ABSTRACT
In 1546, the Catholic Church in the Spanish Netherlands added to the Index of Banned Books an anonymous Dutch pamphlet on the bride of Christ now ascribed to Ysbrandt Schol (c. 1464-1534), an obscure preacher who was executed for heresy, possibly as a Sacramentist-Netherlandish Protestants who challenged traditional doctrines on the sacraments in the 1520s and 30s.1 If not for a brief notice of the burning of both the author and his book by representatives of the Inquisition in the Spanish Netherlands, Schol’s Devout Contemplation on the Bride of Christ could not now be categorized as either Protestant or Catholic, medieval or early modern, much less cause for a death sentence. After Schol’s execution, Peter Jansz of Leiden reissued a part of his burned book as Van dye bruyt Christi een devote contemplatie [A Devout Contemplation on the Bride of Christ] as a small anonymous pamphlet.2 This had been the concluding chapter of the Profitable and consoling little book on belief and hope [Een profitelijck en[de] troostelick boecxken vanden gheloove ende hoope], where Schol instructed brides of Christ to prepare for the end of the world using language and theology which closely resembles fifteenth-century Dutch treatises on the bride of Christ. Schol, like some medieval authors as well as early Reformers like Martin Luther, presented the bride’s union with Christ as a transaction in salvation that initiated creation’s destruction. In the mid-1520s, when Schol first preached his ideas, this genuinely medieval aspect of the bride of Christ alarmed secular and religious authorities responding to Luther’s demands for reform. By the 1530s, when Schol was executed and his books burned, this same theological understanding would have deeply worried authorities responding to a prophetic Anabaptist commune in Münster in 1534-35. In the 1540s, when Schol’s work was reprinted anonymously, the bride of Christ had become part of a violently contested argument about sacramental theology and a symbol representing newly
1 Jesús Martínez de Bujanda, Léon-Ernest Halkin, and Patrick Pasture, eds., Index de l’Université de Louvain: 1546, 1550, 1558 (Sherbrooke: Sherbrooke Centre d’études de la Renaissance, 1986), 183-4. Albert F. Mellink, De Wederdopers in de noordelijke Nederlanden 1531-1544 (Groningen: J.B. Wolters, 1954), 344.
