Introduction : Beeldenstorm : iconoclasm in the sixteenth-century Low Countries

After 450 years the Beeldenstorm of 1566 still deserves our careful historical analysis because it was unquestionably a game changer in Netherlandish politics and culture. More generally, we believe that iconoclasm breaks open cultural codes and thereby helps us to understand past societies. While we must thank the previous generations of historians for taking the iconoclasts seriously, the historians and art historians in this issue go a step further by also taking seriously the targets of iconoclasts – lay Catholic devotion and religious material culture. This theme number analyses the dialectics between iconoclasts and the material objects they targeted, between those who attacked and those who actively or passively defended the traditional community, between those who destroyed and those who restored or reinvented the religious patrimony, and in doing so reveals what was at stake in the sixteenth-century Low Countries