strengthen their community with funeral rituals partly held out of the public eye, in the privacy of their clandestine house churches.31

At the same time, as the contributions in this issue show, these diverging repertoires were highly unstable and could be changed, inverted, and moulded according to context and intentions. Confessional tensions were exacerbated by divisions over the staging of death, which added to the dynamics of revolt, civil war, and the eventual disintegration of the Low Countries. The two new states that emerged strongly linked their identities to how they dealt with death. In the Habsburg Netherlands, the celebration of the ‘very special dead’ – the martyrs and the saints – became the focal point of the Catholic Reformation around which the governors Isabella and Albrecht built their legitimacy.32 In the Dutch Republic, on the other hand, Catholic death rituals no longer had a place in the public realm, but biblical and medieval martyrological traditions were incorporated into the ways in which ‘political martyrs’ like Oldenbarnevelt and the brothers De Witt were revered, such as their belongings and body parts being stored as relics.33

The 1564 execution of Fabritius, a visual and performative spectacle intended to purify the Antwerp community from sin and evil, caused ruptures instead. As such, this execution laid bare how various groups experienced death through very different visual and sensorial repertoires. At the same time, his death functioned as a symbol, enabling Protestants to make a stand against the authorities by collective action during his execution and thereafter by publicizing his death in print and song. The afterlife of Fabritius’s execution is a telling example of this dynamic. The authorities’ opponents appropriated the spectacle of death, turning the visual representation of his death into a textual one, which might have allowed them to better communicate the sensuous suffering of the martyred monk. Immediately after the execution, descriptions of his painful death appeared in print, leading to his inclusion in well-known Calvinist martyrologies. These pamphlets also contained a song, which was ultimately absorbed into the Geuzenliedboek, the collection of the most important rebel songs of the Dutch Revolt.

Taken together, then, the essays in this special issue demonstrate that the encounter with mortality was a constituent part of everyday life in the early modern Low Countries, and foremost show that this experience became embedded in scripted and ritual repertoires, sometimes making and sometimes breaking communities. The shared certainty of death left a mark on the culture of the early modern Low Countries. Especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when war and disease ravaged the region, it resulted in the production of vanitas art, funeral sermons, ars moriendi prints, mourning poetry, deathbed psalms, hymns, memento mori pendants, grave monuments, épitaphiers, and commemoration masses. Hence, this issue helps to convey how interdisciplinary dialogue and the inclusion of a wide range of sources is crucial in trying to understand the complex anthropological structures of experiences in the past.

Demonstrating how these rituals and repertoires were at stake in not only religious, but also political and cultural debates in the early modern Low Countries may help us to better understand how modern-day cultural repertoires of staging, sensing, and experiencing death can divide or unite communities. While editing this issue, the death of George Floyd exposed the deep divisions and tensions at work within both American society and across much of the globe, and ignited a whole range of these sensory or visual repertoires: from chanting and rock-throwing protesters, to silently kneeling policemen, and a livestream of Floyd’s memorial service, showing the gold coffin in which he is buried. At the same time, the world is now dealing with the covid-19 pandemic that caused national communities to turn inwards and close their borders. Within these communities, however, new solidarities emerge, for example through the collective agony over the lack of proper burials for beloved ones, or through the organized applauding for caregivers. Although the situation today of course is very different from the early modern period, it is interesting to see how the repertoires through which mortality is sensed and staged are fundamental for the formation of communities and can function as rallying points for change, just as they did in the early modern Low Countries.