O, Lord, save us from shame. Narratives of emotions in convent chronicles by female authors during the Dutch Revolt,

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1 O, Lord, save us from shame. Narratives of emotions in convent chronicles by female authors during the Dutch Revolt, Erika Kuijpers, Leiden University The Reformation and the Dutch Revolt motivated many authors in the Low Countries to take up their pens. People wrote diaries, chronicles and histories, so as not to forget, or make sense of events, as a form of self-justification or apology, to assert their loyalty to their rightful overlord or their faith in the one and true God. Such texts were often produced in cities, often by notable citizens who also held public office, but we also possess texts by authors from the middling artisan ranks. Moreover, there are texts by clerics, both secular and regular, and of differing status in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In this paper I will confine myself to a very specific corpus of texts, that is to say the chronicles which were written by female conventuals in both the Northern and Southern Netherlands. 1 In these convents people often began to write a chronicle during or just after experiencing major changes that had been brought about by the war. From 1566 all convents in the Netherlands experienced the threat of successive waves of iconoclasm and assault. Some convents fell victim to violent plunder and destruction. Conventuals were chased away and had to wait years before they could return to their convent, if ever at all. Initially, the threat came from local inhabitants who came out in support of the Protestant rebel armies of the so-called Beggars ; at a later stage cities that had remained loyal to their Spanish-Habsburg overlord were besieged by the armies of the rebellious States, while rebel cities were besieged by Habsburg armies. In many case such sieges were followed by violent plunder. During 1 I read a number of published chronicles by nuns from convents in Amersfoort, Weert, Den Bosch and Tienen see: F. Boerwinkel, Cronyk van Sint Aagten Convent: een oude kloosterkroniek uit de 15-17e eeuw (Amersfoort, 1939); Ch. Creemers, Kronijk uit het klooster Maria-Wijngaard te Weert , gevolgd door eene bijdrage tot die kronijk op het jaar 1566 en een vijftal stukken betrekkelijk de Hervorming te Weert , Publ. de la Soc. hist. et archéol. dans le Limbourg, 12, 1875, pp ; Anna Wielant, Gedenck-weerdige Avonturen, Alteracien, ende verstroijinge, jae Martelie, en verwoestinge, die de annuntiaten binnen Thienen hebben geleden vande Geusen Anno 1635 in het beginsel van Junius, alsdan hunnen bichtvader was, den 10 van die maent van de Geusen is vermoort, en voorts soo verre als hun eenigsints int schrift kan achtergelaeten worden, trans. by F Canjuweel (Tienen, 1729); H. Alfen, Kroniek eener kloosterzuster van het voormalig Bossche klooster Mariënburg over de troebelen te s-hertogenbosch e.e. in de jaren , Uitgave van het Provinciaal Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen in Noord-Brabant; 27 ( s Hertogenbosch, 1931). 1

2 such episodes convents obviously had most to fear from the rebels, yet in practice, royal soldiers did not spare them either. In the 1580s Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, all ecclesiastical property was sequestered by the new reformed authorities. Many religious abandoned their vows, or went into exile. After the Reformation devout women in the cities sometimes formed clandestine religious communities. In the tertiary convent Mariënburg in the city of Den Bosch an anonymous sister reported on what she had experienced in the years The first iconoclasm there occurred on 22 August A fragment: And when they were finished there, they came into the sister s choir, and smashed beautiful pieces and many books, and they took away all the cloths and veils and gowns, and where they saw images of our blessed Lord, they attacked them more fiercely than of other figures, yet they particularly hated the sight of a crucifix. Oh, Jews and Turks would barely do as they have done [ ] but when they saw our sisters, who huddled together as defeated people: some weeping, some calling upon God, as much as they could, and as if they were expecting to die. And when they saw this, they were crestfallen and said: be content, we shall not harm you, but you should no longer venerate these little gods, or we will give you more of the same tomorrow. 2 Besides triggering them, this passage resounds with descriptions of emotions. Yet a problem that is troubling historians is that they feel that the emotional expressions in early modern texts do not appear very authentic. Emotions seem to be dictated by genre, and are often expressed in clichés. We can see this clearly in this passage: to compare iconoclasts with savages, or Jews or Turks, is a topos that we see in 9 out of 10 descriptions of the iconoclasm. The same is true for the weeping and prayer of the nuns, and the embarrassment this causes the image-breakers. Other emotions, like personal mourning or shame are very seldom in evidence. In early modern descriptions of emotions we seek in vain for the introspective traits that we value so much today, and that are sometimes 2 H. van Alfen, Kroniek eener kloosterzuster van het voormalig Bossche klooster Mariënburg over de troebelen te s-hertogenbosch e.e. in de jaren , Uitgave van het Provinciaal Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen in Noord-Brabant; 27 ( s Hertogenbosch, 1931), p. 3. 2

3 confused with authenticity. The tertiary sister from Den Bosch does not write about her personal feelings there are other genres for doing so - but about those of all sisters collectively. She represents war as a collective experience, and that includes the experience of fear, indignation and sorrow. Emotional scripts This has nothing to do with [a lack of?] authenticity. In every culture, including our own, there exists a normative script for the display of emotions. As soon as we express emotions in words, we use preexistent narrative schemes. That is the way to interpret, legitimize and to share an emotion. We possess a repertoire of possible ways to verbalize emotions, which is extensive but not unlimited. We can choose an opportunity, our audience, a ritual setting, a genre, format, and we also can make choices at the level of language: structure, narrative perspective, frames, images, topoi and finally also words. The management of emotions, in other words, is tied to the cultural instruments and means which are at a person s disposal. In the process valuable emotions have to be expressed and triggered, while less desirable ones have to be controlled or justified. 3 Obviously the narrator s identity also affects the range of possibilities. Gender, age, stature and status, literacy and previous reading experiences, all aspects of the social context should be taken into account. Yet of most convent chronicles it is hard to establish when exactly and by whom they were written or how they were put together. Some manuscripts may be the work of several authors, who have copied material from each other. Extant manuscripts are often copies, but sometimes even that we can not always determine. The texts were probably written by the better educated women in the convent, the daughters of local elite families, or the mother superior herself although we know that the education of even such elite women did only really began to improve in the seventeenth century, under the influence of the counter-reformation. 4 3 Eric Shiraev, Cross-cultural psychology: critical thinking and contemporary applications, 2007, Charlotte Woodford, Nuns as historians in early modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. ***. 3

4 Thus, we know virtually nothing about the writer of the Den Bosch chronicle, which survives only as a copy. 5 Since the confessor and mother superior are mentioned by name in the text, they were probably not the author. 6 Because she frequently speaks of our sisters, it is likely that she was among their number. The convent had been founded in 1423 as a community of the sisters of the Common Life. 7 In 1469 it had become part of the Franciscan order. 8 The writer undoubtedly knew of Thomas a Kempis, De imitatione Christi. When comparing her language to that of other chronicles of the time, the authors seems to have been someone of limited training and experience in writing. Her spelling is messy, inconsistent and sometimes outright crazy. She spells some words phonetically and makes some odd mistakes, like writing baptists when she means papists, when she is clearly not thinking of Anabaptists or the like. Some sentences are suddenly in rhyme. Here and there the text seems to reflect oral narrative traditions. Just like medieval song texts, she sometimes directly addresses her audience at the start of a sentence. Item, you should know 9 ; Further you shall hear of wonders 10 ; Item, I shall write to you now, what evil was done here in Brabant by our Beggars or young Turks. 11 On the other hand [because of that?] the style is very lively and expressive. The author is perhaps a poor writer, but she is a good storyteller. I suspect that this chronicle was written at the end of 1575 or early in 1576 because when describing 1574 she talks of this is the previous year. The text comes to an abrupt halt in February It is not intended as a history of the convent, like many other convent chronicles in this period, but is clearly intended as a history of the troubles that began in 1566, as is also clear from the title: this is an outrage, perpetrated against the Holy Christian faith of the Roman church and God s commandments and the seven sacraments in many 5 Kroniek door een zuster in het klooster Mariënburg (Ulenborch) te 's Hertogenbosch; , Koninklijke Bibliotheek Den Haag, 131 H 20, ik verwijs steeds naar de teksteditie van Van Alfen: Kroniek eener kloosterzuster van het voormalig Bossche klooster Mariënburg. 6 Van Alfen: Kroniek eener kloosterzuster van het voormalig Bossche klooster Mariënburg p P.Th.J. Kuijer, 's-hertogenbosch : stad in het hertogdom Brabant ca (Zwolle, 2000), 8 L. Meerendonk, Tussen reformatie en contra-reformatie. Geest en levenswijze van de clerus in stad en Meierij van 's-hertogenbosch en zijn verhouding tot de samenleving tussen ±1520 en ±1570 (Tilburg 1967), Van Alfen: Kroniek eener kloosterzuster van het voormalig Bossche klooster Mariënburg, p Ibidem, p Ibidem, p.32. 4

5 places and towns in the land of Brabant; so I will write something about Den Bosch, what has happened there. The text is written on 84 double sided folio pages. A large part covers events in and around the convent Mariënburg and the city of Den Bosch. That is where we find most detailed eyewitness statements. Yet otherwise the sister mainly reports information that she has heard from others or has seen in print. That is quite a lot, even if it is quite haphazard. Thus she spends two full pages reporting on the Battle of Lepanto. She reports on a variety of political and military developments, but not always on the ones that are most important. Thus she mentions the siege of Haarlem, but is silent about that of Leiden. The emphasis is very much on the persecutions of the Catholic clergy in rebel-controlled areas. She reported rumours about many instances of murder, assault and rape. There must have been an enormous fear of the rebels in convents in these years. She tells the tale of the Gorcum martyrs (19 priests, killed by the Beggars sanctified in1867) in a fair amount of details, including the notion that this is a genuine instance of martyrdom both because they were devout and steadfast, and because of a miraculous cure of a sick person who had begun praying besides the hanging corpses on the gallows. 12 Descriptions of iconoclasm are interspersed with anecdotes about the interventions of divine providence; the perpetrators are struck by sudden paralysis or all sorts of terrible diseases. The narrative parts always end with shorter or more extensive religious conclusions or reflections about the evil in man or the suffering of the roman catholic clergy. At those points, the text is didactic rather than descriptive. In what ways does this text express emotions? How can we characterize the language of emotions in this type of text? Because the emotional import is not just determined by the choice of words, but also in the structuring of the text, the rhetoric of lamentations, the drama of the tales and the ways in which actors are presented, we also should pay attention to those aspects of the text. As Jochen Kleres has pointed out it is in any case impossible to distinguish between emotions and the situations that evoke them. Emotions are narratives, 12 Ibidem, 35. 5

6 he asserts. to analyse emotions narratively we thus need to ask who acts how to whom and what happens.. 13 Narrative structure The approach of Kleres, which he calls narrative emotion analysis, deals not only with the language of emotions (words, syntax) but also with other textual instruments, such as the structure of the text and agency. With regard to structure, the use of so called sequences of dramatic action is interesting. In the Den Bosch chronicle, neutrally formulated and chronologically structured historical events alternate with stories that are more condensed time-wise. Events are described in far more detail and the actors are staged with a lot of expression. Significantly, apart from describing events she could have personally witnessed, the sister also tells stories she must have gathered second-hand in that way. About the capture of the town of Den Briel by the Beggars in 1572 she for instance writes: [ ] they walked into the convents and chased them all out. And they found an old blind brother, who could not walk; they have escorted him out through the city and said disparagingly come and see the town. And when he was in the middle of it, they shot him dead 14 Writing so-called plotted stories with rising dramatic action is a way of stirring up emotions. But in these narrative segments, emotions are also ascribed to the characters. When the city of Den Bosch is in the hands of the Beggars in 1567, the chancellor of Brabant, was kept under house arrest for month. Only when the royal troops threatened to put the town to the sac, if the citizens would not release the chancellor, the local militia decided to let him leave the town. When they inform the chancellor he replies: you should have come earlier to release me. And I will saved anyway, even if you don t do it. And when the militiamen heard that, they were crestfallen and spoke 13 Jochen Kleres, Emotions and Narrative Analysis: A Methodological Approach, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 41 (2011), , aldaar: Van Alfen: Kroniek eener kloosterzuster van het voormalig Bossche klooster Mariënburg, p.32. 6

7 humbly. And the chancellor was in tears and so were they This has happened on the octave of Easter, that is to say on the 6 th day of April. 15 Sequences of dramatic action often end with a concluding remark that expresses an emotion. To illustrate, the description of the first Iconoclastic Fury ends as follows: But never was there a happier hour than when day broke. Because not at any cost would we again suffer the fear that we suffered that night. 16 Some of the dramatic episodes are followed by a longer lamentation which usually contains a religious lesson. O Lord, how all your creatures suffer. Shall this apprehensiveness last any longer. O, Lord, I have deserved it: forgive me that I have sinned so grievously against thee. Our brethren in Christ 17 wanted Papist goods and monks blood 18, but those assisting Christ cannot be harmed, neither by man nor by the Devil. 19 Agency A second way of expressing or stirring up emotions can be achieved through the narrative construction of agency. In narratives that express fear or helplessness, for example, the self can be rendered as an object to others actions. In shameful narratives, the self is often diluted. 20 Indeed, the convent chronicles include rumours about the rape of nuns by Beggars, but it never gets more specific. In the description of shameful events, the victims are always anonymous. The sisters of Den Bosch cast themselves in the role of victim. In doing so throughout the text, they identified with the dejected and desolate Catholics. The only activities the sisters actually do themselves in the narrative are praying, fearing and weeping. The fact that they play no other role in the story underlines the resignation with 15 Ibidem, p Ibidem, p kistbrueders, in the original. 18 Baptist in the original, but she always writes Baptist when she means Papist. 19 Van Alfen: Kroniek eener kloosterzuster van het voormalig Bossche klooster Mariënburg, p Kleres, Emotions and Narrative Analysis, p

8 which they went through the ordeals. This strategy is effective. Not only are there passages in which heretics observe submissively the piety of good Catholics, the Catholics are also confirmed in their faith in God: the passages in which divine providence strikes iconoclasts with paralysis and other nasty diseases are positively triumphant. The beer brewed on the fire of the holy statues of the saints promptly changes into blood. 21 The actions described in the chronicle are mostly those of villains. Actors are staged to stimulate collective fear. Strategies of othering 22 were important in the media of the period. Yet, although our nun enthusiastically demonizes the Beggars in general, the story gets more complicated when the events are more close by and involve her fellow citizens of Den Bosch. The stories about Beggars misbehaving elsewhere are anonymous and abound with gruesome details. But she frames the seditious leaders of the protestants of Den Bosch as down-and-outers and criminals: verscymmelde boeven, without respect and without manners. She writes spitefully how preachers scum of the earth dress like noblemen and are treated by the local population with the utmost respect. 23 When in May 1567 the regime of the rebels in Den Bosch is ended by the arrival of a royal army of German soldiers she describes with some degree of empathy the fear of the people who had sympathized with the rebels: But when they came, there was much groaning and moaning among the beggars, because those who were no free burgers, did not dare to stay here. And so children left behind their parents, husbands their wives, fathers their children, the widows their children and kin. Oh, those Beggars, and we all should have wanted that lot of beer never to have been bottled. Because it will yield bitter dregs. 24 Finally, on closer consideration, I was struck by the great variety of words, phrasing and metaphors that the author uses to express emotions. Yet, in order to reach a valid conclusion on this score further comparison with other texts will be necessary. This was beyond the 21 Van Alfen: Kroniek, p Kleres, Emotions and Narrative Analysis, p Van Alfen: Kroniek eener kloosterzuster van het voormalig Bossche klooster Mariënburg, p. 9, 10, Ibidem, p

9 scope of my paper today. For those interested I compiled a list of frequently occurring emotive words which I added to the handout. Conclusion Although the language of this Den Bosch sister is irregular in terms of spelling and syntax, and despite the impression she gives of being an untrained writer, she was probably very effective in the evocation of emotions among her readership. Her style of writing raises the assumption that she is an experienced story-teller or, at least, that she was part of a lively oral culture and familiar with a number of rhetorical instruments. During war, sermons could exhort believers to resignation and perseverance in the true faith by making reference to misdeeds of the heretics and the miracles that indicated who was on the right side. 25 After big disasters or military successes believers were urged by church and government authorities to observe days of prayer. The sisters were in daily contact with family members and people from town. The Council of Trent had by then not yet imposed enclosure on their community. 26 Rumours also spread via the clergy, confessors and other contacts between convents. It is, furthermore, possible that the author of the chronicle regularly got hold of printed news. Her work clearly reflects the collective fear for an enemy that was demonized through various media. So, how about the authenticity of the emotions that are present in the chronicle? In the Netherlands, nuns especially were raised with the Passions of Christ, the holy saints and martyrs. The texts they read, or that were read to them, were pre-eminently suited to invoke emotion and empathy. Could the chronicle from Den Bosch perhaps be seen as a new 25 Jelle Bosma, Preaching in the Low Countries, , in Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period, ed. by Larissa Taylor (Leiden, Boston, Köln: BRILL, 2001), pp (p. **). 26 The Bishop visited all convents in Den Bosch in order to reform them according to the Council of Trent: Item aengaende den sloot soe stont er in, datter geen werlijcke luyden binnen en souden gaen noch dat wy by ons vrienden en souden eten noch drincken noch tegen spreken dan voer die traly ende dat wij niet en soude gaen in onse kerck noch int patershuys noch int groot spreeckhuys. Dit is een swaer dinck om te doen, dat wij niet geloeft en hebben ende ons oerden niet toe en verbynt. Van Alfen: Kroniek eener kloosterzuster, p

10 Passion story in which emotional rhetoric and stylistic devices were directly copied from pious literature? I believe that there are two reasons why we should not doubt the authenticity of the emotions of our nun. In the first place, the chronicle is a hybrid genre but, unlike theatre or poetry, it does not set itself the task of exciting a great variety of emotions, the aim of the work was to write a history. Most chronicles never appeared in print, or only much later in the nineteenth or twentieth century. It remains to be seen what these nuns used as a model. We know that convent chronicles were often copied and read aloud. But each chronicle has a different format. Some are dry enumerations, others flamboyant lamentations. There are chronicles with strong didactic or devotional elements, but some attempt to keep close to the truth. But of all authors, tertiary nuns should surely be counted among the specialists in the language of emotions. However, this text also features emotions that are less compatible in Christian emotional narratives and rather express civil feelings: dismay about the collapse of the local community and social fabric, about treason, civil loyalty and the grief about the loss of the town s honour. The Beggars in Zeeland who hang local priests are the evil servants of Satan, but the sympathizers of the Revolt in Den Bosch are fellow citizens, men, women, children, who are just as much victims of these disastrous troubles. The second reason why I think that emotions in these chronicles are genuine is precisely because they do not differ that much from other surviving texts of contemporary eyewitnesses who had experienced the horrors of war. Laymen, citizens, and protestants were equally looking for ways to ascribe meaning to their memories and to frame their fears, despair, and sorrow in religious narratives about sense of suffering and endurance. Constancy, resignation and trust were common ways of dealing with the experience of violence and insecurity. This was the emotional script with which everyone tried to make do. 10