Something Old and Something New: Illustrating Spousal Ceremonies in "Religious Ceremonies of the Known World"

Western Europe and Armenia: Europe I

            The various Christian religions of Europe are more familiar to Bernard and Picart. They both fled France, ending up in Amsterdam. (16) Thus their travels in Europe had been at least somewhat more broad than other continents, and there were far more people around them who had extensive religious knowledge, particularly of different Protestant denominations. Here, then, Bernard and Picart (who died as the fifth volume was being published) turned back toward specific religions rather than regions or countries or ethnic groups of the world. The one exception here is the Armenians, who are still considered as a group rather than a sect of Christianity. Other groups, like the Anabaptists, Quakers, and Lutherans, are all categorized as a religious tradition.
            One series of spousal ceremonies that would have been very familiar both to Bernard and Pciart and the readers of their Dutch translation were the Dutch marriage traditions. Picart dedicates no fewer than four engravings to various parts of traditional Dutch customs relating to marriage, from the “Palmknoopen” (when the bridal party gathered to create small bouquets that they would then throw at the bride and groom before they went to the church) days before the wedding to the actual ceremony. Each engraving comes with the illustrator’s own annotations, adding even more narrative and scholarly depth to Bernard’s commentary. For these two French refugees, learning about Dutch marriage traditions was an act of assimilation. They can see both the oddities and the beauty in the traditions many of the members of their community participated in.

 

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