a passport to heaven. veneration of saints in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Sibylla Goegebuer
the search for balance The exhibition ‘From Surgeons to Plague Saints: Illness in Bruges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ explores how society in that period sought to balance the roles given to worship and to medical science respectively in the pursuit of a long and moral life and a death inspired by God. The dividing line between a rationally and an irrationally founded world view was far from fixed: it fluctuated between matter-offact and emotional responses to life’s events and evolved as science and society themselves developed. The shift in religious and medical attitudes at European level that began in the sixteenth century has been adopted as the exhibition’s leitmotif and mapped onto the situation in Bruges. The exhibition offers visitors a visual survey of the interaction between faith and medicine, based on works of art, publications, archival documents, instruments and implements,
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and medical and scientific information. Lasting five months, it spans two hundred years of medicine and devotion.
softening a harsh reality Ludovico Guicciardini (Florence 1521–Antwerp 1589) paid little attention in his Descrittione
di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferiore, published in 1567, to signals of the coming social, economic and mental depression. How was this phase in history reflected in patterns of worship at the time? How did social grievances come to be grafted onto growing religious divisions? How did people anticipate impending calamity through prayer? Did religion
29 St Barbara consoling the dying, c. 1700, engraving, Austrian?, inv. V0048926, Wellcome Library, London A priest comforts a dying man. Death – holding an hourglass and scythe – keeps watch nearby. A winged man, symbolizing time, points at the words in a book. St Barbara appears at the top, alongside her attribute, the tower. She holds a chalice with the host, representing the Eucharist, in her right hand. The light of mercy beams down from her heart onto the dying woman.
