A Brill Calendar: June 25

Few subjects were more hotly contested during the 16th century than religion; particularly in the European Delta.

The wish to look at Christian religion and practices along new lines and to adjust to change in the secular world had already existed before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church-door in 1517. ‘Modern Devotion’ was one such, a spontaneous, hardly organized spiritual movement, originating around medieval mystics, authors and scholars like Jan van Ruusbroec, Thomas à Kempis and Geert Groote: individuals fascinated by piety, not enamoured by institutions. Modern Devotion saw in the written word and books powerful instruments of salvation; and the monastic communities saw copying texts as a crucial activity. A city like Leyden and its environs boasted 22 nunneries and 6 monasteries for men; a ‘bibliopolis’ well before the birth of the municipal university in 1575.

Leyden became notorious in Europe as the home-town of the inn-keeper and tailor Jan Beukelszoon, who believed the end of time to be near; and that the ensuing ‘New Jerusalem’ would first manifest itself at Münster during Easter 1534. Spurred on by his mentor and prophet, Jan Matthijs, a Haarlem baker, Jan managed to get control in that Westphalian city, initiating a short-lived reign of terror, coming to an end when the Bishop Von Galen of Münster regained his See on June 25 1535; after a siege long enough to ensure the destruction of all books excepting the Bible. In Dutch idiom, ‘Jantje van Leyden’ is still associated with operating in an irresponsible, slip-shod way.

It is seldom, that two sieges – Münster preceding Leyden by forty years – are so vastly differing from one another, while being intimately linked, seen as the last stages of a long metamorphosis of religious awareness. It grew in absence of formal articles of faith recognized in consensus by prudent discussion and diplomacy.