On 10 June 1691, the Amsterdam Beguine Cornelia Willems Vlinder received a hand-painted prayer card on parchment (fig. 1).⁸ Calligraphed on the reverse is a poem:

The poem characteristically describes the relationship between a spiritual virgin and her bridegroom Christ. She has left the world (‘Who considers the world a mockery’) to love her Lord through sexual abstinence, penance, fasting or mortification, and emulating the sufferings of Christ (‘Let, Suffer’). She learns from edifying books when meditating or listens to sermons. Her bridegroom dwells and rests in her heart.

The front features a painted, emblematic scene and the motto ‘Your Holy Passion and pain is medicine to my soul’. The scene depicted is a landscape above which two souls rise to heaven in the form of burning hearts, accompanied by the Arma Christi, Christ’s instruments of torture. One heart depicts an exalted soul to God, meant here as an example of a bride: in this case Cornelia Vlinder, the other that of her bridegroom Christ with whom she will be united in heaven after her death. The image complements the poem. It is likely that one of the Beguines made the prayer card herself.¹⁰ The note at the bottom right, ‘Pray for G. v. Broek’, refers to the name of the donor – perhaps the widow Geertruijt van de Broeck, who also lived at the Beguinage.¹¹

In the tradition of the ancient monastic rule ora et labora, women performed daily manual labour to contribute to their livelihood. Besides spinning and embroidery, they also traded in prayer books (catholica) and devotionalia or provided engravings with colours or flower decorations.¹² They also drew their own prayer cards after engraved examples.¹³ It fitted in with the handiwork they had to do every day.¹⁴ During this work they could contemplate virtues yet to be performed and meditate upon sermons or legends of saints. Images were also used in the process.¹⁵

More examples of such emblemata have been preserved: landscapes with acting hearts (souls) framed with flowers and fruits, the symbols of virtues (fig. 2). Flower wreaths refer to heavenly eternal life and the closed garden (hortus conclusus), as described in the Song of Songs. Pondering such images was supposed to support imaginary experience in order to reach a mystical union with Christ while contemplating and receiving communion, as the title explains: ‘This is common to love: to turn two into one.’

After the Reformation, Catholics in the Dutch Republic remained in close contact with their fellow believers in Flanders. During the seventeenth century, the network of monasteries and clergy outside the Republic’s borders recovered, partly due to an effective Counter-Reformation offensive. Spiritual fathers of Beguinages in the Dutch Republic corresponded with colleagues in the Southern Netherlands about the rules and regulations that the Beguines had to maintain.¹⁶ In order to facilitate the reading of spiritual booklets, chests full of edifying literature were imported from Flanders, where many books of hours and kloppen books written by Dutch spiritual fathers were printed.¹⁷ One of the many popular booklets to support and teach the reader how to build a virtuous spiritual life was De gheestelycke vryagie, waer Christus de ziele is vryende (The spiritual lovemaking, in which Christ makes love to the soul), first published by the Brussels printer Godfried Schoevaerts in 1624-1626 (fig. 3). The author is not mentioned, but was probably Joannes Mytens, the parish priest and spiritual father of the Brussels Beguinage from 1619 to 1660.¹⁸ It was dedicated to spiritual virgins in general, but ‘especially to other devout believers, such as Beguines and others who often take Holy Communion’.¹⁹ The booklet was divided into chapters, each describing intentions that the women could study when meditating. The themes were introduced with a figure: a devotional print that could support the recollection of related texts during prayer.²⁰ The prints were partly inspired by older images (figs. 4-5). The origins of this visual image culture lie in the love mysticism (minnemystiek) and sufferings mysticism influenced by the Song of Songs – sermons written by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) – and continued uninterrupted until well into the eighteenth century.²¹

The De gheestelycke vryagie initially appeared in two volumes in 1624 and 1626, followed by revised editions in 1632, 1649, and 1682.²² Apart from all kinds of prints, the booklets contain dozens of songs as an interpretation of the mysticism treated in words and images.²³ The 1649 edition includes a new song with which the painter and poet of the Vlinder print must have been familiar, given the textual similarities.²⁴ This is a spiritual song dedicated to the mystical union of a Bride with Christ (Een gheestelijck Liedeken, hoe de Bruyt oft Christun ziele haeckt om mee Christo vereenicht te zijn).²⁵ The title of the prayer card is based on the following stanza: ‘Pressure, suffering, and great pain is medicine for my soul’ (Druck, lyden, ende groote pijn/Is mijnder zielen dan een medecijn). The poem on the prayer card also contains similarities to the song. The stanza ‘An exalted soul to God/who considers the world a mockery’ was based on the lines ‘For he who is united with God/esteems the joys of the world as a mockery’.²⁶ The first stanzas ‘Love the Lord and not otherwise/Shared love finds sorrow’ resemble the first lines of the song: ‘Jesus is my love and no one else/ (…) O Lord remove me from that sorrow.’²⁷ Also noteworthy is that one of the song’s stanzas was included as a caption to a print in the 1626 edition, depicting the virgin on her deathbed (fig. 6): ‘O Lord my heart has no rest/Before thou quench’st my desire/Let me be united with you/Then shall I be delivered from all pain.’²⁸

Geertruijt obviously knew De gheestelycke vryagie, which she had consulted for inspiration of the watercolour and poem, well, because there is a connection between image, poem, and song. The booklet thus becomes an interesting source of information on the life, interpretation, and spiritual development of Catholic women in the Northern Netherlands.²⁹

During the Revolt in the late sixteenth century, paintings and statues were removed from confiscated churches, destroyed, or sold.³⁰ Mary, the saints, and love-mysticism had been declared taboo by the followers of Calvin, and songs, according to many Calvinists, distracted the believer from the word. The Reformed Church had initially reduced the liturgy to a simple word service. Until the second half of the seventeenth century, organ playing was condemned; organs were only allowed to be played before and after the service, and psalms were to be sung in unison.³¹ This was in contrast with Catholics, who had for centuries considered sung prayer an essential part of their faith. In kloppen and beguine communities, praying while singing was an important part of the Mass and daily tidal exercises. Singing together was also best done while undertaking crafts and in the streets. Surviving Catholic books of hours and prayers are full of spiritual songs, and often refer to the appropriate melody. In the Counter-Reformation, singing thus became, in part, a demonstrative act of resistance against the Reformed government. After all, it was impossible to ban women from singing polyphonic (Marian) songs.³² Besides the intensive use of devotional prints, religious songs became important as they were within the scope of action and identity of Catholic women.

After the Reformation, the public road to intellectual and professional independence seemed, to many Catholic women, to have been blocked.³³ Beguinages proved to be a legal alternative to the women’s convents whose lands and wealth had been forfeited or confiscated.³⁴ If a woman did feel called to ordination as a nun, a vocation considered higher within the ecclesiastical hierarchy than becoming a semi-religious, she could seek refuge in one of the hundreds of convents and abbeys in the Generality Lands, Flanders, and the Rhineland that had either survived the Reformation or had been founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³⁵ Many of the women whose parents could afford a dowry entered them as nuns, but records of them after this point are invariably missing.³⁶ In the seventeenth century, the number of nuns, beguines, and spiritual virgins in Flanders must have exceeded ten thousand.³⁷ As yet, unfortunately, little research has been done on these convents.³⁸

Catholic women had the choice between marriage, with its related restrictions, or a spiritual vocation that allowed them to remain freer in their actions and able to assert their financial independence. They self-consciously and voluntarily chose one of the many possible religious lifestyles, ranging from becoming a tertiary (a lay member of a religious order or brotherhood) to being ordained as a beguine: the rigour of their self-chosen religious life varied greatly. Moreover, living as a virgin ‘in the world’ provided women with status: a pure life appealed to the imagination. Benedictus van Haeften even wrote that he considered marriage for women equal to slavery.³⁹ There was a belief among Catholics that by living virtuously on earth, virgins would be united with their heavenly bridegroom after death. For beguines and spiritual virgins, inspiration for leading a pious life was found in the hagiographies of female saints and founders of the order, including some who had lived recently and had now been officially canonised by Rome. Following these role models, they cared for the sick, the poor, and orphans, or taught girls. The booklets, prints, and songs were frequently inspired by the life stories of these women, such as Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), Joan of Valois (1464-1505), Theresa of Avila (1515-1582), her disciple Anna of St Bartholomew (1550-1626), and Maria Magdalena de Pazzi (1566-1607). The Dutch holy women Geertruid van Oosten of Delft (c. 1310-1358) and Lydwiena of Schiedam (1380-1433) also attracted renewed attention.⁴⁰ In both the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, the Catholic Habsburg monarch Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain (1566-1633) was honoured, admired, and praised for her good works.⁴¹ After the death of her husband Albrecht of Austria in 1621, she became a spiritual widow and joined the Clares as a tertiary. From then on, she was portrayed only in the black habit and depicted in many paintings and prints.

In the Republic, many women, often those very rich and distinguished, chose a life as a spiritual virgin or beguine, allowing them to develop independently and intellectually. Most of them are unknown, because they were rarely annotated in notarial deeds and wills as religious virgins or widows. They often also remained unrecorded in genealogies because they did not provide offspring. Research on these women from the Catholic elite is still in its infancy, but evidence, such as it is, points to the fact that they also supported Catholic care of the poor with their donations.⁴² They furnished hidden churches with beautiful paintings, silver, jewellery, and precious paraments.⁴³ They thus ‘bought’ and acquired power, influence, and status in the Catholic Church, working closely with priests – also celibate – whom they regarded as equals.⁴⁴ Catholic networks of prominent families maintained national and international contact between themselves.⁴⁵ Through names on devotional prints, where their religious identity is mentioned, many kloppen and beguines can be identified as such; further research can thus be carried out into their lives and influence. A woman’s spiritual state is usually mentioned on prayer cards, under her name. An example would be Agnes de Fays, a spiritual daughter and tertiary, who passed away in Amsterdam on 1 October 1761 (figs. 7-8). Many of her notarial acts have been preserved, which show that she was a wealthy woman living on the Keizersgracht. In her will, drawn up on 19 December 1759, she bequeathed her large fortune to Catholic causes such as the old poorhouse and the girls’ and boys’ orphanage.⁴⁶

In studying devotional prints, we should appreciate the early modern norms and values attached to these semi-religious women. The self-elected and exalted ideal of virginity could confer status on a woman and allow her to take charge of her own life.⁴⁷ It was also a good excuse to present an idealised image towards the ‘evil’ and ‘sinful’ outside world which, however, did not always concord with reality. Esther van Thielen, for instance, writes about copious feasts celebrating a profession or the jubilee of nuns in the Falcontinnen convent in Antwerp and the Vredenberg convent in Lier.⁴⁸ Such rich sources about Dutch kloppen and beguines are, as yet, only rarely available, but more will hopely be discovered. Surviving vitae mostly paint an ennobled picture, so as not to block the way to eternal life for deceased fellow spiritual virgins and nuns.⁴⁹

Catholic women made frequent use of religious prints in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Thousands of devotional prints circulated for private devotion, kept in prayer and song books or hanging on people’s walls for spiritual imagination.⁵⁰ Because devotional prints have only rarely survived in public collections, the important role they played in the spiritual life of Catholics has remained underexposed until now.

The prayer cards – often sold individually and bound into edifying booklets – are also difficult to trace because they are either rarely described in library indexes or not at all. Prints with bridal mysticism from De gheestelycke vryagie are a striking example. Such representations, whether discrete or preserved in the context of books and manuscripts, give us insight into the inner life and spirituality of women. Texts, images, and songs contributed to the development of their religious identity.⁵¹ Together, the marginally transmitted devotionalia form pieces of a large puzzle about the doings of these women, their connection with the divine, and with each other.

In this essay, a devotional print from the Amsterdam beguinage was chosen as a starting point. The prayer card is representative of the use of Catholic prints and drawings by thousands of women who chose a (semi-)religious life after the Reformation. The representations, texts, and names found within them offer starting points for further interdisciplinary research, which might pay fruitful attention to the important mixed-media context and connection with songs, prayerbooks, and manuscripts. The Dutch examples of songs, books, and prayer cards discussed in this article crossed borders because of the strong connections Dutch Catholics maintained with fellow believers in the Southern Netherlands and the Rhineland. The role of women in forming and maintaining these connections remains, as yet, underexplored. Examples of recently canonised female saints were important for their emancipation process. But active seventeenth-century women such as the Habsburg governess Isabella Clara Eugenia were also legendary in their lifetimes. She became an example in the Netherlands encouraging many ladies to choose an independent life as a spiritual virgin or widow, alone or in a community.