UC Santa Barbara

In the Northern Netherlands, despite its interfaith diversity, toleration was tantamount to an unstable coexistence that limited the rights of subordinate faiths. After the Alteration in 1578 prohibited Dutch Catholics from publicly displaying their faith, holding public office, and dispossessed of all church property by Protestant civil authorities. My dissertation argues that, in these conditions, Catholics mobilized visual culture to create a permanent record of their distinctive shared experience of subordination, producing a collective culture of resistance that undermined Reformed hegemony. In so doing, they adapted to their devotional needs both the late medieval tradition of affective piety that originated in the Northern Netherlandish movement of the Devotio Moderna and the seventeenth-century mystical revival which was taking place across Europe. From their homes, Dutch Catholic women acted as leaders in their faith communities by transcribing sermons, circulating visual materials, and organizing secret performances of the Mass. By bringing together a wider range of visual materials, devotional texts and archival documents, this project envisions how visual culture ensured the continuity of the Dutch Catholic community. In this way, this dissertation challenges long-held assumptions about the Protestant nature of the post-Reformation Netherlands, while engaging with ever-relevant concerns regarding social relations between the powerful and powerless. From the act of hand coloring a small prayer card of Christ’s flagellation to the foundation of clandestine sacred spaces, my dissertation surveys the material scope of Dutch Catholic visual culture and its driving role in community-organized reformation.