Weerzinwekkende lichamen: Doodsrituelen en de zintuiglijke Reformatie in zestiende-eeuws Antwerpen (1519-1609)

Through diseases, war and religious violence, the experience of death was omnipresent in the sixteenth-century Low Countries. At the same time, the Reformation deeply divided lay believers on theological conceptions of death, afterlife and the Last Judgement, as well as on the appropriateness of traditional sensory funerary rituals. 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. For France, case studies have revealed how fierce conflicts arose in early modern communities when heterodox believers refused to engage with traditional Catholic funerary ritual. This dissertation researches lay funerary practices across different confessions in sixteenth-century Antwerp, and gauges whether in the Low Countries - as in France - the boisterous arrival of the Reformation led to sensory confrontations in and around the deathbed, the scaffold and the grave. It asks to what extent collective responses to death and loss (due to natural and human causes) enhanced the formation and radicalisation of forming confessional communities in the ongoing Dutch Revolt. It does this by bringing the premodern understanding of the porous body into historical research on both the reformation of the senses and the Dutch Revolt, and argues this perspective helps us to deepen our understanding of sixteenth-century believers and their actions at times of emotional distress, conflict and war.