De productie, functie en betekenis van Besloten Hofjes: een interdisciplinair onderzoek naar historische mixed media (1450-1600)

The Enclosed Gardens are unique reliquaries of the sixteenth century, imagining the praised garden of the Song of Songs. Their wooden cases contain relics, polychrome statues, seals in wax or pipe clay, tinted glass beads, pilgrim badges and various silk flowers and plants. This garden decorum, composed of individual devotionalia, allows to uplift the viewer into higher immaterial realms. Some of these shrines can be closed with painted panels on which patrons and their saints are depicted. Seven of these mixed-media objects were preserved by the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Gasthuiszusters of Mechelen and are currently the focus of a major restoration and conservation project (2014-2018).

Up until now, the typology of the Enclosed Gardens has been mainly been studied from the perspective of the seven Mechelen Gardens and the female religious context in which these pieces are said to have been made and functioned. Local historians and scholars previously suggested these gardens were the result of the hospital sisters’ loving devotion to the making of silk flowers and assembling of the Besloten Hofjes. This romantic perception on the production circumstance and reception of these objects became the standard way to approach these mixed-media pieces. Other Enclosed Gardens, such as the ones found in various convents and beguinages in modern-day Belgium and Germany, were subjected to the same sentimental perception. In this research, however, the Besloten Hofjes will be studied from a broader perspective starting with the study of those Gardens that no longer exist today in archival sources and the less-known examples from Balen, Herentals, Diest, Geel, Antwerp, Sint-Lenaarts, Arras, Kalkar, Frechen, Bentlage and Ebstorf. Furthermore, this interdisciplinary research aims to analyse the Enclosed Gardens as testimonies of the developing privatisation of piety in the early modern period. Not only will these shrines be studied as a whole but also their mixed media character will be subjected to profound examination.