Chapter 1 An Archaeological Approach

1.1 The Madonna of Soeterbeeck

In one of the corridors of the former convent of the canonesses regular of Soeterbeeck in Deursen, near Ravenstein, in a recess facing the door to the refectory, sits a clothed statue of the Blessed Virgin and Child (Fig. 1).1 The two figures each wear a crown of gilded silver, a white robe with an abbreviation of their name in gold embroidery and a necklace with a cross, and Mary also bears a sceptre in her right hand. Once upon a time, the statue even had a complete wardrobe with numerous sets of gowns. It is housed in a wooden, neo-Gothic baldachin, with two candlesticks on either side.2 Until recently, flowers and a prie-dieu completed the tableau.

The Madonna and its baldachin acquired their current place in the 1960s, when the nuns’ gallery where they had enjoyed pride of place for several decades (see Figs 232 and 234) was removed from Soeterbeeck’s conventual church.3 The move was necessitated by architectural changes, and the devotion which the statue inspired will not have been any the less for its new location. This situation changed radically, however, when in 1997 the last remaining sisters left the convent for Sint-Jozefoord, a nursing home for elderly religious in Nuland, and the building afterwards became the study and conference centre of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, now known as Radboud University. The statue is still there, but in its newly acquired academic context it has an entirely different meaning than it had when it was still in a monastic environment. It is exactly the same statue, but it has turned from a devotional object into a historical piece of art, nice to look at but not to bow down to. The prie-dieu before it first became a piece of scenery and has since been removed altogether, as have the flowers.

The step from object of religious veneration to museum piece was only a small one, however, compared to a much more profound change which the statue had already undergone long before the end of the twentieth century. When the figures’ clothes are removed, it becomes evident that the body parts that are normally visible are all late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century replacements of portions of what is in fact a late medieval, polychrome wooden statue, severely damaged by wood-worm (see Figs 253 and 254). The substitutions will have been made as restorations or to hide the object’s deterioration from view, but it looks as if something else is going on as well. A large part of the statue’s front is clearly missing, and it seems likely that Mary and Jesus were not always just with the two of them. A third figure, originally held by what is now the Infant, appears to have worn off or been forcibly removed. If this is indeed the case, the Madonna of Soeterbeeck was once a statue of Anne with the Virgin and the Child on her lap, and the replacements confirm and contribute to an earlier transformation.4

The statue’s materially effected identity change did not only cause it to be venerated as a different image, but is also likely to be at the root of a legend surrounding the object. In the second version of

Chapter 3 In Times of Trouble

3.1 The Fire of 1539

3.1.1 Reports of the Fire Incident

After its auspicious beginnings in the fifteenth century, Soeterbeeck suffered a series of severe calamities in the sixteenth. The first of these was what a document dating from 1556 describes as a brandt […] in huer goidshuys (‘fire in the convent’) on 20 March 1539, daer bij dat zij grotelijcx beschadicht zijn geweest (‘in which they suffered severe damage’) and were forced die huysinghe vanden convente wederomme op te tim[meren] (‘to restore the convent’s buildings’).1 Soeterbeeck’s later chronicler Arnoldus Beckers, who was rector from 1772 to 1810, reports that the fire started due to a sister’s carelessness and almost entirely destroyed the convent:

Ons klooster Soeterbeeck alduis gefondeert en begiftight sijnde, is door sorghloosheit van een suster afgebrandt, en bijnaer door t vier geheel vernielt.2

(‘Our convent of Soeterbeeck, having been founded and gifted in this way, burned down because of a sister’s carelessness, and was almost completely destroyed by the fire.’)

Schutjes appears to have had access to a more specific source, and writes that the fire devastated the church, the dormitory and the women’s house.3

That the flames laid waste to a large part of the convent, including the church, is relevant to this chapter’s purpose of continuing the history of Soeterbeeck’s library, because it means that many books will have been lost. This is explicitly confirmed by Beckers, who continues his account by describing the fire as follows:

In welckers brandt buijten den onnomelijcken schaeden des kloosters, de religieusen haere brevieren, swarte mantels etc. hebben verlooren.4

(‘In which fire the religious did not only suffer unutterable damage to the convent, but also lost their breviaries, black copes, etc.’)

The sisters wore black copes over their habits during choral prayer. For practical reasons, these garments will have lain or hung in a room close to the nuns’ gallery that we suppose to have been present in the