ABSTRACT
Material culture, whether by design or in our appropriation of it, is inhabited by our beliefs, hopes and fears.1 The verticality and intense decoration of Gothic cathedrals, for example, through such features as pointed arches, ribbed vaults and fl ying buttresses, celebrated God’s glory and the orderly nature of the universe in such a way that theology became visible, the cathedral being at once a terrestrial sanctuary and an echo of the harmony and perfection awaiting the righteous in heaven.2 It is not hard to imagine how such associations, as familiar (albeit historically situated) as they seem to us today, gained quite different signifi cance for sixteenthcentury Calvinists, opposed to Catholicism’s idolatry. As for connections between belief in a new future and new forms of architecture, we should remember that France’s fi rst Protestants had to worship where they could, often taking over Catholic churches or other buildings belonging to the community at large.3 The right to construct temples was in fact not even granted to French Calvinists until 1577-and even then, various legal constraints remained. It is the Edict of Nantes in 1598 that marks the true beginning of temple construction-a short-lived story, of course, with the revocation of that edict being issued less than a hundred years later in 1685.4 Although in such circumstances architectural design and its ability to manifest theological conceptions of the future could only be a secondary concern for Calvinists, certain changes were regularly made to appropriated structures, and new structures generally shared certain elements, suggesting a nascent Calvinist aesthetics that sought to make material culture conform to and express theological design. At Montauban’s (formerly Catholic) Eglise Saint-Jacques, for example, not only were icons and images removed, but so was the church’s spire-thus eschewing the risk of human hubris from rivalry with divine creation.5 The fi rst purposefully built temples were marked by prominent pulpits (refl ecting the importance of the ‘word’), clear (as opposed to stained) glass windows and empty naves-an aesthetics marked by simplicity and the desire for a more direct and personal connection with God.6
