Ruben Suykerbuyk - 9789004433106 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 07:56:16AM via free access Chapter 2 The Image of Piety at the Dawn of Iconoclasm The veneration of Saint Leonard in Zoutleeuw was but one of many cults in the devotional landscape of the Low Countries. Since the 1970s, scholars have increasingly used the concept of ‘local religion’, emphasizing the diverse and creative ways in which local communi- ties interacted with official religious structures.1 Because they were able to show how specific these regional and local religious dynam- ics were, they also caution us not to extrapolate from a single case. It is always necessary to consider the bigger picture. How can the case of Zoutleeuw shed some light on devotion in the Low Countries around 1500 in general? What do we know about lay piety during the decades before the introduction of Protestant thought? The nega- tive views of late medieval piety that long dominated the histori- ography on the matter have been discussed in the Introduction. On closer inspection, however, some of these views contain several out- right contradictions. The Catholic priest Reinier Post, for example, disdained late medieval piety, but still noticed a significant increase in the number of commemorative foundations and new religious buildings. He related this – perhaps correctly – to an increased de- votional liberality of believers (offergezindheid der gelovigen).2 More recently, late medieval European devotion has also been studied in its own right, and although there is still no consensus on its qual- ity, scholars now mostly agree on its striking intensity.3 Particularly around 1500, there was a significant, Europe-wide devotional boom. The German situation is especially well-researched in this respect, most notably in a pioneering article by Bernd Moeller. He was the first scholar to study the period immediately preceding the Reformation as an epoch in its own right, countering the view that it was nothing more than an Auflösung der mittelalterlichen Welt.4 Figure 54, detail What Post had interpreted in terms of decay or overload, Moeller Anonymous, Stained-glass saw as a series of coherent utterances of extremely intense piety: an window depicting scenes enormous increase in the number of religious foundations between from the life and cult of Saint 1450 and 1490, the creation of a significant number of confraternities Leonard, 1535, Sint-Lenaarts, after 1450 and a Baufrühling all over Europe that led to a flourishing church of Saint Leonard © KIK-IRPA, Brussels © Ruben Suykerbuyk, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004433106_004 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Ruben Suykerbuyk - 9789004433106 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 07:56:16AM via free access 76 Chapter 2 of the flamboyant Gothic style. As a result, Moeller characterized the later fifteenth century as one of the most pious periods of the Middle Ages.5 Later studies confirmed Moeller’s views.6 Philip Soergel, for in- stance, investigated the many pilgrimage shrines in Bavaria, and found that the large majority dated back only to the late fifteenth century. Especially in the more rural areas, Soergel claimed that ‘sites were very much creations ex nihilo’.7 One famous case in the Rhineland is the town of Düren, which turned into a main cult cen- ter for the devotion to Saint Anne overnight after the theft of a relic from Mainz in 1500, and started to compete with long established centers such as Aachen, Trier and Cologne.8 The most notorious ex- ample is the cult of the Schöne Maria in Regensburg, where pilgrims flocked together from 1519 onwards. Initially, the town council decid- ed to promote the site by arranging a papal indulgence bull and com- missioning pilgrim badges, but soon the pilgrims’ more and more extravagant utterings of devotion led to chaos. In the end, the town asked Luther for advice.9 Although there is a lot less research on the rest of Europe, it seems likely that the devotional surge around 1500 was a broader phenomenon. For example, the devotion for Saint Anne suddenly became immensely popular all over Europe from the 1470s onwards. Her cult was promoted by humanists and clerics, but they were supported by an expanding popular cult.10 For France, Lucien Febvre famously noted un immense appétit du divin, Jacques Chiffoleau spoke about des manifestations ‘aberrantes’ ou ‘folles’ de la piété, and Neil Galpern placed the apogee of what he called ‘late me- dieval religion’ around 1500.11 In a broader northern European per- spective an exponential increase in numbers of pilgrims has been noted, although it has hardly been analyzed and quantified.12 Old Sources, New Views: Miracles and Indulgences This is precisely the period in which the veneration of Saint Leonard in Zoutleeuw was heavily promoted and put on a broader geographi- cal map. Hence we should try to discover whether a similar develop- ment can be found elsewhere in the Low Countries as well.13 The historiographical overview indeed lays bare the need for a new sur- vey of late medieval piety in the Low Countries through the lens of these latest insights. There are hardly any long-term surveys of indi- vidual churches in the Low Countries that focus on their functions as Ruben Suykerbuyk - 9789004433106 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 07:56:16AM via free access The Image of Piety at the Dawn of Iconoclasm 77 pilgrimage shrines. As a result, comparing Zoutleeuw with a broader context is difficult. Still, it remains essential to at least sketch a new image in order to understand the environment in which the cult of Saint Leonard was promoted. The following discussion aims to initiate this charting of the broader Netherlandish context by using two proxies: miracles and indulgences – two devotional aspects that have been put forward as central to the cult of Saint Leonard in Zoutleeuw. A fresh look at old sources may provide new views. Miracle Collections Testimonies of the wonderful stories that happened at shrines were often carefully assembled in miracle books by the local wardens or clergy, usually registering the date of the miracle as well as the place of origin of the miraculé.14 Long discarded as expressions of medi- eval superstition and devotional hysteria, such collections have now been re-evaluated as highly valuable sources for historical research. The work of Ronald Finucane has been a particularly important con- tribution in this regard. By approaching miracle narratives through contemporary concepts, he was able to convincingly argue that it is unnecessary to resort to fraud and hysteria to explain medieval miracles. The bulk of the source material he analyzed actually con- sists of miraculous cures, which led him to consider medieval no- tions of health and disease. Finucane found that both were highly fluid categories, fundamentally different from ours. Given the high mortality rates, in the right context, the slightest improvement in bodily conditions could easily be seen as a miracle. Not the saints, but the pilgrims worked the miracles: ‘A single cure was worth well over a hundred failures, was enough to give a boost to what people desperately wanted to believe’.15 In Finucane’s wake scholars started to reread miracle collections, not only as sources for religious his- tory, but also as documents on medieval notions of infirmity, moral issues and social discourses.16 Of course, miracle collections have their bias. They were assem- bled and written with a very precise purpose in mind. In most cases, these texts – increasingly written in the vernacular and often dis- played on a chain near the shrine itself – were used to promote the shrine in question, since having a substantial dossier was indispens- able to obtain indulgences and official recognition. It goes without saying that, in the eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities, shrines that could boast a significant number of miracles were more qualified for indulgences. Nor should miracle books necessarily be considered Ruben Suykerbuyk - 9789004433106 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 07:56:16AM via free access 78 Chapter 2 to be accurate recordings of the total amount of worked miracles. Gabriela Signori has argued that textual miracle collections repre- sent only the very last step in a much larger process, in which they are preceded by narratives in other forms, including sermons and paintings.17 In this regard, some complaints by early seventeenth- century antiquarian collectors of medieval miracle books in the Low Countries are also telling.18 Justus Lipsius, for example, essentially used a miracle collection to compile his account of the wondrous events at the shrine of Our Lady of Halle. However, he noted a con- siderable gap for the sixteenth century, which he attributed to the negligence of those who were in charge of their registration. After all, Lipsius had been able to see for himself that the church still held votive tablets and other images that bore witness to miracles that were not included in the book he was given.19 Still, the careful collec- tion of evidence and testimonies shows that the correct registration of what happened was often a serious concern in the compilation of miracle books. No miracle book assembling any wonders from Zoutleeuw has been preserved, but there is ample material elsewhere in the Low Countries.20 As the registered miracles should be considered genuine religious expressions, i.e. experiences from believers and pilgrims themselves, they can provide a broad outline of how the popularity of devotions evolved. The pertinence of this source type for the present study of piety is evident, all the more so because most miracle collections from the Low Countries in fact date to the long fifteenth century.21 Starting from a total set of 1850 dated mir- acles, happening at 27 different shrines all over the Low Countries sometime between 1400 and 1620, it is possible to draw an overall, chronological evolution by which we can chart how late medieval shrines fared throughout the long sixteenth century.