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The Matter of Piety provides the first in-depth study of Zoutleeuw’s exceptionally well-preserved pilgrimage church in a comparative perspective, and revaluates religious art and material culture in Netherlandish piety from the late Middle Ages through the crisis of iconoclasm and the Reformation to Catholic restoration. Analyzing the changing functions, outlooks, and meanings of devotional objects – monumental sacrament houses, cult statues and altarpieces, and small votive offerings or relics – Ruben Suykerbuyk revises dominant narratives about Catholic culture and patronage in the Low Countries. Rather than being a paralyzing force, the Reformation incited engaged counterinitiatives, and the vitality of late medieval devotion served as the fertile ground from which the Counter-Reformation organically grew under Protestant impulses.
Price: $93.00
Pages: 428
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Publication Date:
24 September 2020
ISBN: 9789004426306
Format: Hardcover
“It is not only the extended timespan and the bottom-up perspective that lends this beautifully published book an ambitious scope. Its multidisciplinary approach, bridging the gap between history and art history, and the use of different types of sources – written, visual, and material – further adds to the far-reaching aims of this work.”
Carolina Lenarduzzi, Leiden University. In: Early Modern Low Countries 7 (2023)
“[...] Suykerbuyk's carefully crafted publication, which is rich in material and findings, makes for stimulating reading.”
Esther Meiser, TU Köln/TU Dortmund. In: Renaissance Quarterly 1 (2023)
“Suykerbuyk goes far beyond the core competences of his discipline [...]. He combines an examination of material and visual material with a critical analysis of written sources, and methods employed in statistics. In this way he provides “hard figures” (presented clearly in the form of graphs and tables) that challenge the broadly presented claims of previous scholarship, such as that of the total decline of Catholic forms of piety from the 1520s onward and that of the totality of the Reformation’s impact. [...] The strength of The Matter of Piety lies, moreover, in the combination of micro-historical study with a comparative perspective, since the case of Zoutleeuw is presented against a broadly sketched background of the developments in other religious, especially pilgrimage centers in the Low Countries and beyond, in the long sixteenth century.”
Aleksandra Lipińska, University of Cologne. In: Speculum, Vol. 98, No. 3 (July 2023), pp. 937–938.
Carolina Lenarduzzi, Leiden University. In: Early Modern Low Countries 7 (2023)
“[...] Suykerbuyk's carefully crafted publication, which is rich in material and findings, makes for stimulating reading.”
Esther Meiser, TU Köln/TU Dortmund. In: Renaissance Quarterly 1 (2023)
“Suykerbuyk goes far beyond the core competences of his discipline [...]. He combines an examination of material and visual material with a critical analysis of written sources, and methods employed in statistics. In this way he provides “hard figures” (presented clearly in the form of graphs and tables) that challenge the broadly presented claims of previous scholarship, such as that of the total decline of Catholic forms of piety from the 1520s onward and that of the totality of the Reformation’s impact. [...] The strength of The Matter of Piety lies, moreover, in the combination of micro-historical study with a comparative perspective, since the case of Zoutleeuw is presented against a broadly sketched background of the developments in other religious, especially pilgrimage centers in the Low Countries and beyond, in the long sixteenth century.”
Aleksandra Lipińska, University of Cologne. In: Speculum, Vol. 98, No. 3 (July 2023), pp. 937–938.
Ruben Suykerbuyk, Ph. D. (2018), Ghent University, is postdoctoral researcher at the same institution. He is the author of several works on fifteenth- to seventeenth-century religious art, material culture, and patronage in the Low Countries.