Leylim Erenel

The Artistic Patronage of Bruges’ Confraternity of the Holy Blood in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Supervisor: Professor Susie Nash
Advisor: Professor Alixe Bovey

My dissertation examines the patronage of the Confraternity of the Holy Blood in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bruges, treating its commissions as a means by which the organisation fashioned and projected its corporate identity while acting as custodian of the city’s most treasured relic and sustaining devotion to it. Bringing together archival evidence with surviving objects and images, it traces commissions from processional items such as the sculpted wooden candleholders now known as the ‘Pareerkaars’, to the Confraternity’s ceremonial garments and their exceptional visual documentation in the ‘Parureboek’. A final strand links these collective projects to commissions by individual confrères, showing how personal patronage could articulate confraternal identity and express veneration of the Holy Blood while participating in the broader devotional culture of late medieval Bruges.