Introduction: Divided by Death? Staging Mortality in the Early Modern Low Countries

This special issue examines the multifaceted phenomenon of death in early modern Low Countries. When war, revolt, and disease ravaged Netherlands, experience came to be increasingly materialised vanitas art, funeral sermons, ars moriendi prints, mourning poetry, deathbed psalms, memento mori pendants, grave monuments, épitaphiers, commemoration masses. collection interdisciplinary essays brings historical, art literary perspectives bear on complex cultural anthropological dimensions past societies. It argues that sensing staging mortality reconfigured confessional political repertoires, alternately making breaking communities delta Rhine, Meuse, Scheldt. As such, death’s ‘omnipresence’ within context ongoing war religious polarization contributed reconfiguration