ABSTRACT
Sometime during the night of 7-8 August 1546 a disused towngate at Mechelen, which served as a powder magazine, blew up, killing 150 people and destroying some 800 houses. This disaster made good copy for within the year no fewer than 15 pamphlets had been published, which recounted, in varying degrees of detail, the tragedy at Mechelen. Two appeared in Dutch, one in French and 12 in German: these were collated and edited by the Flemish philologist Robert Foncke in 1932.1 The anonymous authors of the Dutch editions and the French translation interpreted the calamity as a warning from God, who employed phenomena such as ‘thunder, lightning and other sorts of bad weather’ to call sinful man to repentance.2 The reports combined stories of high drama – the rescue of a man trapped for three days under rubble – with the stereotypical miracle, in this case, the delivery of a child from the womb of its dead mother. For good measure, they also invited readers to heed the fate of the gamblers in a tavern who had died still clutching their gaming cards. The Dutch texts included a fulsome tribute to the ‘noble, honourable, wise and discerning Governors, Rulers and Lords’: thanks to their wise counsel the wars and death which had recently threatened Brabant had been averted.3
