Chapter 15 Fleeing the Deathbed: Sensory Anxieties and the Persecution of Non-Catholic Dying Practices in Antwerp, 1560s–1570s
In: The Moment of Death in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450–1800Search for other papers by Louise Deschryver in
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Abstract
In mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp refusing to partake in Catholic funerary rituals could buy you a one-way ticket to the scaffold. In the late 1560s and 1570s, both the city’s secular and clerical authorities had come to consider lay deathbed behaviours as meaningful markers that crystallized Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist identities, and as such a prime site for detecting hubs of heresy within the city walls. Lay believers, too, increasingly considered deathbed practices to signal one’s confessional identity in this life and the next, and thus to immediately influence the fate of the soul in the afterlife. In this chapter, I investigate who was persecuted for non-Catholic dying in Antwerp’s 1560s and 1570s. In untangling ordinary men and women’s unorthodox deathbed practices at this time, this chapter deepens our understanding of the moment of death as a site of sensory strife during the Reformation. I show that confessional subversion was rarely a straightforward choice even for devoted members of the city’s Protestant communities. Most importantly, however, I argue it was essentially through the body and the senses that one did or did not die within a certain confession, and the authorities’ battle for Catholic orthodoxy, too, was centred around lay believers’ dying bodies.