The Miracle of Amsterdam: Biography of a Contested Devotion

This lavishly illustrated translation of a 2017 book by two Dutch Catholic scholars who have been investigating Amsterdam’s Stille Omgang or “Silent Walk” for more than thirty years argues that this annual Catholic march, which began in 1881 (in a country that prohibited formal religious processions) and still continues under rules that have been considerably modified during the past half-century, constitutes “the largest collective expression of individual religiosity” in the Netherlands and Western Europe (vii).¹ The book’s arrangement stresses the direct links between the march and the annual celebrations of Amsterdam’s Eucharistic miracle of 1345 under greatly different circumstances before the Reformation’s triumph. Not only do too many interruptions—there is an “almost complete lack of sources” about annual observances far into the nineteenth century (98)—mar assumptions about its continuous commemoration, but the medieval processions also involved much less walking around and near a central shrine, which, not so incidentally,...