The churches that iconoclasts entered throughout sixteenth-century Europe were veritable palaces of memory production, filled as they were with monuments and inscriptions referring to the lives and deeds of deceased elites. Because material culture was amply deployed to transmit information to posterity, memory was still explicitly tangible and visual in nature.16 Tombs and epitaphs were the visible and enduring material pivot around which commemorative rituals were continually staged, and they provided biographical and genealogical particulars on the dead and their kin through texts and heraldry. In Mechelen, for instance, the tomb of Franco van Halen and Maria van Gistel not only recorded their dates of death and seigniorial titles in the inscription, but also their lineage by identifying their parents and great-grandparents through heraldic codes. The full suit of armour decorating Van Halen’s gisant furthermore identified him as a knight, and the garters depicted on his sculpted tunic revealed his membership of the eponymous order. At a glance, observers of the tomb were provided with essential information on the illustrious figures it preserved.

If memorial monuments functioned as material encyclopaedia entries, carved in stone or brass, the church buildings that hosted them have understandably been interpreted in terms of archives or as ‘repositories of local memory’.17 Such categorizations stand on firmer historical ground than might at first seem to be the case. Many examples are known of text tablets, hung on church walls, that publicly disclosed the contents of foundation charters hidden away in the institutions’ archival chests, either by summarizing the main points of the text or by repeating it entirely verbatim (figs. 2–4).18

Such tablets evidently functioned as a double control mechanism: they reminded the officiating clergy of their duties, but they could also be referred to by heirs of the founders or by the community in cases of negligence. Individual monuments in churches were even used as legal arguments in lawsuits. In 1475, for instance, two noblemen took their dispute over the seigniory of Herseaux to the Council of Flanders, where each tried to justify his claims by submitting drawings of tombstones of their respective ancestors as evidence.19 A century later, in October 1574, the Council of Brabant was asked to pronounce a judgment in a conflict that revolved around the rightful carrying of coats of arms. Drawings had again been submitted, and this time the prosecutors even led two councillors to the actual tombstones and hatchments in the nearby Brussels church of Saint Gudula to verify the heraldic claims for themselves.20

The hosting churches often took care of the objects they archived. After all, the people who chose burial places inside churches mostly paid for the eternal concession of the tomb, which meant that the corpse and the monuments were to remain in place until the end of time. Yet institutions are also known to have occasionally violated such agreements for financial benefit, because the burial spaces could be sold again, just like the brass or stone of the accompanying monuments.21 This practice gave rise to interesting conflicts. In 1560, for instance, the surviving relatives of Jan de Witte (d. 1424) forced the churchwardens of Our Lady in Bruges to install a new epitaph, following their discovery that the wardens had removed the original. And in 1562, Joos vander Vlamincpoorte sued the churchwardens of Saint Giles in Bruges for having moved the ‘costly slab’ of his ancestor Jan vander Vlamincpoorte (d. 1350) and selling the brass inlays to the church of Saint Salvator.22 Neither of the prosecuting parties could have personally known the men commemorated in the monuments in question, which pays eloquent testimony to the continued importance later generations attached to the material memory of their remote ancestors. Significantly, these extended far beyond the maximum of three generations to which the oral memory within families was generally limited.23 Material culture essentially sustained ancestral interest, and vice versa.

The Reformation unsettled this archival function of churches, by questioning the pillars of Catholic memorial culture. Rooted in both spiritual and social concerns, Protestant critique opposed the ample investments for the dead to the acute needs of the living poor. The only group said to benefit from the traditional situation were the clergy, who were increasingly accused of making a business out of the dead. In German polemical poems of the early 1520s they were scornfully referred to as Totenfresser (‘death-eaters’), while the Calvinist minister Pierre Viret insulted them in a 1552 publication as flayers, living from human skin.24 These critiques went hand in hand with theological discourse. Protestant theologians refuted purgatory as a papal invention and believed that the fate of the human soul was fully dependent on God’s mercy. As a consequence, intercession for the dead was rejected as a spiritual impossibility: the living were entirely incapable of procuring salvation for the dead. Good works or praying for the souls of the dead during expensive Masses were therefore not only entirely obsolete, but also a waste of money that was better given to the poor.25 At the same time, funerary rituals focused less on the deceased person and more on Christ, and thus evolved into edifying events for the community of the living. As Peter Sherlock has aptly observed, ‘the ars moriendi, or art of dying, was translated into the art of living well’.26

In territories where Protestantism was adopted the cyclical anniversary and memorial Masses for the souls of the dead were thus abolished.27 Yet the same ideas that underpinned these measures soon circulated in the Low Countries too, spread through prohibited books by writers such as Viret, and through clandestine sermons.28 In 1527, for instance, the renegade priest Claes van der Elst tried to convince an audience in Brussels that ‘good works cannot save our souls’, and in a popular polemical treatise from 1554, Jan Gerritsz Versteghe (Joannes Anastasius Veluanus) noted that the money set aside for memorial foundations was better spent on the poor. The latter text also argued for the abolishment of anniversary and memorial Masses because the practice of ‘monthly and yearly praying [for the dead] is heretical and improper’.29 While the theological subtleties varied between the different confessions, it is significant that, throughout Europe, all major reformers on the wide Protestant spectrum agreed on these points.

The consequences for the material counterparts of the dismissed memorial rituals were the subject of a greater debate that also prompted reflection beyond Protestant communities. Luther, on the one hand, was very accommodating, categorizing memorial monuments as adiaphora, things that in themselves are neither good nor bad. In 1542, he even recommended the installation of epitaphs because the combination of text and image provided meditational aids for passers-by.30 However, the critical Christian humanist Erasmus strongly condemned the installation of commemorative monuments as early as 1522:

The fact that Catholics very soon felt obliged to counter critiques of expensive tombs and other monuments is illustrative of the issue’s scope. In 1531, for instance, the humanist Johannes Faber started his funeral sermon for Margaret of Austria by scorning those who ‘condemned tombs, monuments, and funerary ceremonies’, and who instead wished ‘that the bodies of the deceased [should be] devoured by animals and beasts’.32 Yet, in the years to come, opposition to funeral monuments would only grow fiercer with the rise of Calvinism. Reformed theologians took a more aggressive stance on the matter, and virtually encouraged the destruction of memorial monuments. In 1552, for instance, the fugitive Ghent polemicist Maarten Micronius called upon his readers to pray for their sovereigns, ‘that they may have the spirit of Ezekiel, Jehoshaphat, and Josiah to destroy all idolatrous Masses, altars, images, and graves’.33

While much of the critique focused on the visual and material expressions of memory in churches, these ideas in fact amplified an existing tradition of criticism of ancestor worship in itself, one which identified the cult of the dead through formalized rituals as the root of all idolatry. The relevant locus classicus was the biblical story of the mourning father who had his untimely deceased son commemorated by a statue and gradually lapsed into idolatry by imposing its ceremonial veneration on his subjects (Wisdom 14:15). Services for the memory of the dead – be they saints, sovereigns, or a commoner’s deceased father – were understood to be distractions from the community’s attention to the one true God, and the monuments that depicted them not only broke the biblical prohibition on the making of images, but also risked being worshipped as idols themselves.34 Polemicists in sixteenth-century Europe propagated these ideas anew: Calvin famously requested that he be buried in an unmarked grave to prevent himself from being venerated as a saint, and, in the Low Countries, Veluanus emphasized that any posthumous service for the deceased (even ‘kings or other persons who had done something special on earth’) was pure idolatry.35 The topicality of such discourse is demonstrated by the circulation of a print series, designed by Maarten van Heemskerck, that illustrated biblical stories of iconoclasm such as the ones referred to by Micronius.36 One of these prints depicts the breaking of graves in a highly explicit and particularly morbid way, showing the exhuming of decaying corpses with skin and hair still partly intact (fig. 5). The narrative may be set in historical Judah with an antique strigilated sarcophagus broken open on the right, but the smashed tombstone depicted right in the centre of the image, inscribed with the typical Dutch incipit Hier Leit (‘Here lies’), reveals its unabated relevance for the mid-sixteenth-century Low Countries.

The largescale Iconoclastic Fury or Beeldenstorm of 1566 would take the Reformation’s theoretical contentions about the dead to their dramatic implementation.37 Just like any other type of imagery in churches, many tombs and epitaphs fell prey to the iconoclasts’ hammers, much to the horror of Catholic observers. Relating the destructions in Tournai and Valenciennes, for instance, the moderate Catholic Pontus Payen lamented how the breakers ‘assailed the images, without sparing the sepulchres of princes and great lords’.38 While for convinced Calvinists memorial monuments were just another idolatrous example of prohibited religious images that had to be swept away, to many a bystander the attacks were gross expressions of disrespect for the dead that undermined the social order. The letters sent in the wake of the events in the Low Countries by the vicar Maximilien Morillon to his absent archbishop cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle exemplify the widespread feeling of distress and incomprehension.39 Writing about the iconoclasm in Breda, he perplexedly added that ‘even the tombs for the lords [of Polanen and Nassau] are demolished and violated’.40 Unsurprisingly, the mutilations meted out onto the famous tombs of members of the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty particularly horrified him. ‘One shudders to say more’, he added after reporting the reputed – yet erroneously assumed – destruction of the tomb of Charles V’s sister Isabella of Austria in Ghent. The violation of Isabella of Bourbon’s monument in Antwerp elicited the bitter remark that ‘even the Turks and the barbarians would not have been able to treat the churches worse than has happened in Flanders, Brabant, and Holland’.41

For an ecclesiastical observer like Morillon, attacking the graves of queens and duchesses came close to lese-majesty. In France, similar destructions have understandably been referred to as ‘virtual regicide’.42 But the tombs and epitaphs of local elites were attacked in very much the same way. Furthermore, the abundance of available examples throughout the Low Countries makes clear that these particular iconoclastic acts were not merely political statements, but also conveyed crucial religious meaning. Material evidence of focused attacks on effigies’ faces and hands – perceived as the organs of speech and expression (fig. 6) – is confirmed by contemporary descriptions like that of the anonymous observer in Mechelen. In 1566, Marcus van Vaernewijck described the mutilation of the tomb of François Van der Gracht (des Fossez, d. 1552), Lord of Schardau, and his two successive wives, whose effigies in the church of Saint James in Ghent were hammered in the faces and stripped of their noses.43 Traditionally, tombs and epitaphs were the material focal point of memorial rituals, and the representations of the deceased that they carried served as proxies for the commemorated individuals during these ceremonies.44 Disfiguring faces and hands, therefore, did not just temporarily disturb the eternal rest that the dead were promised in their funeral Masses, it attempted to definitively deactivate the monuments’ ritual and idolatrous potential. As such, the effacement of funerary monuments made a clear statement about the place of the dead in society: blurring out their individual features materially accentuated the idea that they had definitively left the world of the living.45

This was iconoclasm at its most personal. In a local context, the breaking of effigies of deceased community members, the relatives of whom were often still alive, was of an entirely different order than attacking biblical imagery or statues of saints. In several instances there is ample evidence to suggest that the iconoclastic acts were deliberate attacks on the memory of particular individuals and that the targets were carefully headhunted.46 The aforementioned mutilation of the tomb of François Van der Gracht in Ghent, for instance, was far from an act of accidental vandalism. As Peter Arnade has demonstrated, the course of the Beeldenstorm in Ghent was, to a large extent, informed by the painful memories of the 1540 suppression of the city’s revolt that led to the humiliating Caroline Concession.47 As then bailiff of Ghent, Van der Gracht represented the Habsburg authority against which the guilds rebelled. He must have personally felt endangered, as he temporarily fled the city when the situation got out of hand. But he soon returned, and after Charles V had restored order, he was made responsible for the prosecution of the convicts, and thus became the face of the much-hated repression.48 Defacing his reportedly opulent monument, therefore, must have been a deliberate personal attack on the figure of Van der Gracht and on the controversial memory it materialized.

The most morbid attacks on the dead and their memory occurred when the breaking of tombs was followed by the desecration of the corpses they contained. Notorious and highly illustrative is the example of Pierre de Werchin (1498-1556). As sénéchal of Hainaut, he had been responsible for the execution of many Calvinists in Tournai, most notably Bertrand Le Blas, who, on Christmas Day 1554, had snatched the consecrated host out of the priest’s hands in the city’s cathedral and ripped it into pieces while loudly proclaiming that the Mass was idolatrous. Le Blas was burned at the stake, but his inclusion in Jean Crespin’s Protestant martyrology had clearly kept his memory alive, as his execution informed the equally gruesome treatment of the sénéchal’s corpse in 1566.49 The latter had been buried in the Chartreuse of Chercq, just outside of Tournai, in a reportedly ‘very rich alabaster tomb’. It included an extensive, rhymed epitaph that praised his office and his protection of the Holy Church, scorned the inhabitants of Tournai who followed ‘false doctrine’ as the devil’s minions, but also kindly asked the onlooker to pray with fervour for ‘the soul of the good Werchin’. Unsurprisingly, this was considered to be unadulterated provocation, and the controversial monument was violently attacked in the summer of 1566.50 But the corpse of de Werchin was also dragged from its uncovered leaden coffin. Significantly, the baker Jehan Ruyant took his left arm – which was reportedly ‘still partly covered in flesh, with the hand that smelled very bad’ – in order to burn it in his oven, just as the sénéchal had done with Le Blas. However, as the baker’s wife could not stand the stench, he abandoned this sinister reprisal and instead threw the decaying arm into the river Scheldt.51 Dated slightly later, Heemskerck’s aforementioned print is directly reminiscent of such episodes, and other documented examples confirm that this ‘barbarous cruelty and vengeance against the dead’ was not the only such case.52

Such attacks meant that the religious debates threatened the memorial landscape in Netherlandish churches with imminent loss. While the Beeldenstorm of 1566 saw many monuments mutilated, the short-lived Calvinist Republics in the Low Countries of the late 1570s and early 1580s posed a much more drastic threat to their conservation. Churches and their property were confiscated, and many of the brass tablets and inlays in tombstones were removed and sold.53 This was done in a highly systematic way, which meant that whole series of commemorative inscriptions were lost forever. An illustrative example of what these sales meant to the material archives of churches is provided by the Utrecht antiquarian Arnoldus Buchelius (1565-1641). Visiting the church of Saint James on the Coudenberg in Brussels in 1615, he recorded the epitaph of Gerard Numan (d. 1500) and his wife Cornelia van Oudheusden. However, the inscription he read alerted him to the fact that what he saw was not the original, but a stone substitute installed by their grandchildren as a replacement for the brass tablet which had been taken away in 1581. Significantly, the new slab no longer provided the dates of Gerard and Cornelia’s death, which suggests that the knowledge of these facts had vanished along with the original tablet (fig. 7).54 Once more, this is illustrative of how much the preservation of memory depended on its material carriers, even within two generations of the family itself.

The most immediate response to these threats of destruction was to protect them through the simple expedient of removing them to a place of safety. This happened in Ghent, for instance, where news of the iconoclasm in Antwerp on 20 August 1566 alerted citizens to the troubles that would arrive two days later. Apart from the many epitaphs of which Marcus van Vaernewijck deplored the loss in his account, he also mentioned several examples ‘that, before the riots began, had wisely been taken off’. In the city’s church of Saint James, where François Van der Gracht’s tomb would be the target of violent mutilations, one such timely rescue operation was carried out by fellow confraternity members: Hugo van der Goes’s famed epitaph painting of Wauter Ghautier, a former member of the guild of Saint Sebastian, was taken down by that organization’s servant. In most cases, however, epitaphs seem to have been saved by relatives or heirs of the commemorated people, significantly referred to by van Vaernewijck as ‘those who were entitled to [take them off]’. One of these was the ‘very costly’ epitaph of Simon Bette (d. 1554), Lord of Bottele, made of alabaster, marble, and touchstone, and still preserved in the cathedral of Saint Bavo (fig. 8). Moving such a delicate, composite work was no simple task, but the fact that it nevertheless happened ‘as best one could’ is not only illustrative of how real the iconoclastic scare was, but also of how much this monument mattered to Bette’s surviving kin.55

Epitaphs indeed remained a cherished part of familial property: given to churches as material documents to be stored in a public archive, they could also be reclaimed by surviving relatives when necessary. In Bruges, for instance, the wife and son of Jan de Schietere (d. 1575) temporarily took back his new epitaph of 1576-1577 during the city’s Calvinist regime, and had it reinstalled after the Catholic restoration (fig. 9).56 Other monuments never returned to their original place, however, and ended up in exile together with their rightful owners. Such was the case with the family epitaph that the Amsterdam burgomaster Cornelis Jacobsz (1512-1592) had installed in the city’s Oude Kerk around 1570. When he was banned in 1578, he removed it and fled to exile in Kalkar, taking his painting with him. He eventually died there, and the painting was put in a new frame and installed above his grave in the local Nicolaikirche.57 But not every epitaph was given a new public function after an authorized removal. The court painter Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (1500-1559), for instance, had given his own epitaph painting to the Brussels church of Saint Gorik, but when the work’s fate was threatened by the city’s Calvinist regime, his son Hans ‘saved it in time from the desecrating hands’ and took it with him to the court in Prague, where he was appointed artist to Emperor Rudolf ii.58 Thus, as it were, the material memories returned to private family archives.

Small epitaphs were of course relatively easy to move temporarily, but that was virtually impossible in the case of massive tombstones or tomb monuments, which could only survive by the grace of personal protection. Maximilien Morillon reported how the tomb of Charles ii de Poitiers (alias Pictavia, d. 1539), councillor and chamberlain of Charles V, and his wife Jeanne Carondelet (d. 1537) was saved from destruction in the convent of the Calced Carmelites in Mechelen by two – apparently unrelated – noblemen who happened to be in the church when the riots started.59 However, it can be assumed that such brave behaviour was rather unusual in the midst of the often violent troubles. A rare instance of the deliberate on-site protection of tombs was reported in Diksmuide, where the low number of breakages appears to have been the result of negotiations between the magistracy and a menacing gang of iconoclasts. Reportedly, they eventually happened under the supervision of the bailiff, who ensured that the most important pieces in the church were spared.60 As the town council noted proudly in their report of these events, the pieces that were spared included not only the rood loft and the sacrament house, but also the tombs of the lords of Diksmuide.61 Such considered supervision was absent in the majority of other churches, leaving the greater part of immovable monuments unattended and vulnerable.

If monuments for the dead could not be secured materially, the possibility remained of recording on paper the memory that they encapsulated in stone, brass, or paint. This is indeed what happened in a type of manuscript now referred to as épitaphier, but which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was generally referred to as recueil d’épitaphes. This terminology is slightly misleading, however, because their focus, accuracy, and detail are subject to great variations: while the most basic examples merely summarize or transcribe funerary inscriptions, most also include drawings of coats of arms (with or without colour) on tombs, epitaphs, or other carriers of memorial data such as stained-glass windows. Furthermore, the most elaborate contain, in varying levels of detail, descriptions of the monuments in question, their materials and their localization, and some even include drawings.62

This type of manuscript is frequently mined by scholars for its often unique information on lost objects, heraldry, and genealogy, but it has received strikingly little attention as a source type. While it is generally acknowledged that the épitaphier originated in the mid-sixteenth century, its initial function, use, and the reasons for its genesis have been completely neglected.63 It cannot, however, be accidental that the sudden appearance of the épitaphier coincides with the impending largescale disappearance of the monuments recorded in it. In the Low Countries, the earliest preserved examples date to the 1550s and 1560s.64 As has been demonstrated, this was the moment when various strands of Protestant critiques on traditional memorial practices resounded ever louder, became increasingly more violent, and eventually erupted in actual attacks. Moreover, stories about earlier iconoclastic campaigns elsewhere in Europe had circulated widely, creating an iconoclastic scare in the Low Countries well before the Beeldenstorm of 1566. A notorious example that caused a continental stir was the 1534-1535 Anabaptist rebellion in Münster, where all tombs, epitaphs, and stained-glass windows disappeared.65 The separately preserved sheet of paper documenting the tomb of Franco van Halen in Mechelen, which might very well have been part of an entire épitaphier, beautifully illustrates this dynamic process between threat and recording: while the making of the first drawing in 1560 happened in an increasingly hostile climate, the actual mutilation sparked the addition of even more elaborate notes in 1582. Buchelius’s oeuvre, too, clearly was the result of such concerns: his notebooks reveal a striking preference for recording monuments in the churches that had suffered the most from iconoclastic attacks, and in the preface to one of his manuscripts he voiced his motives for compiling it by relating how, ‘lately, [he had] looked sorrowfully upon the loss of many funeral monuments [...] all over the Low Countries’.66

The best-known examples of épitaphiers in the sixteenth-century Low Countries were compiled by heralds and kings of arms, but they do not seem to have been direct products of their office, nor were they their exclusive producers. Among the earliest instances are the manuscripts by the elusive Cornelis Gailliard (or Gaillaert, c. 1520-1563) from Bruges, now mostly known through later copies. A rather adventurous career serving as, among other things, chamberlain to Cardinal Reginald Pole and soldier in the papal army, took Gailliard to Italy and the Holy Land, but in 1549 he returned to his hometown in the Low Countries. There, he applied himself to heraldic and genealogical research, and was soon considered an expert. Reportedly, Charles V eventually appointed Gailliard king of arms of the County of Flanders, but this remains unconfirmed. Nevertheless, he was consulted for genealogical advice in matters of state, such as the design of the tomb for Charles the Bold in Bruges (1559-1562). Gailliard also seems to have undertaken his investigations at his own initiative, rather than simply acting on official command, however. Travelling around the county, he filled manuscript after manuscript with the information he found on the memorial monuments held in various churches. Thus, he assembled a vast collection of memorial data to which he would subsequently turn for his many genealogical and heraldic writings that traced the descents of various lineages.67 The same goes for the painter Josse de Becberghe (fl. 1564-1613), who was appointed king of arms of Brabant in 1578, but who had been working on his personal épitaphiers from at least 1564 onwards.68 Eventually, he became lieutenant to the king of arms of the Order of the Golden Fleece and thus served as head of the Heraldic Chamber, a department at the Habsburg court that grew out of the office of herald at the end of the sixteenth century, and that supervised heraldic issues and claims.69 In this capacity, Becberghe would produce certified copies of tombstones (fig. 10), for which he doubtless drew on his personal expertise and collection of épitaphiers.

There was evidently a market for such memorial data, as suggested by the large number of surviving copies of these manuscripts. The oeuvre of the painter Jacques Le Boucq (d. 1573) from Valenciennes, another early compiler, provides more clues to the interested clientele. Le Boucq served Charles V and Philip ii as herald and lieutenant to the king of arms of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Between 1555 and 1572, he assembled various manuscripts containing information on church monuments found throughout the Netherlandish provinces of Artois, Brabant, Flanders, and Hainaut.70 The available evidence suggests that noble families turned to the expertise and collections of such heraldic specialists for the compilation of manuscripts with a particular focus. It is known, for instance, that Le Boucq assembled a Recueille des antiquités de la noble maison de Hennin Lietart [Hénin-Liétard], and that he produced a recueil d’épitaphes pertaining to the De Jauche family in 1563-1565, presumably at the request of Gabriel de Jauche (d. 1579), Lord of Mastaing.71 Furthermore, the stipulation in Le Boucq’s last will that his books and papers were to be sold by auction was met with great enthusiasm.72 For instance, an armorial from his collection went to Jean Lalou, a schoolmaster from Valenciennes, who furthermore copied some of Le Boucq’s other manuscripts and himself also produced several épitaphiers and genealogical compilations pertaining to the Low Countries.73 Other manuscripts by Le Boucq – including his famous Recueil d’Arras – ended up in the possession of Alexandre Le Blancq (d. 1574), Lord of Meurchin, whose inventory of books betrays an avid interest in genealogy, heraldry, and funeral culture. Le Blancq possessed several épitaphiers, some possibly by Le Boucq, but later copies suggest that he also compiled his own manuscripts.74 Another nobleman with an interest in acquiring manuscripts by a specialized artisan was Christoffel van Huerne (1550-1629), Lord of Buneghem and Abeele. From around 1575 he had worked on his own épitaphier, but he later also acquired a manuscript that included drawings from monuments in Ghent, which had been compiled around 1560 by the city’s painter Arent van Wijnendale (d. 1592).75

Given their genealogical and heraldic value, this noble interest in épitaphiers is not surprising, because the cultivation of ancestry and the continuity of lineage were among the prime concerns of this social group.76 Knowledge and maintenance of the material culture of ancestral memoria played a key role in maintaining a noble identity. For instance, in his 1569 history of his own noble house, Erasmus van Brakel (1532-1593), Lord of Varembeke, explained that ‘for every man cherishing the virtue of his predecessors, it is a pleasant thing to see the churches adorned with their beautiful sepulchres, and old letters and inscriptions, and the windows filled with their heraldic quarters and alliances’.77 In 1574, Jean de Brialmont (1540-1596), Lord of Atrin, even had an act drawn up for his new-born son Otto (d. 1629). Primarily aimed at transmitting heraldic and genealogical knowledge about his family, it described several paintings ‘so that his heirs will always have recollection of their good predecessors, and will be incited to live as virtuously as they did’. On the one hand, it describes four recent portraits – of himself, his two parents, and his wife – by Jean Ramey (c. 1540-1603), which in turn elicited a short family chronicle on the recent events in the Low Countries, describing his loyalty to Philip ii and the Duke of Alba. On the other hand, it relates how, in 1565, he had Ramey copy an old epitaph of his predecessors, which reportedly dated to 1290, in order to replace the original in the church at Chênée, near Liège. As the document states, he wanted ‘to retain the authentic piece for himself, in memory and recollection of his ancestors who [therein] are portrayed, mentioned, and armed’.78

The extent to which the mounting Protestant critique of traditional memorial culture formed the immediate cause for Brialmont’s action remains unclear, but it is evident that the threats it posed to ancestral monuments seriously endangered the nobility’s cultivation of continuity, heredity, and its visible manifestations. As the continuity of lineage was one of the central pillars of noble culture, the increasing need to record the memory materialized in monuments becomes understandable. After all, the practice of record-keeping itself has been identified as an ‘anchor of identity […] distinctive to noble status groups’.79 They had long kept genealogical memorials, in which, for example, they traced the histories of their illustrious families back in time for as many generations as possible, in order to demonstrate their longstanding nobility. Interestingly, in the later sixteenth century this genre of memorial texts, too, increasingly included funerary inscriptions and references to memorial monuments.80 The family memorial produced by Hendrik van Halmale (1549-1614) from Antwerp, for instance, was followed by information pertaining to the families of the sixteen heraldic quarters of his paternal grandfather Willem (d. 1553), collected from libri anniversariorum as well as tomb monuments, painted panels, and stained-glass windows. Several of these material sources he briefly described, occasionally leading him, just like Brialmont, to record family stories.81 As the fate of the rich public archives that remained in churches became increasingly uncertain, it was evidently thought wise to add the relevant records to the personal family archive.

Yet, for all this noble discourse about the past, a closer social characterization of the nobility in question suggests that their interests also looked ahead. The preliminary survey above seems to indicate that the earliest épitaphiers were commissioned and collected by the lower local nobility (the ‘lords of’) in particular, rather than by the higher strata of the aristocracy in the Low Countries. This readership compares well with that of heraldic treatises, the subject matter of which is evidently closely related to the contents of the épitaphiers. These treatises circulated among a broadening audience throughout the sixteenth century, and it has been argued that this reflected the social aspirations of lower status groups.82 The composition and internal hierarchy of the nobility as a social entity was indeed the subject of considerable mobility, to which end ambitious individuals creatively moulded the past into a useful memory, through monuments, chronicles, or other means. Nobility has even been described as ‘a memorial practice’ in itself.83 Crucially, however, the sixteenth century saw the transition of a medieval concept of nobility, based on unwritten social consensus and the enactment of vivre noblement, to an early modern practice of conferring titles by the sovereign, aided by his heralds and the Heraldic Chamber.84

This new practice evidently required official registration, but also written evidence to prove a descent and genealogy worthy of such official recognition.85 It is precisely in this respect that the religious situation, and the Revolt in which it eventually resulted, created opportunities, because the conflict led to an unprecedented number of ennoblements as a reward for loyalty. Such was the case for the abovementioned Hendrik van Halmale, for instance, who was knighted in 1598 by Philip ii for his fidelity to the Habsburg cause.86 Yet the destruction of funeral monuments and their removal from the public to the private sphere also created the opportunity to falsify them, and thereby tailor the familial history they embodied to the needs of the living descendants. In 1569, Erasmus van Brakel complained that ‘it seems licit nowadays for everybody [...] to forge his arms’, and the abovementioned case taken to the Council of Brabant in 1574 is illustrative of the accusations this could lead to.87 Becberghe’s involvement in the latter case points to the judicial role of heralds, but even they were confronted with a chaotic reality. In a letter to King Philip ii, the herald of Hainaut Guillaume Rugher (fl. 1559-1585; appointed in 1576) complained about the heraldic usurpations ‘that one daily observes in churches [...] on epitaphs and elsewhere’, and he ironically even requested to be bestowed with the authority ‘to break or take them down’.88 It has also been demonstrated how such falsifications were common practice in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, where even the most powerful men like Johan van Oldenbarnevelt commissioned false epitaphs to give greater distinction to their actual lineage.89 Thus, the ruined churches of the Low Countries could serve as fertile breeding grounds for new status claims, and the épitaphiers were evidently considered precious sources for heraldic and genealogical knowledge by all parties.

Eventually, the rejection of Protestant treatments of the dead and the apparent disrespect for deceased ancestors became a strong argument in Catholic hands. As Judith Pollmann has aptly observed, ‘in a society that in all other respects emphasized the importance of family bonds and ancestry, the most awkward question a Catholic could ask of Protestants was what happened with their Catholic ancestors’.90 Catholic commentators on the Beeldenstorm remarked bitterly that iconoclasts ‘did not realize that they condemned the daily use of images of all their ancestors’.91 On the rebound, many noblemen pointed to the unbroken chain of commemoration in their family history and explicitly emphasized how their own ancestral piety was a clear sign of their Catholic conviction. Erasmus van Brakel, for instance, praised his ancestors’ virtuousness and stated that their foundation of commemorative ceremonies demonstrated their ‘affection towards our Catholic religion’ – a pious tradition which he himself continued as scion.92 Furthermore, in Jean de Brialmont’s 1574 description of the age-old epitaph he had copied, he pointed out how his ancestors were ‘portrayed on their knees before the crucifix, keeping their hands together like good Christians and Catholics, following the Roman Church, our holy mother, just like their own ancestors and good predecessors’.93 Ancestral piety was now claimed as a confessional distinction, which became a prerequisite for social advancement in the Habsburg Low Countries.

Presented as a break with ancestral tradition, the Reformation could indeed be seen as a pressing problem, and the question of how to deal with dead ancestors unsurprisingly also occupied minds outside of the officially Catholic realm. For instance, after Buchelius had abandoned the Church of Rome to become a confessionally undefined yet critical Christian, he still criticized the Calvinist disrespect for previous generations fiercely: ‘They neglect the monuments of the ancients, and do not attend to the memorial Masses of our ancestors, saying that their names have already been written in heaven, so that some of them seem more barbaric than the Goths themselves.’94 A similar societal angst for these rapid cultural changes can be observed elsewhere in Europe, too.95 In England, for instance, where purgatory and chantries were abolished by royal command, there was a genuine concern among the population about the religious status of their predecessors, who had lived in error as Catholics. The governing authorities recognized the difficulty of convincing the population that their parents were heretics, and a popular rebellion in 1549 even demanded the restoration of commemorative practices. The country was simultaneously swept by iconoclasm, but Elizabeth I soon recognized the problem and explicitly forbade the destruction of funeral monuments in 1560, stating that it contributed to the undesirable ‘extinguishing of the honourable and good memory of sundry virtuous and noble persons deceased’.96 That was exactly what was feared in the Low Countries, and what must have incited the draughtsman in Mechelen to make his record of the tomb of Franco van Halen.

The developments described in this article were not limited to the Low Countries but resonated throughout Reformation Europe. While the épitaphier’s geographical spread and its chronology remains to be charted, it does not seem to have been an exclusively Netherlandish genre. In Mainz, for instance, the vicar and cathedral archivist Georg Helwich (1588-1632) collected funeral inscriptions and heraldic data in manuscripts that served as working material for his genealogical and historical studies, and from 1600 onwards similar collections had even appeared in print in England.97 The common denominator that unites many of these efforts is the recording of heraldry and genealogy, a subject that enjoyed a boom in popularity all over Europe in the later sixteenth century, and which continued well into the seventeenth. English scholars have even postulated the existence of a veritable ‘genealogical craze’.98 The traditional explanation for this phenomenon has always been socially inspired, pointing to a historical correlation between the periodical emergence of new social groups and increasing genealogical interest.99 The present study of the Low Countries, however, draws attention to the ongoing religious debates as crucial breeding ground for this phenomenon, and allows us to appreciate the intermingling of social with religious factors. Much research remains to be done on the early development of the épitaphier, a genre with a primarily genealogical and heraldic purpose. But given the tense religious context in which it developed, it can be argued that the épitaphier was at least partially a reaction to the debate brought up by the Reformation. The fear of the impending disappearance of ancestral monuments not only sparked the genesis of the épitaphier, but also functioned as a catalyst for the inclusion of memorial monuments in other forms of noble record-keeping, which could serve to further social status. By questioning the place of the dead and the propriety of traditional memorial culture, the religious debates that stirred the sixteenth century fostered renewed thinking about death. This not only took the form of debates about the place of the anonymous dead, but also encouraged a heightened sensitivity to one’s own ancestral past. These changes, in their turn, sparked the development of a very personal kind of antiquarianism as a new commemorative practice.