Inconspicuous Halidom
The material religion of Catholic barn churches in North Brabant
J. Gan (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
J.M.K. Hanna – Mentor (TU Delft - History, Form & Aesthetics)
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Abstract
During the Dutch Reformation, the non-Calvinist religions, including Catholicism, were forbidden to use churches, so they were practised instead in relatively unrecognisable clandestine churches (schuilkerken), one type of which was the barn church (schuurkerk). This sacred space, hidden in the humblest structures, once dotted the Roman Catholic area of North Brabant, but was almost entirely abandoned and demolished in the 19th century. Inspired by theories of religioscape and material religion, an analytical framework is constructed around the architectural typology of the schuurkerk and its context to study the tensions between the authorities and the Catholics in this religious conflict over a hundred years. By extracting three attributes of the schuurkerk, the paper reflects on the repression and toleration of the authorities, the adaptation and creation of the Catholics, and the reasons for the disappearance of schuurkerken.