ABSTRACT
In this volume Boudewijns used rhetoricians' poetical forms to express her disappointment with the Calvinist domination of Brussels (1581-1586). Calvinist rule resulted, for example, in the temporary closing of churches. Genuine fear arose among Catholics concerning the future of their creed in Brussels and the Southern Netherlands. Boudewijns' sensitive poems do not seem to have been intended as a bulwark for Catholic orthodoxy to check Calvinist (and democratic) progress. Very much unlike the polemical rhetoric and the virulent scorn heaped upon the followers of the Reformation some decades earlier by the Antwerp teacher Anna Bijns, Boudewijns's resigned and rather nostalgic lyric poetry expresses consolatory concerns in a quite impersonal style. Her longing for mystical (re)union with the Lost Husband is almost purely medieval. More refined than Anna Bijns, more medieval in inspiration, Boudewijns is also a far more discreet poet. Invectives are scarce in her poetry, and the conventional catalogue of the opponents' vices and sins in contrareformational poetry is reduced to the charge of rebellion, of tyranny The lack of humility and obedience of the Calvinists must surely lead to spiritual and economic decline, according to Boudewijns. A despairing tone of fin du siècle awareness can thus be detected in her poetry, which emphasizes the return to God and Christ as the only alternative to the evil of the times.
