Leuven Research Early Modern History Doctoral Fellowship 2017, Belgium

"Rest in peace". The management of death and burial during the Dutch Revolt.

Burials were highly explosive matters in the sixteenth-century strife between Catholics and Protestants. When Catholics continued to insist on the sacrament of the Last Anointing, a funeral mass led by the priest and a burial in sacred ground, Protestants rejected this ‘ritual industry’, and came to defend a sober ars moriendi and a plain burial indesignated though not sacred cemeteries. For the Holy Roman Empire, the British Isles and France, it has been extensively documented how burials thus induced confessional disputes and even religious violence, but strikingly sources in the early modern Low Countries do not register similar outbursts in or around cemeteries. Hence, this research project examines this absence of outspoken religious violence, by testing the hypothesis that it was eventually prevented through a remarkable management of death at different levels. This management consisted of the multi-level prescriptions of local, central and ecclesiastical authorities on the crucial rite de passage, as well as the engagement of local citizens with the manner in which burials could and should take place. Moreover, it argues that this top-downand bottom-up management of death led to the unforeseen outcome that at least from 1576 onwards, regulation systematically included provisional pacification measures for the ‘other’ confession, a procedure eventually surviving in the Dutch Republic. The project thus aims to explain why the Low Countries were an exception to the rule, and why and how bereaved during the Dutch Revolt could rest in peace.