Early Modern History in Leuven is looking for a motivated doctoral student. You will carry out innovative scientific research on the history of the Dutch Revolt, and in particular, you will focus on the impact of public and secret executions, both on royal and rebel side.
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, Protestantsrejected 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 BritishIsles and France, it has been extensively documented how burials thus induced confessional disputes and even religious violence, but strikingly sources in theearly modern Low Countries do not register similar outbursts in or around cemeteries.
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 depassage, 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 pacificationmeasures 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. We are looking for an additional doctoral student in this project, while Dra. Louise Deschryver examines the emotional and sensorial repertoires of death duing the Dutch Revolt within the framework of this project. You can apply until 14 September 2018.
A complete description can be found in this link!
For more information, please contact prof.dr Violet Soen (the supervisor of the PhD) and Louise Deschryver.