Abstract

The Leuven ommegang or procession in honour of Our Lady Sedes Sapientie, patroness of the City and of the University, was recorded by the distinguished sixteenth-century local historian and Clerk of the Registry Willem Boonen as part of his comprehensive History of Leuven and its institutions. These show the procession as it stood in 1593/4, with its fabulous pageant waggons, cortèges of Famous Women of the Old Testament, sponsored by the craft and trade guilds, the ambachten, and divers giants and fabulous beasts, presented as a Renaissance comic strip. The 34 Old Testament heroines, from Sara wife of Abraham to the Mother of the Maccabees, all types of the Blessed Virgin, are accompanied by the other characters in their stories, and are presented in an unconventionally female-centred way. The drawings are an expressive record of Biblical pageant costume of the late 16th century: but moreover, each drawing is accompanied by a page or more of detailed description which tells us more not only about the costumes and props, but also about the Biblical traditions in which these figures are to be read. These descriptions appear on external evidence to date from c. 1500.