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ON 10 AUGUST 1566, the Reformed preacher Sébastien Matte delivered an inflammatory sermon at the village church of Steenvoorde in the westkwartier (west quarter) of Flanders, which led some of the congregation to attack the religious images, paintings, and other liturgical items at the nearby religious house of Saint Laurent. This was the start of the beeldenstorm (image storm) or iconoclastic fury, which spread rapidly through Flanders and across the Habsburg Netherlands. Ten days later, the churches and religious establishments in Antwerp were sacked and, by the end of the month, the image breaking had moved northward to the Holland towns of Amsterdam, Delft, Leiden, and The Hague, as well as to Le Cateau, Tournai, and Valenciennes in the south. The beeldenstorm caused alarm not only because of the scale of religious violence, but also the speed with which it spread across the Low Countries. The 450th anniversary of the beeldenstorm was commemorated in 2016 by a series of exhibitions, talks, and cultural events (together with a website, http:// www.beeldenstorm450.eu/) held in the region where it began. The Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap (Royal Netherlands Historical Society) devoted a volume of the BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, titled Beeldenstorm: Iconoclasm in the Low Countries, to exploring various aspects of the beeldenstorm, with essays by established historians and early career researchers. The Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam also held a two-day conference entitled "Iconoclasm: Beeldenstorm and Beyond," which sought to consider the events in a global perspective. It was a conference that addressed not only the destruction of 1566, but also considered these events within the broader context of iconoclasm and the cultural destruction of subsequent centuries. The anniversary of the beeldenstorm coincides with a period of increasing interest in iconoclasm in general. Over the last decade, more than a dozen books have been published looking at different aspects of the subject during the early modern period. Some of these studies have provided detailed examinations of particular periods of iconoclasm, focusing on the extent and character of the destruction, as well as the motivations of its perpetrators. Other publications have raised questions about the terminology used in discussions of iconoclasm, the broader chronological context, and its aftermath.

The Orbis sensualium pictus, first published in 1658, was an important element in the pedagogical programme of the Czech Reformer, Jan Amos Komensky [Comenius]. Through the use of illustrations with an associated key, it was intended to educate young children about the names and terms of items and activities that they saw in the world around them. Although the significance of the work has long been recognised and has been studied in the wider context of Comenius' philosophical ideas, comparatively little attention has been paid to the illustrations in this work. The intention of this article is to examine the portrayal of religious faiths in the Orbis sensualium pictus as well as to demonstrate that, in spite of Comenius' rejection of confessional differences, they depict Christian worship and religious practice from a largely Lutheran perspective.

During the autumn of 1566 a series of Calvinist churches or temples were erected across the Southern Netherlands. These buildings attracted the attention and curiosity of contemporaries because of their unusual appearance and the speed with which they appeared. The polygonal ground plan of these buildings as well as the use of the term ‘temple’ led some observers to associate them with the Temple of Solomon. The English merchant Richard Clough commented that in Antwerp the Reformed had ‘layd the fondasyonss of syche tempelles more lyker the tempell of Salomon then hoder wysse’. Another observer also described these round churches as being built in the style of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. These comments suggest that Calvinists were perceived (at least by some) as linking their reformation of religion with an appropriation, possibly a recreation, of Jerusalem in the West. The purpose of this paper is to examine this contention, setting the architecture against the tradition of medieval conceptions of the architecture of the Temple, and of Calvin’s and Calvinists’ ideas of the role and use of space in the Reformed religion.

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