Embodied Piety: Sacrament Houses and Iconoclasm in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries

On the eve of the Beeldenstorm , a great number of churches in the Low Countries had a sacrament house, a shrine for the Corpus Christi, often metres high. These monstrance-like tabernacles were nearly all destroyed by iconoclasts between 1566 and 1585. This essay discusses the dialectics between the construction and destruction of sacrament houses before and after the Beeldenstorm . It argues against a strict divide between material devotion and spiritual belief by highlighting the intertwining of Catholic and Calvinist embodied pieties. Fuelled by their opposing conceptions of the Eucharist,... Mehr ...