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Title: «Tot Babels schande». Een refreinfeestbundel in het calvinistische Brussel
Author(s): COIGNEAU, Dirk
Journal: Spiegel der Letteren
Volume: 43    Issue: 3   Date: 2001   
Pages: 205-223
DOI: 10.2143/SDL.43.3.389

Abstract :
In the sixteenth century, rhetoricians’ contests did not give as a rule rise to the publication of the performed plays or recited refrains. Because of the allegedly heterodox and scandalous content of the texts, the first such publication by Jan Lambrecht in Ghent in 1539 elicited a severe critical response from the central authorities leading to restrictions on further activities of the Chambers. In 1560 a general edict imposed precensorship on the treatment of religious matters. These measures did not prevent rhetoricians from participating in contests on moral and theological questions where different opinions could meet. For protestant poets especially, precensored contests were an exercise in formulating their ideas in generally Christian terms. In 1581, however, a contest in Brussels under the new Calvinist hegemony, suddenly relieved them from two decades of censorship and forced irenism. The refrains, taking a clear polemical stand against the Catholic Mass and the worship of ‘idols of wood and stone’, were published by Jan van Brecht

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