“It is not only the extended timespan and the bottom-up perspective that lends this beautifully published book an ambitious scope. Its multidisciplinary approach, bridging the gap between history and art history, and the use of different types of sources – written, visual, and material – further adds to the far-reaching aims of this work.”
Carolina Lenarduzzi, Leiden University. In: Early Modern Low Countries 7 (2023)

“[...] Suykerbuyk's carefully crafted publication, which is rich in material and findings, makes for stimulating reading.”
Esther Meiser, TU Köln/TU Dortmund. In: Renaissance Quarterly 1 (2023)

“Suykerbuyk goes far beyond the core competences of his discipline [...]. He combines an examination of material and visual material with a critical analysis of written sources, and methods employed in statistics. In this way he provides “hard figures” (presented clearly in the form of graphs and tables) that challenge the broadly presented claims of previous scholarship, such as that of the total decline of Catholic forms of piety from the 1520s onward and that of the totality of the Reformation’s impact. [...] The strength of The Matter of Piety lies, moreover, in the combination of micro-historical study with a comparative perspective, since the case of Zoutleeuw is presented against a broadly sketched background of the developments in other religious, especially pilgrimage centers in the Low Countries and beyond, in the long sixteenth century.”
Aleksandra Lipińska, University of Cologne. In: Speculum, Vol. 98, No. 3 (July 2023), pp. 937–938.